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mubouon Open source and self hostable/private file converter

Another good option is to actually just use puppeteer (headless chrome)

mubouon Some people think AI writing has a tell – the em dash

This article is a huge nothing-burger that seems to hinge on the sentence "some would-be AI sleuths claim that the em dash is seldom seen outside of AI text," which is just plain nonsense.

mubouon How I install personal versions of programs on Unix

tl;dr: by putting them in the home directory

Everyone does this; it's pretty standard. Using XDG directories (~/.local/bin) is most common nowadays, but hey, you do you.

It does annoy me that cargo has its own bin directory in ~/.cargo, but I'm too lazy to set the env vars to move it.

mubouon Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft

No, in XP you were essentially logged in as root 24/7 (assuming it was your machine), and any program -- including your browser -- was running as root too. I remember watching a talk about how stupidly easy it was to write rootkits for XP. "Drive-by viruses" were a thing, where a website could literally install a rootkit on your machine just by visiting it (usually taking advantage of some exploit in flash, java, or adobe reader). Vista flipped it, by disabling the admin account, so that in order to do something as admin you needed to "sudo" first. That alone put a stop to tons of viruses.

mubouon Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft

Another often-underappreciated advancement was the UAC added in Vista. People hated it, but viruses and rootkits were a major problem for XP.

mubouon Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

Probably didn't help that Clip Studio is predominantly used by Japanese artists, and virtually all models capable of producing anime-style images were trained on a dataset of their own, stolen pixiv art.

mubouon Ask HN: Is using Cursor still coding?

If you use stable diffusion to make an image, are you "drawing"?

Coding is the act of writing code. Prompting an AI until it poops out a half-working product is not writing code.

Having the editor/copilot generate some boilerplate or copying shit from Stack Overflow isn't coding either, but once you've done that you go back to coding, so there's a difference there. (Using SO is part of the job, yes, but so is attending meetings and I sure don't feel like I'm "coding" whilst sitting in standup. Any engineer who spends 100% of their time coding is lucky indeed. The point is, just because you're making software doesn't mean you're "coding".)

mubouon Show HN: Building better base images

I'm not really understanding what this does specifically. It looks like it creates the filesystem on the host machine using chroot and then tarballs it?

Is there an advantage to that over combining layers and using cache mounts to avoid those redundant downloads?

A side-by-side comparison of dive's output would be helpful (https://github.com/wagoodman/dive).

Also can you clarify what you mean by "requiring full rebuilds of all previous steps"?

mubouon The Shard programming language – 0.0.3

How much do you think you would need to implement in the language before you can write the Shard compiler in Shard?

mubouon What about a "preferred" keyword in TypeScript?

I think what you're looking for is an `internal` modifier. This allows class members to be public within a library, but private outside it.

It's been proposed since 2015: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/5228

Currently, you can use `@internal` in jsdoc, which with the `stripInternal` option in tsconfig will cause it to be omitted from the type declarations for a similar effect.

https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#stripInternal

Edit: I've also seen libraries abuse `@deprecated` to inform users not to use an internal API:

https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?#example/jsdoc-deprecat...

mubouon BleepingComputer: Microsoft states creation of 'inetpub' folder is intentional

"Yes, we totally meant to do that"

Anyone who got the update (I keep mine paused as long as humanly possible, security be damned), did it actually install IIS?

mubouon Ask HN: Former employer is submitting my old resume

What do they even hope to accomplish with that? Get you hired? Or bait & switch the client? In any case, you should talk to your company's legal team (and not randos on the internet). Whatever the former employer is doing, it sounds like it could have the effect of sabotaging your new company's business or reputation with that client, which could be illegal.

mubouon Tell HN: ProtonVPN Partners with TorrentLeech

Torrenters are probably the #1 customer for VPNs, so advertising in places that will reach those potential customers makes perfect sense, and not desperate at all IMO.

mubouon Show HN: I made a fast file explorer for Windows

`fs::recursive_directory_iterator` Oof. You might want to look into how voidtools' Everything works before calling this "efficient." (The fastest windows search tools don't actually recurse the filesystem, but instead read the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) directly.)

Also, a bit of advice: separate your business logic (file searching) from your UI logic (rendering the GUI). That'll make refactoring (and unit testing) much easier and helps to avoid tangled spaghetti code as you start building larger applications.

mubouon Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)

It can even export as Mermaid? That's awesome. I could see that being super useful as a way to take a db schema and turn it into a chart for a github readme. Definitely bookmarking this.

Btw, the SQL import doesn't seem to work for an sqlite `.schema` dump; it breaks on the PRIMARY KEY here:

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "__EFMigrationsHistory" (
        "MigrationId" TEXT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT "PK___EFMigrationsHistory" PRIMARY KEY,
        "ProductVersion" TEXT NOT NULL
    );

(This is the standard migrations table that Entity Framework creates.)

