MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
What matters in automated form filling?
by entslscheia | 2025-12-18 11:13:13+00:00
We’re surveying developers and product folks on automated form filling beyond browser autofill—think multi-step flows, client-side validation, and SPA/iframe quirks. We’ve run a small study across 120 public forms (auth, checkout, job apps, SaaS signups) to identify pain points and success criteria, and we’d like your input on what really matters.

What we tested (lightweight, not a full product):

- Field detection: labels/for, aria-* attributes, nearest text nodes, and simple layout proximity (bbox distance, alignment).

- Basic value policies: skip sensitive fields by default (SSN/passports), prefer vault-sourced data for PII, and respect “required” heuristics.

- Flow handling: wait for async validators, detect SPA route changes, and retry on soft failures (error text appears).

- Validation priors: regex + checksum for email/phone/postal/IBAN; minimal locale rules.

Early metrics (small sample, indicative only):

- Field association accuracy: ~86% on simple forms; drops to ~63% with shadow DOM or custom inputs.

- End-to-end completion: ~58% for single-page flows; ~34% for multi-step with conditional fields.

- False positives (filled the wrong field): ~7% overall; concentrated in tables/repeaters.
by clan | 2025-12-18 11:14:35+00:00
This actually makes me happy! I must be getting old!

It truly is a bad one but I really appreciate Kevin Day for finding/reporting this and for all the volunteer work fixing this.

All I had to do was "freebsd-update fetch install && reboot" on my systems and I could continue my day. Fleet management can be that easy for both pets and cattle. I do however feel for those who have deployed embedded systems. We can only hope the firmware vendors are on top of their game.

My HN addiction is now vindicated as I would probably not have noticed this RCE until after christmas.

This makes me very grateful and gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside!
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-12-18 11:14:49+00:00
It doesn't look like shit content, but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310650

posted an hour ago with 4 measly upvotes among other threads with hundreds of upvotes on spot 10?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311092

4 upvotes in 26 comments, also on spot 10 after refresh?

Still zero comments for both! If all you need to end up in the top 10 is 4 upvotes within 30 minutes I could start selling hacker news front page placements right here, right now.

Is the value of an upvote karma based? Is the ranking view based? Are view by high karma accounts worth more? In any case, those two posts are pretty sketchy. No one cares enough to comment on them and they are still on the frontpage.
by CalRobert | 2025-12-18 11:14:50+00:00
For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards.

Here's a good livestream from my town - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 (I share the livestream because that makes it harder to say it's cherrypicked)

Or here's a more polished, edited video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w

We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside.

What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.
by everdrive | 2025-12-18 11:15:15+00:00
Like basically every truism, it's a broad generalization and when you pick it apart you find all sorts of cases where the terms are loosely defined or else the truism just doesn't fit. There is at least something to be said here, and this is something of an adaptation of Ibn Khaldun's work on the concept of "asabiyyah" in the Muqaddima. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun#al-Muqaddima_and_t...

From the Wikipedia summary:

"The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of aṣabiyyah, translated as "group cohesiveness" or "solidarity".[41] This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion."
by dkga | 2025-12-18 11:15:21+00:00
I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world in 2015 and 2019, in Mariana and Brumadinho.)

The most interesting part is that Minas Gerais has unusual top-of-the-hill aquifers, instead of in valleys. The rare mineral formation in its mountain tops collects water and only slowly dispenses it to the subsoil, keeping its quality.[0] Needless to say, unfortunately I hold very little hope for it, considering it also sits on some of the most desirable iron ore deposits in the world.

