MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9dev | 2025-12-18 15:26:22+00:00
No, that's what I was getting at. Thinking "they" are in charge is actually very widespread, with varying opinions on who "they" actually are—whether it's billionaires for you, the Rothschild's for others, or Reptilians for some.

How great it would be to have a select few evil masterminds, a clear enemy to roil against! That isn't reality, though. Would the super-secret council of puppet masters have allowed Trump to become president of the USA (again) and ruin the economy? You'll have an answer to that, obviously. It matters little. Reality is far more complex, shadow masters prefer stability over chaos, and the world is generally full of competing and opposing interests.

A few rich men might hold a lot of power in their hands, I give you that; but unless you limit "the world" to mean an arbitrary smaller region of earth, nobody is in charge of it all.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-12-18 15:26:29+00:00
Hey, I created htmx and while I appreciate the publicity, I’m not a huge fan of these types of hyperbolic articles. There are lots of different ways to build web apps with their own strengths and weaknesses. I try to assess htmx’s strengths and weaknesses here:

https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/

Also, please try unpoly:

https://unpoly.com/

It’s another excellent hypermedia oriented library

Edit: the article is actually not nearly as unreasonable as I thought based on the just-f*king-use template. Still prefer a chill vibe for htmx though.
by Nemorous | 2025-12-18 15:26:34+00:00
I built a powerful web scraper to automate wordlist generation using CSS selectors.

My team used it to place top 10 out of ~500 teams in the National Cyber League last season.

Key features: Scrape any website using CSS selectors, Auto-clean and deduplicate wordlists, Apply hashcat-style transformations, Generate themed wordlists in seconds instead of 30+ minutes manually

Open source Python tool. Happy to answer questions about the tool or NCL password-cracking strategies!

Full writeup: https://medium.com/@smohrwz/ncl-password-challenges-how-to-s...
by sneak | 2025-12-18 15:26:41+00:00
> So say if my UK friend connected directly to my PC with SSH/RDP, both uses end-to-end encrypted link, to chat with me using `wall`, `write` or Windows Task Manager, then all of sudden this is a hostile and Mr Big Ben will just launch laser at me to burn me to death. Wow, this is just messed up.

No, because nobody is using those systems to communicate at scale to try to destabilize a government.

Quantity has a quality all its own.
by bmacho | 2025-12-18 15:26:50+00:00
> If you never seen HTMX it is a small js library that lets you swap some part of your dom with the responses from your webserver.

> This means that in theory you don't need js, nor do your users need to download a full page like it's 1999. Your webserver replies with fully server-renderd HTML but just for the dom node (say a div) that you want to replace.

You got this backwards. With HTMX you need js. But just to swap a div, you can use link target + iframe, like it's 1999.
by simonw | 2025-12-18 15:27:04+00:00
The value is being better at it than any QA or product manager.

Experienced software engineers have such a huge edge over everyone else with this stuff.

If your product manager doesn't understand what a CORS header is good luck having them produce a change that requires cross-domain fetch() call... and first they'll have to know what a "cross-doman fetch() call" means.

And sure they could ask an LLM about that, but they still need the vocabulary and domain knowledge to get to that question.
by dagmx | 2025-12-18 15:27:07+00:00
Yes, you can continue to use anything that doesn’t require using Apple services.

So you could use your existing apps but not download new ones from the App Store.

You could use iMessage with some restrictions. You could use Apple Music but only the free radios. You could use Apple’s photos but would lose sync.

Usability depends on how much you rely on those services, but the device itself is still useable for other things.
by tiffanyh | 2025-12-18 15:27:09+00:00
I don’t want to minimize the pain people experience here, but it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers.

Gift cards are the #1 fraud vector in payments ... because it lets stolen cards be converted into a cash-like equivalent with zero traceability.

So fraud/risk system are highly sensitive to gift cards.

It's not an excuse, but I see in this thread people minimizing the problem at hand - so I just wanted to call that out.
by skydhash | 2025-12-18 15:27:14+00:00
> Yeah, but you had to integrate it until it at least compiled, which kind of made people think about what they're pasting

That’s a very low bar. It’s easy to get a program to compile. And if it’s interpreted, you can coast for months with no crashes, just corrupted state.

The issue is not that they can’t code, it’s that they can’t problem solve and can’t design.
by neilv | 2025-12-18 15:27:33+00:00
> > There is one way the Apple community could exert some leverage over Apple. Since innocently redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card can have serious negative consequences, we should all avoid buying Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as possible that they could essentially be malware.

It's December holidays time, but I assume that most Apple gift cards that would be purchased for the holidays already have been, so...

Maybe people should also be urged to demand to return any Apple gift cards already bought. Arm people with a copy of the news story. If retailers resist, then regulators can get involved.
by dj_gitmo | 2025-12-18 15:27:38+00:00
> It is almost aways a failure of the technical infrastructure previously created in the company. An AI will solve the trivial aspects of the problem, not the real problem.

This is so true. Software that should be simple can become so gnarly because of bad infra. For example, our CI/CD team couldn't get updated versions of Python on the CI machines, and so suddenly we need to start using Docker for what should be a very simple software. That's just an example, but you get the idea, and it causes problems to compound over the years.

You really want good people with sharp elbows laying the foundations. At one time I resented people like that, but now I have seen what happens when you don't have anyone like that making technical decisions.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-18 15:27:49+00:00
Jonathan Blow is one of my personal heroes, but he does seem to be living 5 years behind politically (he spends a lot of time ranting at the woke crowd, who seem nowhere to be found anymore anyways). That's probably a good thing. I doubt he's as addicted to the internet as the rest of us. He's said some odd things in interviews in the last couple years though.

I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn't find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted "Nature is healing" after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he's your angry uncle.)
by fzeroracer | 2025-12-18 15:27:51+00:00
It's really quite funny too, because women were a huge population of programmers and computer science graduates all the way up to the mid 1980s, when the ratios began flipping in favor of men. The biological argument would assume that either something changed biologically from 1980s onwards to make women less predisposed to be programmers, or (the more usual argument I see) 'that they were just doing the gruntwork' which usually exposes them as who they are.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-18 15:28:01+00:00
This reminds me of efforts to reproduce Ancient Greek music. [1] It's very similar in that there's a lot of hints, but still enough missing parts that there seem to be two schools of thought, that can even present within the same project. That linked audio is unpleasant, but perhaps they just liked it? Yet, this solo [2], comes from the exact same project - and is amazing.

I do not think tastes can change to such a degree that that first link would ever be pleasant to listen to, though that itself could be intentional for theatrical, theological, or other such purposes. Music seems innate to humanity - children generally start 'dancing' of sorts to music, 100% on their own, before their first birthday, long before they can speak or usually even walk!

The thing is that even if we do not personally like some form of music, I think we can still appreciate it. The Chinese guqin [3] is my favorite example - it goes back at least 3000 years, is played in a fashion completely outside the character of modern music - to say nothing of Western musical tradition as a whole, and yet nonetheless sounds amazing and relaxing even to a completely foreign ear.

Culture and tastes may change, but I think our ability to appreciate (or be repelled) by things is fairly consistent.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y

[2] - https://youtu.be/UAmuQBnNty8?t=540

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ninn-CfAMy8
by 9rx | 2025-12-18 15:28:23+00:00
Maybe a bit pedantic, but does manual testing really need to be done, or is the intent here more towards being a usability review? I can't think of any time obvious unintended behaviour showed up not caught by the contract encoded in tests (there is no reason to write code that doesn't have a contractual purpose), but, after trying it, finding out that what you've created has an awful UX is something I have encountered and that is something much harder to encode in tests[1].

[1] As far as I can tell. If there are good solutions for this too, I'd love to learn.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-18 15:28:26+00:00
It would be a suboptimal UX potentially (vs live funds on a physical gift card), but Apple could tie the gift card to an Apple ID at purchase with a QR code or something similar, and then permit gifting through the existing Apple ecosystem primitives. Apple could then enforce stronger controls as the value is transferred internally on their internal ledger. In financial services, its all about tradeoffs.

The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889 - January 2024

($day_job is financial services, a component of my work is fraud mitigation)
by wg0 | 2025-12-18 15:28:34+00:00
This evangelism around HTMX is bit misplaced.

First - simple use cases sure great. But imagine you have to update some element out of the from tree. Now you need to have OOB swaps and your HTML must contain that fragment.

Not just that your server template code now has to determine if it is HTMX request and only render OOB fragments if so.

Even at decent size app, soon it turns super brittle.

Yet to talk about complicated interfaces. Let's not go complicated just think of variants in an E-commerce admin panel.

3 variants with 5 values each these are 125 SKU rows that must be collapsed group wise.

htmx can do it but it's going to be very very difficult and brittle.

So it is surely very useful but it is NOT the only tool for all use cases.
by lunar_mycroft | 2025-12-18 15:28:34+00:00
> We're very close to invokers being baseline, and that will take care of plenty of what htmx was designed to do.

From what I've seen, invokers without extra code are designed for client side interactivity (e.g. showing a modal), which is orthogonal to the (correct, IMO) use case of HTMX. You shouldn't use HTMX to turn every custom user interaction into a network round trip, you should use it instead of fetching JSON. If a user interaction wouldn't trigger a network request if you built your app with react/vue/svelte/{insert_framework_of_choice}, then it shouldn't trigger one if you build it with HTMX either.

You can add custom commands with invokes and custom JS, but at that point you're basically re-implementing HTMX yourself, and I'm not sure what the advantage of that would be over hx-trigger="command" (especially when you also consider using fixi if you don't need all the features of HTMX). There's also the triptych proposals [2] from one of the HTMX maintainers which would add some of HTMX's behaviors to HTML, but those are a long way from being baseline, and may get there.

[1] https://github.com/bigskysoftware/fixi

[2] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/
by csense | 2025-12-18 15:28:58+00:00
Paying for long distance telephone service is beginning to pass from a shared, lived experience of most Americans into history. There's already a generation gap.

As of 2025, those in their 40s and older probably actually paid a long distance bill at some point. Those in their 30s likely have clear memories of household rules against long calls to faraway relatives because of the expense. Those in their 20s presumably have less clear memories.

And people in their early 20s or younger may have never known long distance at all.

I suppose this happens for all historical events [1]. As a young person I put stuff like the JFK assassination, Vietnam and Martin Luther King Jr. in the same mental bucket as the American Revolution, the Roman Empire or the age of the dinosaurs; it's all history that happened a long time ago.

I'm old enough that I ought to be used to it by now, but for some reason it's still shocking to realize the shoe's on the other foot, and I'm the one who remembers things that will be ancient history to a younger generation.

[1] https://xkcd.com/647/
by briliantbrandon | 2025-12-18 15:29:11+00:00
It's roughly 1/10 that are causing issues. Not a huge deal but dealing with them inevitably takes up a couple hours a week. We also have a codebase that is shared with some other teams and our primary offenders are on one of those separate teams.

I think this is largely an issue that can be solved culturally within a team, we just unfortunately only have so much input on how other teams work. It doesn't help either when their manager doesn't seem to care about the feedback... Corporate politics are fun.
by pawelduda | 2025-12-18 15:29:58+00:00
To prove the point, author mentions company that went from React to Htmx and saw positive change in relevant metrics. When you do that, it usually means your app has matured in a sense and you can be sure that htmx will be sufficient to handle all the functionality

I'm however more curious about going the other way, i.e. you start a project with Htmx which happily grows but after a while, a large feature is requested which inevitably changes the direction of the app into React use-case territory. I can't think of concrete example but you now have to work around it with htmx or commit to rewriting to React (or alternative). Wonder what are thoughts of people who had to deal with this
by xnorswap | 2025-12-18 15:30:12+00:00
That's like saying my C# is getting turned into CLR bytecode, so I do have to learn CLR bytecode because I have an abstraction over it.

Yet I know roughly what it is, but I couldn't begin to actually write the stuff myself.

Good abstractions mean you don't have to worry about the layer below.

Now of course it's not really the case that React holds up to being a good abstraction, especially when it comes to CSS and styling, but I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that abstractions force you to learn the level below.

Otherwise we'd all spend half our time learning assembly.

I do have sympathy though for a developer who just wants to focus on the higher level paradigm and let the library maintainers worry about the innards.
by purerandomness | 2025-12-18 15:30:24+00:00
The reality of React is that you have to keep re-learning and un-learning stuff if you want to keep up with React's ecosystem, because the surface area of the libraries is so large. (see "JavaScript fatigue")

Whereas with HTMX you learn a very, very basic concept in 15mins, and you're good to go for the next decade(s), and it will be more than enough for 80% of your projects.

Same as with vim and Emacs vs. proprietary IDEs and text editors.
by lm28469 | 2025-12-18 15:30:32+00:00
Always the same old tiring "this has always been possible before in some remotely similar fashion hence we should not criticise anything ever again" argument.

You could intuitively think it's just a difference of degree, but it's more akin to a difference of kind. Same for a nuke vs a spear, both are weapons, no one argues they're similar enough that we can treat them the same way
by kristopherleads | 2025-12-18 15:30:41+00:00
I really think the answer here is human-in-the-loop. Too many people are thinking that AI is a full on drop-in replacement for engineers or managers, but ultimately having it be an augment is the magic. I work at FlowFuse so super biased, but that's something I've really enjoyed with our MCP and Expert Assistant - it's built to help you, not to replace you, so you can ask questions, get insights, etc. faster.

I suppose the tl;dr is if you're generating bugs in your flow and they make it to prod, it's not a tool problem - it's a cultural one.
by infecto | 2025-12-18 15:30:49+00:00
Again no disrespect, it’s blunt honesty. I am not promoting anything. I live in the US and work at the intersection of finance and software. Your site has quite literally zero details on it. It’s a bunch of fluff on the landing page. Why would anyone signup without any information about what they are signing up for. Your response to a question about sourcing it’s odd. You only mention 10qs which you built a scraper for but the docs you linked to don’t really have much in the way of 10q data. Some surface metadata but none of the guts of a 10q. Most of the data you linked to is market data that you would have to be sourcing through a third party. It’s just an odd response for someone like me who works in the industry that you mention 10q but none of the data is really what I would consider 10q data.

Wish you luck but don’t take honest opinions from someone who buys significant amounts of financial data as someone trying to promote a service. Just linking someone I would consider a competitor to yours in the Edgar space.

The question is about financials and nothing you linked to is about financials.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-18 15:31:16+00:00
> I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.

I am totally unfamiliar with Spain, but wondering what would government have to do to improve the situation? They wouldn’t build government owned and operated houses? Or is it that they do not issue permits for builders, or tax incentives are all wrong?
by visarga | 2025-12-18 15:31:20+00:00
It will come around, we have rudimentary computer use agents and ability to record UIs for LLM agents. They will me refined and the agent can test UIs as well.

For UIs I do a different trick - live diagnostic tests - I ask the agent to write tests that run in the app itself, check consistencies, constraints and expected behaviors. Having the app running in its natural state makes it easier to test, you can have complex constraints encoded in your diagnostics.
by ndr | 2025-12-18 15:31:21+00:00
See the quickstart from htmx.org

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/htmx.org@2.0.8/dist/htmx.min.js"></script> <!-- have a button POST a click via AJAX --> <button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML"> Click Me </button>

When the user clicks the button the browser will take the result of the request to `/clicked` and swap the whole button dom node for whatever the server sent.

As a dev you get to write HTML, and need to learn about some new tag attributes.

Your browser is still running js.
by weitendorf | 2025-12-18 15:31:27+00:00
Legibility and domain modeling get mixed up with business models and incentives, so good-simple just isn’t the same thing to the people paying for simple and the ones fascinated by simple,

What mongo solved was user adoption and being legible to a specific type of person making a business decision with very high LTV (a web developer handling JSON and needing a scalable database for it they could dump it into). It’s aligned with the purchaser’s needs and incentives and honestly isn’t awful even if it does end up becoming enormously expensive later, because you might just really need a database your team understands and can use asap.

Mongo churns because what’s legible to a purchaser and what captures the essential qualities of some kind of application domain or abstraction are different things. Once immediate growth is covered and you can afford someone who knows a lot about databases to work on yours they’re like “what the hell” because it turns out that it didn’t do what you’d typically consider the bare minimum of a database: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40901573

But what is consistency, and how nitpicky are you about it if your problems seem to be solved well enough that something’s no longer a problem? I like software because there is a certain mystique behind understanding things like “public key cryptography would be useful in any universe with numbers” or “you really couldn’t improve on TCP for what it does”, because these tie in to real world problems but are also universally applicable, so distilling them to their essential form reveals a kind of API of the universe. But you don’t need that to get value from software and computers, you just need to solve your problem, that being, you need a database now or you lose a sale. What’s “simple” or even what counts as a database isn’t legible between the two.

Tech has a lot of money wrapped up in it so there’s a lot of attempts at capturing mindshare and defining things because the payoff is enormous. It just doesn’t sound fun to me to build up a house of cards selling a database that isn’t actually a database and deciding to figure out that whole database thing later when churn, CAC, LTV, and market adoption metrics tell me to. But also, customers really did need to shove json into databases and weren’t too picky about the particulars. So fuck it, this is a database.
by _menelaus | 2025-12-18 15:31:29+00:00
Don't you think the populace needs to be armed though? I think its a given that eventually the government will be intolerably corrupt and a revolution will be necessary. Nobody denies that less guns -> less shootings. The logic is that some amount of shootings are tolerable to preserve democracy, and that if our goal is to reduce mass shootings, social reforms intended to improve mental health are the correct choice.

Imagine you are in charge of a monkey enclosure. The monkeys sometimes go crazy and kill each other with rocks. You can:

A: Remove all rocks. Monkeys stay suicidally miserable but can't inflict harm as easily. Problem solved?

B: Mitigate conditions that make them suicidally miserable. Some say its impossible, but then again, just a generation ago the monkeys had rocks without frequent violence.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-12-18 15:31:31+00:00
Some of the best surviving examples of greco-roman use of colour are from Pompei. You can go and look at them yourselves, the Museo Archeologico in Napoli is a fantastic place to visit: https://www.museoarcheologiconapoli.it/en/portfolio-item/tem...

All the garish colours were prob heavily muted or diluted with varnish/oil. You don’t pant an artwork like a house, it is a layered technique and fairly similar to historic painting techniques used today:

https://emptyeasel.com/2014/12/02/how-to-paint-using-the-fle...

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