MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Allein - Markdown editor with AI autocompletion, completely offline
by szdoro | 2025-11-19 19:03:39+00:00
Hi everyone! I built Allein, a Markdown editor powered by Ollama — use your own LLMs locally for AI-assisted writing, completely private, no account required, and works offline.

What it does:

- Context-aware autocompletion (think GitHub Copilot for Markdown)

- Writing improvements (spelling, grammar, readability)

- Flexible model selection—swap between different LLMs based on your needs and your device's capabilities

- Full-featured Markdown editor with live preview

Why I built it: I wanted GitHub Copilot-like autocompletion in a lightweight text editor—something between Apple Notes' basic suggestions and a full IDE. As a non-native English speaker, I also wanted built-in writing improvement tools to help me improve my English.

Tech: Built with Tauri, React, Rust, and Ollama for local LLM inference. Ollama is incredibly powerful, and this felt like a perfect use-case for it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Feedback on the concept and any features you'd like to see are very welcome!

GitHub: https://github.com/szilarddoro/allein

Website: https://allein.app
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-19 19:03:46+00:00
To begin with that isn't true, because the worst offenders are third party cookies, since they can track the user between websites, but then you can block them independently of the first party cookies.

Then you have the problem that if they are using a single cookie, you now can't block it because you need it to be set so it stops showing you the damn cookie banner every time, but meanwhile there is no good way for the user or the government to be able to tell what they're doing with the data on the back end anyway. So now you have to let them set the cookie and hope they're not breaking a law where it's hard to detect violations, instead of blocking the cookie on every site where it has no apparent utility to you.

But the real question is, why does this have anything to do with cookies to begin with? If you want to ban data sharing or whatever then who cares whether it involves cookies or not? If they set a cookie and sell your data that's bad but if they're fingerprinting your browser and do it then it's all good?

Sometimes laws are dumb simply because the people drafting them were bad at it.
by zrn900 | 2025-11-19 19:04:30+00:00
> Most websites do. not. need. cookies.

All websites need cookies, at least for functionality and for analytics. We aren't living in the mid-1990s when websites were being operated for free by university departments or major megacorps in a closed system. The cookie law screwed all the small businesses and individuals who needed to be able to earn money to run their websites. It crippled everyone but big megacorps, who just pay the fines and go ahead with violating everyone's privacy.
by jmward01 | 2025-11-19 19:04:41+00:00
I think the possibilities are huge with this area. I'd love to see more 'manager' layers that build on top of any 'cloud' system, even a local one, to give you a standard stack that is easy to move. Imagine something that lives at the hypervisor level (that you trust and was mature) taking control of your various cloud accounts to merge them and make it easy to migrate/leave one provider for another. I know that is the promise of terraform but we all want a good, consistent, interface to play with and then build the automation tools on top of. Maybe that is a good direction for proxmox? integrating with cloud providers in a seamless way. Anyway, a lot of promise in this area no matter the direction it takes.
by antonvs | 2025-11-19 19:04:49+00:00
Let's take an example: a managed database, e.g. Postgres or MySQL, vs. a self-hosted one. If you need reasonable uptime, you need at least one read replica. But replication breaks sometimes, or something goes wrong on the master DB, particularly over a period of years.

Are you really going to trust Claude Code to recover in that situation? Do you think it will? I've had DB primaries fail on managed DBs like AWS RDS and Google Cloud SQL, and recovery is generally automatic within minutes. You don't have to lift a finger.

Same goes for something like a managed k8s cluster, like EKS or GKE. There's a big difference between using a fully-managed service and trying to replicate a fully managed system on your own with the help of an LLM.

Of course it does boil down to what you need. But if you need reliability and don't want to have to deal with admin, managed services can make life much simpler. There's a whole class of problems I simply never have to think about.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-11-19 19:04:58+00:00
Yep. Perl the first language I ever used to professionally do something approximating "real programming" (as opposed to one-off scripting). And then I learned Python and never touched Perl again ... at least at the time, to my very inexperienced self, it felt like an improvement on every single axis.

In retrospect, probably 90% of my enthusiasm for python over perl was just "if you use python, you never have to think about variable sigils ever again." That and `string.split()`.
by jmyeet | 2025-11-19 19:05:07+00:00
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.

We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.

I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
by kqr | 2025-11-19 19:05:21+00:00
To be clear, I'm not expecting a full analysis within hours. I'm hoping for a method of analysis by which the major deficiencies come up at a high level, and then as more effort is spent on it, more details around those deficiencies are revealed.

