MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ByteSync – Open-source hybrid file sync (LAN and remote, E2EE)
by paulfresquet | 2025-11-14 14:02:32+00:00
Hi everyone, I've been developing ByteSync, an open-source file synchronization, backup and deduplication tool designed to bridge the gap between local and remote sync.

In spirit, it's somewhat closer to FreeFileSync, but with an integrated networking layer and end-to-end encryption — which means you can synchronize files between computers on the same LAN or across the internet without VPNs or firewall setup. Everything works transparently through the same interface.

The synchronization model is based on DataNodes (which represent repositories, such as servers or NAS devices) and DataSources (the folders or files inside them). A session can include multiple participants, each with one or several DataNodes, and ByteSync handles all comparisons and transfers automatically.

To optimize performance, the engine uses a two-stage inventory process: an initial indexation followed by comparisons limited to items that actually changed. This keeps synchronization fast even with large datasets. There's also a flat mode, useful when structure doesn't matter and you just want to compare or align files by name.

Currently, ByteSync is focused on interactive synchronization — it's not yet automated or daemon-based (CLI integration is planned). But it's already fully functional for discovering and managing differences between repositories, both local and remote.

ByteSync runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and the entire codebase is available on GitHub: https://github.com/POW-Software/ByteSync

You can also download binaries and read the documentation here: https://www.bytesyncapp.com

I'd really appreciate feedback and contributors — whether on usability, architecture, or ideas for future features. The goal is to make a solid, privacy-respectful alternative for hybrid file synchronization that remains simple to use and open for everyone.
by paulfresquet | 2025-11-14 14:04:11+00:00
A bit more about the design philosophy and how ByteSync may differ from other synchronization tools:

ByteSync is meant to give users control and visibility over what’s happening. Instead of syncing in the background, it operates through explicit sessions — you decide when and how synchronization occurs, selecting which changes to apply and in which direction before any transfer happens. This makes it particularly useful for data management, backups, or multi-location setups where you need to understand what’s being moved before it happens.

Each session defines one or several DataNodes (repositories) and DataSources (folders or files). For example, you might have a local workstation with a DataNode containing project folders, a NAS with backups and archives, and a remote server for off-site replication. All of them can be part of the same session, compared and synchronized through end-to-end encrypted exchanges. This model keeps things explicit while still supporting flexible topologies — local or remote, single or multi-participant.

When synchronizing over the internet, transfers go through a temporary encrypted buffer in the cloud, used only as a relay for data exchange. All content is protected with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) — nothing is stored or accessible on the relay, and data exists there only for the duration of the transfer. This allows remote synchronization to work seamlessly without VPNs, firewall rules, or manual network setup.

Under the hood, ByteSync relies on full desktop clients for Windows, Linux, and macOS, along with cloud components that handle orchestration and temporary relaying when needed. A command-line mode is also planned, and the design work for it is already underway.

Performance-wise, ByteSync uses a two-stage inventory process: an initial indexation phase that collects file size and modification timestamps, followed by a comparison phase that computes block-level signatures only for files that show differences. This avoids redundant network round-trips and dramatically improves performance in remote scenarios where latency would otherwise make full scans impractical.
by hannasanarion | 2025-11-14 14:04:29+00:00
Xbox One/PS4 is when both sides standardized on BluRay.

When Xbox360 and PS3 came out, the format war was only just starting, and the consoles were on either side of it.

PS3 came with a BluRay drive and the games were delivered on BluRay.

Xbox360 came with software support for HDDVD, but the actual disk reader hardware was a DVD reader (famously, a large off-the-shelf part selected at the last minute that required a redesign of the cooling system to accomodate its size), and the HDDVD drive was an optional add-on that nobody bought.

The fact that every PS3 could read BluRay, but you needed a special extra to play HDDVD on Xbox 360 is arguably the main reason BluRay won the format war.
by netsharc | 2025-11-14 14:04:31+00:00
In a sci-fi world that sounds nice, the tweet makes it sound like you could get a computer which Captain Picard can ask "Computer, scan all ship systems for information about Spot the cat" and the AI can talk to different systems (Windows apps) and ask it about information relevant to Spot (i.e. which has been tagged with metadata like subject=Spot).

