MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-13 10:12:44+00:00
Sigh. Piss poor engineering, likely by humans. For the love of god, do atomic updates by duplicating data first such as in a move-out-of-the-way-first strategy before doing metadata updates. And keep a backup of metadata at each point of time to maximize crash consistency and crash recovery while minimizing the potential for data loss. An online defrag kernel module would likely be much more useful but I don't trust them to be able to handle such an undertaking.

If a user has double storage available, it's probably best to do the old-fashioned "defrag" by single-threaded copying all files and file metadata to a newly-formatted volume.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-12-13 10:13:41+00:00
tbh there's nothing weird about those.

The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"

Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)

The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.

Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)
by rodriguejr | 2025-12-13 10:13:59+00:00
I’m the author (founder/CEO at Cloudsweep, mentioned in the bio). This post is about a pattern I keep seeing: cloud cost overruns often start as a software predictability problem (variance, leaks/drift, autoscaling lag), not a FinOps dashboard problem. Happy to answer technical questions; not here to sell anything.
by quchao | 2025-12-13 10:14:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie developer, and I wanted to share a small project I built after being repeatedly frustrated by a very specific problem: removing backgrounds from videos.

This started with something pretty mundane. I often record short videos for product demos, tutorials, or social posts. Nothing fancy — just a person or a product in front of a normal background. But every time I wanted to reuse that footage elsewhere, I hit the same wall.

The existing options felt like overkill:

Setting up a green screen just to record a 10–20 second clip.

Opening After Effects or Premiere for what should be a simple task.

Spending more time tweaking masks and edges than actually working on the content.

What bothered me most wasn’t the lack of tools — it was that the tools were optimized for editing workflows, not outcomes.

What I actually wanted was simple:

“Give me a clean cut-out video that I can reuse anywhere.”

No timelines. No keyframes. No learning curve.

So I built a website that does just one thing: You upload a video → it removes the background automatically → you download the result.

That’s it.

I made a few deliberate constraints while building it:

No requirement for a green screen.

No assumption that the user knows video editing.

No attempt to become a full video editor.

Focus on the quality of the final output, especially edges and subject separation.

In other words, I tried to optimize for time-to-usable-result, not feature count.

Right now, the tool is most useful for:

Content creators who want clean talking-head clips.

People making product or demo videos.

Educators or marketers who need reusable video assets.

Anyone who just doesn’t want to “learn video editing” to solve a small problem.

I’m sharing this here not as a big launch, but because I’m genuinely curious:

Is background removal something you deal with often?

What do you care about most in the result? (edges, speed, formats, batch support, etc.)

If you’ve tried similar tools, what annoyed you the most?

Happy to hear any feedback, criticism, or “this is not actually a problem” takes. I’ll be around in the comments.

Thanks for reading.
by seec | 2025-12-13 10:14:44+00:00
Yes, to me it looks like they are now primarily selling placement in search results (or just space on their various properties). I never really understood the rationale behind click-based prices; someone following a link doesn't necessarily make them buy, and the ad got displayed regardless. But it's probably because Google was a bit coy about ads in the start to protect its reputation, so they didn't look too much like ads. Now they have so much traffic on relevant terms that they can sell the top spots at an expensive price.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-13 10:16:35+00:00
That's both a logical fallacy and a strawman argument, not to mention an ad hominem attack. I did not claim that Russia would stop anything and even if Russia did attack several neighbours it is irrelevant. Reasoning and trying to see through the haze is not "having an agenda".

My claim is that Russia is not going to invade or start a war with the EU/NATO/Western Europe (and that, consequentially the "Russia scare" is mostly fearmongering). I don't think that they ever had a plan to, but in any case their campaign in Ukraine has shown that they don't have the capability.
by spacechild1 | 2025-12-13 10:17:34+00:00
> Special case at being ripped off when flights from London, Paris or Berlin across the continent are cheaper than trains from Graz to Vienna.

A "Sparschiene" ticket from Vienna to Graz typically costs between 10€ and 25€. With the Vorteilscard, a regular ticket costs 22€. (I believe the full regular price only exists to rip off tourists :)
by swiftcoder | 2025-12-13 10:17:52+00:00
> Unifont only stores one glyph per printable Unicode code point. This means that complex scripts with special forms for letter combinations including consonant combinations and floating vowel marks such as with Indic scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, etc.) or letters that change shape depending upon their position in a word (Indic and Arabic scripts) will not render well in Unifont. In those cases, Unifont is only suitable as a font of last resort. Users wishing to properly render such complex scripts should use full OpenType fonts that faithfully display such alternate forms.

An important caveat, that while this is potentially a useful fallback font to at least something for unknown glyphs, without any sort of combining/shaping, it's not going to usefully render a whole bunch of languages (i.e. languages like Arabic will be a disaster)
by YurGrhm | 2025-12-13 10:19:03+00:00
Hey HN! I built this after months of late-night debugging sessions.

