MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kayodelycaon | 2025-12-24 02:24:14+00:00
I did a bunch of work creating pdfs using a low-level API, object goes here stuff.

As far as I understand it, at its core, pdf is just a stream of instructions that is continually modifying the document. You can insert a thousand objects before you start the next word in a paragraph. And this is just the most basic stuff. Anything on a page can be anywhere in the stream. I don't know if you can go back and edit previous pages, you might have a shot at least trying to understand one page at a time.

Did you know you can have embedded XML in PDFs? You can have a paper form with all the data filled in and include an XML version of that for any computer systems that would like an easier way to read it.
by algorithmsRcool | 2025-12-24 02:24:40+00:00
The Tree of Life is singular to me as a piece of cinema, americana and a meditation on the beauty of life and especially childhood.

When I saw it the first time, I was so awestruck by the breathtaking cinematography and the incredible music, but even more so by the vision of it all. I had simply never seen anything like it.

I saw it another 4 times before it left theaters.
by CapsAdmin | 2025-12-24 02:24:49+00:00
In that case, my point about Garry not liking Lua despite choosing it for Garrysmod, for seemingly the same reason as antirez is very appropriate.

I haven't read antirez'/redis' opinions about Lua, so I'm just going off of his post.

In contrast I do know more about what Garry's opinion on Lua is as I've read his thoughts on it over many years. It ultimately boils down to what antirez said. He just doesn't like it, it's too unfamiliar for seemingly no intentional reason.

But Lua is very much an intentionally designed language, driven in cathedral-style development by a bunch of professors who seem to obsess about language design. Some people like it, some people don't, but over 15 years of talking about Lua to other developers, "I don't like the syntax" is ultimately the fundamental reason I hear from developers.

So my main point is that it just feels arbitrary. I'm confident the main reason I like Lua is because garry's mod chose to implement it. Had it been "MicroQuickJS", Lua would likely feel unfamiliar to me as well.
by boggyb | 2025-12-24 02:25:47+00:00
You can make webrtc work on enterprise networks by tunneling turn tcp traffic over websocket. The flow looks like this.

client's webrtc app using turn (pointing to the same machine IP) <-> tcp server/ websocket client (runs on client machine) <-> websocket server (relays turn packets) <-> real turn server <-> host's webrtc app

https://github.com/amitv87/turn_ws_proxy

I implemented a similar technique for Browserstack more than a decade ago to bypass enterprise firewalls by tunneling turn packets over (websockets/sse/socket.io etc.)
The `tcp server/ websocket/sse/scoket.io client` was hosted as part of a packaged chrome app / firefox extension. WebSocket and TURN servers were hosted on same machine to minimize the latency (could have been embedded in same process to reduce latency further).
by eru | 2025-12-24 02:26:19+00:00
Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.

(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
by neomantra | 2025-12-24 02:27:14+00:00
The file granularity you chose was at the perfect level for somebody to approach the source code and understand how Redis worked. It was my favorite codebases to peruse and hack. It’s been a decade and my memory palace there is still strong.

It reminded me how important organization is to a project and certainly influenced me, especially applied in areas like Golang package design. Deeply appreciate it all, thank you.
by EvansWilson | 2025-12-24 02:29:42+00:00
The "Don of the PayPal Mafia" is making a massive pivot. Known for his contrarian bets and early venture capital wins, Peter Thiel’s latest public equity moves suggest a dramatic change in sentiment toward the electric vehicle market and a newfound embrace of established tech giants.

According to the latest filings, Thiel has radically restructured his holdings, moving away from volatility and parking capital in the world’s most stable tech fortresses.

Inside the Peter Thiel portfolio 2025

The most striking aspect of the Peter Thiel portfolio 2025 update is its concentration. The portfolio is currently comprised of just three major stocks, totaling approximately $74.4 million in value.

Unlike the diversified approach of many hedge funds, Thiel is making high-conviction bets. However, the composition has shifted from pure disruption to what looks like a "flight to safety." The portfolio is now balanced between retaining a foothold in Tesla while aggressively entering the AI and consumer tech establishment.

The Tesla Exodus: Cutting Exposure by 76%

The biggest headline is the massive sell-off in Tesla (TSLA).
While Tesla remains the largest single holding at 38.83% of the portfolio (valued at ~$28.9 million), Thiel has hit the sell button hard. The data shows a reduction of -76.16%, shedding over 207,000 shares.
After holding the stock for roughly nine months, this massive reduction suggests the tech visionary sees limited upside or increased risk in the EV sector heading into 2026.

The New Bets: Microsoft and Apple

Where did the Tesla money go? Straight into the two biggest companies in the world.

