MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I built an offline PDF tool to avoid silent merge errors
by PDFPlussOffline | 2026-01-04 00:02:12+00:00
In administrative and legal work, merging PDFs is not just about convenience.
If one file is missing or duplicated and the tool doesn’t tell you, the result can be dangerous.

I ran into this problem multiple times.
Many PDF tools “worked”, but they merged files silently even when something was wrong.

That scared me more than slow performance.

So I built a small offline PDF tool for my own work.
It focuses on:
- working fully offline
- explicit logs instead of silent behavior
- warning when files are missing or duplicated
- prioritizing correctness over speed

I’m not trying to sell anything.
I just wanted a tool I could trust in real document workflows.

I’m sharing this to see if others have faced similar issues,
and whether this approach makes sense to you.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-04 00:02:12+00:00
> Do you think it is realistic that a (relatively) small country next to a superpower seeks protection from the rival superpower ?

Like the Baltics, Poland, Taiwan, South Korea, Berlin, ... Yeah seems pretty realistic.

> What would happen if panama wanted to join a defence pact with Russia ?

Russia or a defensive alliance that includes countries like Germany and France?

> What happened during the Cuban missile crisis ?

A bunch of cold war nonsense? Russia tried to station first strike weapons and the US responded poorly.

> I wish all countries could be independent and free of meddling from superpowers. But at some moment you have to be realistic.

Lmao and that is why you conclude that Ukraine should not be permitted to seek a defensive ally after being invaded (2014).
by ahmgeek | 2026-01-04 00:02:34+00:00
Usually, you need a presence in each country, like an official entity. It's easy for a myriad of countries to do that for a fee; even in Dubai, you can form a company. Then you can acquire numbers easily in these countries. I am now supporting the UK (easy to get)/US/CA, and will soon support some European countries as well. What's hard are the countries that require authority talks like Egypt :D

I am Egyptian living in Europe, so I want to support it, but I left it for a bit.

There are a lot of telephony providers out there (Twilio, Bandwidth, etc.) So it's easy to start building.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-04 00:02:38+00:00
Manipulating features smaller than what TSMC manufacture is possible in many places (just at great expense), TSMC's special sauce is being able to manufacture it in quantity and economically. Ultimately it's always going to be difficult to completely protect storage at rest, because it is possible to take something apart atom by atom, but it does raise the cost of the attack substantially.
by ManuelKiessling | 2026-01-04 00:02:45+00:00
A boy receives a horse as a gift. Villagers say, "How wonderful!"

The Zen master replies, "We'll see".

The boy falls while riding the horse, breaks his leg. Villagers say, "How terrible!"

The master says, "We'll see".

War comes, all young men are drafted, but the boy is spared due to his leg. Villagers say, "How lucky!"

The master says, "We'll see".
by ArtificeAccount | 2026-01-04 00:02:51+00:00
I am working on a few different websites.

A unit conversion calculator I made a few months ago: https://www.calculateconversion.com/

A small business website: https://artificesoftware.com/

A philosophical quote repository, this is what I am currently working on. Over 600 quotes (all typed by hand, no copy-paste, not that it matters). I am working towards 1,000 in total: https://crucialquote.com/
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-04 00:03:00+00:00
I have never, on my own free will, assigned multiple-choice questions in a serious course. And never will.

- They have a base marks of 20-25% (by random guessing) instead of 0.

- You never see the working. So you can't check if students are thinking correctly. Slightly wrong thinking can get you right answers.

- They don't even remotely reflect real life at all. Written worked through problems on the other hand - I still do those in my professional life as a scientist all the time. It's just that I am setting the questions for myself.

- The format doesn't allow for extended thought questions.

In my undergrad, I had some excellent profs who would set long work through exam question in such a way that you learned something even in the exams. Simply a joy taking those exams that gave a comprehensive walk through of the course. As a prof, I have always tried to replicate that.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-04 00:03:08+00:00
Part of Schachnovelle as I remember it is that Dr. B as Weltbürger is driven crazy by the dual facts that Czentovic is both a primitive brute and yet succeeds at chess via brute force, which perhaps is meant to be compared with his earlier imprisonment in 1938, by people who succeeded at politics not by subtlety but by brute force.

The idea that cosmopolitan, educated, and cultivated people could be left like deer in the headlights by brutes setting themselves through by force reminded me of your description of TMT, or at least the ego-protective "helps hide the facts that their life was dependant of the whimsical violence of the princes" part of your explanation.

Does this unpacking make any more sense?

