MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdcravens | 2025-12-23 19:54:18+00:00
In the earlier days of the web, there were a lot more plugins you'd install to get around on most websites: not just Flash, but things like PDF viewers, Real Video, etc. You'd regularly have to install new codecs, etc. To say nothing of the days when there were some sites you'd have to use a different browser for. A movement towards more of a standards-driven web (in the sense of de facto, not academic, standards) is what made most of this possible.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-23 19:54:21+00:00
I am sorry, but "you are dumb" is not an argument. I just do not care about the law at all+. Far too often have I seen justice abused in the name of the law. Any appeal to some supposed legality just rings entirely hollow.

Either the government acts justly and I support their actions or it acts unjustly and I will oppose that action. Whatever some piece of paper says or does not say I do not mind.

+ Of course I care about it in so far I have to understand how getting into conflict with the prevalent interpretation of it will have consequence for me or my family or my friends. I pay my taxes, after all.
by metadope | 2025-12-23 19:54:36+00:00
I remember feeling sheepish when I was hired to a position titled 'Software Engineer'. To me, those two words together seemed incongruent. Not quite an oxymoron but certainly a puzzlement.

Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?

I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art than science. They made me take the title and the stock options and the business cards.

I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.

I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that software development will continue to mature and evolve, and eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept software as a science.

For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work that often resembles engineering.
by 1659447091 | 2025-12-23 19:54:59+00:00
It's also not just about the juries. I recall when the "stingray" fake cell tower thing was first spreading across police departments there were articles about how some decided not to prosecute because the defendant had good lawyers that would require the whole setup being exposed. Now there is a lockdown mode on apple that disables 2G. (maybe also, but not sure about, android)
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-23 19:55:05+00:00
Hey! Maker here.

Context: I'm a solo dev who got frustrated with enterprise analytics tools. I was paying Mixpanel + GA4 subscriptions while my side project generated zero revenue. Classic indie hacker mistake.

The final straw was GA4's interface redesign. 2 hours to build a signup funnel. The 45kb script was killing my Lighthouse scores. And I was losing 15% of EU signups to cookie banners.

I wanted to build something that:
1. Looks beautiful (the 3D globe is surprisingly motivating to watch)
2. Answers questions in plain English instead of pivot tables
3. Doesn't cost more than my hosting ($9/month for both seemed fair)
4. Respects privacy without being preachy about it

Technical challenges:
- Tracking script size: ended up using event batching + compression to hit 3.8kb
- Globe performance: WebGL shader optimization to load in <3s
- AI costs: smart routing between GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4 based on query complexity
- Realtime scalability: connection pooling because 40 concurrent viewers = $$$ on Supabase

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, privacy approach, or why I chose Supabase over self-hosting!
by Aurornis | 2025-12-23 19:55:06+00:00
> So, no WebSockets

The corporate firewall debate came up when we considered websockets at a previous company. Everyone has parroted the same information for so long that it was just assumed that websockets and corporate firewalls were going to cause us huge problems.

We went with websockets anyway and it was fine. Almost no traffic to the no-websockets fallback path, and the traffic that did arrive appeared to be from users with intermittent internet connections (cellular providers, foreign countries with poor internet).

I'm 100% sure there are still corporate firewalls out there blocking or breaking websocket connections, but it's not nearly the same problem in 2025 as it was in 2015.

If your product absolute must, no exceptions, work perfectly in every possible corporate environment then a fallback is necessary if you use websockets. I don't think it's a hard rule that websockets must be avoided due to corporate firewalls any more, though.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-23 19:55:21+00:00
What is the purpose of compiling this to web assembly? What web assembly runtimes are there where there is not already an easily accessible (substantially faster) js execution environment? I know wasmtime exists and is not tied to a js execution engine like basically every other web assembly implementation, but the uses of wasmtime are not restricted from dependencies like v8 or jsc. Usually web assembly is used for providing sandboxing something a js execution environment is already designed to provide, and is only used when the code that requires sandboxing is native code not javascript. It sounds like a good way to waste a lot of performance for some additional sandboxing, but I can't imagine why you would ever design a system that way if you could choose a different (already available and higher performance) sandbox.
by elevation | 2025-12-23 19:55:35+00:00
Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language.

The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who can block the change, and there's a growing body of backwards compatibility to preserve. This leads reasonable people to give up on Rust and use something else[0], which compounds situations like [2] where projects that need it drop it because it's hard to find people to work on it.