Microsoft (MSFT): This is now the second-largest holding, making up 34.09% of the portfolio ($25.3M). This "New Buy" of 49,000 shares is a clear bet on Microsoft's dominance in enterprise AI and cloud computing.
Apple (AAPL): Thiel also opened a new position in Apple, buying 79,181 shares valued at over $20 million (27.08% of the portfolio).

What It Means for Investors

The signal from the Peter Thiel portfolio 2025 data is unmistakable: Defensive Growth.
By dumping a speculative, high-volatility asset like Tesla in favor of the cash-flow kings Microsoft and Apple, Thiel seems to be preparing for a market environment where stability and entrenched moats win over pure speculation. If one of Silicon Valley’s boldest risk-takers is running for safety, should you be doing the same?
by bnc319 | 2025-12-24 02:31:42+00:00
So… hear me out. Could I connect this to an airline’s paid in-flight WiFi network, and then broadcast an open network to effectively open up access to all other passengers for free? If enough WiFi pirates do this on flights perhaps it would kill paid WiFi entirely (just need enough Good Samaritans)

(And yes I know there are other bypasses you can do like spoofing MAC addresses to get around some device count restrictions)
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-24 02:31:59+00:00
Pro-tip: have your DHCP server auto-issue your PiHole's IP as the DNS address — this makes all IoT and phones use your PiHole (unless secure-DNS or hardcoded). There are methods to make your firewall accomplish something similar (pfsense?) but I don't know how and DHCP is easier, at least for my network users.

My [now disabled] Honeywell thermostat had the most packet-sends (not data, just #packets). Wouldn't have caught it without my network defaulting to PiHole.
by zauguin | 2025-12-24 02:32:51+00:00
This seems highly misleading.

> - 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.

Compared to other formats this is actually relatively easy in a PDF since the way the text drawing operators work they don't influence the state for arbitrary other content. A lot of positioning in a PDF is absolute (or relative to an explicitly defined matrix which has hardcoded values). Usually this makes editing a PDF harder (since when changing text the related text does not adapt automatically), but when removing data it makes it much easier since you can mostly just delete it without affecting anything else. (There are exceptions for text immediately after the removed data, but that's limited and relatively easy to control.)

> - 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.

That's actually rather tricky in PDFs since they usually contain embedded subset fonts and these usually do not have "🮋" as part of the subset. Also doing this would break the layout since "🮋" has a different width than most letters in a typical font, so it would not lead to less formatting issues than the previous option. Unless the "🮋" is stretched for each letter to have the same dimensions, but then the stretched characters allow to recover the text.

> 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.

PDF does not have a concept of a background color. If it looks like a background color in PDF, you have a rectangle drawn in one color and something in the foreground color in front of it. What you usually see in badly redacted PDF files is exactly this, but in opposite color: Someone just draws a black box on top of the characters. You could argue that this is smarter since it would still work even if someone would chnage colors, but of course, PDF is a vector format. If you just add a rectangle, someone else can remove it again. (And also copy & paste doesn't care about your rectangle)
by IanCal | 2025-12-24 02:32:51+00:00
It doesn’t need to do all of a job to reduce total jobs in an area. Remove the programming part then you can reduce the number of people for the same output and/or bring people who can’t program but can do the other parts into the fold.

> If OpenAI believed GPT could replace software engineers, why wouldn’t they build their own VS Code fork for a fraction of that cost?

Because believing you can replace some or even most engineers leaves space for hiring the best. It increases the value of the best, and this is all assuming right now - they could believe they have tools coming in two years to replace many more engineers yet still hire them now.

> You sit in a meeting where someone describes a vague problem, and you’re the one who figures out what they actually need. You look at a codebase and decide which parts to change and which to leave alone. You push back on a feature request because you know it’ll create technical debt that’ll haunt the team for years. You review a colleague’s PR and catch a subtle bug that would’ve broken production. You make a call on whether to ship now or wait for more testing.

These are all things that LLMs are doing to various degrees of success though. They’re reviewing code, they can (I know because I had this with for 5.1) push back on certain approaches, they absolutely can decide what parts of code adds to change.

And as for turning vague problems into more clear features? Is that not something they’re unbelievably suited for?
by CivBase | 2025-12-24 02:32:54+00:00
> Use an Apple TV for the "smart" features.

Use a PC for "smart" features. Used PC hardware is cheap and plenty effective. And the Logitech K400 is better than any TV remote.

No spying (unless you run Windows). Easy ad blocking. No reliance on platform-specific app support. Native support for multiple simultaneous content feeds (windows) - even from different services.

And it's not like it's complicated. My parents are as tech-illiterate as they come and they've been happily using an HTPC setup for over well over a decade. Anyone who can operate a "Smart TV" can certainly use a web browser.
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-24 02:32:54+00:00
To be fair, AI cannot write the code!