Influencers Wall is a premium pixel advertising space where creators and influencers buy permanent visibility. Select your spot on the grid, upload your profile pic, add your link – it displays instantly. No subscription, no approval, fully automated. Pay once, stay forever.

The technical challenge: how do you let thousands of users select pixels simultaneously without double-selling the same spot?

My solution: real-time collaborative locking via WebSocket. When you select pixels, others see them locked instantly. Abandon checkout? Auto-release.

Tech stack: Supabase (Realtime + PostgreSQL with atomic RPC functions), Netlify Functions, PayPal, JWT auth – all on free tiers.

Scarcity model: Only 10K blocks (1 million pixels) exist. Ever. Price starts at $1/pixel, increases by $0.01 for every 1,000 sold. Early adopters pay less.

Would love your feedback! Thank you!
by generic92034 | 2025-12-13 10:19:17+00:00
In some countries, where people receive conditioned social security benefits, just sending the money via bank account will have disadvantages (at worst the next sum from social security is lowered 1:1 by the money received and they try to keep it that way). So, if you do not meet the gift receiver in person and do not trust the postal service with cash, a gift card can be a solution.
by quapster | 2025-12-13 10:19:25+00:00
The wild part here is that nobody in the 1860s "planned" this fight, but the incentives of that railroad grant scheme basically created a privatization hack that took 150 years to fully mature.

Checkerboard grants were sold as a compromise: give half to the railroad so they'll build, keep half so the public can "share in the upside" later. In practice, the private squares became de facto gatekeepers to the public ones, and once land got valuable enough (ranching, minerals, hunting rights, viewsheds), the optimal move for the private owner was to weaponize ambiguity in trespass law to extend control across the whole block.

Corner crossing is interesting because it attacks that hack at the most abstract layer: not fences, not roads, but the geometry of how you move through 3D space above a property line. If the court says "yes, you can legally teleport diagonally from public to public," a ton of latent "shadow enclosure" disappears overnight. If it says "no," it quietly ratifies a business model where you buy 50% of a checkerboard and effectively own 100%.

This is why the case drew such disproportionate firepower: it's not about four hunters and one elk mountain, it's about whether "public land" means you can actually go there, or just that it exists on a map while access gets gradually paywalled by whoever can afford the surrounding squares.
by solatic | 2025-12-13 10:20:28+00:00
Agree, and I would go another step to suggest dropping Docker altogether for building the final container image. It's quite sad that Docker requires root to run, and all the other rootless solutions seem to require overcomplicated setups. Rootless is important because, unless you're providing CI as a public service and you're really concerned about malicious attackers, you will get way, way, way more value out of semi-permanent CI workers that can maintain persistent local caches compared to the overhead of VM enforced isolation. You just need an easy way to wipe the caches remotely, and a best-effort at otherwise isolating CI builds.

A lot of teams should think long and hard about just taking build artifacts, throwing them into their expected places in a directory taking the place of chroot, generating a manifest JSON, and wrapping everything in a tar, which is indeed a container.
by MrMetric | 2025-12-13 10:20:47+00:00
Change your network name. When the TV prompts you to connect, join the renamed network. Then, rename it back so everything else can connect again and the TV can't. I can think of a few potential problems with this, but, it might work?

Or blacklist the TV's MAC address in your router settings. Didn't think of that first for some reason.
by johnisgood | 2025-12-13 10:20:47+00:00
I use `-ldflags '-extldflags "-static"` as well.

From the .go file, you just do `// #cgo LDFLAGS: -L. -lfoo`.

You definitely do not need Alpine Linux for this. I have done this on Arch Linux. I believe I did not even need musl libc for this, but I potentially could have used it.

I did not think I was doing something revolutionary!

In fact, let me show you a snippet of my build script:

# Build the Go project with the static library if go build -o $PROG_NAME -ldflags '-extldflags "-static"'; then echo "Go project built with static library linkage" else echo "Error: Failed to build the Go project with static library" exit 1 fi # Check if the executable is statically linked if nm ./$PROG_NAME | grep -q "U "; then echo "Error: The generated executable is dynamically linked" exit 1 else echo "Successfully built and verified static executable '$PROG_NAME'" fi

And like I said, the .go file in question has this:

// #cgo LDFLAGS: -L. -lfoo

It works perfectly, and should work on any Linux distribution.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-13 10:22:22+00:00
> Major flaws in a specification for one function are usually quickly picked up when the proof for another function relies on the missing specification properties

Great point!

