MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2025-12-15 09:32:44+00:00
TypeScript is indeed Javascript, all you have to do is remove the type annotations. They are not code.

TS does have some minor things like enums that need to be transformed and are actual code, but those are very few, and leftovers from early days of TS, and the TS authors regret having implemented them. For many years now the TS philosophy has been that the CODE part of TS is 100% ECMAscript, and only annotations, which are not code, are added.

The initial Babel transpiler for TS => JS, and still the most part of the current one, simply removes annotations.

It is recommended not to use the few parts that are actual code and not standard JS. They are certainly not needed any more since ES6.

People may get confused because the type syntax itself is almost like a programming language, with conditions and all. But none of that ends up as code, it's not used at runtime.

One of the IMHO worst design decisions of TS was to bundle type checking and transpiling into one tool. That caused sooo many misunderstandings and confusion.
by ewa-szyszka | 2025-12-15 09:33:20+00:00
Solid read! I started my career of at a former Xerox R&D that was acquired by NAVER Labs, which is an interesting story in itself of passing of time and the new (AI R&D) replacing the old (print technology): https://www.news.xerox.com/news/NAVER-to-acquire-Xerox-Resea...
by openspend | 2025-12-15 09:33:23+00:00
OpenSpend is an open-source, free-to-use, self-hosted payment gateway for your next app, project, or business. It lets end users send money directly to businesses using their online banking app or website. And businesses can check live and instantly whether the money has been deposited or not.

Learn more at https://github.com/openspend/openspend
by egorfine | 2025-12-15 09:33:26+00:00
This does not make sense to you because you are looking from a technological standpoint. The reason to rewrite coreutils (or sudo) in Rust is not technological, as there is no merit. Coreutuils are titanium rock stable tools that no one asked to rewrite.

And this is precisely why the worst Rust evangelists aim to rewrite it: virtue signaling with no suffering of the opposing party is not good enough.
by misiek08 | 2025-12-15 09:34:29+00:00
Roomba couldn’t remember map, so when you wanted to clean part of the apartment you had to build barriers or just walk with it. It also got lost way too many times.

As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-15 09:35:15+00:00
There is no yes and no. This is a fact. Even a small startup of 3-5 people will pay more in terms of salaries than the total license costs they consume. A larger enterprise will will spend 50 to 100 times more on salaries then software license fees.

The reason software licenses are easier to cut by the finance team when things are not going well is because software does not have feelings although we all know that this not making a dent. Ultimately software scales much better than people and if the software is "thinking" it will scale infinitely better.

Building it all in house will only happen for 2 reasons: 1. The problem is so specific that this is the only variable option and the quickest (fear enough). 2. Developers and management do not have real understanding of software costs.

Developers not understanding the real costs should be forgiven because most of them are never in position to make these type of decisions - i.e they are not trained. However a manager / executive not understanding this is sign of lack of experience. You really need to try to build a few medium-sized none essential software systems in-house to get an idea how bad this can get and what a waste of time and money it really is - resources you could have spent elsewhere to effect the bottom the real bottomline.

Also the lines of code that are written do not scale linearly with team sizes. The more code you produce the bigger the problem - even with AI.

Ultimately a company wants to write as few line of code as possible that extract as much value as feasibly possible.
by oersted | 2025-12-15 09:35:56+00:00
> high-accuracy syntax highlighter (called Tree-sitter)

Just wanted to note that tree-sitter is lower-level and more general: it's an incremental parser that is specialised for gracefully and efficiently parsing partially-correct code snippets or code being edited live.

It's an important building block of the highlighter, but it needs more on top to complete the package. It can be used for anything that requires awareness of code structure in an editor.
by ursAxZA | 2025-12-15 09:36:34+00:00
I understand the need to seed future debates early.

My hesitation comes from the fact that most proposals implicitly assume a “fixed physical capability” for AI systems — something we don’t actually have yet.

In practice, social impact won’t be determined by abstractions but by power budgets, GPU throughput, reliability of autonomous systems, and years of real-world operation.

If scaling hits physical or economic limits, the eventual policy debate may look more like progressive taxation on high-wattage compute or specialized hardware than anything being discussed today.

And if fully automated systems ever run safely for several consecutive years, that would still be early enough for the Overton window to shift.

I’m not dismissing long-term thinking.

I’m pointing out the opportunity cost: attention spent on hypothetical futures tends to displace attention from problems that exist right now. That tradeoff rarely appears in the discussion.

So for me it’s just a question of balance — how much time we allocate to tomorrow’s world versus today’s neighborhood.