It can write some types of code. It is fascinating that it can bootstrap moderately complex projects form a single shot. It does a better job at writing unit test (not perfect) then the fellow human programmer (few people like writing unit tests). It can even find bugs and point + correct broken code. But apart from that, AI cannot, or at least not yet, write the code - the full code.

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. The $3B is better spent on coming up with truly novel technology that these companies could monopolise with their models. Well, the can't, not yet.

My gut feeling tells me that this might be actually possible at some point but at enormous cost that will make it impractical for most intents and purposes. But even if it possible tomorrow, you would still need people that understand the systems because without them we are simply doomed.

In fact, I would go as much as saying that the demand for programmers will not plummet but skyrocket requiring twice as many programmer we have today. The world simply wont have enough programmers to supply. The reason I think this might actually happen is because the code produced by AI will be so vast overtime that even if humans need to handle/understand 1% that will require more than the 50M developers we have today.
Show HN: Send free letters to your future self or others
by sankar_builds | 2025-12-24 02:33:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small web app that lets users write letters and schedule them to be delivered to their future selves or to other people, for free.

The idea came from wanting a simple way to reflect on goals and thoughts over time without ads or paywalls.

How it works:
- Write a letter
- Choose a future delivery date
- The letter is delivered automatically when the date arrives

Tech stack:
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Resend
- Inngest

I’d really appreciate feedback on:
- Use cases you find interesting
- Privacy concerns or improvements
- Features you’d expect from something like this

Happy to answer questions.
by drnick1 | 2025-12-24 02:35:38+00:00
> Run one wireguard server in your home and one client instance on this router and now all of your devices can share the same residential VPN connection.

You don't need a "travel router" for this. My phone is permanently connected to my server via Wireguard (so that I can access my files from anywhere). Adding another device just requires adding a peer in the server's config file and can be accomplished very quickly. It's not clear what problem the travel router solves, unless perhaps you travel with dozens of devices.

> no million suspicious login detected from all your social accounts,

I can personally do without those.
by kimixa | 2025-12-24 02:35:55+00:00
If you can realistically notice and reason out a bug within ~45 seconds of seeing the diff, then they are really shallow "dumb" bugs. The sort that even a junior would be expected to avoid.

And I wonder how many other massive issues are being committed to main, but would take longer to reason out, but you're already looking at the next 45-second shallow bug.

This has to be a joke, right?
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-24 02:36:00+00:00
My guess would be that if the benefitting legal party didn't need to declare they also benefitted from this (because they legally can't be caught, etc.) they wouldn't.

I know and am friends with a lot of lawyers. They're pretty ruthless when it comes to this kind of thing.

Legally, I would think both parties get copies of everything. I don't know if that was the case here.
by vunderba | 2025-12-24 02:36:11+00:00
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dictatorship, but it’s definitely trending toward authoritarianism.

Wasn't too hard to put together a quick graph of the past decade for the U.S. using the World Press Freedom Index (relative ranking and score) - an annual ranking of 180 countries published by Reporters Without Borders that measures the level of press freedom.

https://imgur.com/a/4liEqqi
by dmayle | 2025-12-24 02:37:34+00:00
The sad part of all of this was that the company that does this tried to poach me back in 2013 or 2014, but I was disgusted by the practice, so I refused to even interview.

Since then, I've made sure every single TV I own has this turned off (I go through the menu extensively to disable, and search on Google and reddit if it's not obvious how to disable like the case with Samsung).

I have an LG Smart TV, and just a week or two ago I was going through the settings and found Live Plus enabled, which means either they renamed the setting (and defaulted this to on), or the overrode my original setting.

Either way, I'm super annoyed. I want to switch to firewalling the TV and preventing any updates, but I need a replacement streaming device to connect to it.

Does anyone have recommendations for a streaming device to use (presumably one with HDMI CEC, that supports 4k and HDR)? I use the major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV) and Jellyfin.
Show HN: Depsy – normalized SaaS dependency health in one API call (cached,fast)
by malik_naji | 2025-12-24 02:37:48+00:00
Hi HN! I built Depsy (depsy.io), an API that returns normalized status for your SaaS dependencies in a single call, during incidents I kept losing time to "status-page roulette" (Slack,Okta,GitHub, Cloudflare, etc)... Depsy is meant to answer one question fast: "is it us, or the vendor?"

What it does:

- Query 1–2000+ vendors in one request
- Cached + normalized output (so you don’t parse different status formats)
- Designed to plug into on-call flows (dashboards, alerts, runbooks)

Why I'm posting:

I'm looking for feedback from SRE/DevOps folks:

- What fields would you need in the response to trust it during an incident?
- What vendors are "must-have" for you?
- Would you rather send a vendor list, or have Depsy manage "your stack" profiles?

