MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-18 18:55:05+00:00
What's your decision tree for when you feel you need a SPA in 2025?

At least some of what you may not be getting in this space is how many developers right now seem to be hugely deprioritizing or just dropping SPA from their decision trees lately. Recent advances in CSS and ESM and Web Components such as View Transitions and vanilla/small-framework JS (ESM) tree-shaking/"unbundling"/importmaps give MPAs more of the benefits of a complex SPA with fewer of the downsides (less of a "mandatory" build process, smaller initial bundle load). It is easy to feel less of a need for "complex SPA" to be on your architecture options board.
by hostyle | 2025-12-18 18:55:45+00:00
Most people spend maybe 1/4 of their working age life at a job working for someone else. Why would you deliberately sabotage that by checking out mentally and waste all that time on sub-standard work? How do you expect to earn a promotion? You can produce good code at work and even better code at home for yourself. Deliberately producing slop at work will not help anyone.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-18 18:55:48+00:00
Oh, for sure. It's often good to bet on the underdog in a competitive market -- it helps ensure that competition continues to exist.

When I sold PC hardware, I'd try to find the right fit for a customer's needs and pricepoint. Way back then, that often meant selling systems with relatively-inexpensive Cyrix or AMD CPUs and more RAM instead of systems with more-expensive Intel CPUs that had less RAM at any given price -- because those were good tradeoffs to make. By extension, I did a very small part to help foster competition.

But gamers drive the bulk of non-datacenter GPU sales and they don't necessarily act that way.

Having observed their behavior for decades, I feel confident in saying that they broadly promote whatever the top dog is today (whether they can afford to be in that club or not), and aren't shy about punching down on those who suggest a less-performant option regardless of its fitness for a particular purpose.

Or at least: The ones who behave this way sure do manage to be loud about it. (And in propaganda, loudness counts.)

I suspect they'll be fawning over nVidia for as long as nVidia keeps producing what is perceived to be the fastest thing, even if it is made from pure unobtanium.
The reason smart founders pick bad startup ideas
by suhaspatil101 | 2025-12-18 18:55:54+00:00
Most startup advice sounds reasonable on the surface. “Find a problem.” “Scratch your own itch.” “Build something people want.” I followed all of it, and still watched smart founders, including myself, spend months building things that quietly went nowhere.

That contradiction bothered me enough to dig deeper. I started reading failure postmortems, dead Product Hunt launches, abandoned GitHub repos, and long Hacker News threads where people explain why they passed on an idea.

After a while, a pattern emerged. The problem isn’t that people lack ideas. It’s that we evaluate ideas using storytelling logic instead of survival logic.

We choose ideas that sound interesting, feel ambitious, or look good in a pitch, but collapse the moment they meet real-world behaviour.

What kills most ideas isn’t competition or execution. It’s that they don’t replace anything urgent.

They don’t map to an existing habit, a recurring cost, or a painful workaround someone is already using.

When you ask simple questions like who is paying, what they stop doing when they adopt this, and why now, most ideas fall apart very quickly.

To stop repeating this mistake, I began writing ideas down as hypotheses instead of inspiration.

Each idea had to survive a few uncomfortable questions: what existing behavior does this replace, what would kill it in the first thirty days, and what is the smallest experiment that could prove or disprove demand.

Most ideas failed immediately. A few survived longer than expected.

Over time this turned into a private database I used to avoid wasting months on weak ideas. It wasn’t a collection of “great ideas.”

It was a record of ideas that survived brutal filtering, along with many that didn’t. Eventually I cleaned it up into something others could browse, now called startupideasdbcom (google it), mostly because I kept wishing something like this existed earlier.

If you’re stuck choosing what to build, or tired of clever ideas that die quietly, this might save you some time.

And if you disagree with the framework, I’m genuinely interested in where it breaks, Hacker News usually finds the flaws faster than anywhere else.
by yawaramin | 2025-12-18 18:56:07+00:00
Invokers don't give you what htmx gives you out of the box. If you want to, for example, have an invoker command to fetch a resource and swap it in to the page, you have to write custom JS for that. That's the thing that htmx gives you out of the box, along with error handling, progress indicator support, history support, animated transitions, and a host of other features.

If you don't need or want all these and are happy with the worse UX, then of course you don't need htmx.

Re your suggestion: datalist makes you select an option, then fills in an input with the value of the option. Then you have to submit the form to actually get the resource you just searched for. Active search gives you the links to the resources directly in the search results, so you can load them with one click. There's a big UX difference.
by half0wl | 2025-12-18 18:56:19+00:00
I appreciate this blogpost. I'm the one at Railway responsible for this decision, so I wanted to share some context from our side.