[0] https://www.projetopreserva.com.br/post/os-raros-aquiferos-d... (in Portuguese)
by wongarsu | 2025-12-18 11:16:56+00:00
Ok, I can see the "fascist sympathizer" (though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall). But "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" doesn't seem substantiated from those links, unless I'm missing something here? Women being less interested in programming according to him is completely orthogonal to whether he thinks they should play a role
by marziply | 2025-12-18 11:17:31+00:00
I find both of your stock apps (API and investment) quite interesting but both websites are eerily absent of any information outside of their respective purposes. Both websites are clean and the designs are nice but struggle on mobile it seems (I'm on Android, Brave browser, horizontal scroll seems to be buggy). I wish there was additional information outside of just what they do - I'd like to know more about the developer that created them, goals/ambitions for the future, that kind of thing. Right now, the investment app looks like a scam from an outside perspective. One page, limited information, nothing personal about it. How can I trust such a website with my hard earned cash? I think an improvement would be to have additional pages on who you are, why I should trust you, and what exactly I might get in return for my subscription. It's also probably important to make it clear that you cannot promise any long term profits from this app and that it is almost akin to gambling so users should be prepared to lose money.
by CalRobert | 2025-12-18 11:17:32+00:00
Aside from the fact that drivers have been known to mount sidewalks (especially while sending a text), the real problem is intersections, and crossing said stroads. When there's 8 lanes of Dodge Rams, Chevy Silverados, and F-250's with hoods that are taller than your head you're putting a great deal of trust in the red lamp overhead to actually stop them from killing you.
by santa_boy | 2025-12-18 11:18:04+00:00
I run a side project n0c0de.com [1] ... thats no-code with two zeroes

I develop apps for experienced operators who want to start their own business.

It averages well over $500 / month in side income. Typically about $3-5K depending on the amount of time I have.

I spent perhaps a decade pushing going independent due to inability to get a product ready. I ended up learning the skills and now to solve that pain point for others.

[1]: https://www.n0c0de.com
by Xylakant | 2025-12-18 11:19:08+00:00
Fun thing is that almost every other CI as a service provider charges you in some shape or form for self hosted runners. CircleCI limits the number of self-hosted Job Running in parallel based on your plan and charges a fixed base fee per seat.

So moving away from GHA will not make self-hosted runners free, they’ll move into a different pricing structure that may or may not be beneficial.

And I think charging for self-hosted runners is actually fine. They’re not free for the provider either - log aggregation, caching of artifacts, runner scheduling, implementing the runner software etc are non-trivial problems for any larger CI system.

So I’m actually fine with the proposed change since it also gives me the power as a customer to say “hey, I’m paying for this, fix it.”
by krapp | 2025-12-18 11:19:10+00:00
I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity.

Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework.

People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?

Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-18 11:19:13+00:00
Streetview almost any US suburb. There often is not a way to safely cross a 60ft+ wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means large vehicles with distracted drivers are driving 50mph+.

Almost all businesses are located on these wide roads, and neighborhoods basically become islands for the kids. It’s especially bad in the winter, because it gets dark quicker, and crossing that 60ft+ wide 40mph+ road gets dicey even as an adult.
by CalRobert | 2025-12-18 11:19:17+00:00
Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username)

There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do.

I just wish this were available to more families.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-18 11:19:22+00:00
The reason this is so is that there is no way to say "the library accepts UTF-32, for other encodings use the standard decoder" because there is no such a decoder. "For want of a nail". So it circles back to the idea of easily composable software which is not yet there. Everybody bring their own nails and there is no way to move nails between projects.
by slifin | 2025-12-18 11:19:59+00:00
Cars, I nearly got run over as a kid a few times

Now as an adult I'd be worried about cycling around with cars that would hit me in the chest and not the legs on impact

Also cars make it very easy for a stranger to pull up and kidnap, parents subconsciously know that and factor it into their decisions

There was also youth clubs where I grew up and a BMX track and no phones so play was mostly happening outside

Society is going to continue to degrading as long as debts keep increasing

Debts will keep increasing because the only way to create new money is everytime someone gets a loan the bank injects the principle into the economy but then expects interest on top so there will never be enough money in the economy for everyone to pay off all their debts

We'll either get mass debt forgiveness or societal collapse and so far we've opted for societal collapse
by cefboud | 2025-12-18 11:21:08+00:00
The human psychology is intriguing. The more I see "... Zig ..." the stronger the urge to learn and build something with it becomes. In practice, though, I've found that building things with languages I am familiar with is more enjoyable for me, personally.

A severe case of mimetic desire. I suspect a lot of devs suffer from it.
by mft_ | 2025-12-18 11:22:15+00:00
I think you're trying to shift the goalposts, or you're just not seeing that we're stuck in circular logic.

----

You originally said there isn't an economic basis to locals' antipathy to outsiders.

I provided evidence to show that an economic basis is plausible.