Having written low-level high-performance programs, Fabrice Bellard has the experience to write a memory safe language that allows hardware control. And he has the faculties to assess design changes without tying them up in committee. I covet his attentions in this space.

[0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han...

[1]: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-typ...

[2]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/
by xeromal | 2025-12-23 19:55:40+00:00
Yeah, I went to school for computer science but I am in no way a scientist. I'm not doing research and I'm not innovating anything that I already hasn't been built. I'm just building it for who needs it.

The space for innovation in computer science is pretty limited when it comes to constructs like how we build something considering how fully featured libraries and such are. Literally everything I've built in my career has been built better by someone else. If I am a scientist, it's the person in the lab making 10,000 flu shots a day.

I'll just say that my career in the industry as a programmer has made me very good at working on my car and I think they're more intertwined and connected then anything theoretical
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 19:55:41+00:00
I mean, it does exist, it goes by "Volvo Car AB", and it's a real company owned by Geely Holding (full name "Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd.").

But it does exist, just isn't the same as it used to be, back in the "seat-belts is for everyone" era.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-23 19:56:04+00:00
I honestly think the single file thing is best reserved for C, given how bad the language support for modularity is.

I've had the inverse experience dealing with a many thousand line "core.php" file way back in the day helping debug an expressionengine site (back in the php 5.2ish days) and it was awful.

Unless you have an editor which can create short links in a hierarchical tree from semantic comments to let you organize your thoughts, digging through thousands of lines of code all in the same scope can be exceptionally painful.
by nxobject | 2025-12-23 19:56:05+00:00
I agree: he loves to "roll your own" a lot. Re: minimal dependencies - the codebase has a software FP implementation including printing and parsing, and some home-rolled math routines for trigonometric and other transcendental functions.

Honestly, it's a reminder that, for the time it takes, it's incredibly fun to build from scratch and understand through-and-through your own system.

Although you have to take detours from, say, writing a bytecode VM, to writing FP printing and parsing routines...
by ffuxlpff | 2025-12-23 19:56:14+00:00
- AI, find me a monastery to buy!

- OK, I suppose you want one in US. How many monks do you want?

- Well, ten would do.

- I found this one. It looks good but has only five monks.

- I like it. Are the monks righteous enough?

- My AI brain didn't find any transgressions, at least mentioned in news.

- I'll take it!
Show HN: Full-text search engine for Epstein docs (OCR and OpenSearch)
by ProbDashAI | 2025-12-23 19:57:09+00:00
Hi HN,

Like many people, I was frustrated that the released Epstein/Maxwell court documents were mostly scanned images (PDFs) with no text layer. This made them impossible to Ctrl+F or analyze programmatically.

I built a pipeline to fix this using Python, Tesseract, and OpenSearch.

The Site: https://epsteinfilez.com

The Stack:

Ingestion: Python workers using ocrmypdf (Tesseract) to perform parallel OCR on raw files.

Search: OpenSearch for indexing the extracted text.

Frontend: Next.js (SSR) for the UI.

Infrastructure: Self-hosted Docker swarm.

Features:

Sub-second full-text search across all files.

Highlights search terms directly on the PDF page.

Deep linking to specific pages/documents.

This is a transparency tool, not a political one. I wanted to make the raw primary sources accessible to researchers and journalists.

Feedback on the search relevance or indexing pipeline is welcome!
by axeluser | 2025-12-23 19:57:13+00:00
Hi HN! I'm the creator of CarryFit.

I built this after getting frustrated while shopping for a new backpack. I kept switching between product pages, airline websites, and random forums/YouTube videos, trying to figure out if a bag would actually fit as a carry-on across airlines I travel most. It was surprisingly tedious, so I decided to collect the data once and make it available for anyone else dealing with the same problem as a free tool, without constants asking for emails, ads, or whatever.

CarryFit lets you enter your bag's dimensions and checks them against 170+ airlines' carry-on and personal item policies. You can filter by region or specific airlines, and it shows you how well your bag fits each one.

The feature I'm most happy with is soft bag support. Soft bags can compress a bit, so the tool accounts for that flexibility when checking compliance - it makes the results more realistic.

The data comes from airline policy pages (linked for each airline), though I should mention that policies do change and enforcement varies by airport and flight load. I use it myself as a sanity check before trips, but always recommend verifying with your specific airline.

It's open source and runs entirely client-side. Would love to hear feedback or if you spot any incorrect data or got any ideas for improving this tool for the whole community.
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 19:57:21+00:00
It invokes a couple of classic "LLM writing red flag" tropes. But they're ones that are reasonably appropriate in context.

