MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: DocsRouter – The OpenRouter for OCR and Vision Models
by misbahsy | 2025-12-18 07:55:18+00:00
Most products that touch PDFs or images quietly rebuild the same thing: a hacked-together “router” that picks which OCR/vision API to call, normalizes the responses, and prays the bill is sane at the end of the month.

DocsRouter is that layer as a product: one stable API that talks to multiple OCR engines and vision LLMs, lets you route per document based on cost/quality/latency, and gives you normalized outputs (text, tables, fields) so your app doesn’t care which provider was used.

It’s meant for teams doing serious stuff with documents: invoices/receipts, contracts, payroll, medical/admin forms, logistics docs, etc., who are either stuck on “the OCR we picked years ago” or are overwhelmed by the churn of new vision models.

Right now you get a REST API, simple SDKs (coming soon), a few pluggable backends (classic OCR + newer vision models), some basic routing policies, and a playground where you can upload a doc and compare outputs side by side.

I’d love feedback from HN on two things:

1- If you already juggle multiple OCR/vision providers, what does your homegrown router look like, and what would you need to trust an external one?

2 - Would you prefer this or use the LLM/OCR providers directly, with the possibility of changing the provider every so often?

Demo and docs are here: https://docsrouter.com
by avidiax | 2025-12-18 07:56:43+00:00
The problem posed by this article is that companies are wasting candidates' time by making applying take time while offering no actual position.

What if we imagined that companies charged a fee to apply instead of charging candidate time? Then these ghost positions would be obviously considered fraud. We don't normally pay applicants for their time, but isn't a ghost position requiring substantial time to apply also a fraud on the applicant?

All I'm saying is, by removing the payment in time, you remove the fraud.

Applicant spam is an orthogonal problem that has other solutions. Linked-in could limit applicants to one application every 30 minutes, max 16 per day. Employers can use keyword filtering as they already do.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-18 07:57:47+00:00
> the exact same things the sloppy player is doing, but you do it in time and in tune.

It depends on the level we look at it, but I think there is fundamental difference in what excellent (professional grade?)players are doing compared to "sloppy" ones.

It is not just done with more precision and care, they will usually have a different mental model of what they're doing, and the means to achieve the better result is also not linear. Good form will give good results, but it won't lead to a professional level result. You'll need to reinvent how you apply the theory to your exact body, the exact instrument in your hand, what you can do and can't and adjust from there.

That's where veteran players are still stellar while you'd assume they don't have the muscle and precision a younger player obviously has.

PS: I left aside the obvious: playing in time and in tune is one thing, conveying an emotion is another. It is considerably hard to move from the former to the latter.
by pella | 2025-12-18 07:58:07+00:00
> Comparatively, almost nobody on Hacker News ever saw it.

imho: if you want more HN eyeballs next time, consider a "Show HN"[1] submission with the github repo link upfront.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html [2] https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/pkd-server-php
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-18 07:58:57+00:00
Yes I agree with your comment, as you say I feel like the author of this post is trying to game the system for their "investors" and I do feel like it doesnt get into the ethos of hackernews

Purpose of hackernews as you said is fulfilling curiosity, its not a place where people should try to post to get eyeballs or something because their investors said so.

Honestly hackernews to me is a place where tinkering as a hobby is appreciated. I have read so many large threads here and ended up sometimes having a new point of view on something and so many posts here which make me want to be curious and tinker around too. I cannot really name something exactly which clicks on hackernews but that is what makes it unique and this does mean I cannot explain it to others sometimes since my hobbies are tangential to hackernews too, I just end up saying my hobby is tinkering with computers (currently only software)
by maxbond | 2025-12-18 08:00:03+00:00
Sounds like analysis paralysis. Read posts here, pay attention to what this audience expects, and then post your work. If you really want to find a source on this topic Michael Lynch (mtlynch) wrote a book called Hit the Front Page of Hacker News and you can find it if you search for it (I haven't actually read it), but I think spending an hour a week reading HN and asking yourself why a piece of writing did or didn't work for this audience would be more worthwhile.
by ensocode | 2025-12-18 08:01:24+00:00
I’m impressed, but honestly: I don’t document enough to get real value from an AI consuming my stuff. To make this useful, I’d either need a brain interface that logs my thoughts, or I’d have to speech-to-text everything I say throughout the day. Only then could an AI reasonably help connect dots or answer questions like: “What should I focus on next week?”
by wickedsight | 2025-12-18 08:02:43+00:00
Also, people here are probably too technically inclined to understand what normal people want. If you look at the $500/mo side projects thread, there's a bunch of projects where HN would probably say: 'but anyone can do that themselves using X'.

