MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Practical Web Tools – 50 file converters that run in-browser
by cobrapi | 2025-12-05 14:40:43+00:00
I built a collection of file conversion and PDF tools that process everything client-side. No uploads, no server-side processing. Files never leave your browser.

Site: https://practicalwebtools.comThe core tools:

- PDF to/from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images - Image conversion (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, GIF, BMP) - Audio conversion (MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, M4A) - PDF editing (split, merge, sign, redact) - File compression, hash generation - Some financial calculators (FIRE planning, SaaS metrics, etc.)

There's also an AI chat that connects to Ollama on localhost — genuinely local, no fallback to cloud APIs.

Tech: Next.js, WebAssembly for the heavy lifting, ffmpeg-wasm for audio.

The PDF stuff uses pdf-lib plus some custom WASM modules.Tradeoffs I'm still working through:

ffmpeg-wasm is ~25MB, so I lazy-load it. Still painful.

Safari's WASM memory limits cause issues with large files.

Mobile performance is inconsistent.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or get told why my architecture is wrong.
by alistairSH | 2025-12-05 14:41:16+00:00
Yeah, I can easily see something like 2 separate at $20/month vs 1 super at $35/month (make-believe figures).

Assuming all WB and Netflix customers move to the super platform, that's a loss for Netflix (assuming the super platform doesn't significantly reduce their costs).

And the $35 might be more than some set of current Netflix subscribers want to pay, so they drop the service, so an even bigger potential loss.

Certainly, I have no desire to subsidize sports fans via a higher Netflix super package.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-05 14:41:29+00:00
The liquid fluoride salt reactors got a lot of attention starting in the 00's but the more I look at it the more I see that liquid chloride fast reactors solve the problems of the fluoride salt reactor (graphite and its discontents, marginal neutronics for breeding, etc.) and of the fast reactor (fuel fabrication, fuel fabrication, fuel fabrication)

That kind of reactor can generate so many excess neutrons it can spend some breaking down the worst of the fission products -- it looks like something out of science fiction, it's maybe better than a fusion reactor.
by marcosdumay | 2025-12-05 14:41:46+00:00
The bad idea from Marx that lead him astray into pseudo-science territory wasn't worker alienation. It was the labor theory of value (and the other stuff he created to make it looks like it works).

Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common.

But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile".
by SunlightEdge | 2025-12-05 14:41:49+00:00
I don't find Netflix "live action" movies to be super violent and there are a lot of non-violent shows. Its animations can be quite violent though (and those are good quality). From the little I know, it, like every other big platform, does shy away from sex. This has been a theme for decades - its ok to be violent but sex is a no no.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-05 14:41:50+00:00
People often use "RSS" as a generic term for a web/news feed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)? Are there particular pros/cons/trade-offs for each?

I know that for podcasts we're currently basically "suck" with at least providing RSS (even if there are also other options):

* https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host...
by d_e_solomon | 2025-12-05 14:41:50+00:00
We keep seeing headlines framing higher retail spending as a sign of economic resilience. But the mechanics behind that spending look very different today:

Unit volumes are declining

BNPL is growing in essential categories

Credit card rollover rates are rising

Savings buffers are shrinking

If the marginal dollar of “growth” is now debt-financed, is the metric still meaningful?

I’m curious how others see it. Is consumer spending still a valid indicator of economic strength, or should we be treating it as an obligation metric rather than a confidence metric?
by user34283 | 2025-12-05 14:42:00+00:00
Probably many underestimate the importance of the sound.

A home theater arguably is as much about the subwoofer and surround speakers as it is about the screen.

Especially the subwoofer has a big impact. When you feel the sound it's literally impactful. At other times, it really helps immerse yourself in the scene, even if it's not a typical bass sound, but like background noise in a busy city street.

The properly configured subwoofer makes you feel like you're there, while it just falls flat on a regular speaker.

That said, the fewest people have a home theater setup, so it's probably irrelevant to why people stopped going to the cinema.
Show HN: LinkScale – Bulk CSV URL Shortener (Solved My SMS Campaign Workflow)
by PEGHIN | 2025-12-05 14:42:00+00:00
I'm an agency guy managing SMS campaigns. Every week, I'm stuck importing 500+ URLs into Excel, shortening them, tagging with UTMs, and exporting. It's mind-numbing.

Bitly's API wanted $300/month for this exact workflow. Seemed insane for what amounts to "take URLs → add query params → store them."

Spent a Friday night building LinkScale on top of Short.io's infrastructure. The workflow: Upload CSV → System adds UTMs → Download shortened links with tracking.

Tech stack: - Next.js + React frontend - Supabase for link history & analytics - Short.io API for the actual shortening (they handle CDN) - No custom infrastructure costs

Shipped it expecting nothing. Got ~50 free tier signups over 2 weeks. A few asked about lifetime pricing vs monthly, which is why I added a $199 lifetime option.