> supplementing with standard e.g. unit tests helps catch specification bugs like this

I don't think it does -- any specific input+output pair that a unit test tests for will satisfy all the constraints of a complete spec, so it will necessarily also satisfy an incomplete spec (i.e., a subset of those constraints). You could detect overly strong spec constraints this way, but not insufficiently strong ones.
by sageandre | 2025-12-13 10:22:45+00:00
"Hey HN,

I’m a freelancer based in Botswana. I got tired of sending static PDF quotes or paying for bloated invoicing SaaS tools that didn't fit my workflow.

So, I built my own interactive Quotation Builder directly into my portfolio site: sageandre.com

The Tech:

Backend: Custom PHP Router (No Laravel/Symfony bloat). Frontend: Vanilla JS for the logic (calculating add-ons/features in real-time). Why: I wanted clients to 'build' their own package before they even talk to me. It filters out low-budget leads and gives instant transparency.

It’s live now. I’d love you to try breaking the calculator or roasting my pricing logic.
by latexr | 2025-12-13 10:23:10+00:00
What you are saying is that you either do not understand or do not care for craft (it’s an observation, not a criticism), but craft has definite value beyond the end result. Effort does play a huge part, including in animation.

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2019/03/painting-backgroun...

The lights in windows on the background of Akira, for example, were painstakingly painted one by one. That takes skill. That is impressive. It’s the kind of work that makes one with an appreciation for art (which goes beyond “pretty picture”) take another look and imagine what the artist was feeling and thinking as they were working. It makes you wonder about exact techniques and how to improve them, how to create something new.

All of that enhances the appreciation for the movie. The craft, the skill, the sweat put into it to make a hard and grandiose vision plays into how good and influential it has become.

Had those buildings just been spit out by gen AI along with everything else, there would be no value to taking a second look. You’d probably be looking at distorted images anyway, and even if you weren’t it’d just be a bunch of pixels with no intentionality to it. If no one put effort into the details, there’s no reason to look at them. The converse is also true.
by deaux | 2025-12-13 10:24:19+00:00
I also use them as coding assistants among other things, like lots of other people, and hitting and exceeding 200k is absolutely not the norm unless you're using a large number of huge MCP servers. At those context sizes output quality significantly declines, even with the claims of "we support long context". This is why all those coding assistants use auto-compression, not just to save money, but largely to maintain quality. In any case, >200k input calls are a small fraction of all.

Ironically at that input size, input costs dominate rather than output, so if that's the use case you're going for you want to be including those in your named prices anyway.
by piker | 2025-12-13 10:24:30+00:00
Actually the `windows-rs` team weighed in:

impl IRibbonExtensibility_Impl for Addin_Impl {

unsafe fn GetCustomUI( &self, _ribbon_id: windows::core::Ref<BSTR>, out: windows::core::OutRef<BSTR>, ) -> HRESULT { log("GetCustomUI called()"); if out.is_null() || out.write(BSTR::from(RIBBON_XML)).is_err() { return E_POINTER; }; S_OK }

}

https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/issues/3832

Thanks for pushing on the issue! I've updated the blog post for GetCustomUI.
by mxmilkiib | 2025-12-13 10:26:08+00:00
I wonder how this might figure in relation to PoTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), either way

PoTs being where the autonomic system doesn't equalise blood pressure, especially when standing up n still for several minutes, this the brain doesn't get enough oxygen, so brain fog, head rushes, grayouts (and fatigue, temperature dysregulation + intolerance)

(I've the hyper-adrenergic variety, hyper-PoTS, where the brain tries to generate pressure in a way that will never generate pressure, leaving it so frustratingly easy to have adrenaline rushes that can last for hours)

I've seen a PoTS professional describe the effects as like kind of a mini stroke

it's getting more attention now due to the long COVID relation, and it seems that maybe microclots have become a prime suspect as a possible cause to many symptoms, though there's so many jigsaw pieces, and discerning correlation n cause n effect etc..

obviously there's many contextual tipping points between that and this study (if generalisable)

apparently I have a strong heart. idk

related;

I've nostrils with the collapsing innner valve, so I can't get deep breaths through my nose (and got getting enough air whilst sorry l asleep is a cause of bruxism)

rhinoplasty then turbinate reduction helped mildly, but apparently having some cartridge inserted would help prop the path open for a more normal use.

so,

both of these leave me feeling out of breath a lot

and it's why I'm a month breather. hopefully a third bit of surgery will finally properly help

some kinda vague anecdata there, some kind of a lens anyway!
by yawpitch | 2025-12-13 10:26:40+00:00
Interesting… I’ve been all over the planet, and in none of the really interesting, out there places have I ever seen someone looking at an obscure travel vlog about interesting, out there places.

I have seen a lot of people consumed by the algorithms of very uninteresting, in there places. The places I go to to see people consumed by travel vlogs.

Your problem isn’t with the people creating social media, your problem is with the people advertising on it.
by jbstack | 2025-12-13 10:27:02+00:00
> this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.)