In reality, it's Microsoft. Click this popup now to get 12 months free of 1TB OneDrive, and Copilot 365!
by zahlman | 2025-11-14 14:04:46+00:00
> For decades, researchers have tried to create semiconductor materials that can also act as superconductors -- materials capable of carrying electric current without resistance. Semiconductors, which form the foundation of modern computer chips and solar cells, could operate far faster and more efficiently if they also possessed superconducting abilities.

Really? First I've heard of it. And it also doesn't make any sense, since defintionally a material can't be superconducting and semiconducting at the same time, any more than it could be conducting and insulating at the same time. Are they imagining some new kind of thermal-switching circuitry?

This reads to me like the researchers came up with an irrelevant novelty (which is, to be fair, a valid and important part of scientific progress; it still expands our understanding of the universe) and Science Daily asked an LLM to rationalize it as useful.
by p4ul | 2025-11-14 14:04:49+00:00
I had the same reaction. Haven't they been selling DGX boxes for almost 10 years now? And they've been selling the rack-scale NVL72 beast for probably a few years.[1]

What is changing?

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-11-14 14:06:03+00:00
> I'd really hate to see the world go down the path of gatekeeping tools behind something like ID or career verification.

This is already done for medicine, law enforcement, aviation, nuclear energy, mining, and I think some biological/chemical research stuff too.

> It's a tradeoff we need to be willing to make.

Why? I don't want random people being able to buy TNT or whatever they need to be able to make dangerous viruses*, nerve agents, whatever. If everyone in the world has access to a "tool" that requires little/no expertise to conduct cyberattacks (if we go by Anthropic's word, Claude is close to or at that point), that would be pretty crazy.

* On a side note, AI potentially enabling novices to make bioweapons is far scarier than it enabling novices to conduct cyberattacks.
by harshreality | 2025-11-14 14:06:24+00:00
You're arguing things I didn't argue. The top-level comment wasn't about how to do some math problem that Sonnet or even Opus is capable of; it was about math book recommendations, and I was specifically mentioning that even though the LLM won't understand the math pedagogy behind why one book might be better than another, it's trained on enough commentary that it will give good recommendations (or anti-recommendations) for any well-known textbooks.

My experience with people who have LLM subscriptions of any kind is that they use them all the time and would immediately ask an LLM that kind of question, rather than asking on a web forum that's not even dedicated to math. So I think it's a fair presumption that someone asking that question doesn't have access to the best commercial models.

On the largely irrelevant question of what math LLMs can do, although Opus may do better, Sonnet can follow procedures sometimes but not consistently. It has blind spots and can't scale procedures; beyond certain numbers or dimensions or problem complexity, it just guesses (wrong). And those limits are quite low. If you want 2 simple examples:

4294967297*1331

Invert this matrix: m=[1 0 5 0 3 7; 2 3 0 3 3 2; 1 0 1 1 0 1; 3 5 3 5 1 2; 2 4 3 2 1 5; 1 0 5 2 1 5]

LLMs follow procedures, but whimsically. Better LLMs will be less whimsical, but they still won't be fully competent unless they digest questions into more formal terms and then interface with an engine like Wolfram.
by Atheros | 2025-11-14 14:07:37+00:00
It does devalue the image indeed. He didn't cut out the jumper and paste it onto the sun but he did take images of the sun and paste them onto the jumper, using the jumper as a mask. Which seems to me like a distinction without a difference.

If his images were real they would have shown the powered paraglider too. The images are a composite of photos that he took of the sun and a frame from the video that he took of the jumper.