First off, sorry you got nailed by this. I genuinely empathize because _we_ got nailed too - the Railway.com frontend is hosted on Railway, and we had references to these vuln versions buried in old packages that weren't used in live code. We couldn't deploy for a bit until we sorted it out. It sucked.

That said, I believe this was the right call for a few reasons:

1. We have to think about our entire userbase. Our DX makes deploying easy, which attracts a lot of non-technical folks such as PMs, vibe cobers, newbies, etc. A significant chunk of them would either have no idea this was happening, no idea what an RCE even is, or no clue how to fix it.

2. We're trying to break the "I'll fix it later cycle" because that mindset is how security debt piles up. Yes, it's a heavy-handed approach. It shifts the action item left in the SDLC by blocking vuln deploys outright. We _could_ just alert people, and we did, but we've learned the hard way that people don't read emails. This was the only intervention that actually worked. Other platforms like Vercel also took the same approach.

3. This disproportionately impacted users who weren't using Next.js. We had to scramble when attackers leveraging this exploit started causing degradation across <10% of our fleet [0].

Your feedback on container and resource isolation is valid; there's stuff we could do better, and we're working on it. As a platform, it's a hard dance between "you got pwn'd for ignoring shit" and "why didn't you protect us from this?"

We made this call to protect the majority, and I recognize it's not going to make everyone happy. Despite this, I would still have made the call. I wished the majority of our userbase knew better than us, but the reality is they don't. My only regret is not making this call earlier when we were first notified. The sad thing here is people like you who _do_ know better than us doesn't have an escape hatch out of this - and I would argue that this isn't an escape hatch we should be providing.

(And for the record, we aren't actively killing live running workloads on vuln versions unless our scanner picks up that they're compromised using heuristics we've developed for known cryptominers, etc.)

[0] https://blog.railway.com/p/incident-report-december-16-2025

edit: typos and minor phrasing tweaks
Ask HN: Tech conference organizers, how hard is your job?
by cloudedcordial | 2025-12-18 18:56:38+00:00
Many of us go to conference to present their work, connect with like-minded individuals and possibly finding the new opportunity.

From the off-hand remarks from some conference organizers, their work carried some risk and could be thankless. They could face the following unpleasant things: * A speaker got cancelled because of something they posted or said. * Nasty people violated code of conduct. * Conference organizers got verbal abuse and death threats because they rejected a speaker's proposal. * Anything money related.

What are the other difficulties of the conference organizers?
by desertrider12 | 2025-12-18 18:56:56+00:00
Braid also has the stars which are so well hidden that I can’t imagine anyone finding them without a walkthrough (though some people obviously did in order to make the walkthroughs).

The Witness is different, it really does teach you everything you need to 100% it. I cheated on the ship puzzle but it’s totally possible to figure out.
by TCSoft | 2025-12-18 18:57:07+00:00
This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired", haha. Everyone wants the equivalent of QuickBooks built-in to the software. I need something to bring back my enthusiasm from years ago.
by tyfighter | 2025-12-18 18:57:08+00:00
I haven't made a website of any kind since a C&C: Red Alert fan site somewhere on GeoCities in the late 90s.

I work on graphics drivers. They're hard write and even harder to debug. You have to be a huge nerd about graphics to get very far. It's a relatively rare skill set, but new, younger, nerdier people keep on coming. Most people in graphics are quiet and are just keeping the industry functioning (me). It's applied computer architecture in a combination of continuous learning and intuition from experience.
by strangattractor | 2025-12-18 18:57:08+00:00
One last post.

The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.

Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?
by reactordev | 2025-12-18 18:57:33+00:00
They don’t understand that not only tax payer funds go to these systems but the systems turn around and create victims of those in their care.

Paying to stay in jail should be done on an availability of funds, like bonds are (mostly), else it costs the tax payers. The shell companies that operate these prisons shouldn’t be allowed to charge inmates per diems if they are receiving tax payers dollars for them.

People think it’s all murders and rapists when that’s only 5% of the population at most. Most are in there for petty crime, drug charges, 3 strike rules, administrative chains, or mental health issues.

Yet for 27¢/day, will pick cotton for a local textile.
by bookofjoe | 2025-12-18 18:57:48+00:00
>You can contact an employee

Off topic pretty much: In 2013 I was one of the 8,000 people in the U.S. selected by Google to be able to buy Google Glass ($1,500 [$2,000 in today's money]) in its first release to the public. One thing I will never get over is the customer service offered to us Glassholes: not a toll-free number, no automated voice mail tree: I'd call for any reason AT ANY TIME NIGHT OR DAY OR WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY and a Glass specialist would answer within a couple rings and spend as much time on the phone with me as I needed to resolve my issue.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-18 18:57:50+00:00
That's what I said in my original message. By my account, GPT 5.2 is better than Gemini 3 Pro and Opus 4.5

Gemini 3 Pro is a great foundation model. I use as a math tutor, and it's great. I previously used Gemini 2.5 Pro as a math tutor, and Gemini 3 Pro was a qualitative improvement over that. But Gemini 3 Pro sucks at being a coding agent inside a harness. It sucks at tool calling. It's borderline unusable in Cursor because of that, and likely the same in Antigravity. A few weeks ago I attended a demo of Antigravity that Google employees were giving, and it was completely broken. It got stuck for them during the demo, and they ended up not being able to show anything.