What otherwise tends to happen, in my experience, is the initial effort brings up some deficiencies which are only partially the major ones, and subsequent effort is spent looking mainly in that same area, never uncovering those major deficiencies which were not initially discovered.
by didibus | 2025-11-19 19:05:38+00:00
I'm not exactly disagreeing, its just that I don't think that's a criticism of MCP for tool calls.

You need a way to expose tools to LLM, even for what you're talking about. The LLM can't write code without access to code writing tools.

MCP is a protocol for exposing tools to an LLM agent in an extensible way.

If you didn't have MCP for this, the alternative wouldn't be a python script. It would be some other tool calling protocol.

Maybe a good criticism is that the protocol doesn't have a defined mechanism for piping tool calls together. It be nice to define as part of the protocol a standard way for the model to say call tool1 and then pass output.foo as input.bar of tool2.

I feel that can probably be an eventual extension.

As an advanced user of coding agents that you let run locally or have sandboxed yourself, you might get more power and mileage by having it implement scripts and execute them, or use bash/curl and so on, to say access the Google Drive standard APIs for whatever you want to do, than to use the Google Drive MCP. I 100% agree. But that's not adequate for all users, and it's not really an alternative to supporting custom tools in an agent.
by wilg | 2025-11-19 19:05:51+00:00
I have been using GPT 5 High Fast in Cursor primarily over Codex, because Codex seems to take way longer and generally annoy me by doing strange CLI stuff, but hopefully I can switch to this new one. I also tried it against Gemini 3 Pro in Cursor and it's hard to tell but at least in some cases I felt like GPT5 was giving better results.
by runjake | 2025-11-19 19:05:53+00:00
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.

I disagree because conversely, outages for larger providers cause millions or maybe even billions of dollars in losses for its customers. They might be more "stuck" in their current providers' proprietary schemes, but these kinds of losses will cause them to move away, or at least diversify cloud providers. In turn, this will cause income losses to the cloud provider.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-19 19:06:04+00:00
I wonder what the benefit really is. Things are so early in AI, that I feel like anything in the “generative engine optimization” world (the phrase used by Semrush) is going to be obsolete soon and a new approach will be necessary. So does it really make sense for Adobe to acquire here? Or is it just about getting talent into Adobe quickly?
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-19 19:06:49+00:00
> If you want rigorous controlled studies you'll get it in due time.

I hope so, because the alternative is grim. But to be quite honest I don't expect it'll happen, based on what I've seen so far. Obviously your experience is different, and you probably don't agree--which is fine. That's the great thing about science. When done properly it transcends personal experience, "common sense", faith, and other imprecise ways of thinking. It obviates the need to agree--you have a result and if the methodology is sound in the famous words of Dr. Malcolm "well, there it is." The reason I think we won't get results showing AI tooling meaningfully impacts worker productivity are twofold:

(1) Early results indicate it doesn't. Experiences differ of course but overall it doesn't seem like the tools are measurably moving the needle one way or the other. That could change over time.

(2) It would be extremely favorably in the interests of companies selling AI dev tools to show clearly and inarguably that the things they're selling actually do something. Quantifying this value would help them set prices. They must be analyzing this problem, but they're not publishing or otherwise communicating their findings. Why? I can only conclude it's because they're not favorable.

So given these two indications at this point in time, a placebo like effect seems most likely. That would not inspire me to sign a purchase agreement. This makes me afraid for the economy.
by saltcured | 2025-11-19 19:06:51+00:00
I'm not the one you asked, but I think a lot of 'wealthy' neighborhoods in the US mean suburbia with larger single-family-home lots, and roads often feel a bit more rural. In my area in California, these are often unincorporated (county) lands just outside larger towns.

You sometimes see a very clear boundary. The more middle-class housing is subdivisions built all at once somewhere in the 1960s-2000s, with underground utilities and street lights. This infrastructure was mandated by the city, when the developers were looking to get their newly built neighborhood annexed into it. Around the next corner, darker streets with overhead utilities and more spread out lots with oversized "McMansion" houses. These are following the more relaxed county building codes and had the space available for such construction.

These roads are also more likely to have expensive new cars with all the computerized functions. Walking in this limbo world at the edge of our town, I've also noticed being blinded by cars as a pedestrian with more dynamic effects. I suspect are the car's system actively painting me with more light. It is a little bit like the "fringing" you see when the cutoff of older HID projection lamps sweeps over you due to road undulation. But it happens too quickly and both vertically and horizontally. It feels like being hit with a targeted spot light.

I wish the engineers spent the same care to put a dark halo on a pedestrian face as they do for oncoming drivers. Even when carrying my own flashlight, such encounters can be dazzling enough to basically go blind and not be able to see the dark paving in front of me for a minute. My light is more to make me visible to the cars than to really illuminate my path for myself. It doesn't stand a chance against the huge dynamic range of these car lighting systems.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-19 19:07:00+00:00
> The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.