What I learned: Bulk link management is way more painful than it should be. People are still copy-pasting or using Bitly's clunky interface.

Happy to discuss technical decisions, pricing strategy, or answer questions about the stack.

Site: linkscale.pro
by amiga386 | 2025-12-05 14:42:07+00:00
> how do you switch DNS over when your DNS provider is down?

You list multiple nameservers.

yoursite.com. 86400 IN NS ns1.yourprovider.com. yoursite.com. 86400 IN NS ns2.yourprovider.com. yoursite.com. 86400 IN NS ns1.yourotherprovider.com. yoursite.com. 86400 IN NS ns2.yourotherprovider.com.
by bluGill | 2025-12-05 14:42:16+00:00
This is not clear. The article is talking about traditional seeds for which that could be true (I don't know what is traditional in Kenya). Other commenters are talking about Maize which is from America and thus not traditional in Africa and thus there are no traditional seeds in Kenya. Maize also benefits greatly from hybridization, but there are other plants that do not, if we are talking about Maize you are wrong new seeds are much better than traditional, but if we are talking about other seeds who knows.
by kace91 | 2025-12-05 14:43:03+00:00
>Why is is so important that freedom of speech also be anonymous?

Because it is a shortcut for an otherwise extremely hard to enforce freedom.

Can you afford to defend your speech in court?

Can you prove that an action taken against you by someone in power is retaliation against your speech?

Can you handle social ostracism by a majority that disagrees?

If the answer to some is no, your freedom of speech has practical limits.

This is not to say that a world with anonymous speech is necessarily better, I’m just saying that in terms of guarantees it has a clear advantage.

Case in point: will you answer a workplace questionnaire the same way whether or not it is anonymous?
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-12-05 14:43:18+00:00
The man who constantly says he will find a way to have a 3rd term, who commits war crimes and also suggests the death penalty for his political opponents a few weeks before carrying out war crimes because his opponents said militaries should not commit war crimes even if ordered to.

The leader who announces, illegally, that all his predecessors' orders are null and void.

I mean we could go on and on, no?
by hereme888 | 2025-12-05 14:43:22+00:00
Totally agree. One thinks the other lacks critical thinking, the other thinks "they" have no common sense. And politicians and the media (both mainstream and social) have encouraged and exploit this for personal gain.

At the end we're left with people just saying things without having any knowledge of actual facts, because the sources of information lack the basic facts, purposefully reporting a biased and superficial version of reality.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-12-05 14:43:38+00:00
Unless they were driving very very low miles per year, they are simply incorrect. A car isn't making it over 100k miles without an oil change IMO, even a Toyota.

Similar to how this person went most of a lifetime without noticing and wondering what oil change businesses, advertisements, coupons, etc were for... They also didn't notice someone in their household or a service provider of some kind (brakes, tires, idk) changing their oil.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-05 14:43:52+00:00
Well, I'd say that the standard movie format just isn't what people want anymore.

The problem movies have is they have a relatively short amount of time to deliver a complete story. 90 to 120 minutes just isn't a lot of time to be compelling. That's why some of the best movies are split into parts.

Consider Andor as an example. It's some of the best media ever made (IMO) and it simply would not work in the movie format. What makes Andor work is the excellent character development and the time spent building and shaping the universe under a fascist government.

Andor had no length constraints per episode. That allowed it to tell complete satisfying stories with the promise that you'll get more in the next episode.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-05 14:43:53+00:00
>There is no employer loyalty, that died in the 90s.

As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.

Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.

I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.

No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.
by alnwlsn | 2025-12-05 14:44:10+00:00
I think everyone builds one of these little camera cars at least once.

I made one when I got my NTC CHIP[0] in 2015. This was a pretty big deal at the time because Raspberry Pi were still months away from releasing a model with integrated WiFi, and were sold out for quite a while after that. You had to use USB WiFi adapters, and this was always a little flakey.

I attached my camera to a servo so you could tilt it up and down, and it even had a rear facing camera and a magnetic connector, so you could back up and 'dock' with a power supply to recharge. I wanted to make a little claw arm for it, but I never got that far. Good times, makes me want to do another one.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)
by rsynnott | 2025-12-05 14:44:12+00:00
> I'm impressed Torvalds managed to not know what he was referring to (the Twitter firings).

I mean, naughty old Mr Car didn't _invent_ this nonsense; IBM was fairly notorious for it in the 80s, say. He's probably the most prominent recent example.

> The first one could be useful though.

How?

> a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.

No. It's really not. For a start, you probably lose basically everyone very senior by that mechanism. But also you lose the troubleshooters.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 14:44:12+00:00
You're making this way more complicated than it is, no need to compare against others to understand if what Sony is doing is a streaming service or not.