I once had to help a relative sue a bank who had closed his account after he refused to answer their very intrusive questions (they wanted to know details about distant relatives living in another country). They also refused to return his money (tens of thousands) and refused to explain why. No amount of complaining or escalating made any difference, although we did manage to get a nice recording of an employee saying that he thought the bank was in the wrong.

It took me issuing court proceedings, plus several more months of negotiating with their lawyer, before they finally settled out of court. Even then they tried to not pay the court fee, and they tried to get us to sign an NDA (I refused to budge on both). Altogether, it took 6 months to get the money.

Similar to how people in this thread are talking about mitigating reliance on cloud providers (e.g. with offline backups), I now do not trust any bank. I avoid being in a position where any one bank can ruin my life. That means having multiple accounts and spreading my money around.

Luckily for me I have a legal background so when a corp (big or small) does this sort of thing to me I don't hesitate to sue them. In almost all cases this causes them to "wake up" and start taking your issue seriously, in a way that the front line customer support reps never do. I recommend this to the author of the original post.
by jan_nan | 2025-12-13 10:27:59+00:00
TV devices are a hot mess to support from a streaming perspective, they each come with their own quirks that mean some perfectly-in-spec encoding and packaging techniques will result in a failed playback on some models of TV. Once a TV device _is_ supported, that support has to be maintained typically for more than a decade until usage of that model falls so low that dropping it from support can be justified.

It would be prohibitively costly to produce per-device renditions so instead there is one generic rendition produced for "all smart TVs" and another one for "UHD capable smart TVs".

Traditional TV manufacturers all work with the BBC to get their devices certified, which is a requirement for carrying the iPlayer app and comes with legal agreements that asset that a device _will_ be able to playback BBC content for as long as it's supported.

Because Apple like to Think Differently, they opted not to align with the entire rest of the TV industry in standardising on MPEG-DASH spec. They instead require all developers to stream video using the HLS protocol. As UHD content on iPlayer is geared exclusively for smart TVs, and all the other smart TVs support MPEG-DASH, the UHD workflow simply never evolved the ability to target Apple's TV devices.
by gsky | 2025-12-13 10:28:01+00:00
>> "Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell

America and Europe invaded other counties for no valid reasons which means they are the fascist nations.

Is not America buying Russian Uranium and fertilizers is not helping Russian economy?.

Is not Europe buying Russian gas and oil is not helping Russian economy?

btw India never ever traded with crypto. bought oil under price cap which was set by the west.
by graemep | 2025-12-13 10:28:08+00:00
This is very different in practice, because it is pervasive rather than something you have to set up for particular cases.

If this was usual it would help a lot with people's tendency to hard code the correct answer rather than fix formulae. Just that aspect of it would be a huge improvement. People do this all the time with simple financial problem, for example.

A lot of what people use spreadsheets for is not all that simple. Again, especially with financial applications. People manage huge amounts of money using horribly complex models implemented in Excel.
by niemandhier | 2025-12-13 10:28:19+00:00
There is almost no opportunity cost: The academic pyramid swaps out the lower parts of the hierarchy at a high pace. You might lose a few smart people who become professors but the average sting theory phd goes to finance or whatever field requires absurd amounts of math at the moment.

You do get people who are happy for a few years since they can live their childhood dream of being a physicist before the turn to actual jobs.
by viraptor | 2025-12-13 10:29:59+00:00
> which make zero financial sense for the consumer

Not in all situations. Because of various cross promotions between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount every time. That really adds up over a year.

For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.
by secfirstmd | 2025-12-13 10:30:48+00:00
Yep totally. It's something I've incorporated. Especially where the main incident commander gets overwhelmed with decisions, tunnel vision or distraction. For example getting trapped into threat hunting rather than commanding.

I actually think most cyber incident responder training for the commander is pretty weak because it doesn't do a great job of instituting the stress element. Physical security training does it in a much better way. The result is the need to create custom stuff. Because some shitty off the shelf big vendor table top or similar ain't gonna do it.
by eikowagenknecht | 2025-12-13 10:31:00+00:00
I‘m running a very small personal website / blog as well (https://eikowagenknecht.com) where I‘ve been writing about mostly home automation related things that I couldn’t see properly documented before, but also other topics sometimes. A typical page would be a migration guide for Home Assistant from a Pi 4 to Pi 5.

These niche posts had their steady stream of visitors for years now, coming almost exclusively from Google. But August 25 2025, from one day to the other it dropped by about 95 percent and it has been that way ever since, from 1000 visitors per month to maybe 50. Nothing I tried SEO wise could fix it.

Now I don’t need visitors for anything, but I‘m kind of sad that people who were clearly finding my content useful (I got lots of thank you mails and things like that) can’t find it any more.

Nowadays, I get more traffic from Bing, Yandex.ru, DDG and Brave than from Google..