Is it pretty? Certainly! It's art! But it's 'photography' the same way the 'So Yummy' YouTube channel is cooking.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6abePkXncCM
by graphememes | 2025-11-14 14:08:46+00:00
Every time I read a post about this, none of the prompts are shared, and when I review the actual commands and how the AI is working it makes me realize that the person who is driving is not experienced in doing so. AI's will do a best attempt, you can see this by looking at the reasoning / thinking output, additionally, the temperature, is usually pretty moderate (4.5-8) and so you'll have heavy "creative liberties" taken. So you need to account for that, you have to show it the right and wrong way to do things. I don't usually use agents or AI for things that are one-offs but not copy & paste, or for deep thinking / critical tasks that require human thought where AI wouldn't be able to do it.

For all the other trivial things, I can delegate those out to it, and expect junior results when I give it sub-optimal guidance, however through nominal and or extreme guidance I can get adequate / near-perfect results.

Another dimension that really matters here is the actual model used, not every model is the same.

Also, if the AI does something wrong, have it assess why things went wrong, revert back to the previous checkpoint and integrate that into the plan.

You're driving, you are ultimately, in control, learn to drive. It's a tool, it can be adjusted, you can modify the output, you can revert, you can also just not use it. But, if you do actually learn how to use it you'll find it can speed up your process. It is not a cure-all though, it's good in certain situations, just like a hammer.
by n4r9 | 2025-11-14 14:08:51+00:00
I'm not sure you know the subject very well. By 1986 Cochrane had already overseen fibre installation in the long lines network - leading to a dramatic drop in maintenance and staffing costs - and had installed fibre to his home. He had a clear understanding of the tech and the costs involved. You don't end up on as big a list of boards and directorships as he has without being savvy with both tech and economics.
by TZubiri | 2025-11-14 14:09:59+00:00
>So when Wisconsin demands that websites "block VPN users from Wisconsin," they're asking for something that's technically impossible. Websites have no way to tell if a VPN connection is coming from Milwaukee, Michigan, or Mumbai. The technology just doesn't work that way.

https://youtu.be/Pr4v725LPOE?si=ih3gfTSpiHumtrFs&t=79

"That's not how apps work"

"Then make it work you think we are stupid but we are not, we know" VPNs have something to do with IPs which are necessarily geolocatable , and also users need to make an account to connect to a VPN, you can just ask them what country and State they are in.

Being willfully obtuse draws no sympathy, and will not exclude companies from compliance
by snthpy | 2025-11-14 14:10:03+00:00
I get what you're saying but I don't think that's the right analogy here.

Part of the cost is the amortization of the development cost of building and training the model. Perhaps that's why there is a monthly subscription component. That would make economic sense, although I suspect it's more psychological in that you want people to use your product and a subscription makes that easier. If you think about the cost of each generation then you're not going to have a good time using it.

My point was more though that you pay for the convenience and the inference cost. I can also make my own bread, but my local bakery or supermarket can make it much more efficiently at scale and cheaper.
by knollimar | 2025-11-14 14:10:54+00:00
In regards to "Because the RNG wasn't written "based on" the copy righted content."

Does that mean I can distribute the seed if I find one and this RNG wasn't trained on that content?

Does it prevent me from sharing that number on the internet?

It seems like theres a lot of subjective intent here that I'm extremely skeptical

For an LLM also:

If it's lossy enough that it needs RAG to fix the results is that okay?

-------------------

In my opinion I think actually getting the output is where the infringement happens. Having and distributing the LLM weights shouldn't be infringment (in my head) because of the enforcability of results. Otherwise you risk banning RNGs or them all being forced to prove they didn't train on copyrighted content
by snaking0776 | 2025-11-14 14:12:08+00:00
The book Modernity and the Holocaust is a very approachable book summarizing how the action of the holocaust was organized under similar assumptions and makes the argument that we’ve since organized most of our society around this principle because it’s efficient. We’re not committing the holocaust atm as far as I know but how difficult would it be for a malicious group of executives of a large company quietly directing a branch of 1000’s who sleepwalk through work everyday to do something egregious?
by thunky | 2025-11-14 14:12:26+00:00
> your comparative analysis (beyond its rather strange disconnect with your fellow Human beings)

You seem to be having a different conversataion here. I'm comparing work output by two sources and saying this is why people are choosing to use on over the other for day to day tasks. I'm not waxing poetic about the greater impact to society at large when a new productivity source is introduced.