So I guess back to basics:

> A streaming media service, also known as streaming service, is an online provider that allows users to watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet

Fairly simple, I think at least. So with that, is what Sony is doing a streaming service, regardless of what HBO/Amazon/their mother is doing? Yes, in my humble opinion, what Sony is offering lets users "watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet", so it is a streaming service.

I disagree it's pedantic, it's just understanding what terms mean, in this particular case, what "streaming service" means.
by tete | 2025-12-05 14:44:30+00:00
> Us nerds can come up with something better. Federated, encrypted, anonymous and unblockable.

And eventually illegal. That's what we see already.

And if it's not technically illegal then Google, Apple and OpenAI will censor it. Again, we see that already. On YouTube you cannot even talk about important topics such as suicide.

It's also coordinated. As much as I dislike Infowars, the fact that private institutions killed it at the same time is just scary.

Just like it's scary that we now have ethics taught by private entities. Be it what you can search or what ChatGPT or Gemini think.

It feels like a lot of these are strongly locked in place, which if you look at history is extremely bad. Only now private institutions have more power and control than any king ever had.

And all of that is if you don't consider the pockets full of money.
by softwaredoug | 2025-12-05 14:44:33+00:00
The sad thing is the WB Studio had a successful year and is healthy.

It's all the other idiotic stuff that's been attached to WB over the years that has broken the business. Time Warner AoL Discovery... is a poster child for what goes wrong when merger after merger happens.

A restructured WB Studio + HBO might be a good business.
by squigz | 2025-12-05 14:45:05+00:00
Yes, I acknowledged this in another comment.

The thing is, punishment cannot strictly be punitive - there must be an opportunity to learn and grow, otherwise nothing changes.

When we "punish bad behavior" in adults by, for example, sending them to jail for crimes, without providing counselling and other services to get their life back on track, where does that lead us?

When we "punish bad behavior" in adults by, for example, kicking them out of the family for shitty views, where does that lead us?

The trick, as I highlighted, is walking the line between these 2 things. Many people don't, and just jump to the punishment.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-05 14:45:24+00:00
Look I get how Ne Zha 2 was a big success and showed signs of good production quality, but lets be honest: The movie was boring. I'm sure the mostly Chinese audience that sat with me in the theater enjoyed it but I fell asleep halfway in.

The "east" has more work to do to capture that magic that the western imperial order (Hollywood) has wrought upon the world.

I will continue to watch and observe how things play out.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-05 14:46:09+00:00
Im a software engineer but have been around the block enough times that I now lead large teams. It annoys me a little when people here talk about how worthless management is. I just want everyone to know that good management is very hard, way harder than anything I’ve ever faced in software development. It’s subjective, non deterministic, all the things digital logic is not. It’s very hard which is why bad management is so common.
by buccal | 2025-12-05 14:46:39+00:00
> I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.

There is OpenWISP: Leveraging Linux OpenWrt, OpenWISP is an open-source solution for efficient IT network deployment, monitoring & management.
by another_twist | 2025-12-05 14:46:49+00:00
True that and you left Succession off the list :).

Thats why I think its a good addition. Its a step up from their usual quality. They are anyways paying 72B for the company. Netflix has distribution and Warner Bros delivers quality. I think its a perfect fit. I mean imagine Warner getting acquired by Amazon and folded into prime video - that thing where search returns episode names rather than the series. That would be like Rolexes being sold at the local Walmart. There's only two homes for quality content and thats Apple TV and Netflix. Thats why I think its a good deal.
by nonethewiser | 2025-12-05 14:47:03+00:00
>Consolidations like this were bound to happen. In the mid 2010s we had a good thing, only one streaming platform with pretty much every movie and tv show.

This has been the narrative about the state of streaming services for years now. People upset that content is too fragmented across services. Now we get some significant consolidation and people are upset. They just ignore that angle and find a different one to gripe about.

I think this is great.
by mmis1000 | 2025-12-05 14:47:05+00:00
Well, you can actually write slow css if you make real deep nested flex container. And it's not even too rare. You can actually find such example in yhe wild.

The spec of flex layout requires it to layout its child elements several times to compute actual layout. Make it deep and nested without proper constrains will results in n*n*n*n… layout computations and bring down the browser on resize.
by zaphar | 2025-12-05 14:47:16+00:00
I do think that holds more water than just "It's old".

However for pretty much any dev I would hire for a job they can get to grips with a technology that's older pretty quickly. Where it does get dicey is when good dev just refuses to work with it. For those devs, I think, when they hold that opinion it typically means one of those other reasons is behind their refusal.
by JLO64 | 2025-12-05 14:47:24+00:00
Supergirl and The Batman 2 are releasing relatively soon so I don’t think that will be affected much by all this. Same with Clayface since that just entered post production. It’s the movies coming after (Superman 2, Batman movie thats not tied to “The Batman”) that will be affected by all this.