I have caught myself on occasion rewriting to avoid looking too much like an LLM. But I've also introduced em-dashes to my writing — here's a gratuitous example just for fun — simply because the LLM slop writing discourse prompted me to research the X11 input system.
by skrebbel | 2025-12-23 19:57:39+00:00
Concur. In fact I feel like it's painfully off-brand for Volvo to go all-in on touchscreens. They were so proud about inventing the 3-point safety belt that they embedded it into their logo for decades. Volvo has always been about safety and to-the-point functionality. If any brand could get an enthusiastic following (and a productive marketing campaign) for de-emphasizing screens and emphasizing buttons, it's them.
by sp1nningaway | 2025-12-23 19:57:54+00:00
My information may be out of date because I worked at Starbucks a looong time ago (Frappuccinos were just introduced!), but they absolutely DO make each task measurable, independent and transparent, which is why a well-run Starbucks is way more efficient than almost any local coffee shop I've ever been to.

During a rush, each drink has a discrete series of tasks to be completed, and each worker can do their part without knowing anything about the rest. Take the order, print the receipt, hand it off to the barista, the barista makes each drink one at a time and puts it on the counter.

No head cache, no wait states. The bottleneck is definitely dependent on the barista steaming the right milk ahead of time and pulling the correct number/type of shots, but even a "bad" barista has a pretty straightforward set of tasks.

Unfortunate that the meat of the article is behind a paywall, because the way it is looking at Starbucks resonates with how I (fondly) remember it. I'm not a logistics person, so maybe I'm missing the point you are making!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-23 19:58:05+00:00
I had been in a similar boat and here are some softwares that I recommend or would discuss with you

https://github.com/libriscv/libriscv (I talked with the author of this project, amazing author fwsgonzo is amazing) and they told me that this has the least latency out of any sandbox at only minor consequence of performance that they know of

Btw for sandboxing, kvm itself feels good too and I had discussed it with them in their discord server when they had mentioned that they were working on a minimal kvm server which has since been open sourced (https://github.com/varnish/tinykvm)

Honestly Simon, Deno hosting/the way deno works is another good interesting tidbit for sandboxing. I wish something like deno's sandboxing capabilities came to python perhaps since python fans can appreciate it.

I will try to look more into your github repository too once I get more free.
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-23 19:58:16+00:00
Intrusive linked lists have performance and robustness benefits for kernel programming, chiefly that they don't require any dynamic memory allocation and can play nice with scenarios where not all memory might be "paged in", and the paging system itself needs data structures to track memory statues. Linked lists for this type of use also have consistently low latency, which can matter a lot in some scenarios such as network packet processing. I.e.: loading a struct into L1 cache also loads its member pointers to the next struct, saving an additional step looking it up in some external data structure.
by kayfox | 2025-12-23 19:58:20+00:00
Things I have found that only do 10mbit:

Old CNC equipment.

Older Zebra label printers.

Some older Motorola radio stuff.

That SGI Indy we keep around for Jurassic Park jokes.

The LaserJet 5 thats still going after 30 years or something.

Some modern embedded stuff that does not have enough chooch to deal with 100mbit.
by danielbln | 2025-12-23 19:58:28+00:00
Did it? Cryptocurrency enabled gambling and illicit purchases, that's it. In all other ways it was/is a solution in need for a problem.

Current gen AI has a ton of issues, but it nevertheless enables vast amounts of use cases today, right now.

And hoping that slop that is created today will provide work for the artisanal craftsman in the future is wishful thinking at best.
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-12-23 19:58:52+00:00
Cyber attacks have gotten pretty sophisticated. Lately supply chain attacks are all over HN, I got hacked through a Web3 interview. I managed to get the site down after complaining to their hosting provider.

November 1st I received an email that I had been hacked and all private data including a video of me was owned. I got really emotional but then after reading it, I saw it was a generic threat and nothing could be done.

You are asking, what can be done? Start with the basics, strong password and MFA everywhere. Avoided pirated Windows, and if you can avoid the OS entirely as well. Basic cybersecurity awareness need to be taught in schools. After 23andme, a lot of companies just have very shitty practices as well.
by spudlyo | 2025-12-23 19:59:10+00:00
Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it knew its master's hands were on the keyboard.
by riku_iki | 2025-12-23 19:59:13+00:00
> If ICBMs are incoming to the Continental United States the world is ending.

its up to discussion. US has many measures which combined could give them a chance to survive nuclear war, namely: preemptive strike by tridents on enemy's silos(https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...) and anti missile defense.

> Are we expecting missiles to come from the Gulf of Mexico?

there is a possibility of submarine launch from that direction.
by Galxeagle | 2025-12-23 19:59:28+00:00
The key insight here is the same reason why every internal department service eventually goes to a ticket system - adding queues (and by extension delays) improves efficiency. Resources can be used at 100% capacity ('always more work to do'), you can offer good service to only those who matter (i.e exec VIPs), and you can batch work (pour 2+ cups of brewed coffee at once).

Unfortunately it means that any time you need anything from someone outside your team, it comes with a lead time of '3-5 business days' unless you know the magic words or you raise it up the chain.
by benterix | 2025-12-23 19:59:56+00:00
> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you need to admin 10,000+ computers, Windows is still the king.

What?! I was doing kickstart on Red Hat (want called Enterprise Linux back then) at my job 25 years ago, I believe we were using floppies for that.
by mikepavone | 2025-12-23 20:00:15+00:00
> When the network is bad, you get... fewer JPEGs. That’s it. The ones that arrive are perfect.

This would make sense... if they were using UDP, but they are using TCP. All the JPEGs they send will get there eventually (unless the connection drops). JPEG does not fix your buffering and congestion control problems. What presumably happened here is the way they implemented their JPEG screenshots, they have some mechanism that minimizes the number of frames that are in-flight. This is not some inherent property of JPEG though.

> And the size! A 70% quality JPEG of a 1080p desktop is like 100-150KB. A single H.264 keyframe is 200-500KB. We’re sending LESS data per frame AND getting better reliability.

h.264 has better coding efficiency than JPEG. For a given target size, you should be able to get better quality from an h.264 IDR frame than a JPEG. There is no fixed size to an IDR frame.

Ultimately, the problem here is a lack of bandwidth estimation (apart from the sort of binary "good network"/"cafe mode" thing they ultimately implemented). To be fair, this is difficult to do and being stuck with TCP makes it a bit more difficult. Still, you can do an initial bandwidth probe and then look for increasing transmission latency as a sign that the network is congested. Back off your bitrate (and if needed reduce frame rate to maintain sufficient quality) until transmission latency starts to decrease again.

WebRTC will do this for you if you can use it, which actually suggests a different solution to this problem: use websockets for dumb corporate network firewall rules and just use WebRTC everything else
by jefftk | 2025-12-23 20:00:45+00:00
It all depends on how much context the reader has. For some audiences a comment explaining bounding boxes would be helpful; for others your example comment adds nothing that isn't immediately apparent from the code.

Part of figuring out a reasonable level of commenting (and even variable naming) is a solid understanding of your audience. When in doubt aiming low is good practice, but keep in mind that this was 2D graphics software written at a 2D graphics software company.
by treyd | 2025-12-23 20:02:17+00:00
It's pretty consistently been shown that this just can't provide low-enough latency for gamers to be comfortable with it. Every attempt at providing this has experience has failed. There's few games where this can even theoretically be viable.

The economics of it also have issues, as now you have to run a bunch more datacenters full of GPUs, and with an inconsistent usage curve leaving a bunch of them being left idle at any given time. You'd have to charge a subscription to justify that, which the market would not accept.
Show HN: Built a gratitude letter generator in a weekend with Lovable
by iowadev | 2025-12-23 20:02:32+00:00
End of year seemed like a good time to thank people who helped me this year. Research shows gratitude letters boost well-being, but most people never send them.

Built this with Lovable in a weekend. Pick a template, write your message, download as a beautiful letter design. No sign-up required.

Try it: https://grateful.ly
by yodon | 2025-12-23 20:02:34+00:00
Not directly related, but does anyone know why McDonald's moved away from the "number 1", "number 2", "number 3" ordering style they developed, which significantly reduced the amount of time a typical customer takes to place their order (enabling more turns at the register/ordering screen without preventing customers from making non-numeric-based orders) and moved to their current in-store signage which feels almost explicitly designed to increase order time and customer cognitive load at the register? The main screens over the register offer the eyes no structural guidance on how to scan the contents, so every word and line has to be read individually. The clutter around the words makes recognition more difficult. The sequencing of content on and off of the screens means the desired information is frequently not visible at all and the customer is forced to wait for it to rotate back into visibility.
by oliwarner | 2025-12-23 20:03:15+00:00
They drew black boxes over the text. The text is still underneath. On OCR'd scanned documents, the text you'd copy is actually stored in metadata and just linked by position to the image.

Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text.

It's a bizarre oversight.