Like the person creating coloring pages from images using Stable Diffusion. Many HN users would just do it themselves, but many parents have no idea how to do that.

Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project with AI or whatever tech is hype today.
by port11 | 2025-12-18 08:02:44+00:00
Yours is a fairly cynical take, if realistic. It's true that hosting a forge or code repo is fairly complex and doesn't move the needle for most businesses, but…

As a CTO at a small company, I chose to self-host key infrastructure or picked small players to avoid tech giants. Perhaps there'll be more businesses like that, where decision makers put their money where their mouth is.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-18 08:02:44+00:00
I've found that there is a snowball effect too

If someone has less votes and its still something I find interesting, I am more critic of the whole situation to upvote

But if someone already has 400 upvotes and is on the top of the site, I will look more into it with ("woah a lot of people upvoted, lets see why" and then read the comments and some of the comments are really brilliant that it becomes the reason why I upvote the post itself too

I am sure that hackernews doesnt really recommend it but I do feel like its something that I do subconsciously that I have observed and wanted to share. It does feel like random stuff but still in a way which still makes sense for the whole ethos of hackernews.
by microtonal | 2025-12-18 08:03:16+00:00
Also, apparently they run an IoT platform for other users on the same host that cannot only visualize sensors, but also trigger (mains-powered) devices.

The right thing to do is to roll out a new server (you have a declarative configuration right?), migrate pure data (or better, get it from the latest backup), remove the attacked machine off the internet to do a full audit. Both to learn about what compromises there are for the future and to inform users of the IoT platform if their data has been breached. In some countries, you are even required by law to report breaches. IANAL of course.
by SilverSlash | 2025-12-18 08:04:09+00:00
"Coursera to Combine with Udemy to Empower the Global Workforce with Skills for the AI Era"

Incredibly sad to hear this. Coursera was transformative for my education and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better.

I know these open courseware platforms have been bad for many years now but this feels like the final nail in the coffin for Coursera. I'm just grateful my education happened to overlap with the advent of the open courses movement and before they realized it was never going to be profitable.
by PlqnK | 2025-12-18 08:05:09+00:00
They would need a vulnerability in containerd or the kernel to escape the sandbox and being root in the sandbox would give them more leeway to exploit that vulnerability.

But if they do have a vulnerability and manage to escape the sandbox then they will be root on your host.

Running your processes as an unprivileged user inside your containers reduces the possibility of escaping the sandbox, running your containers themselves as un unprivileged user (rootless podman or docker for example) reduces the attack surface when they manage to escape the sandbox.
by randycupertino | 2025-12-18 08:05:18+00:00
I saw this post on reddit where some sketchy AI company (Alpheva AI) is posting jobs and requesting a screenshot of all applicants having left their app a 5-star review in the app store as part of the application process:

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1pp0iej/thi...
by marcyb5st | 2025-12-18 08:05:27+00:00
I jumped to Vivaldi. I was drawn to it by the amount of personalization it offers and after spending a bit of time setting it up to my liking it is now my daily browser.

I don't use the integrated calendar or mail client, just the browser and you don't notice these features are even there since they don't spam you.

It is chromium based however.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-18 08:06:29+00:00
Jesus, 130k++ subscribers, WOW!!!!

This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic!

If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show. In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.
by drsim | 2025-12-18 08:08:34+00:00
Distribution has always been monetized. What margin did a retailer take for putting your boxed software on the shelf? How about that magazine ad? Google search? And so on. Get over the idea that a platform should give you their distribution for free.

The problem comes when there is no way for you to own the distribution, pay nothing to the platform, and still be able to build on top of it. That’s the closed portion we should rally (legislate?) against.