From my own vantage point, the future talk feels disproportionately dominant, so the T-1000 analogy came naturally.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-15 09:37:20+00:00
I'm seeing the opposite. AI is actually increasing the demand for what would previously be too expensive, bespoke integrations and solutions. Those are now becoming more feasible and doable. There is also the notion that a lot of companies are actually very behind on embracing software or SAAS. Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades.

The fallacy here is believing we already had all the software we were going to use and that AI is now eliminating 90% of the work of creating that. The reality is inverted, we only had a fraction of the software that is now becoming possible and we'll be busy using our new AI tools to create absolutely massive amounts of it over the next years. The ambition level got raised quite a bit recently and that is starting to generate work that can only be done with the support of AI (or an absolutely massive old school development budget).

It's going to require different skills and probably involve a lot more domain experts picking up easy to use AI tools to do things themselves that they previously would have needed specialized programmers for. You get to skip that partially. But you still need to know what you are doing before you can ask for sensible things to get done. Especially when things are mission critical, you kind of want to know stuff works properly and that there's no million $ mistakes lurking anywhere.

Our typical customers would need help with all of that. The amount of times I've had to deal with a customer that had vibe coded anything by themselves remains zero. Just not a thing in the industry. Most of them are still juggling spreadsheets and ERP systems.
by sodimel | 2025-12-15 09:37:56+00:00
Trying to rebuild my website (php mvc built a decade ago) using Django. I want to be able to update any page content, upload and display images, have multiple blog instances. I do a lot of django-cms by day, but it's too much for a small personal website, so I started to create a (tiny, foss) CMS based on Django, django-prose-editor for the content, and some new apps (for now, Page & Blog).

The site isn't even online, but for now I'm starting to think about the next steps (seo-related things to implement, generalize app functions to handle not only blog but other (hypothetical) apps as well, improve code quality and repo readability, separate apps from the website so anyone can add them to their django website if they want to). It's a lot of work for something no one will ever use, but I must at least try to make it clean and discoverable :)
by gethly | 2025-12-15 09:38:15+00:00
Accounting is way too risky to automate. Essentially it is the most important and "must be done PERFECTLY" aspect of any business. And there are millions of little quirks that good accountant has to know that no AI will ever be able to supplement. Sure, there are some basic tools and services, but nothing will ever be created that can take over the whole thing. My accountants are my biggest business expense, so I would love to have some SaaS for 20 bucks a month but that will never-ever happen. It's a pipe dream and anyone who thinks otherwise is just wasting time.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-12-15 09:38:51+00:00
I still have one like that, and it runs mostly fine, but is partly held together by duct tape these days. Not replacing it as long as I can keep it running.

Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
by benrutter | 2025-12-15 09:39:21+00:00
Ooh I like this! I love Hacker news and Lobsters but they're both very US centric, seem great to have a European one.

UI is very nice and simple, one tiny bit of feedback is that a 'guidelines' page would be worthwhile, especially while it's new! I thought I'd post my own project on the site - sometimes that's a little bit of a no-no though, and I couldn't find any guidelines to steer me towards what types of things to share, etc.

Edit: Tiny extra feedback, is upvoting something immediately changes the rankings in the browser. It's pretty impressive speedwise, but especially if you're a couple pages in, you can bump something off of the page you're on which makes it a little weird to do something like 'upvote article and then check the comments'.
by pocketportfolio | 2025-12-15 09:39:27+00:00
Two months ago I posted a fairly standard SaaS portfolio tracker. The feedback was blunt but fair: asking people to upload their full financial transaction history into a random startup’s database is a bad trust model.

I listened and spent the last ~60 days undoing that decision. I deleted the database, removed signup entirely, and rebuilt the app to be 100% local-first. All portfolio data now lives in your browser (localStorage). No accounts, no backend storing trades.

While doing this rewrite, I realized the hardest part of the original system wasn’t charts or UI—it was parsing the inconsistent CSV exports from brokers. So I extracted that logic into a standalone, dependency-free npm package: @pocket-portfolio/importer, which currently handles CSVs from ~15 brokers (Robinhood, Fidelity, eToro, etc.).

Stack:

Frontend: Next.js 14 (App Router) + Tailwind

State: LocalStorage (custom hook for quota management)

Parsers: TypeScript (published to npm)

Hosting: Vercel (but added a Dockerfile for self-hosting)

Demo: https://www.pocketportfolio.app Source: https://github.com/pocket-portfolio/pocket-portfolio NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pocket-portfolio/importer
by reincoder | 2025-12-15 09:39:45+00:00
We are actively trying to improve our system and build it as figuratively 'antifragile'. We can not afford to get comfortable and we need to constantly find faults in it. If you know anything, you can contact our founder or me directly.