> ignores the fact that a "stellar" model will fail in this way whereas with us humans, we do get generationally exceptional specimens that push the envelope for the rest of us.

Sure, but you're ignoring the fact most work does not require a "generationally exceptional specimen". Most of us are not Einstein.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-14 14:12:32+00:00
I'll note that they had a large annotated data set already that they were using to train and evaluate their own models. Once they decided to start testing LLMs it was straightforward for them to say "LLM 1 outperforms LLM 2" or "Prompt 3 outperforms Prompt 4".

I'm afraid that people will draw the wrong conclusion from "We didn’t just replace a model. We replaced a process." and see it as an endorsement of the zero-shot-uber-alles "Prompt and Pray" approach that is dominant in the industry right now and the reason why an overwhelming faction of AI projects fail.

If you can get good enough performance out of zero shot then yeah, zero shot is fine. Thing is that to know it is good enough you still have to collect and annotate more data than most people and organizations want to do.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-11-14 14:12:51+00:00
Don't get excited.

The author also claims to have proved the twin prime conjecture. https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/The_Twin_Prime_Conject...

They don't seem to be affiliated with any university and don't seem to collaborate with anyone except this one person, Andrew Elliot.

My assessment of the probability that this is a real proof: Less than 0.1%.
by igleria | 2025-11-14 14:12:52+00:00
> make the humans irrelevant

Only the poor or undesirable ones. I have the (hopefully incorrect) feeling that universal basic income and similar proposals are red herrings (due to their impracticality) to distract the masses from the fact that once people with enough economic power don't need them to fulfill their wishes, they will be in no better position than cattle.

There might not be a universe where, for example, someone with ALS is able to benefit from a humanoid robot for their daily needs unless they already had enough money/resources before this incipient revolutionary technology is deployed en masse.

We are close to a point where even personal security or securing one's assets can be done with robots. So you would not even need to keep human private security happy.

Again, I really really hope this new technology benefits the average person. I'm not optimistic on that happening.
by fallingfrog | 2025-11-14 14:12:57+00:00
Sure- when I talk about trying to avoid choices when it comes to fashion, I am describing myself. I thought when I was young that people who i saw presenting themselves in a way that seemed deliberate were being artificial, and in order to be authentic i should avoid trying to present any specific image to the world.

What I was actually doing was wearing whatever my relatives gave me for Christmas. So, in my attempt to avoid making any choice I just ended up dressing like a nerd- which of course, I was, but I guess the point is that trying to avoid a choice is also a choice. We are all guilty, as you say!
by PopAlongKid | 2025-11-14 14:13:46+00:00
Some terms as defined in an accounting course I took once (U.S. based).

Revenue = The total value of goods or services a company sells during a particular accounting period.

Gross Margin = The difference between revenue and the cost of goods sold. Also called Gross Profit.

Net Income = A corporation’s net earnings or “bottom line.” Net income is the residual of revenues after cost of goods sold, operating expenses, depreciation, interest, and taxes are considered.

Operating Expense = Expenses incurred in conducting normal business operations. Operating expenses may include wages and salaries, employee benefits, administrative expenses, research and development costs, and other similar expenses.
by TZubiri | 2025-11-14 14:14:13+00:00
>Businesses run on VPNs. Every company with remote employees uses VPNs. Every business traveler connecting through sketchy hotel Wi-Fi needs one. Companies use VPNs to protect client and employee data, secure internal communications, and prevent cyberattacks.

Oh look, someone's conflating business VPNs and consumer VPNs again. This time to legitimize consumer VPNs.

The cited laws propose to ban pornography for minors, and ban VPNs that hide geolocation and their use in accessing pornography. Nothing to do with businesses using private VPNs to encrypt employee traffic.