There is an argument, similar to mine on distribution, that there is no inherent right that a platform should be open. That the extra utility that comes from being open should make the platform more competitive in the market vs. closed platforms.

The challenge is that with dominant platforms they are monopolistic. There is no chance for competitive forces to reward openness.

These two parts of the debate are often conflated, which hides what is truly troubling: dominant platforms controlling both distribution and access.
by laurentiurad | 2025-12-18 08:08:35+00:00
I built and run several SaaS platforms:

- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.

- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.

- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.

- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.

- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.

- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.

All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).

On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).
by dsincl12 | 2025-12-18 08:08:35+00:00
We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed.

https://troviamo.app
by rramadass | 2025-12-18 08:09:08+00:00
Apropos of "Sprezzatura"; you will find plenty of worldly wisdom in The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence by Baltasar Gracian translated by Jeremy Robbins.

Two aphorisms of relevance to this thread are;

-- Aphorism 174:

Don’t live in a hurry. To know how to parcel things out is to know how to enjoy them. With many people their happiness is all over with life still to spare. They waste happy moments, which they don’t enjoy, and then want to go back later when they find themselves so far down the road. They are life’s postilions, adding their own headlong rush to time’s inexorable march. They want to devour in a day what could barely be digested in a lifetime. They anticipate every happiness, bolt down the years still to come, and since they’re always in such a rush, quickly finish everything. Moderation is necessary even in our desire for knowledge so as not to know things badly. There are more days than joys to fill them. Take enjoyment slowly and tasks quickly. It’s good when tasks are completed, but bad when happiness is over.

-- Aphorism 221:

Don’t be annoyingly impetuous – committing yourself or others. Some people are stumbling blocks to their own dignity and to someone else’s, and are always on the point of doing something stupid. You’ll come across them easily and get rid of them with difficulty. They don’t mind causing a hundred annoyances a day. They are quarrelsome by nature and so contradict everyone and everything. Their judgement is always back to front, and so they disapprove of everything. But the people who most try good sense are those who do nothing well and speak ill of everything. For there are many monsters in incongruity’s vast territory.
by Sayuj01 | 2025-12-18 08:09:11+00:00
Hey everyone!

I originally built this just so I could quickly SSH into my server from my iPhone without copying keys around and didn't want to pay for some overpriced apps. It turned into a full SSH client that keeps everything in sync across all my devices.

It’s end-to-end encrypted and intentionally not a subscription.

Curious how you’re managing SSH across devices today, and happy to chat in the comments.
by torunar | 2025-12-18 08:10:19+00:00
> Now, with the advent of Agentic AI

Why having an easy way to organise a data feed that will work even on cheapest clients and servers, when you can simply boil a tank of water to get a half-assed hallucination loosely based on the source, right?

I have seen people trying to bury RSS for the past 15 years — didn’t happen yet. It is still widely used by blog enthusiasts — that’s basically how I get information about new posts from my favourite old-tech authors.
by stillworks | 2025-12-18 08:10:41+00:00
And yet, they won't like it if aspiring SDEs use AI to "assist" when interviewing :D

Just yesterday had a coding interview (not any FAANG) and the interviewer wanted a screen share and also checked my IDE settings to make sure "AI" was turned off.

Not that I intended to or even intend to use LLM based tooling for interviews.

Although having said that, if I intended to, interviewers won't find out. Interviews should always be done in person. (That took a different tangent... sorry)
by manfromchina1 | 2025-12-18 08:11:09+00:00
What are some other really useful skills? AI/ML frameworks, data skills, cloud basics, embedded programming, PCB design, sensor integration, front-end, back-end/API, version control? That would just be a start. After that an MI6 hopeful would have to pick up some physics, materials science and basics of precision instrumentation so they can get a job at a Chinese foundry...for reasons. Oh, and they would have to be good at Mandarin, too. Nobody said spying was easy :)
by lovich | 2025-12-18 08:11:49+00:00
To add onto this, the single exception I am aware of to this rule is the result of the gas explosions in Massachusetts.