The problem is that everyone knows we are the most accurate data provider and our growth is exponential. To my knowledge, most cybersecurity teams use our data to some degree. We cannot risk having any secrets out there that could disrupt the accuracy of the system. We are aware of several cases where accuracy may be affected, with the most notable being adversarial geofeed submissions.

If the issue is an adversarial geofeed submission, it is a well-known problem. When active measurement fails, we have to fallback to some location hint. There are layers of location hints we have to fall through to ultimately landing on echoing geofeed location hint.

But aside from that... I'm not sure what could possibly impact us. A substantial systemic malicious change in data accuracy seems highly unlikely and quite impossible.
by hatefulheart | 2025-12-15 09:39:50+00:00
Unrelated to the article but I want to address something that really rubs me up the wrong way about comments on HN.

I recall the ML phase we had before the “AI” phase and I do not remember anyone disputing that complex mathematical models can shift the economy, make or break jobs, the whole shebang.

What really irks me about comments like “AI will/won’t xyz” is the muddying of the waters by the word AI. It’s utterly meaningless but because it means nothing it has so much power. For example:

“Statistical models will take over middle class jobs”

Vs

“AI will take over middle class jobs”

In my mind, these two statements are equivalent in what they are actually saying but the latter closes off any reasonable discussion and lets the looney bin users on here (of which there are many) start with their basilisk song and dance and all the absolutely insane hot takes that come with it.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-15 09:40:28+00:00
> When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.

This is indeed a problem. Especially when growing up in a small town you can get stuck in a monoculture where people all have the same interests (I think in the US that's often sports and religion I think, in my case it was a bit different). I have zero interests in any of those and I don't do pretend. So I never fit in well either.

I also started looking for online places and started embracing being different. It wasn't easy but it did shape who I am. I'm still very much in alt cultures now.

These days I live in big cities where it's much easier to find groups to fit me than to try and fit in to whatever monoculture exists.
by rasengan0 | 2025-12-15 09:40:42+00:00
Thank you, finally a SRS implementation I can use for my plain text files. Very nice! I had Gemini make a deck from https://github.com/eudoxia0/hashcards , hashcard_tutorial.md and after correcting my deck to account for escaping the < and > with \< and \>; on the second run ($ hashcards drill --card-limit=10 ./)dealt me all the correct cards, like a self QA I really like the keyboard shortcut of space and 1,2,3,4 for making deck reviewing quick work.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 09:40:45+00:00
But targeting the Arduino IDE only means to have a GCC version to compile and some upload program and then set a bunch of variables in platform.txt . It doesn't actually make it any harder to not use the Arduino IDE.

> The problem with the IDE is that it doesn't offer a gradual path to more advanced usage. You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project. You can split off functionality into libraries, but the way library resolving works is way worse compared to "proper" build systems. There are projects to provide makefiles for Arduino projects, but it's a bit of a pain to set up - I use that for CI on some of my stuff, but it clearly is on the other end of difficulty scale.

It actually isn't all that hard. I recently did exactly that and it took like a week, most of which was spent on understanding what the Arduino IDE does with strace. Initially I assumed the Arduino IDE does way more stuff then it actually does. The makefile projects are too complicated, because they try to abstract over the installation and project. Instead I used Autotools which is way easier and simpler. It also breaks less, because these makefile projects tend to hardcode paths.

To save others the work: All you need to do is populate CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, ... with the information from platform.txt and boards.txt . Then tell your build system to use the cross-compiler toolchain from your OS. Take care to only use the exact uploader program version that the Arduino IDE also uses, I have been burned by using the latest version, which bricked my board (i.e. you can't upload anything to fix it and need to use a second board to reflash the bootloader). This information is in the package_index.json file. Granted this is annoying to work with using fulltext search, you would have a much saner experience actually using the JSON format, but it still works and I am lazy.

> You're pretty much stuck with a single file main project.

You can have multiple files just fine, this is actually the reason why the Arduino IDE defaults to having this project directory. The Arduino IDE just assumes all files below that are things to compile. You need to remember to not name the other files with *.ino, but *.cpp, *.c and *.h, otherwise you end up with multiple main functions. An *.ino file is just a *.cpp file that gets preprocessed with a main function template.

> And of course the editor is horrible

You can tell the Arduino IDE to use another editor, which is what I did when I used it.
by rerx | 2025-12-15 09:40:57+00:00
BSH (Bosch, Siemens, Neff brands) have their main production sites in Europe, a lot in Germany still. But of course China as well. https://www.bsh-group.com/about-bsh/bsh-worldwide/

Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm

(Edit: No replies after 8 hours, but of course they then came in quickly after Europe woke up..)
by ETH_start | 2025-12-15 09:41:22+00:00
Government employees are ~7% of the population, ~12–13% of employment, but account for roughly a quarter of government spending through payroll.

