MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbesto | 2025-12-08 13:08:22+00:00
> It’s literally their business model

It's literally not. It happens to be the business model for a subsection of private equity (usually large cap) and its the one that gets most headlines. There are roughly ~5,000 M&A events per year (often involving PE) and yet you'll hear about 5~10 at most cases where the company gets loaded with debt and stripped of assets. The large plurality of PE groups are buy and hold for 4~7 years and are largely focused on EBITDA expansion.

> If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.

No offense, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
by nijave | 2025-12-08 13:08:29+00:00
While good in theory, in practice secrets are used to validate those privileges have been assigned. Even in schemes like metadata servers, you still use a secret.

Pedantically I'd say maybe it's more fair to say they shouldn't have access to long lived secrets and should only use short lived values.

The "I" stands for Integration so it's inevitable CI needs to talk to multiple things--at the very least a git repo which most cases requires a secret to pull.
Show HN: Prime Tool - I built simple browser tools to avoid sign-up heavy sites
by flyd | 2025-12-08 13:08:32+00:00
Hi everyone,

I've been building a small collection of browser-based tools that solve everyday problems without requiring accounts, logins, or backend processing. Everything runs client-side and loads instantly.

Prime Tool currently includes:

QR Code Generator Invoice Generator PDF ⇄ JPG Converter JSON Formatter & Validator Emoji Picker Calculator Hub (20+ small calculators) RGB/HEX/HSL Color Maker Random Name Picker

I built this because I was tired of "simple tools" being overloaded with ads, paywalls, watermarks, trackers, and slow UIs. This project is still evolving and I'd love feedback from the community, especially on performance, UX, missing utilities, or tools worth adding.

https://primetool.io
Show HN: First-principles AI Superagent that turns thoughts into deliverables
by MartyD | 2025-12-08 13:08:42+00:00
I've been frustrated with shallow answers from AI tools, so I built CoThou, a Personal AI Superagent that reasons from first principles with built-in self-critique, exploring multiple approaches before producing outcomes.

Instead of generating quick responses, it breaks user's instructions into subtasks and delivers highly accurate, real-time optimized results, much like a human expert would.

You can try it free at https://cothou.com

Feedback welcome!
by throwawayround | 2025-12-08 13:09:18+00:00
Our arrangement over the past year was implied, so yes, effectively a handshake agreement. I don’t have an issue with him taking a salary when we can afford it. The problem is that for the company to maintain runway and keep me full-time, he would likely need to forgo a salary that he doesn’t actually need.

What confused me was how he framed it. First it was about “recouping some of his investment,” and when I pushed back that this isn’t how early-stage compensation works, it shifted to “saving money for family and legacy.” Both are understandable personal goals, but taking salary for those reasons directly increases the company’s risk at a stage where survival comes first. That mismatch is what I’m trying to sort out.
by tranq_cassowary | 2025-12-08 13:09:19+00:00
> Can you be more specific here? I don't see anything like that in my links.

You made a general statement about attacks from GOS on GNU/Linux. I replied that this happens in the context of wrong comparisons being made.

> You're trolling again, with no reasonable arguments. You can find a reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176660

Im not trolling. You say you dont trust Google at all. Thats your position. Then my argument is to not trust their code, regardless of which project its submitted to. How is that unreasonable. Your argument is the unreasonable one. You somehow think contributions by other companies to Linux would balance out or erase your trust issues with the Google code? Why would that make any difference.

> This is not the actual issue. The actual issue is that existing patches for a known vulnerability become unavailable, because Google decided so, making GOS potentially insecure. Patches without the source code shouldn't be trusted.

The issue gets patched. Whether the code is published doesnt change the code... People can also sti reverse engineer the code. Its not a black box. Its often just Java code. You can easily decompile Java, bytecode maps easily to the source code. Its an effort you have to do, yes, but so is reading and properly auditing the source code as well. You seem to think publishing the code somehow magically makes it more secure. While that isnt true. People would still need to properly audit it. It barely happens in practice. And it can also perfectly be done with compiled code.

> Until Google alters the deal

If Google were to put the restriction in AOSP, GOS can simply remove it from the code... And if its not in AOSP than it doesnt impact GOS.

> There is no security without freedom. If you're protected by a steel door, but you don't have the key, you aren't safe: You're imprisoned. You can't protect yourself from Google without having freedom to run what you want on "your" device.

This metaphor doenst make any sense in relation to the planned sideloading restrictions. I suggest reading the blogposts from Google about what the process will look like.
by level09 | 2025-12-08 13:10:32+00:00
Thanks, that means a lot coming from someone who has clearly evaluated many of these stacks.