W/r/t monetization, you should know there's a really powerful flowchart tool called draw.io that's already free. It's not tailored specifically towards databases the way yours is, but it can make similar graphs, so if you go too hard on monetizing you might cause people to just use that instead. Maybe there are some more B2B-oriented extensions or db integrations, or maybe a team collaboration feature you could add without compromising the core tool.

mubouon Ask HN: Do you use anti-virus software?

Windows Defender.

If I download a sketchy binary, I'll run it through VirusTotal, but there's no reason to have any of that junk running on my PC all the time.

mubouon Microsoft's new Windows 11 Start menu is bigger and fixes a major pain point

So much empty space. Does anyone else miss compact, purposeful UI designs?

mubouon Show HN: I built a Rust crate for running unsafe code safely

That's fair. I do wish error handling in Rust were easier (try blocks have been in "unstable" for almost a decade). Panicking probably shouldn't have existed in the first place.

mubouon Cool URLs Don't Change

I still have redirects on my blog for URL patterns that old versions of my site used 10-15 years ago. I'm confident that no one has ever bookmarked or linked to those pages (no one's reading my blog lol), but it's a matter of principle!

mubouon LLMs understand nullability

LLMs don't approximate human thought, though. They approximate language. That's it.

Please, I'm begging you, go read some papers and watch some videos about machine learning and how LLMs actually work. It is not "thinking."

I fully realize neural networks can approximate human thought -- but we are not there yet, and when we do get there, it will be something that is not an LLM, because an LLM is not capable of that -- it's not designed to be.

mubouon LLMs understand nullability

Of course, you're right. Neural networks mimic exactly that after all. I'm certain we'll see an ML model developed someday that fully mimics the human brain. But my point is an LLM isn't that; it's a language model only. I know it can seem intelligent sometimes, but it's important to understand what it's actually doing and not ascribe feelings to it that don't exist in reality.

Too many people these days are forgetting this key point and putting a dangerous amount of faith in ChatGPT etc. as a result. I've seen DOCTORS using ChatGPT for diagnosis. Ignorance is scary.

mubouon LLMs understand nullability

It's not age-old nor is it controversial. LLMs aren't intelligent by any stretch of the imagination. Each word/token is chosen as that which is statistically most likely to follow the previous. There is no capability for understanding in the design of an LLM. It's not a matter of opinion; this just isn't how an LLM works.

Any comparison to the human brain is missing the point that an LLM only simulates one small part, and that's notably not the frontal lobe. That's required for intelligence, reasoning, self-awareness, etc.

So, no, it's not a question of philosophy. For an AI to enter that realm, it would need to be more than just an LLM with some bells and whistles; an LLM plus something else, perhaps, something fundamentally different which does not yet currently exist.

mubouon Website is available without encryption, and yours should be too

> A server that demands a client to trust its certificate and to work with up to date encryption methods raises a barrier and shuts people out.

Going to need to back up this statement somehow, because the only time I've seen TLS pose a barrier to anyone is YouTubers showcasing retro hardware and trying to access the modern Internet on an ancient version of IE or Netscape Navigator.

Edit: Ah, nevermind. They did mention older hardware but I was thinking that, if you're going to support browsers so old they don't even support TLS, you may as well support Gopher too. Then I looked at the rest of their site and saw that they do, in fact, support Gopher: gopher://box.matto.nl

mubouon Show HN: I built a Rust crate for running unsafe code safely

> I'm referring to the fact that the rust code panics at the slightest sign of discomfort.

That's kind of up to you as the developer though. I generally avoid writing functions that can panic -- I'd even argue any non-test code that panics is simply poorly written, because you can't "catch" a panic like you can in a high-level language. Better to return an error result and let the calling code decide how to handle it. Which often means showing an error to the user, but that's better than an unexpected crash.

mubouon We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing

On top of that, I hear the RAW format on some smartphones is saved after the phone does its fake-HDR and computational photography bullshit, so it's even further from "raw" with those cameras.

mubouon We are still using 88x31 buttons

Yeah, I knew what they were but I'd never heard them described as "88x31 buttons," even back in the early 00s, so I had no idea what this article was going on about at first.

mubouon Vibe License – An unconventional license for AI-generated code

"I might have stolen this"

mubouon On JavaScript's Weirdness

The issue with variables and loops that OP described is worse with React, since you create closure inside the render function for event handlers, and if that closure captures any state variables (rather than a getter function for example), then you'll end up referencing stale state. React relies on linters to protect against this, but that only goes so far and the API design makes it easy to screw up, so you have to be on your toes.

Edit: To be clear, this is specifically a React hooks problem, not the old React with classes.

mubouon In retrospect, DevOps was a bad idea

> all employees should be pulling in the same direction

This. I've worked at companies where the infra/devops teams were openly hostile to the dev teams. It's incredible that companies like that function, and that management doesn't seem to care, when teams that are supposed to be working together are pointing guns at each other instead.

mubouon Tea vs. Rootbeer, what will destory your laptop the best?

This is what I come to HN for :)

You might want to open it up (if you can) and make sure the motherboard is dry to prevent corrosion.