As for the $400 statistic, it in no way shows that US disposable income PPP is lower than peer countries.

Liquidity does not equal income and savings behavior does not equal purchasing power.

That generous welfare systems reduce savings is well-documented finding.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-15 09:42:21+00:00
This has been the official line and "correct thought" for decades so it is unsurprising that it should yield results. It has gone into over-drive with, or thanks to, the war in Ulkraine, and renewed push for the EU to involved itself in military matters. Similarly, anyone who does not agree with further political integration, or objects that it is already too much, is depicted as wrong and, gasp, obviously "far right", as very well examplified in this article.

Manufacturing consent works.

> "No one is putting into question the existence of the EU anymore, but they fundamentally disagree [on] what they should do,*"

This is a little misleading because this has actually been the main contention, not the very existence of the EU/EC even since the days of Margaret Thatcher. The debate has always mostly been about political integration, and that's what is being suppressed more and more.

The far right may have been, in general, opposed to the EU but the fallacy, again, is the current use of the term "far right". Taking France as an example, the National Rally is now the largest party by votes and number of MPs, it is the main party of the right and not "far right", which is FUD. It has embraced the general euroscepticism of the traditional French right, including from the Gaullists (De Gaulle's political movement) but not the outright dismantling of the EU.

Edit: Really the HN crowd has become very obtuse and narrow-minded... What's the point of posting these articles if commenters are only allowed to agree, or disagree, depending on what is the expected correct reaction?
by eternityforest | 2025-12-15 09:42:36+00:00
With off the shelf options, preferring FOSS if possible, I still enjoy using and contributing to open source.

Some of the substitutions wound up being a step down in features, or required rethinking parts of workflows, but the time savings is such a benefit.

Custom notetaking tool with p2p sync-> Google keep

Custom batteries included Linux distro for SD protection, Kiosk browsers, offline docs, creative commons content packs -> a few scripts built into my control server on vanilla RasPi OS

Rsync-> Borg -> Kopia(to avoid fussing with Borg's community NAS package)
by furyg3 | 2025-12-15 09:42:45+00:00
Are there any good robo-vacuum cleaners that will still clean your floor if the internet is down?

I've had my Miele vacuum cleaner for 15 years now, and I bought it second hand. I can still buy bags and filters for it, and when the floor roller piece broke (something heavy fell on it) I was able to buy a replacement one for cheap. I see no reason why it can't go another 10 years.

It feels like a very low probability that a robo-cleaner I buy now will come from a company that (in 10+ years) will a) exist and b) support 10+ year old vacuum cleaners.
by Angostura | 2025-12-15 09:42:58+00:00
Huge shame. I have an LG running WebOS that I bought in 2012 and is still going strong and receiving updates (well, it received one last year, but not this one).

I was always impressed with how unshittified it was, and knew that when I got another TV it would be a WebOS LG.

Now this :(
by OxfordOutlander | 2025-12-15 09:43:02+00:00
I agree about boutique software, but see the development still being external -

To attempt to summarize the debate, there seems to be three prevailing schools of thought:

1. Status Quo + AI. SaaS companies will adopt AI and not lose share. Everyone keeps paying for the same SaaS plus a few bells and whistles. This seems unlikely given AI makes it dramatically cheaper to build and maintain SaaS. Incumbents will save on COGS, but have to cut their pricing (which is a hard sell to investors in the short term).

2. SaaS gets eaten by internal development (per OP). Unlikely in short/medium term (as most commenters highlight). See: complete cloud adoption will take 30+ years (shows that even obviously positive ROI development often does not happen). This view reminds me a bit of the (in)famous DropBox HN comment(1) - the average HN commenter is 100x more minded to hack and maintain their own tool than the market.

benzible (commenter) elsewhere said this well - "The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon."

This same logic explains why external boutique beats internal builds --

3. AI helps boutique-software flourish because it changes vendor economics (not buyer economics). Whereas previously an ERP for a specific niche industry (e.g. wealth managers who only work with Canadian / US cross-border clients) would have had to make do with a non-specific ERP, there will now be a custom solution for them. Before AI, the $20MM TAM for this product would have made it a non-starter for VC backed startups. But now, a two person team can build and maintain a product that previously took ten devs. Distribution becomes the bottleneck.

This trend has been ongoing for a while -- Toast, Procore, Veeva -- AI just accelerates it.

If I had to guess, I expect some combination of all three - some incumbents will adapt well, cut pricing, and expand their offering. Some customers will move development in house (e.g. I have already seen several large private equity firms creating their own internal AI tooling teams rather than pay for expensive external vendors). And there will be a major flourishing of boutique tools.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224