Opus 4.5 is good, and faster than GPT-5.2, but less reliable. I use it for medium difficulty tasks. But for anything serious—it's GPT 5.2
by snapwich | 2025-12-18 18:57:54+00:00
I've documented and shared some code repos that I use to manage concurrent AI agents (Claude Code in my case).

I wrote this article because I often heard about people using git worktrees to work with multiple agents but I never saw someone document exactly how they do it and how they adopt them into their development workflow.

I came up with this workflow that I've been using for almost a year now and have been extremely productive, so I thought I'd share.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-18 18:57:54+00:00
> I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.

That's going too far. The person recording them might be the same person who is used to making the food, or might be taking literal dictation from that person.

Knowing how to make food isn't the same skill as knowing how to explain the process in a way that someone who isn't already trained to make the food can follow.
by tananaev | 2025-12-18 18:58:40+00:00
I was very skeptical about Codex at the beginning, but now all my coding tasks start with Codex. It's not perfect at everything, but overall it's pretty amazing. Refactoring, building something new, building something I'm not familiar with. It is still not great at debugging things.

One surprising thing that codex helped with is procrastination. I'm sure many people had this feeling when you have some big task and you don't quite know where to start. Just send it to Codex. It might not get it right, but it's almost always good starting point that you can quickly iterate on.
by dewey | 2025-12-18 18:59:01+00:00
> I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards

I think gift card or not isn't really relevant, fraudulent activity can happen in a lot of ways like iCloud being paid by a stolen credit card, or TV shows being rented with hacked PayPal account.

The real issue is simply that there's no proper support avenue for serious issues that at this point affect your whole life, a family or a whole company. There's also no real avenue for a user to get the authorities to do anything to help with their case.
by cess11 | 2025-12-18 18:59:19+00:00
I'd wager it might be in response to israeli authorities having made clear that they're suspecting it was done by Iran.

Here and there it is also claimed that he was jewish, which I haven't seen any credible sources corroborate.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-strange-death-of-nuno-lo...
Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)
by lulzx | 2025-12-18 18:59:33+00:00
I needed to generate invoices in a Node.js app. jsPDF is 229KB. I only needed text, rectangles, lines, and JPEG images.

So I wrote tinypdf: <400 lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 3.3KB minified+gzipped. What it does: - Text (Helvetica, colors, alignment) - Rectangles and lines - JPEG images - Multiple pages, custom sizes What it doesn't do: - Custom fonts, PNG/SVG, forms, encryption, HTML-to-PDF That's it. The 95% use case for invoices, receipts, reports, tickets, and labels. GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf npm: npm install tinypdf
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-18 19:00:02+00:00
Okay, so how do you actually show the stuff to the end user?

Just raw structs of data? Or do you turn that back into HTML?

Now you've got two sets of templates to cope with...

Why would I care about how much effort it is for the server to generate? It's already generating HTML from templates, and it's more-or-less infinitely capable of doing so.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-12-18 19:00:03+00:00
The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.

Related, I think math went through a similar transition.
by Groxx | 2025-12-18 19:00:28+00:00
I'd call some null-pointer-lint-with-automatic-fixes tools "vibe coding" tbh. I've run across a couple that do a pretty good job of detecting possible nulls and add annotations about it and that's great... but then the fix is "if null, return null", in practice it's frequently applied completely blindly without any regards to correctness.

If you lean on tools like that, you can rapidly degrade your codebase into "everything might be null and might short circuit silently and it can't tell you about when it happens", leaving you with buggy software that is next to impossible to understand or troubleshoot because there aren't "should not be null" hints or stack traces or logs or anything that would help figure out causes.
by mbesto | 2025-12-18 19:00:35+00:00
> Right now models have roughly all of the written knowledge available to mankind, minus some obscure held out private archives and so on.

Sorry for the nit, but this is a gross oversimplification. Most private archives are not obscure but obfuscated and largely are way more valuable training data then the publicly available ones.

Want to know how the DOD may technically tracks your phone? Private.

Want to know how to make Coca Cola at scale? Private.

Want to know what the schematic is for a Google TPU? Private.

etc etc.
by core-utility | 2025-12-18 19:00:45+00:00
Couldn't this be true in the other direction as well? Anecdotally I see developers putting a lot more scrutiny into vibe coded PRs, while AI code tends to be highly commented (by the AI) and potentially easier to read.