(meanwhile, the Melian Dialogue is the source of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46479662 )
by Aloisius | 2026-01-04 00:03:13+00:00
They are a third party. The EU isn't a country, it's an association and it's clear that solitary between member countries only goes so far.

We saw what happened when France triggered the mutual defense clause in the EU charter after the terrorist attacked. Even when they all but begged other EU states to help them, they were rebuffed.

There's little reason to believe France would behave any differently if the roles had been reversed in the especially if there was any real risk to themselves if they got involved.
by bmacho | 2026-01-04 00:04:36+00:00
> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is.

This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.

> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.

This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.
by avianlyric | 2026-01-04 00:05:04+00:00
The early teens didn’t have huge proliferation of ISPs using CGNATs.

These days ISP can’t get hold of new IPv4 blocks, and increasingly don’t provide public IP addresses to residential routers, not without having to pay extra for that lowly single IPv4 address.

Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.
by oxag3n | 2026-01-04 00:05:25+00:00
Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge?

A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources.

However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my program corrupts memory for variable 'a' in gdb.

LLMs know correct answer to this question because someone shared their experience, including SO.

Are we Ok with stopping this process of sharing from one human to another?
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-04 00:06:02+00:00
I still would like to get other humans' experiences and perspectives when it comes to solving some problems, I hope SO doesn't go away entirely.

With LLMs, at least in my experience, they'll answer your question best they can, just as you asked it. But they won't go the extra step to make assumptions based on what they think you're trying to do and make recommendations. Humans do that, and sometimes it isn't constructive at all like "just use a different OS", but other times it could be "I don't know how to solve that, but I've had better lack with this other library/tool".
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-04 00:06:05+00:00
Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game)

You ask how to do X.

Member M asks why you want to do X.

Because you want to do Y.

Well!? why do you want to do Y??

Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z

Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended!

Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment.

...

Can you help me?

...

I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. Do you have any help?

...(crickets)
by krapp | 2026-01-04 00:06:44+00:00
If by "artificial intelligence" you mean that an LLM can simulate some aspect of what is considered intelligent behavior, no. Clearly LLMs can do that. But then so can a Markov chain.

If by "artificial intelligence" you mean something like the computer in Star Trek - essentially a sentient and self-aware being - then yes, that is a myth. That isn't what LLMs are. Although plenty of people believe otherwise, for whatever reason.

The problem is because LLMs can use and respond to natural language, we humans are hardwired to see them as the latter and anthropomorphize them. We imagine that if we give them a problem there's basically a little man inside the machine smart enough to understand that problem, searching through its data and trying to solve that problem the way a human would. But no, the only thing they're doing is constructing semantically correct output matching an input.

And it's wild that it works as well as it does, but most of that appearance of intelligence comes down to training on human effort and the result of human assumptions and bias.
by nckmi | 2026-01-04 00:06:53+00:00
A major factor is that Venezuela's oil is mostly heavier crude, which is denser and more viscous. This makes it costlier and more difficult to extract and refine, and usually sells for a lower price than lighter crude.

There's also rampant mismanagement, poor infrastructure, and sanctions affecting the output and outcomes. See also: "resource curse"
by jamesgill | 2026-01-04 00:06:59+00:00
Ha--totally agree about the 'house full of easy first steps'. I have a few.

But I think it all still applies; the key is to keep taking small steps toward the thing, not just 'keep taking small steps'. You look at a successful small step and (like I wrote) ask 'what's the next step?' that will build on it.
by gfhifd42 | 2026-01-04 00:07:07+00:00
It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.

Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did.

And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community.

Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves.

Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.
by akkartik | 2026-01-04 00:07:50+00:00
Anybody here have this phone? I'm curious to hear how well it runs https://love2d.org. There's an apk on that page that you can download and install.

(And then if you could try out my https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel and report back, that would be even more helpful.)

Edit 20 minutes later: After I posted this I remembered I have access to a https://www.walmart.com/ip/AT-T-Maestro-3-32GB-Ocean-Green-P.... And both LÖVE and my Carousel work great on it! Much less laggy than any other app on that phone. Including the browser.
by dnautics | 2026-01-04 00:07:55+00:00
as someone building an analyzer for zig, if you sent something like this through the system im building, it would get handled by Zig's optional type tagging; but lets say you did "free" (so your result is half freed, half not freed): it would get rejected because both branches produce inconsistent type refinements, you don't have to solve the halting problem, just analyze all possible branches and seek convergence.
by specproc | 2026-01-04 00:07:58+00:00
Back in the late noughties, my Dad had a NAS. I had a pretty chaotic life at the time and a big stash of old pics on a hard drive I knew could die at any point.