You then use that evidence, and define any examples where it's happening as a 'resort town', and then require evidence that it's also happening in places you wouldn't define as a 'resort town'.

I can't do that, because you excluded the places I can provide positive evidence for, by defining them as resort towns.

----

My basic point remains: there are plenty of places where an influx of short- or long-term tourists causes a meaningful economic shift in the cost of housing (especially) which therefore makes it logical (and not just xenophobic) that the locals might resent the tourists.
by godelski | 2025-12-18 11:22:51+00:00
I think if you leave authors alone they will be more likely to write in the first category rather than the second. After all, papers are mainly written to communicate your findings to your direct peers. So information dense isn't bad because the target audience understands.

Of course that makes it harder for people outside to penetrate but this also depends on the culture of the specific domain and there's usually people writing summaries and surveys. Great task for grad students tbh (you read a ton of papers, summarize, and by that point you should have a good understanding of what needs to be worked on in the field and not just dragged through by your advisor)
by 1659447091 | 2025-12-18 11:22:57+00:00
> We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends.

Similar, except in a city. On weekends, when an adult may be home, we get sent outside as a form of grounding -- "outside. now." -- or if we watched too much tv/video games, and wouldn't come back inside til dark. No asking what we did, where we went, only that we came back in the same health we left. Not having parents home after school (11-14 y/o) meant after-school cartoon binge for a couple hours, then outside to roam around with other kids that didn't have adults home. We'd get in trouble if they came home and we were playing video games or watching tv.
by DoctorOW | 2025-12-18 11:22:59+00:00
Even when it identifies the specific project, it doesn't know C#. I took some scans of some notable CMS websites (so the programming language is provably correct).

WordPress.org (PHP, correctly identified language and framework): https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/88fcab24-5e27-4c77-8ace-94...

Orchard Core (C#, Modern .Net, correctly identified framework): https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/88adbf69-c010-4074-a80f-03...

DotNetNuke (C#, .Net Framework, correctly identified framework): https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/7889b8b9-4fed-43b6-8506-49...
by robbomacrae | 2025-12-18 11:23:25+00:00
As someone who has been waiting for the same thing as op tyre posted, I went to investigate this claim and it seems that it might be true but only when running apps within the Google AI Studio itself.. ie if you were to make an app that was on something like the App Store using Google AI Studio, it would be back to an API key that the developer bears the costs for.

The problem with the current model is that there is a high barrier to justifying the user pays essentially a 2nd/3rd subscription for ultimately the same AI intelligence layer. And so you cannot currently make an economically successful small use case app based on AI without somehow restricting users use of AI. I don't think AI companies are incentivized to fix this.
by anima-core | 2025-12-18 11:23:44+00:00
This is a short position paper that asks a narrow systems question: what changes if large transformers are removed from the runtime inference loop entirely?

The paper introduces Semantic Field Execution (SFE), an inference substrate in which high-capacity transformers are used only offline to extract and compress task-relevant semantic structure. Runtime inference then operates on a compact semantic field via shallow, bounded operations, without executing the transformer itself.

The goal isn't to propose another inference optimization, nor is it to argue that transformers should be replaced. Instead, the paper tries to separate semantic learning from semantic execution and to make explicit which efficiency arguments depend on transformer execution and which don't.

It's intentionally scoped and falsifiable. The paper states where this regime should work, where it shouldn't, and how those boundaries could be tested. It does not present benchmarks or claim universality.

I’m posting this here for technical discussion and criticism, particularly around the execution-model framing and where such a substrate transition would or would not make sense.
by topnde | 2025-12-18 11:23:56+00:00
I run drawcharts[1], which is a tool to help you build good looking hand-drawn style charts. It is not very expensive so I am currently making around 500 a year from it.

Also, as someone who likes to go to conferences and meet and connect with people, I found it hard connecting to 50 people at a conference on Linkedin and then reaching back out to them. So I build LinkedMemo[2] which is a CRM on "top" of Linkedin. You scan a profile, the profile is automatically saved and enriched in the CRM with a quick note.

[1]: https://drawcharts.xyz [2]: https://linkedmemo.com
by beaker52 | 2025-12-18 11:24:02+00:00
You might be surprised at how much you’re willing to surrender if someone gave you some time to come to terms with it.