In that case the company in charge, Columbia Gas, "exited" the market but all the scuttlebutt I heard in the area was that the Mass government was threatening the corporate execution of revoking their charter, which lead to Columbia gas selling their business off at a loss to Eversource

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiSource#Massachusetts_gas_lin...
by imiric | 2025-12-18 08:12:47+00:00
You're right, that was harshly worded. I meant to contrast it with the capability of making a quality assessment of the generated output, and understanding how and what to change, if necessary. This is something that only experts in any field are capable of. I didn't mean to imply that people lacking experience are incapable of attaining these skills, let alone that they're less intelligent. It's just that the field is positioned against them in a way that they might never reach this level. Some will, but it will be much harder for most. This wouldn't be an issue if these new tools were infallible, but we're far from that stage.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-18 08:12:53+00:00
Simplicity and complexity are not opposites. Things become complex when we attend to multiple simple things at the same time.

For example, we have an algorithm that requires a key-value store with typical semantic. For the purposes of our algorithm we could simulate that store using an array and straightforward search and insert routines that just loop through the array without trying to be smart. Then we could attend to details of that key-value store and use a more efficient approach, this time without thinking about our original algorithm; or, perhaps, with a clear understanding of its access pattern.

In both cases the task at hand won't be more complex than necessary. But if we try to do both at the same time, it will be way more complex.

Here the separation is clear, but in real programming it is not clear and to discover these lines of separations is basically the essence of building a system. I think Brad Cox was occupied with that with his Software-IC concept and I kind of share his view that this is yet to happen. Things we build are not as composable as they should be; as they are in other industries.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-18 08:12:57+00:00
Technically, binder is still part of Linux, even if it's not enabled by default in many cases.

This "security vulnerability" is just a local DoS though. Annoying and problematic as it effectively bypasses controls over power on/off behaviour, but as far as I can tell from this report, no memory is leaked and no code execution can be achieved.
by microtonal | 2025-12-18 08:13:42+00:00
Before rewriting the article, roll out a new server. Seriously. It seems you do not have the skills yet to do a proper audit. It’s better to roll out a pristine server. If that is a lot of work, it is a good moment to learn about declarative system configuration.

At any rate, this happening to you sucks! Hugs from a fellow HN user, I know that things like this can suck up a lot of time and energy. It’s courageous to write about such an incident incident, I think it’s useful to a lot of other people too, kudos!
by BeniBoy | 2025-12-18 08:14:38+00:00
I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :)

I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product!

https://minichord.com/
by azuanrb | 2025-12-18 08:14:39+00:00
Being open does not magically make everything better. People are willing to pay for Claude Code for many valid reasons. You are also assuming I have never used OpenCode, which is incorrect. Claude is simply my preference.

I see all of these tools as IDEs. Whether someone locks into VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, or Sublime Text comes down to personal preference. Everyone works differently, and that is completely fine.
by re-thc | 2025-12-18 08:14:53+00:00
> Many HN users would just do it themselves

More likes “claim” to do it themselves. Commenting on the Internet is easy. Making effort is not.

> Makes me wonder how many potentially successful businesses never get built, because too many people are trying to build the next big YC project

The can do it yourself crowd will still claim anything can be done themselves no matter big or small.
by twelvechess | 2025-12-18 08:15:06+00:00
My 10 year old self would be all over those lessons. Currently I am studying Chinese, but I am wondering how much time does it take to finish the lessons. Also on the technical side, some parts of the website take a lot of time to load and clicking begin lessons on the home page gave me a "Failed to open page". I don't know if its because I am on Safari.
by 15155 | 2025-12-18 08:15:39+00:00
As far as I am aware, there's no Federal law prohibiting the publication of SSNs for lawful purposes (which is the typical default.) In Virginia, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli (4th Cir. 2010) touched on this very issue, and ultimately concluded that publishing SSNs is protected speech (some nuance there, but this was the outcome.)

License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.

Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
by randycupertino | 2025-12-18 08:15:41+00:00
I had a creepy one like this happen to me with Linkedin. I sold my uncle's guitar on craigslist using a throwaway gmail address to a guy with a very unique, rhyming name that I would never forget (ie - Gerald Herald). Immediately after he left with the guitar linkedin suggests I add him to my professional network. I never logged in to linkedin from that gmail, never looked this guy up, don't have linkedin app installed on my phone, literally met him for 60 seconds to get cash and hand over a guitar. It still weirds me out.