Dad offers to keep them for me. He's a sensible, stable chap. "Sure I say", and do a full backup of my old pictures and crap to his NAS.

Five years later, the HD is long dead, I'm more together and putting together a fresh setup. I recall the backup and figure I'll merge it with my current files.

He has no memory of the backup, nor ability to find it.

FML. Worst. Backup strategy. Evar.
by ArtificeAccount | 2026-01-04 00:09:05+00:00
Location: Knoxville TN

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: Python, SQLite, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Resume: Clicking my name at the bottom of the page will take you to my LinkedIn: https://artificesoftware.com/about.html

Email: data@artificesoftware.com

I've used Python for more than a decade now, helping research labs analyze data, currently working with machine learning. I also do websites, and am prepared to learn whatever is needed for the job. Please reach out to me if you believe I am a good fit for your position.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-04 00:09:20+00:00
The desire for controller + TV obviously also affected my console-gaming friend. So, the gaming PC is hooked up to a wireless controller and to his gaming display + audio setup, which was historically a ceiling mounted projector and surround speakers (he moved since I last spent hours playing games with him)

The PC means there's a wireless keyboard and some sort of pointing device, but they're just for launching games & basic admin.

Edited to add: Also WTF for refreshing the Xbox. Who is the audience for this product? What is your lead title? Another Halo? But there's going to be an excellent Halo for the PS5 and for PCs, right? A GTA? But people want the newer GTA which won't fit. Maybe I just don't understand the vision here.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-04 00:09:23+00:00
Many of these things (Copilot and Google's AI Mode) go out and search.

I have no idea if I'd do better with Chinese sources, if there was a big FAQ or Wiki in Chinese I probably could load it into IntelliJ IDEA and ask Junie questions about it... Maybe I should! I guess it would be six months ahead in terms of events and might recommend using operators I can't get but I could live with that... And for that matter I don't like the quality of translations I have available for things like Investiture of the Gods
by RossBencina | 2026-01-04 00:09:39+00:00
> we don't even use static analysis and validators for c or C++

There is some use, how much I don't know. I guess it should be established best practice by now. Also run test suites with valgrind.

Historically many of the C/C++ static analyzers were proprietary. I haven't checked lately but I think Coverity was (is?) free for open source projects.
by mochidusk | 2026-01-04 00:09:46+00:00
Hi HN, I soft launched Musel Cloud, a collaborative whiteboard where you can drag and drop files (docx, xlsx, pdf) on the board and edit them in-place. These are all natively rendered on the canvas so they blend in seamlessly with other items. It has a built-in file explorer that syncs with your devices. Is it a whiteboard with a Drive or a Drive with a whiteboard? I'm not sure, but it greatly reduces context switching.

Speaking of context, I made an interesting discovery while working on Musel Cloud. Those who work with Claude Code, Codex, etc... will quickly realize that you'll spend the majority of the time wrestling with context management. With proper context, the LLM can be consistently reliable whereas prompting alone can be hit-or-miss. It turns out whiteboards are really good at managing context and interfacing with LLMs.

Whiteboards are a really crowded category; I didn't even intentionally set out to develop one. I was building a RAG app and needed a way to gather and lay out documents. To my surprise, there weren't any existing product where I can drag and drop forms, documents, contracts, books, etc.. onto a board and then edit them.
by haileys | 2026-01-04 00:10:22+00:00
Not sure what this post has to do with Rust, but people do use static analysis on C and C++. The problem is that C and C++ are so flexible that retrofitting static verification after the fact becomes quite difficult.

Rust restricts the shape of program you are able to write so that it's possible to statically guarantee memory safety.

> Does it require annotations or can it validate any c code?

If you had clicked through you would see that it requires annotations.
by bachmeier | 2026-01-04 00:10:51+00:00
A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it.
by avianlyric | 2026-01-04 00:10:56+00:00
You literally can. You can just use local link addresses, IPv6 routers are guarantee not to forward those packets out of the network, or forward traffic into the network addresses to one of those IPs. Devices within the network can all still talk to each other.

If you really want to do the full Monty, add a NAT to your IPv6 router to have it translate to the local-link addresses, just like it would on IPv4.

I would highlight this is also identical to IPv4, which notably is also a standard built around the idea that every device in the world can, and should, be given a publicly addressable IP. Many large corporations and universities with /8 IP blocks do exactly this. Unfortunately when they originally wrote the IPv4 standard they slightly underestimated how many devices would eventually connect to the internet.
by steebo | 2026-01-04 00:11:25+00:00
I don't see the difference. You are describing the adoption curve (a logistic function) for almost anything.

As with IPv4/IPv6, with Python 2.7/3 you had, even at the very end, a group of stubborn maintainers who didn't put in the effort to transition.

The hard end of Python 2.7 support took care of all that in a hurry.
by porcoda | 2026-01-04 00:11:36+00:00
I regularly use Claude and friends where I ask it to use the web to look at specific GitHub repos or documentation to ask about current versions of things. The “LLMs just get their info from stack overflow” trope from the GPT-3 days is long dead - they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web. In some cases I just upload bits and pieces from a library along with my question if it’s particularly obscure or something home grown, and they do quite well with that too. Yes, they do get it wrong sometimes - just like stack overflow did too.
by dmurray | 2026-01-04 00:11:56+00:00
> The idea is a possible realization of LANGUAGE 18 from "FORTY-FOUR
ESOLANGS":

a sculptural language

it subtracts from potential algorithms,
making them more specific

a program only states what it doesn't do

This made me want to read the other forty-three proposals for esolangs! Some of them are here [0], buy the book for more.

I'm a bit unclear about how much the book specifies Language 18 (is it really just the three-line prose poem above? Other languages seem to have more detail) and how much came from the author of this post.

[0] https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/
by keini | 2026-01-04 00:12:30+00:00
Hey HN, I’m the solo dev of FuseCells (logic grid puzzle for iOS).
A previous Show HN gave me a nice spike, and I’m trying to decide what to prioritize next.

App Store Connect (roughly 6 weeks):
~10.4K impressions
~3.1K product page views
~813 downloads
~10% conversion
~$137 Proceeds, ~$2.8 per paying user
~2.65 sessions per active device

If this were your app, what would you focus on first:
1. onboarding/tutorial clarity,
2. retention loops (daily challenge, streaks, reminders),
3. store page experiments (PPO/A-B),
4. monetization/pricing?

Would love any blunt advice / heuristics / benchmarks.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-04 00:13:11+00:00
It's complicated. From google:

* You must pay the premiums with after-tax money.

* Your total qualified, unreimbursed medical and dental expenses (including premiums and costs like co-pays, deductibles, prescription medications, etc.) must exceed 7.5% of your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI).

* You can only deduct the amount of expenses that exceeds this 7.5% threshold.

* You must choose to itemize deductions instead of taking the standard deduction.

Most taxpayers use the standard deduction as it is often larger than their total itemized deductions.
by mnau | 2026-01-04 00:14:04+00:00
Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:

> Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!

https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...

> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...

> Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive.
> All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
by octaane | 2026-01-04 00:14:43+00:00
You are absolutely bonkers. This post and the rationale behind it are beyond insane.

We do not understand these ecosystems beyond their extreme fragility and low entropy conditions. This is an incredibly destructive and expensive manner of resource extraction that destroys the seabed. Why would anyone sane ever support this beyond, I don't know, someone who also thinks that clearcutting the amazon is a good idea? What kind of vested interest do you have in this blighted technology?
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-04 00:14:51+00:00
I think it's sort of a terminal centrism. They can't accept that they would do such actions for obvious reasons (despite them overtly telling us 'we're going to run the region' and 'it's for oil') so instead they try and downplay it so that they can seem rational which ironically makes them look even more irrational. They're working backwards to try and justify their stance.

It's really insane but also not surprising to see considering how many people do truly live in their own fictional world and never bother to reassess it.
by avianlyric | 2026-01-04 00:14:53+00:00
Using a normal ISP issued router, wouldn’t make a lick of difference if it was IPv4 with a NAT or IPv6 without a NAT. They’re all configured out-of-the-box with a default deny firewall. I’m not actually aware of any residential grade router that doesn’t come configured like this.

Of course if the router is misconfigured, then all bets are off. But that’s true regardless of IPv4 vs IPv6, because people will just compromise your router first and use that as a launch pad for the rest of your network. Just like to do today with plenty of old residential routers.
by eatonphil | 2026-01-04 00:15:13+00:00
Part of a series:

- https://finnvolkel.com/wcoj-generic-join

- https://finnvolkel.com/wcoj-datalog-and-genericjoin

- https://finnvolkel.com/wcoj-dbsp-zsets-and-datalog

- https://finnvolkel.com/wcoj-wcoj-meets-dbsp