It’s just a question of giving you enough time to move on from anger/shock/fear to toward acceptance. It’s like magic and is used all the time.

> Nah, that doesn’t work when…

Sounds like it could be another well known stage of the process called denial. Denial is when you tell yourself that something isn’t possible which makes you feel safer, when in fact you’re already moving toward acceptance - acceptance that you’re going to leave, or pay the price.
by laurentiurad | 2025-12-18 11:24:04+00:00
thanks a lot for the feedback! That's a really good point!

When it comes to QuantiQ, I thought about targeting businesses. I already have 2 major clients and had plenty of demos with others. Usually they are not interested when taking a decision about reading pages on the website. Most of them are concentrated on finding out how you manage incidents, security policy, how do you handle improvement suggestions, SDLC, velocity etc. They anyway do their due diligence when it comes to the founder. But I totally understand your point. For B2C this is really important.

Already fixing the mobile navigation and adding some pages with more info about me.
by seec | 2025-12-18 11:24:17+00:00
Yes, I entirely agree. Even without being part of a group, women will support you as long as you are winning or at least appear to be winning. But the moment your position becomes precarious, they'll just leave.

There are evolutionary reasons for that: women can't side with someone who won't be able to defend them since they don't have the strength to defend themselves. But nowadays you can't say that because of feminism and identity politics.

That's just how things are, and why I think men should always be careful about the trust they put in women around them. They are much more likely to throw you under the bus than even a man who dislikes you.
by cons0le | 2025-12-18 11:24:29+00:00
On my desk I have 2 monitors, one normal 24" and one dasung paperlike. If I need to watch a video or do work that needs high refresh, I just switch to the other monitor. One side benefit of this is you can't use your computers in the dark anymore, you have to turn on the lights like you're reading a book. This does wonders for your eyes.

The e ink screen I use the most is a boox 10.3 tablet. It does have internet and can run android apps. So I can read rss feeds, hacker news, manga, ect. I don't do any "serious" work on it and don't sign in with my main google/apple accounts. The build quality for the price is superb, and its the first eink device I've had that feels premium like an ipad. Its also super thin and the battery lasts me ~2 months on a charge.

As far as fun text based websites, you're already on the best one :) But I also have a million RSS feeds that I read to get the news.
Show HN: A faster way to theme Shadcn/UI
by erikdevriesnl | 2025-12-18 11:25:52+00:00
Hi HN,

shadcn/ui gives you beautifully built React components, but ships with a very neutral theme. Customizing it means dealing with a long list of CSS variables, and most existing “theme generators” just expose those variables in a big form. You still need design knowledge, and it’s easy to break contrast or consistency.

I built uithemes.app to remove that friction.

Instead of tweaking individual tokens, the idea is to start with a base palette. That palette is then mapped across text, backgrounds, borders, muted states, hovers, and sidebars in a way that keeps contrast accessible by default.

When you change the base palette, everything updates together. You don’t have to manually decide which gray to use, whether text should be light or dark, or how borders should adapt. The system handles those relationships for you.

You can use predefined Tailwind palettes, generate a full palette from a single color, or quickly explore themes using a random generator. Each generated theme is usable out of the box, but still fully tweakable.

I’d appreciate any feedback. Most importantly: is the interface immediately clear, or do you find anything confusing about how it works?

Link: https://uithemes.app
by brandhout | 2025-12-18 11:25:54+00:00
It isn't more interesting with solar panels because they won't generate nearly enough electricity in the winter. You should see both as entirely separate energy saving investments, not dependent on one another. (I'm however very happy with "free" cooling in summer)

You might need other radiators if your current radiators are very small. But you also might not in a recent house, or in a recently renovated house (e.g. the radiator are still sized on single-glazing-glass when having double glazing installed).

You can also choose in-foor heating with the next renovation, a lot of homes already have in-floor heating and it's very comfortable. You can probably also boost existing radiators with small fans on the bottom or choose an electronic back-up module which boost the temperature a bit on the coldest days.

Tldr: it really isn't that hard. The focus on hybrid systems in NL is purely thanks to a lobby from gas-boiler installers and manufacturers. Air/water heatpumps are a drop-in replacement in a lot of cases.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-18 11:25:59+00:00
This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women.

1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...