I've seen way more human comments of "I don't know what this does but if I remove it everything breaks" in systems.
Show HN: Spice Cayenne – SQL acceleration built on Vortex
by lukekim | 2025-12-18 19:00:56+00:00
Hi HN, we’re Luke and Phillip, and we’re building Spice.ai OSS - a lightweight, portable data and AI engine and powered by Apache DataFusion & Ballista for SQL query, hybrid-search, and LLM-inference across disaggregated-storage used by enterprises like Barracuda Networks and Twilio.

We first introduced Spice [1] on HN in 2021 and re-launched it on HN [2] in 2024 re-built from the ground up in Rust.

Spice includes the concept of a Data Accelerator [3], which is a way to materialize data from disparate sources, such as other databases, in embedded databases like SQLite and DuckDB.

Today we’re excited to announce a new Ducklake-inspired Data Accelerator built on Vortex [3], a highly performant, extensible columnar data format that claims 100x faster random access, 10-20x faster scans, 5x faster writes with a similar compression ratio vs. Apache Parquet.

In our tests with Spice, Vortex performs faster than DuckDB with a third of the memory usage, and is much more scalable (multi-file). For real-world deployments, we see the DuckDB Data Accelerator often capping out around 1TB, but Spice Cayenne can do Petabyte-scale.

You can read about it at https://spice.ai/blog and in the Spice OSS release notes [4].

This is just the first version, and we’d love to get your feedback!

GitHub: https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448887

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39854584

[3] https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex

[4] https://spiceai.org/blog/releases/v1.9.0
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-18 19:01:00+00:00
I actually hate AI in my core, to the point that if it gets too much more advanced I'll likely be in existential crisis, so don't attack me on those grounds. Given it exists, I'm going to find what's good about it though. I do think the problem of AI existing has to be confronted. Maybe one solution is what the human does is produce specs like the HTML 5 one, and what the AI does is implement it in software.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-18 19:01:17+00:00
Mozilla has lost the trust of its users by making decisions that their userbase doesn't approve of repeatedly, and then partially walking them back after the backlash.

That's not the fault of their users, at least not directly. If you want to argue that Firefox users are stifling innovation or trying to steer the product in a direction that would threaten the future viability of Firefox/Mozilla, I would be open to hearing that argument out even though I don't think that's the issue.

Mozilla is the equivalent of a petrostate in the tech sector. They have a bunch of revenue coming in that they didn't really earn, and they have no idea what to do with it to improve their current condition. To me, that's the core issue.
by dvt | 2025-12-18 19:01:53+00:00
This is a very "Econ 101" way of looking at the problem. If you've ever been to Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Barcelona, you quickly realize you can't "build more," as the desirable city locations are saturated.

The problem is that the supply/demand curves are being manipulated by, as mentioned, property owners which are destroying the fabric of their respective city via short-term rentals (or, by just owning an appreciating empty property), which, in turn, increases rents and prices for housing en masse. All of a sudden, a "boring" property becomes an investment that generates revenue. All of a sudden, hedge funds, banks, etc. want in on the action. There's money to be made, after all!

While this used to be the case in the past (if you bought, for example, farmland, or a factory, or something), the financialization of housing is a relatively new phenomenon.

Expats and global financial markets further complicate this: how can an average Spaniard that makes $50k compete with a California "digital nomad" that makes $150k? Obviously, we need to have some sensible rules that protect the citizens with heritage and history there.
by RS-232 | 2025-12-18 19:02:06+00:00
This is extremely sad. My heart goes out to his family, friends, students, and peers.

Although this was probably a random act of violence, it makes me wonder.

As a nuclear scientist, could he have been involved in any sensitive research?

Maybe he "knew too much" and was deemed a NatSec/InfoSec threat by certain clandestine groups? It wouldn't be the first time...
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-18 19:02:10+00:00
The pattern here feels pretty old: every time something shows up that lets people go much faster, we use it to crash harder first. When cars showed up, people didn’t suddenly become more careful because they could now move at 50 km/h instead of 5 – they just plowed into things faster until seatbelts, traffic rules and driver training caught up.

LLMs in coding feel similar. They don’t magically remove the need for tests, specs, and review; they just compress the time between “idea” and “running code” so much that all the missing process shows up as outages instead of slow PRs. The risk isn’t “AI writes code”, it’s orgs refusing to slow down long enough to build the equivalent of traffic lights and driver’s ed around it.
by mkehrt | 2025-12-18 19:02:19+00:00
A while back the Met in New York had an exhibit of painted reconstructed statues where they let artists make reasonable guesses about what the statues would have looked like. It was pretty fantastic.

Here's an article with one picture I could find, along with a few of the more saturated ones (NSFW artistic nudity): https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibi...