MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-12-24 04:10:35+00:00
>- Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.

>- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.

You're making it sound way harder than it is, when both adobe acrobat and the built-in preview app on mac can both competently redact documents. I'm not aware of instances of either (or any other purpose-made redaction tools) failing. I wouldn't homebrew a python script to do my redaction either, but that doesn't mean doing redactions properly in some insurmountable task for some intern.
by bdangubic | 2025-12-24 04:11:17+00:00
> you are left looking at a mountain of code you don’t understand. And by the time you do, you could have just built it yourself.

SWEs that do not have (or develop) this skill (to fill-in the 10% that doesn’t work and fully understand the 90% that works and very, very quickly) will be plumbers in a few years if not earlier.
by true_religion | 2025-12-24 04:11:56+00:00
I recently discovered Claude, and it does much better than Codex or Gemini for python code.

Gemini seems to lean to making everything a script, disconnected from the larger vision. Sure, it uses our existing libraries, but the files it writes and functions it makes can’t be integrated back in.

Codex is fast. Very fast. Which makes it great for a conversational UI, and answering questions about the codebasw or proposing alternatives but when it writes code it’s too clever. The code is valid but not pythonic. Like the invention of one line functions just to optimize a situation that had could be parameterized in three places.

Claude on the other hand makes code that is simple to understand and has enough architecture that you can lift it out and use as is without too much rewriting.
by rramadass | 2025-12-24 04:12:21+00:00
> It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB.

I am of the firm belief that "Monsieur Fabrice Bellard" is not one person but a group of programmers writing under this nom de plume like "Nicolas Bourbaki" was in Mathematics ;-)

I don't know of any other programmer who has similar breadth and depth in so many varied domains. Just look at his website - https://bellard.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard No self-aggrandizing stuff etc. but only tech. He is an ideal for all of us to strive for.

Watson's comment on how Sherlock Holmes made him feel can be rephrased in this context as;

"I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours [i.e. fellow programmers], but I was [and am] always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with [the works of Fabrice Bellard]."

PS: Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer - https://web.archive.org/web/20210128085300/https://smartbear...

PPS: Fabrice Bellard: A Computer Science Pioneer - https://www.scribd.com/document/511765517/Fabrice-Bellard-In... (pretty good long article)
by jibal | 2025-12-24 04:12:37+00:00
Of course they didn't provide an example, they just waved their hands.

If someone does encounter an example, they are free to correct it by adding sourced material or by removing unsourced material (preferably after a notice on the talk page).

And they say "It's a shame since it can hurt the communities reputation due to how highly ranked wikipedia pages can be" after saying that this happens because 99% of people pay no attention to the topic.
by eviks | 2025-12-24 04:13:01+00:00
> but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file.

This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position
by FrameworkFred | 2025-12-24 04:13:06+00:00
To all the commenters who asked if it's worth it? IMO it's super worth it if you have more than one wifi access point and it gets more and more worth it as your network gets more complicated.

I upgraded to homogenous ubiquiti/unifi when I set up a point to multi-point on my farm because I thought it would make that part easier. Surprisingly, those links aren't really baked in to the rest of it, but the router and wifi antennas that I've installed around those links "just work" with a private, protected, and guest network.

I used to have to update two different routers with the same SSID, username and password to make "hopping" from one to the next "seamless" and, now that I've got 8 wifi antennas in a mesh with a single UI to configure them all, I can't even imagine how I'd do it with the hodge-podge of gear I used to work with.

And I'm probably going to buy a travel router, but I'm wondering, if I use it connect to the hotel wifi, will I be able to use the thing as a wifi hotspot as well or do I have to use an ethernet point because the wifi is "taken"?
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-24 04:14:57+00:00
Haha hey, thanks! I'm dreading renewing the domain but I'm stoked I got it.

I totally agree about data ownership. It also has the benefit of not needing me to pay for storage hosting, a win-win.

I actually just integrated SQLite into the client and will add the ability to sync with Turso (free serverless SQLite) via a user supplied API key.

Might also extend support for self hosted, D1, S3? and so on. Obviously the community can add support for other storage systems as needed
by brianpan | 2025-12-24 04:15:36+00:00
I think you're thinking about git as a separate thing from the IDE.

I love using IJ + git because there are no seams in between edit and commit. For instance, with IJ, I could easily split every other line of a change into separate commits.

Maybe there's a way in git to stage only certain parts of a diff, but I'd have to go an learn another flag or command that I'm going to forget by the next time I need to do it again.

Also with IJ, I just glance at my main branch tab and the highlighting tells me what commits aren't in my checked out feature branch.

Two small examples but there are many more and it adds up.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-12-24 04:16:06+00:00
My point is that 20+ years ago, there was frustration here (and elsewhere) that even if we weren't 10x engineers, even being 3x engineers could not get us 3x the compensation.

That changed in the last 20 years for the better. People who had the work ethic and aptitude to become medical doctors or lawyers or management consultants no longer had to sacrifice compensation if they loved tech.

This is notable and worth calling out, and pointing out it wasn't always like this.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-24 04:18:35+00:00
Verifiability is a core policy on Wikipedia, and with time, citing your sources has become more and more important. Wikipedia isn't was it once was in 2001. Articles can't survive on being verified by their own primary sources, for the same reason we don't want Wikipedia to become a dumping ground for advertisers who then cite their own site in an attempt to gain legitimacy. Secondary sources provide a solid ground truth that the subject in question has gained recognition and thus notability. If those secondary sources don't exist, we can't assume notability based on nothing.

Wikipedia isn't Britannica, because by this point it's probably a lot better than Britannica. They were comparable already in 2005,[1] and I have little reason to believe that Wikipedia is doing much worse on that front nowadays, even though they have vastly more content than Britannica.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-a...
by russellbeattie | 2025-12-24 04:19:36+00:00
There's a third option: Ambivalence.

Any major documents/files have been removed all together. Then the rest was farmed out to anyone they could find with basic instructions to redact anything embarrassing.

Since there's absolutely zero chance anyone in the administration will ever be held accountable for what's left, they're not overly concerned.

The thing that I've been waiting to see for years is the actual video recordings. There were supposedly cameras everywhere, for years. I'm not even talking about the disgusting stuff, I'm talking security for entrances, hallways, etc.

The FBI definitely has them, where are they?

What about Maxwell's media files? There was nothing found there? Did they subpoena security companies and cloud providers?

The documents are all deniable. Yes video evidence can now be easily faked, but real video will have details that are hard to invent. Regardless, videos are worth millions of words.
by csomar | 2025-12-24 04:19:40+00:00
> It is fascinating that it can bootstrap moderately complex projects form a single shot.

Similar to "git clone bigproject@github.git"? There is nothing fascinating about creating something that has existed around the training set. It is fascinating that the AI can make some variations from the original content though.

> If it could write the code, I do not see why not deploy it more effectively to write new types of operating systems, experiment with new programming languages and programming paradigms.

This is where all the "vibe-coders" disappears. LLMs can write code fast but so does copy-paste. Most of the "vibe-coded" stuff I see on the Internet is non-functional slop that is super-unoptimized and has open supabase databases.

To be clear, I am not against LLMs or embracing new technologies. I also don't have this idea that we have some kind of "craft" when we have been replacing other people for the last couple decades.

I've been building a game (fully vibe-coded, that is the rule is that I don't write/read any lines of code) and it has reached a stage where any LLM is unable to make any change without fully breaking it (for the curious: https://qpingpong.codeinput.com). The end result is quite impressive but it is far from replacing anyone who has been doing serious programming anytime soon.
by Terretta | 2025-12-24 04:20:02+00:00
Helix is a commercial multi-protocol streaming server:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_Universal_Server

HTTP Live Streaming is already a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

See also DASH, M-JPEG, progressive download, etc.

> "Who knew?"

Everyone in the streaming industry, and not so long ago that it's been forgotten.
by dangus | 2025-12-24 04:21:38+00:00
Isn't Apple currently disincentivized to make features because they don't even allow competing smartwatches to access a basic feature set on iPhone?

You're basically saying Apple would be disincentivized to innovate on the Apple Watch because Apple would need to release the underlying APIs that make those work with the phone to competing solutions. But the status quo is that competing solutions that are already better than the Apple Watch straight up aren't allowed on the platform, and the Apple Watch generally costs more than its competitors.

You are unintentionally saying that if Apple had to allow third parties to use their private APIs, that the Apple Watch would have to cost less and/or innovate more in order to convince us all to buy it instead of buying a watch from Samsung or Google.

What you are describing is a more competitive and open market where consumers benefit from lower prices and more of an incentive to innovate and justify high prices.

I would also dispute the notion that merely releasing these APIs would somehow give away all your secret sauce. Competitors still have to build the experience on top of that.
by jibal | 2025-12-24 04:23:18+00:00
> However, i still think systemic bias is something to be seriously considered.

I've seriously considered it. It helps to have been an active editor who understands how the place works and has seen the push and pull that prevents such systemic biases ... of course, there is a systemic "bias" toward veridical claims, which is as it should be. That doesn't mean that everything there is true, but there is an active process that tends to eliminate what isn't--sort of like science. But at WP there are numerous adversarial ideological cadres who have to at least play-act at good faith in order to achieve consensus, which results in a lot truth being stated in quite muted qualified ways. It's not perfect but it's hard to come up with a way to do better.
by jalapenos | 2025-12-24 04:23:31+00:00
Because the whole thing wasn't actually wanted. They just needed some theatre to make it look like they were fulfilling their campaign promise.

Trying to get a government to reduce its spending from within is stupid and naive.

There is no scenario, no matter who is voted in, where government spending goes down. They just talk about it, and then increase spending on the things they like (e.g. the last "big beautiful bill").

This was the primary cause of the Trump-Musk spat: former promised the latter a cost cutting campaign, but it was just a trick, used only to destroy those parts of the government he disliked like USAID, after which he promptly neutered it and signed a massive spending bill, basically having conned him.

If it has actually been wanted - something that's literally impossible unless it was say created through an Article 5 convention - it would have been effective.
by dinobones | 2025-12-24 04:24:21+00:00
You spent 3 months on this hacked together garbage when you probably could’ve just configured a pre-existing solution off the shelf with like 10 minutes of reading and understanding documentation.

This blog post reeks of “you can just do things” type of engineering. This is the quality of engineering I would expect from “TPOT” (that part of Twitter) where people talk about working 12 hour days. It’s cause they’re working 12 hours on bullshit like this.

Building some sweet custom codec or binary transportation algorithm was barely cute in like 1989. It definitely ain’t cute now.

How many of these AI and “agentic” companies are just misled engineers thinking they are cracked and writing needlessly complex solutions to problems that dont even exist?

Just burn it all down. Let it pop already.
by DecoPerson | 2025-12-24 04:25:15+00:00
Go with WebView.

As you’re a solo dev, one of your most important resources is your mental capacity. Native platforms & their dev stacks are a world of their own.

Going with WebView allows you to spend your time on other things that matter more. It also helps you prototype quickly and get a feel for what works.

Later, after you have a better, more solid idea of what your game is, if performance is an issue, then you can convert parts of it (or all of it) to native.

(By the time your game is done, I suspect the mobile app dev landscape is going to be quite different than what it is now.)
by bgwalter | 2025-12-24 04:25:24+00:00
Before LLMs, “perfect software” was largely a myth.

We know, your blog is the first static webpage in existence.

Third, it brings back autonomy.

This is the new talking point. Musk claims that cars that are always connected provide "autonomy", vibe coders claim that the stolen code distributed by Anthropic provides "autonomy".

War is peace, freedom is slavery.
by silexia | 2025-12-24 04:26:11+00:00
Thank you for the explanation. As a long time community member, I have seen this principle and agree with it. I am asking how the principle applies to the 60 minutes story so that multiple articles were on the front page, despite all being flagged? This does not seem very relevant as the 60 minutes story was not even killed, but delayed to await additional investigation. Seems like it violates the numbers you mentioned 1), 3), and 4) and 5)?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-24 04:27:37+00:00
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length

This is the only weakness of Barr's method.

> it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision

Anyong relying on automated tools to redact is doing so performatively. At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context to sit down and read through the documents and strike out anything that reveals–directly or indirectly, spelled correctly or incorrectly–too much.
by steffoz | 2025-12-24 04:27:52+00:00
I don’t give employees (and stable freelancers/contractors) the minimum I can get away with; I give them a fair share of the profits on top of their regular salary.

I’m not sure how common this model is in Europe, but it has certainly helped me keep my best employee with me throughout the entire journey and feel much less alone in my decisions—especially at the beginning, when things are harder.

Plus, it's just more fun to share when you can.
by edg5000 | 2025-12-24 04:28:50+00:00
> It’s like saying calculators replaced accountants. Calculators automated arithmetic, but arithmetic was never the job. The job was understanding financials, advising clients, making judgment calls, etc. The calculator just made accountants faster at the mechanical part.

Mechanical and later electical calculators replaced human calculators. Accountants switched from having to delegate computation to owning a calculator.
by sandworm101 | 2025-12-24 04:29:00+00:00
Ctrl-c and ctrl-v are not hacks.

They are unredacted because either those in charge are not familiar with basic office tasks, or someone wanted this stuff to leak and nobody checked thier work. Either brand of incompetance should cause heads to roll. But, just like the signal fiasco, nothing will happen. When your brand is perfection, you cannot ever admit a mistake.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-12-24 04:29:09+00:00
I think this is one where the behaviour is obvious to you but not to people first running across the project. In particular, whether power loss could do any of:

- you lose whatever writes to s3 haven't finished yet, if any

- the local node will need to repair itself a bit after rebooting

- the local node is now trashed and will have to copy all data back over

- all the nodes are now trashed and it's restore from backup time

I've been kicking the tyres for a bit and I think it's the happy case in the above, but lots of software out there completely falls apart on crashes so it's not generally a safe assumption. I think the behaviour is sqlite on zfs doesn't care about pulling the power cable out, lmdb is a bit further down the list.
by drweevil | 2025-12-24 04:29:30+00:00
I lost some DSP code I was working on (DOS, ca. '95). I wanted to recompile it, so I did something like 'del *.obj'. Or meant to. I typed 'del * obj' instead. Lost a day’s worth of work. (DOS even asked me if I was sure. “Of course I’m sure”, I thought as I mashed the Enter key.)

Result? I learned how to use make. (Borland had a nice one).
I also started using my first VCS tool, sourcesafe (pre-Microsoft).
by leonflexo | 2025-12-24 04:29:38+00:00
I only read this because while messing around with learning some basic VPS and NGINX, I used Claude to spin up some quick frontends. One ended up being a geocities hackernews clone. Then while getting some basic process and terminal experience, I piped into Codex CLI to generate a summary modal to my visual liking. All of that to say that while I could have done it on my own, I likely wouldn't have because it allowed me a low friction path to implementing the bits that weren't crucial for what I was trying to learn.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-24 04:30:22+00:00
I don't think this is a case of programmers being bad at things (although I get that you said that as a joke), I think it's much worse than that: This is some kind of weird mind-over-matter "if we believe it hard enough it'll come true" thing. Sort of an "if we beat everyone who says the emperor has no clothes, we can redefine 'clothes' to include 'the emperor's birthday suit'". Note that these people who are downvoting anyone who dares to say that "open source" isn't synonymous with the OSI definition never concede an inch to the notion that the words have a common-sense meaning and the OSI didn't invent the term (provable via internet archive). Because it's not about being right it's about changing reality to match what they wish were true.
Show HN: Open-source Planning Poker web app with no voting limits
by rie03p | 2025-12-24 04:30:46+00:00
I built an open-source Planning Poker web app focused on being simple,
free, and unrestricted.

It uses WebSockets and Cloudflare Workers with Durable Objects
to manage real-time room state.

GitHub: https://github.com/rie03p/planning-poker
by rtkwe | 2025-12-24 04:31:48+00:00
They're not 'hacks' it's the people doing the redaction making beginner mistakes of not properly removing the selectable text under the redactions. They're either drawing black rectangles over the text or highlighting it black neither of which prevents the underlying text from being selected.

Keeping that secret would require sponaneous silence from everyone looking at these docs which is just not possible.
by billy99k | 2025-12-24 04:32:21+00:00
Pretty much everything he's tried to enact (besides name changes of monuments) has been shot down by the supreme court. This is the exact opposite of a dictatorship. You need to educate yourself on our current system of government. But I know, orange man bad.

Want to see a real dictatorship? Ukraine jailed all opposing politicians during the war with Russia and stopped having elections. Yet, it's still supported by a large percentage of the population in the US.

The last administration not only tried to jail Trump on bogus charges, but any lawyer that supported him (and his supporters were fired from their jobs).

In addition to this, we are now seeing that large counties in states like Georgia violated laws with hundreds and thousands of votes in the 2020 election. These all point to a dictatorship, that we lived through, yet nobody like you is complaining about it on HN.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-24 04:33:40+00:00
Seems from what I can find on Google that people with that condition can remember extreme detail but with many limitations. Does not seem they can remember everything that ever happened to them, like a conversation they had with their mother age 5, the questions and answers they put in high school, what was in the article they read 13 August 2009 at 11 am in the morning word for word etc. I would still say that would drive you insane, for at least some definition for which you could not actually function in society.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-24 04:35:02+00:00
It seems like a common tactic by this administration is to just not do what they are required to do until they have been told 50 times and criminal charges are being filed. I suspect the actual truth here is 'don't do this' turned into 'you have 1 day to do this and keep my name out of the release' which led to lots of issues. They probably spent more time deciding the order of pages to release, and how to avoid releasing the things damaging to the administration, than actually doing the work needed to release it. Now they will say 'look, see! You didn't give us enough time and our incompetence is the proof'