A few notes:

Celery is completely optional, it's there if you need background jobs, but the core app runs fine without it. Same with Redis, it falls back to filesystem sessions in development. The idea is to add complexity only when you actually need it.

And that is the beauty of open source. If you don't like Celery, swap it for RQ, Dramatiq or whatever fits your workflow. It's your code.

The stack is opinionated, but the opinion is simple, pick boring, battle tested tools and stay lean. No webpack, no heavy build chains, no node_modules black hole. Vue and Vuetify load from CDN in development and that is perfectly fine. It ships products just as well.

Django is fantastic, and if you're productive there, there is no reason to switch. But if you ever want something lighter where you wire up only what you need, give it a try.
Show HN: Liora Gallery – Minimal self-hosted photo portfolio
by jannchie | 2025-12-08 13:10:36+00:00
Liora Gallery is a minimal self-hosted gallery for photographers to showcase portfolios. Demo: https://photos.jannchie.com. Source: https://github.com/Jannchie/liora.

It runs from a single Docker image, stays phone-friendly, and pairs a public waterfall grid with an admin workspace for uploads/metadata. Map view and EXIF autofill keep locations/camera data intact; S3-compatible storage and duplicates detection are built in. Stack: Nuxt 4 + Nuxt UI/Tailwind, Drizzle ORM with SQLite.
TicketSwap Bot
by lkka | 2025-12-08 13:10:54+00:00
I've been trying to get tickets on TicketSwap for popular events (festivals, concerts, etc.), and I'm noticing tickets are being purchased literally within milliseconds of being posted - often before I can even click the buy button. I'm curious from a technical perspective:

What kind of automation are people running to achieve this speed? Are there known bot implementations that monitor and auto-purchase tickets? How do these bots handle detection/rate limiting? What technologies/approaches would even make this possible (websockets monitoring, API scraping, browser automation)?
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 13:11:26+00:00
It's nice and all, but the same people who are running the biggest ransomware operations now had no trouble receiving the billions of dollars they were stealing directly from US bank accounts before they pivoted to ransomware.

Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it's destination.

But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they'd pay for payment processing otherwise. I'm not sure that really makes a difference though.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-08 13:11:29+00:00
> Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.

The paper voting system is extremely simple, it takes maybe an hour or two at most to explain in any detail you want to anyone who wants to understand it. People can, and many do, register to participate and see it working first hand. The US presidential election system is slightly more complex because of its legal nature, but I am discussing paper based voting in general; and all of the legal complexity would persist even if each state moved to a blockchain or digital based voting system.

In contrast, understanding zero-knowledge proofs requires college-level mathematics knowledge, probably requiring some months or even years to teach to someone who works in a non-mathematical domain, and at least a day or two to really get it even for someone with enough math knowledge who hasn't seen it before. And this is only the theory - the practical parts are in fact MUCH MUCH more complex - to the point that it is almost certain that there isn't a single person in the whole world who could actually confirm for himself that an electronic voting system actually implements the algorithms promised. Establishing that a CPU is executing the code you think it is is extraordinarily difficult, and doing so for the many such systems that would compose an electronic voting system is way past any human.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-08 13:11:52+00:00
Clearly the number of "brain cells" is not a useful metric here- as noted also by Geoffrey Hinton. For a long time we thought that our artificial model of a neuron was capable of much less computation than its biologic counterpart; in fact the opposite appears to be true- LLMs have the size of a tiny speck of a human brain yet they converse fluently in tens of languages, solve difficult math problems, code in many programming languages, and possess an impressive general knowledge, of a breadth that is beyond what is attainable by any human. If that were what five cm3 of your brain are capable of, where are the signs of it? What do you do exactly with all the rest?
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 13:11:54+00:00
> And this is the real miss of much of the Clojure community

I wasn't pointing to the Clojure community at large, the Clojure community is very welcoming to beginners and newbies, like I was once.

It's true that the focus on the language is improving it for everyone, not just beginners, and that can appear like a bad idea if you're a beginner, but I personally agree with this goal.

The problem mentioned by parent is something I haven't personally experienced, but seems exclusive to their job/position/experience, and I don't understand calling that specific person/developer brilliant.
by estearum | 2025-12-08 13:12:01+00:00
Yep, not to mention what you can do with complex conglomerates. For example, one should take a look at the intra-company eliminations that the giant pay-viders do (e.g. UnitedHealthGroup, owner of insurer/payer UnitedHealth and healthcare provider Optum)

Insurers are margin-capped, but wouldn't you know it once you own a PBM and the providers, you can make revenue, holdings, pricing power, and market share rise arbitrarily while never producing a profit beyond the cap.
by monster_truck | 2025-12-08 13:12:04+00:00
Hopefully this trend continues, there's too many dogshit people in positions they shouldn't have at Apple.

Two of the three worst interviews I've ever had were with them. Basically got flown out twice to be insulted by team leads or upper management. Everyone insists I'm supposed to keep trying until I don't encounter someone like that but that doesn't seem right to me, not for a company like this. I can wait
by stevenpotts | 2025-12-08 13:13:02+00:00
Around May I posted a critical CSS generator and it got some attention. I found a word-for-word copy that performs better in Google but has worse results IMO, recently received an email of a person who uses the tool often asking if the tool was being used to train AI and even shared the repo with some people that asked me.

Anyway, this tool appeared to be useful for many people so I moved it to my main site and made it work with Frontend Frameworks and inline CSS, so should work for everyone now.
by mhb | 2025-12-08 13:13:13+00:00
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higherfrequency fluctuations-such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks-that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
Show HN: Axo Pass – Unlock SSH/GPG Keys and Secrets with Touch ID on macOS
by octavore | 2025-12-08 13:13:18+00:00
Hi HN!

I built an open source macOS app that allows you to unlock your SSH and GPG key passphrases with Touch ID. You can also store secrets and inject them into your dev environment using the CLI, and store `age` encryption keys in the Secure Enclave.

I started working on this because I was setting up a new computer, and I didn't like how janky the Mac GPG pinentry tool felt.

Secrets management came later because I also wanted an alternative to 1Password's secrets injection, which only works while online for some reason. This allows me to store `axo://...` URLs in my config files, which get dynamically populated with `ap inject`. The vault spec is inspired by SOPs.

The reason this is an app and not just a CLI tool is because it integrates directly with Apple's Security framework and needs to be codesigned and notarized - an interesting (annoying) problem I should write about

Looking to the future, I'm planning to add support for syncing secret vaults with git, SOPs-backed vaults, syncing public keys to Github, GPG key management (I keep forgetting how to renew my keys), and maybe even implement the ssh-agent protocol so I can store my SSH keys in the app. It's a long list but it will solve many paper cuts of mine.

Would love some early feedback, happy to answer any questions.
by mbesto | 2025-12-08 13:13:28+00:00
> PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it.

This is simply untrue. A typical PE firm creates a GP fund using LPs money. This GP fund typically does a management buyout (which means 50.1% of more) of several companies using a mix of equity (e.g. GPs capital) and debt (banking lenders). So by every definition of the word, they absolutely own the company.
by throwawayround | 2025-12-08 13:13:31+00:00
I’m doing all of the development and he’s handling product and business. It’s just the two of us. Now that we’re entering an accelerator, it’s basically all or nothing for both of us.

Maybe the better question is this: is it ethically acceptable to expect him to take 0 salary until seed without additional compensation, given that this is the only way we can realistically reach a seed round? In my mindset if he doesn't do this sacrifice he already loses 100% of everything.
by rocqua | 2025-12-08 13:13:43+00:00
Not quite. Because that requires pushing an update and only hits those who have windows automatic updates enabled. A lot of companies run those updates on a slight delay, which means they have a decent enough window to block such an update. Microsoft is a big thing to worry about when it comes to independence from the emerging fascist government of the US. But not because 'they can shut off windows'.

The short-term fear should be in enterprise cloud (See ICC judges). The long-term pain lies in blocking security updates (As happened to Russia). One might worry about malicious updates being pushed, but the legal grounds for that are flimsy to non-existent, and Microsoft has very strong business reasons to push back. So even the trump administration would be smart enough to instead target the cloud solutions. Since the legal precedent is very clear and well lubricated "providing services to sanctioned entities", and the business impact is equally crippling.
by chrisweekly | 2025-12-08 13:13:45+00:00
Respectfully, many would find that off-putting. "Advent of X" in tech is entirely decoupled from religion. Keeping it neutral seems to me the "nicest" approach. That said, something like what you described might be a cool exercise for your bible study group. Finally, I appreciated your "incidentally" aside about the origins of philology.
by yakkomajuri | 2025-12-08 13:14:14+00:00
Similar thing happened to me, albeit like 6 or so years ago.

I was very young and had been "in the space" for a couple years. The concept of "decentralization" in general appealed to me as someone frustrated with the abuses of centralized power. I liked the idea of a transparent ledger and wanted to apply it to non-profit initiatives. I even spoke about this at the European Central Bank as a 20 year old (got there via anonymous paper submission -- imagine the surprise).

But very quickly I grew frustrated with how much of the space was scams, people looking to get rich quick, etc. I had been more interested in the applications of blockchain that went beyond crypto but even stopped paying attention to cryptos altogether as a speculative investment. Funny enough, a few people who were "evangelized" by me made a fair bit of money.

I'm thankful though because I got into programming at 18 to write smart contracts, and that actually changed the course of my life quite drastically.
by SpikeMeister | 2025-12-08 13:14:46+00:00
As a fan of Time Team, that's very cynical.

Time Team is a good citizen of the archeological community. It has real professional archaeologists with academic credentials, not just entertainers.

It's funded via Patreon these days and is on YouTube, not TV, so ratings aren't as much of a concern.

Blame the media for the breathless hype if you like, they are the ones benefiting from the clicks here.
by jeanphillippe | 2025-12-08 13:14:50+00:00
It's like the glass of water, while we are seeing the most amount of technology ever in our existence, several issues that we grow up thinking that technology will solve like health, hunger and others, are still unresolved. But the potential is real and up to us to take us there. While the amount of bad things Ai/technology is being used is also on an high (attacks and deceptions) it is still a tool like a knife.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-08 13:15:18+00:00
Hybrid propulsion is already a thing in the marine world (often in navy/military designs):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_g...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel–electric_and_d...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_electric_propulsion
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-08 13:15:50+00:00
I suspect that people instinctively believe they have free will, both because it feels like we do, and because society requires us to behave that way even when we don't.

The truth is that the evidence says we don't. See the Libet experiment and its many replications.

Your decisions can be predicted from brain scans up to 10 seconds before you make them, which means they are as deterministic as an LLM's. Sorry, I guess.
by nyeah | 2025-12-08 13:15:55+00:00
By definition eliminating juries is a move toward an authoritarian state.

EDIT: Sorry if this came across "absolutist". I'm saying transferring power upward from the jury to the judge is a step towards centralizing power. That is true by inspection.

But I'm not saying that eliminating juries is, by itself, the whole slippery slope to losing freedom. I'm not even saying that having juries is necessary for freedom. I'm saying it's one safeguard. It's important where I live.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-08 13:17:06+00:00
I don't think this approach can work.

Anyway, I've written a library in the past (way way before LLMs) that is very similar. It validates stuff and outputs translatable text saying what went wrong.

Someone ported the whole thing (core, DSL and validators) to python a while ago:

https://github.com/gurkin33/respect_validation/

Maybe you can use it. It seems it would save you time by not having to write so many verifiers: just use existing validators.

I would use this sort of thing very differently though (as a component in data synthesis).
by testrun | 2025-12-08 13:17:09+00:00
It is effective but wrong. It is the same as to compare a river flow to dam volume. There is a relation, but does not mean anything.

A better comparison is to compare somebody's net value to the total housing value of a city. For instance comparing Musk's net value to the total value of all the houses/apartments in New York. Or the the value of the gold in Fort Knox.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-12-08 13:17:27+00:00
Even if that'd be true, two wrongs don't make a right. If a government centrally determines whether something is propaganda and censors it, then it's authoritarian. A free society is built on free information and free debate. If you don't have that, then you don't have a democracy to protect. There's no wiggle room or grey area there.

Your government would be no better than Putin starting a "special military operation", and censoring all "foreign propaganda" calling it an invasion. Russia also holds elections, and yet Putin keeps winning.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-08 13:17:52+00:00
> In git you can have only one worktree per branch. For example, if you have a worktree on main you cannot have another one on main.

You can detach the worktree from the repo, and checkout multiple branches at the same time to different locations. Not sure if this also allows checking out the same branch to multiple locations at the same time. You can also have a swallow clone, so you don't have to waste space for the full repos history. So at the end you still have to waste space for each worktree, but this isn't something jujutsu can avoid either, or can it?
by level09 | 2025-12-08 13:17:54+00:00
Thanks for starring!

Honestly, open source changed my life. I've built my own products on this stack. https://mixedcrm.com for example runs on Enferno, along with many several other projects of different sizes. It's been my go to foundation for years.

After taking so much from the ecosystem, giving back just felt right. And value has a way of coming back, whether through contributions, feedback, connections or simply knowing the code is being battle tested by more than just me :)
by fzeindl | 2025-12-08 13:18:12+00:00
Bruce Schneier put it well:

"Willison’s insight was that this isn’t just a filtering problem; it’s architectural. There is no privilege separation, and there is no separation between the data and control paths. The very mechanism that makes modern AI powerful - treating all inputs uniformly - is what makes it vulnerable. The security challenges we face today are structural consequences of using AI for everything."

- https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2025/1115.html...