Speaking of buying Instagram[1], it's plain to see that the horrible judges that Obama appointed simply don't believe that antitrust should exist.

Exactly what you would expect from the guy who let Citigroup appoint his cabinet[2]. The powers that be at the Democratic party thought that Hillary Clinton was too independent for corporate elites, and she makes a fairly good case that they fixed the primary because they thought he was their best chance to "save capitalism" after the crash. They were right. She even sabotaged her next campaign with her desperate need to show bankers that she was a safe choice (e.g. the secret speech.)

> Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition.

And search was only successful for 5 minutes, until SEO broke PageRank. Since that one fragile (but smart) algorithm, and the innovation of buying Doubleclick, everything else has been taking advantage of the fact that we don't have a government that functions when it comes to preserving competition in the market. The West loves corporate concentration; it's better when your bribes come from fewer sources, and those sources aren't opposed to each other.

[1] James Boasberg; "Meta prevails in historic FTC antitrust case, won’t have to break off WhatsApp, Instagram" https://apnews.com/article/meta-antitrust-ftc-instagram-what...

[2] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8190
by dana321 | 2025-11-19 19:07:04+00:00
To get Perl to work with apache (the most used web server for a time), there were two options: the not-so-complicated cgi script which gets executed from scratch on every request, then there was mod_perl which required a lot of tinkering with apache configurations and writing your code in a different way.

Even with those two options, you can't just write some code in a page and execute it without some sort of itermediate code.

Thats why php became so popular, perl coders could pick it up in a day ($ and all) and all you have to do is write .php files to a server - with the bonus that you have a rudimentary templating system built-in to php.

There really isn't much more to it than that.
by Scoundreller | 2025-11-19 19:07:43+00:00
> I used to live on a border and local EMS was 3-digit only. The only way to call the correct EMS was to call their non-emergency number and get forwarded - but only after getting scolded first for not calling the 3-digit number.

I think there's a lot more code running on SIM cards these days to reduce/prevent that. On my Canadian Rogers phone, when I do a network scan, I don't see the american networks at all, but then when I put in a foreign SIM, they light up. Similarly, it can take a while of driving into the US before it detaches from the Canadian network and finally hands over to the US.

It was actually an issue with my French SIM that was supposed to work in Canada and USA: it REALLY wanted to connect to the US networks, even though I was ~10 stories up in Toronto and very occasionally getting an SMS through once an hour to the US network.
by cess11 | 2025-11-19 19:08:03+00:00
It would have been nice if we instead had actually enforced these rules and given the world an alternative digital regime. I suspect it would eventually seem quite attractive to most.

"Well, you can say what you like but it doesn't change anything 'Cause the corridors of power, they're an ocean away"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpo2-nVc27I
by joecool1029 | 2025-11-19 19:08:08+00:00
> Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

Their developers are also very responsive to PR's, I have a couple GCC build fixes in it.

I really soured on Signal early with when running BB10, they would not let us fork and use/distribute websocket builds to get around not having google play services on available on that platform: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...

I'm still a little sour on it now because there's still no way to transfer the identity since they refuse itunes/icloud backup, refuse any way to export a key, and I have to look at hideous corporate memphis icons every time I set up Signal new again on iOS (at least Android doesn't have the last thing).

I mentioned before, but I use mautrix-signal to be able to have a unified (except for telegram) messenger on desktop with nheko or element via matrix. It works really well.
by seo-punk | 2025-11-19 19:08:18+00:00
I’ve been freelancing in the UK for a while, and I’ve always found it surprisingly difficult to get a quick, clear idea of how much to set aside each month for Income Tax + National Insurance.

Existing calculators tend to be slow, require sign-ups, have pop-ups, or hide the result behind forms. The official gov tools are accurate but not designed for speed.

So I built a very lightweight alternative:

https://selfemployedtaxcalculators.co.uk

It gives a monthly tax/NI estimate based on your annual income, using the latest HMRC thresholds for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. There’s no tracking beyond basic analytics, no cookies (other than analytics), no accounts, and the page is intentionally minimal so it loads almost instantly.

A few notes: • It’s not meant to be a replacement for an accountant — just a quick approximation tool • Works fully client-side • No frameworks, kept deliberately simple • I’m planning to add optional features like an “embed” widget and scenario comparisons • I’m interested in expanding it into a collection of practical, no-signup tools for freelancers

I’d love feedback from this community: – Is the calculation logic clear enough? – Anything confusing or missing? – Any UX issues on mobile? – Would an API version be useful?
by rdtsc | 2025-11-19 19:08:19+00:00
Python killed Perl.

By the time Perl 6 was around, Perl's lunch was already eaten by Python. Only a few table scraps left. Perl 6 would have had to be a better Perl 5 and a better Python 2 to win.

Python came with better batteries and better syntax. It allowed producing code you could read and understand a week later. Perl I found was a write-only language for me. I went back looking at my old Perl code and I couldn't decipher it without some effort.

And Python became popular not just because it was a better Perl, but it attracted folks who used Java and C++. CPU speeds were getting fast enough that you could actually do file and network IO at acceptable speeds without all the `public static void main(String[] args)` and `System.out.println(...)` boilerplate, but still had all the object oriented bits like inheritance and composition with which you could go crazy with if you wanted.
by zahlman | 2025-11-19 19:08:47+00:00
> There was always a clear way forward and people were actually moving.

I was always of the impression that people were very reluctant to move even though the benefits were clear and the movement not nearly as difficult as people claimed. But I still hear people complain about, for example, how you can't run CPython 2.x bytecode on a modern CPython runtime even though you can't run CPython 3.13 bytecode on a CPython 3.14 runtime, either and that hasn't slowed anyone down at all.
by antonvs | 2025-11-19 19:09:54+00:00
> It doesnt make any sense to you that I would like to avoid a potential 60K bill because of a configuration error?

This is such an imaginary problem. The examples like this you hear about are inevitably the outliers who didn't pay any attention to this issue until they were forced to.

For most services, it's incredibly easy to constrain your costs anyway. You do have to pay attention to the pricing model of the services you use, though - if a DDOS is going to generate a big cost for you, you probably made a bad choice somewhere.

> You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?

Only if it's something you're interested in doing, or if you're so big you can hire a team to deal with that. Otherwise, why would you waste time on it?
by tyingq | 2025-11-19 19:10:54+00:00
I love Perl. I think, though, that the crazy mix of sigils and braces/brackets to work with complex data structures was one of the main reasons.

Especially for the type of users were Perl had gained some ground in the past...data science, DNA related stuff, etc. Non programmers.

If you look at just about any other language and how you would pull data in and out of json yaml, manipulate individual elements, etc... the Perl is just hard to decipher if you don't have immediate recall of all the crazy syntax for dereferencing things.
by foobarian | 2025-11-19 19:11:00+00:00
Can you imagine if the PSF had been working on Python 4 in parallel, with more backwards compat shifts or even a radically modified syntax?

I think another saving grace was, when considering Python 3, one's choice was between "easy-ish migration to best in class" and "difficult rewrite into second-best". Meanwhile with Perl 5/6 it was "two moderately hard migrations into metastasized shell-script has-been language" and "difficult rewrite into best-in-class with lots of upside".
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-19 19:11:19+00:00
My take on this is that persons are great, everyone should know a few. Groups of people on the other hand are, and always have been, genuinely pretty awful in almost every way. IMHO this is down to some really basic primate stuff that's just inevitable. Social media is a big problem because it makes it easier to create groups, and algorithms are a big problem because they essentially take all of the dynamics that would inevitably lead to conflict anyway, and accelerate them.

Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight
by jakogut | 2025-11-19 19:11:24+00:00
> Unless you have an Intel Arc iGPU, Intel Arc B50/B60, or fancy server GPU, you won't have SR-IOV on your system, and that means you have to pass the entire GPU into the VM.

This is changing, specifically on QEMU with virtio-gpu, virgl, and Venus.

Virgl exposes a virtualized GPU in the guest that serializes OpenGL commands and sends them to the host for rendering. Venus is similar, but exposes Vulkan in the guest. Both of these work without dedicating the host GPU to the guest, it gives mediated access to the GPU without any specific hardware.

There's also another path known as vDRM/host native context that proxies the direct rendering manager (DRM) uAPI from the guest to the host over virtio-gpu, which allows the guest to use the native mesa driver for lower overhead compared to virgl/Venus. This does, however, require a small amount of code to support per driver in virglrenderer. There are patches that have been on the QEMU mailing list to add this since earlier this year, while crosvm already supports it.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-19 19:11:38+00:00
> And that open hypocrisy is a strong theme of trumpism.

trump would open the borders fully today if it meant he'd cling to power few days longer. also we saw what he was doing previously especially 2016-2020...

the 'red' doesn't care of about the law nor does it want to ever solve the immigration issue (or any other issue), only to make sure there's something to try and run elections scaring people with shit like 'migrant crime' and whatnot :) too funny...