>Vulnerable people rely on VPNs for safety. Domestic abuse survivors use VPNs to hide their location from their abusers.

Woah, maybe VPNs have some uses I haven't considered, let's take a look at the linked article.

>Use a virtual private network (VPN) to remain anonymous while browsing the internet, signing a new lease or applying for a new home loan. This will also keep your location anonymous from anyone who has gained access to or infiltrated your device.

I think the loan thing is rubbish I don't get it, and it's unaffected by the law. But the idea of installing a VPN in case the device is compromised might make sense, if the device is compromised it might still be trackable, especially while downloading the VPN, but maybe if it connects at startup, and the RAT isn't configured to bypass the VPN bridge, it might work.

Quite a stretch if you ask me. And again, not relevant to adult sites blocking VPNs.

The rest of the example are the usual "people use it to evade the government and regulations but it can be THE BAD GOVERNMENt AND REGULAtiONS"
by isaacbowen | 2025-11-14 14:14:41+00:00
> One thing: your readers will range wildly in where they can pick this up. The references help (you're marking neighbors), but the density might occlude for some what's actually pretty accessible underneath—which is just: consciousness might be what happens when a process observes itself enough times, and freedom might be what happens when you stop maintaining identity and let yourself land wherever the unknown takes you, and you're not alone in any of that.
by jiehong | 2025-11-14 14:14:57+00:00
Not really.

The solution is elsewhere: let me update my programs centrally without the program deciding. Like the App Store or the apt repository.

It’s fair if devs don’t accept reports unless the user runs the latest version.

If you care about security, like a company, you’re probably also doing that on a schedule, and more or less globally, not in the program itself anyways. If the security fix is critical, I’d argue the user does need to install it asap, and then letting them know does make sense.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-14 14:15:09+00:00
Uhm, you can take 2 or 3.

I usually eat 2 gummies (10mg) when I want to feel the effects, or a half gummy (2.5mg) when I want to microdose.

---

When my mom was in serious pain from cancer, I told her I use CBD for migraines. What I didn't realize was that she went to the dispensary in town, and they didn't have CBD-only products. She took a 5mg THC gummy and then called me up stoned out of her mind.

I wish I knew she planned on taking some, because I would have found the right kind for her.
by anandxrfeu | 2025-11-14 14:15:41+00:00
Hello David!

Would love to be considered for the Portuguese Developer Advocate position.

I built https://radar-de-precos.netlify.app using SerpApi and even wrote about it here https://dev.to/tamilchelvan/criando-uma-ferramenta-de-compar....

The Portuguese-speaking (esp Brazilian) developers remain underserved by localized documentation and tutorials. Expanding this content and partnering with local dev communities could drive meaningful adoption and retention.

Thanks
by Folcon | 2025-11-14 14:15:54+00:00
I'm 100% with Tonsky on this one, it's something that's frustrated me for years and I think it fundamentally boils down to a lack of respect for your user.

I'm going to be careful here, this doesn't mean that there aren't times when we can't avoid bothering our users, but I think we resort to doing so far too often, we don't apply the axiom of "if this person was someone who I deeply respected and would feel real bad if the contacted me and asked me to justify bothering them, would I still do this" as our actual test.

I'm not saying this is uniquely our decision, this entire process might be out of our hands, but in my opinion it bares thinking about and weighing up appropriately.

It's very easy to say it's only 5 seconds, if your software serves millions, that's a lot of people and even if you don't, a couple of 5 seconds here or there adds up very quickly.

I'm not here to berate or point fingers, but we also are users of each others software, so I hope that at least on that level we'll try to do better :)

I know I will.
by notedis | 2025-11-14 14:16:25+00:00
I should be transparent about what Notedis doesn't have: No issue sync integrations (Jira, Slack, Linear, GitHub, etc.). No API or webhooks. No workflow automation. No AI-powered nothing.(not yet at least) What I focused on instead: solid UX/UI for the core flow, zero friction for clients (no login required), email-based replies, one line of code installation. The philosophy: do one thing well vs do everything adequately.