Happy to share details on caching/normalization approach if useful!
by chocoboaus3 | 2025-12-24 02:38:06+00:00
I used AI to build an app just for myself that parses data (using pandas, python etc, not LLM but an LLM coded it) for a report that i need to produce

it's purely for myself, no one else.

I think this is what AI can do at the moment, in terms of mass market SaaS vibe codes, it will be harder. Happy to be proven wrong.
by mmooss | 2025-12-24 02:38:14+00:00
People like Wales have a bizarre blindness to what's happening in our society:

> Jimmy Wales: If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer survey, which has been going since 2000, you’ve seen this steady erosion of trust in journalism and media and business and to some degree in each other. ...

> What do you think has gone wrong?

> I think there’s a number of things that have gone wrong. The trend actually goes back to before the Edelman data. Some of the things I would point to are the decline of the business model for local journalism. To the extent that the business model for journalism has been very difficult, full stop, you see the rise of low-quality outlets, clickbait headlines, all of that. But also that local piece means people aren’t necessarily getting information that they can verify with their own eyes, and I think that tends to undermine trust. In more recent times, obviously the toxicity of social media hasn’t been helpful.

How about a political movement's explicit, extremely aggressive all out assault on social trust, specifically journalism - an 'enemy of the people', target of law enforcement and laws, etc. And how about toxic capitalism's (emphasis on 'toxic', not all capitalism) actually valuing and aggressively embracing complete abandonment and manipulation of trust in order to profit by any means possible (e.g. stereotypical private equity squeezing money out of nursing homes)?

What planet to people like Wales live on? They are so used to ducking this issue that they almost can't see it anymore.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-24 02:38:39+00:00
I feel like this creates a hash value and the real question is how unique of a value does it represent and how easy it is to narrow it down given throwing a dictionary at it. Similarly, unknown names could likely be teased out like a one-time pad. If they appear in multiple sentences then their randomness quickly repeats and becomes something that potentially could be isolated from the rest of the words around them. This would probably be a fun problem for a cryptography class to work on.
by mmooss | 2025-12-24 02:40:18+00:00
> If everyone in the news media is against you or ignores you ...

The 'news media' is an incredibly diverse range of disconnected groups of people, especially in the Internet era. Look at the front page of HN. You hardly see the leading journalism organizations (e.g., NY Times, network news, etc.).

That "everyone" is against you is a conspiracy theory.
by trinsic2 | 2025-12-24 02:41:02+00:00
If you want to see how bad this really is, take a look at AAA games like call of duty where they dynamically alter in game loot mechanics to get people to purchase in game items.

Value is chump change in this department. They allow the practice of purchasing loot boxes and items but don't analyze and manipulate behaviors. Valve is the least bad actor in this department.

I watched half the video and found it pretty biased compared to whats happening in the industry right now.

I feel this argument of Valve deliberately profiting off of gambling not really the whole story. I certainly dont think that Valve designed there systems to encourage gambling. More like they wanted a way to bring in money to develop other areas of their platform so they can make it better, which they did. And in many cases are putting players first. Players developed bad behaviors around purchasing in-game and trading items and have chosen to indulge in the behavior. 3rd parties have rose up around a unhealthy need that IMHO is not Valves doing. And most importantly, since I was around when these systems went into place, allowing me to see what was happening, this kind of player behavior developed over time. I don't think Valve deliberately encouraged it.

The entire gaming industry is burning down before our eyes because of AAA greed and you guys are choosing to focus on the one company thats fighting against it. Im not getting it.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-12-24 02:41:09+00:00
You're close: they should have called it "freedom software". Which they wanted to, but couldn't, because it was trademarked. Source: I e-mailed richard stallman to ask why they didn't, he replied.

You're welcome to think what you want, but I've had to explain to enough juniors enough times what "open" actually means, so I know what people without any preconceived notions think it means, vs what experts on HN associate with the word after decades in the industry.

People who are new to the profession entirely, think that "open" means "you can look inside." Source: my life, unfortunately.

> ... that you didn't even get right.

FYI: this style of conversation won't get anyone to listen to you. And FWIW I was referencing the quip which I'm sure your familiar with. It was tongue in cheek.

> The reality is that good programmers put a lot of effort into choosing names and generally are better at it than the population at large.

... isn't that a No True Scotsman?
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-24 02:41:36+00:00
>All [the guidelines] have done ... is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to ... contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here"

Absolutely. See /u/grey's comment above, which /u/DanG responded with saying ~"no personal attacks"~ (I don't think grey got personal, and I don't think DanG's response was appropriate/warranted).

But as DanG and you have pointed out (in response to my other comments in this thread), porn does have a place on /hn/ — I truly believe the porn industry is the major driver of consumer tech.

Respectfully submitted, and thanks for all the great discussions among ALL users, oranges/admins/&regulars.