My opinion of James Gunn has changed recently (especially after the ending of Peacemaker S2) but I still think he’s the best person possible to be in charge of live action DC. I really hope he keeps some form of control but I doubt it…
by lerno | 2025-12-05 14:47:29+00:00
C3 is a language designed as an evolution of C, without retaining strict backwards compatibility, but excellent interop with C.

This version brings - among other things: struct splatting (some_call(...a_struct, 1, 2)) and vector swizzle initialization (int[<3>] x = { .xy = 3, .z = 5 }). Together with other improvements and fixes.

Some older post on C3:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569724

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108980

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27876570

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005678

Here are some interviews on C3:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC8VDRJqXfc

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rS8MVZH-vA Here is a series doing various tasks in C3:

- https://ebn.codeberg.page/programming/c3/c3-file-io/ Repository with link to various C3 resources and projects:

- https://github.com/c3lang/c3-showcase

Some projects:

- Gameboy emulator https://github.com/OdnetninI/Gameboy-Emulator/

- RISCV Bare metal Hello World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAJxx6Ok4E

- "Depths of Daemonheim" roguelike https://github.com/TechnicalFowl/7DRL-2025
by cma | 2025-12-05 14:47:58+00:00
Tariffs make the overall tax burden on society less progressive. They are flat so tend to push the overall rate towards flat. But affect some spending categories more than others. Rich import luxury goods but also spend more on things like services, experiences, and land (top 1% owns 40%).

Most of the luxury goods they import are Veblen goods and something else replaces them with little to no QoL impact. Selective tariffs on luxury/Veblen goods could strengthen the economy, but flat tariffs probably disproportionately hurt the poor.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-05 14:47:58+00:00
I used to belong to a carnivorous plant forum. The question was raised, "WHY do carnivorous plants often die when planted in nutrient-rich (or non-poor) soils?".

One grower of Venus flytraps set aside 100's of tissue-grown clones to evaluate each theory proposed, and determined that their roots were highly susceptible to fungal attack. Presumably, they had lost this (perhaps metabolically costly) genetic defense, because they were growing in substrates that were naturally hostile to fungal growth.

Anyway, the slightly more fascinating part to me was that, for this pro grower, growing hundreds of plants on a lark was a fairly trivial exercise. I cast aside my prior image of bunny-suited lab techs with pipettes and agar jars; this was full-scale production line.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-05 14:48:00+00:00
[1] are the exercises with solutions (!) of a lecture [2] at ETH Zurich, which include AVL trees in Isabel. The whole list of exercise PDFs is at [3]. I started porting the AVL trees to Scheme [4], but lately have not worked more on this. I also try to make it easy to understand the implementation by providing explanatory comments.

[1]: https://archiv.infsec.ethz.ch/education/permanent/csmr/exerc...

[2]: https://archiv.infsec.ethz.ch/education/permanent/csmr.html

[3]: https://archiv.infsec.ethz.ch/education/permanent/csmr/exerc...

[4]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-data-structures/...
by Retric | 2025-12-05 14:48:05+00:00
A 55” Rear-projection television was way less than a 60” plasma TV back then. Like you I went a little upmarket but from what I recall budget 1080i options were well under a grand.

What matters is the premium over a normal TV and how long it lasts. Spending an extra few hundred for something that lasts 5+ years wasn’t going to break most families budgets. As demonstrated by just how many of those TV’s where sold.
by mzs | 2025-12-05 14:48:21+00:00
Lipo CP, Hunt TL, Pakarati G, Pingel T, Simmons N, et al. (2025) Megalithic statue (moai) production on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile). PLOS ONE 20(11): e0336251. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0336251
by chii | 2025-12-05 14:48:30+00:00
It is not only freedom of speech, but freedom of association that would also be jeopardized.

People long ago used to have to hide that they're gay, not only because they could be ostracized, but that people they associate with could also be under scrutiny.

Being able to track one's movements, or who they associate with, could reveal information that said person would want kept secret.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-05 14:48:34+00:00
> The best engineering manager in terms of getting things done.

Beyond the joke truck thing, his car company hasn't released a new car in almost seven years. Twitter doesn't appear to have done much beyond release a few previously gated features (longer tweets, tweet editing, and the birdwatch/community notes thing were all things they were previously testing) since acquisition.

Like, I dunno, I'm not seeing it.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-05 14:48:51+00:00
> The majority of that list is quite old. Have you seen what they're doing now?

Adolescence (which won big at the Emmy's this year), Stranger Things, The Beast in Me, Last Samurai Standing, A Man on the Inside, The Gentlemen, Absentia, Baby Reindeer, Ripley, Arcane, Squid Game, Dynamite Kiss, Delhi Crime, etc.