MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dagimg-dot | 2025-04-29 15:25:42+00:00
Do you dread the daily grind of manually setting up your apps across multiple workspaces? I did too.

So, I built `floww`—a CLI app to automate this process! Here’s what it does:

YAML-based Workflows: Define complex setups in easy-to-read YAML files.

Workspace Management: Automatically switch to specified virtual desktops/workspaces.

Application Launching: Launch binaries, Flatpaks, and Snaps with arguments.

Flexible Timing: Configure wait times between actions for smoother transitions.

Interactive Mode: Select workflows easily if you don't specify one.

Validation: Check your workflow files for correctness before applying them.

Simple CLI: Manage workflows with intuitive commands (init, list, apply, add, edit, remove, validate).

If you’re on Linux and love optimizing your workflow, give `floww` a spin! Check out the GitHub repo: https://github.com/dagimg-dot/floww

Let me know what you think, or if you have any tips to make it even better!
by looofooo0 | 2025-04-29 15:25:43+00:00
Ok, but now getting rid of your legacy Cobol system becomes 10x cheaper, hence replacing it becomes feasible. Deploying an industrial robot with sensors to do specialized complicated thing x is now only a few skilled queries away and costing you only one workday. Writing software to replace manual process which n many workers do and would lead to savings but not enough to justify a normal programmer writing the code... if price of code goes down, short term fixes become worth the money.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 15:26:03+00:00
> Googling says 27 tax jurisdictions in the EU versus over 13000 in the US.

Cool, great place to start. Let's fix that. Both have similar land mass, similar populations, similar balance of federal-ish and state-ish and local-ish governance, similar cultures, etc.

> And for what? Making the checkout process slightly more convenient for people who lack the mental ability to estimate their total?

Surely handling 13k tax jurisdictions is expensive for businesses and consumers on many levels?
Ask HN: Filtering AI slop in the browser before it hits our eyeballs?
by merksittich | 2025-04-29 15:26:16+00:00
Given the recent explosion of easily-generated synthetic images, particularly low-effort AI visuals on social platforms (e.g., LinkedIn), I'm curious why no mainstream browser-level mechanism exists to filter such content before it meets our eyes.

There are niche browser add-ons that visually classify images to detect AI-generated images. However, none appear to have gained significant traction and none appear to be built for the purpose of hiding visual AI slop. Search providers like Kagi address AI content filtering specifically in image search, which is helpful but not useful for general browsing.

With standardized provenance metadata already available (e.g., via C2PA), why hasn't browser-level filtering of AI-generated images become a mainstream feature, in view of the obvious use-case to improve SNR by hiding or replacing AI-generated images until explicitly requested? Even if it may be gamed as long as there are no hard-to-strip pixel-level watermarks in the images, I presume that most content "creators" would not bother. What am I missing?
by indoordin0saur | 2025-04-29 15:26:28+00:00
My favorite brand drops a new pair of shoes in June. I order them shortly thereafter. They are imported from China who at the time has a 100% tariff. I see a $5 tariff charge. I now know that the $250 pair of shoes actually cost the retailer $5 and my boyfriend who keeps telling me they are cheap trash is suddenly vindicated.
by jll29 | 2025-04-29 15:26:33+00:00
Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts.

Here's my own take:

- It is far too early to tell.

- The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen.

- I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even before LLMs, people were paid penny amounts per word or line translated, and rates plummeted further due to tools that cache translations in previous versions of documents (SDL TRADOS etc.). The same decline not to be expected for interpreters.

- Graphic designers that live from logo designs and similar works may suffer fewer requests.

- Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.

- LLMs are a basic technology that now will be embedded into various products, from email clients over word processors to workflow tools and chat clients. This will take 2-3 years, and it may reduce the number of people needed in an office with a secretarial/admin/"analyst" type background after that.

- Industry is already working on the next-gen version of smarter tools for medics and lawyers. This is more of a 3-5 year development, but then again some early adopters started already 2-3 years ago. Once this is rolled out, there will be less demand for assitants-type jobs such as paralegals.
by chermi | 2025-04-29 15:26:53+00:00
What specifically do you feel you don't grok about inertia? I'll admit the use of "inertia" for explaining phenomena historically bothered me as it seemed like it was just an extra word that was already covered. Inertia/momentum describes what an object will do in the next instant if nothing else "happens" to the object. Force describes deviation from this according to dp/dt = F. Of course this is in the classical sense.

I'm not sure about position. It's a hard one to think about. What's important is that position's numbers (coordinates ) are defined according to a coordinate system. But the actual physical "position" doesn't care about the coordinate system. So things like distance or the time it takes to get from one point to the other (in some units) are invariant under coordinate changes.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-04-29 15:27:03+00:00
1,1,1-trichloroethane doesn't seem particularly toxic - "probable carcinogen", some neurological and liver effects but I'd say it's probably still safer than e.g. isopropyl alcohol which definitely leads to neurological issues long-term. The reason it's banned is because of the ozone layer, not because it's unsafe to individual humans.

I feel like it's probably the wrong chemical though, far too many similar names. Maybe you meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
by salimmadjd | 2025-04-29 15:27:41+00:00
Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak.

Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill.

Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga).

If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games.

I think you can learn a language if you use Duolingo’s streak gamification as a daily motivator but use supplemental materials to actually learn.
by cmdrk | 2025-04-29 15:27:48+00:00
Godot has a nice netcode story with ENet, WebSocket and WebRTC integration. If you just want a off-the-shelf product instead of bespoke Erlangy stuff, I think there are a lot of good options out there like Godot's native high-level networking, products like Nakama, etc.

Server backend framework: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld

Chat server implementation (Erlang): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat_server_example

Chat client implementation (Godot): https://github.com/saltysystems/chat-client-example
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-29 15:28:00+00:00
> You are saying that improved driver education and vehicle maintenance cannot be done in the U.S., yet NYS does it.

The problem is, it's only NYS. Not the entirety of the US. And the federal government can't go and mandate it without a constitutional amendment - and the last one has been passed over 30 years ago, so there is no practical chance something as controversial as that could ever become law.

The only way around this would be a repeat of the Minimum Drinking age, similar to what's being discussed for the "SAVE Act" - the federal government effectively forcing states to abide by tying federal highway or other funding to that condition. And that tactic is, let's be real, outright disgusting and trampling on states rights.
by coldpie | 2025-04-29 15:28:03+00:00
I had the same experience. I'm located in Minnesota, USA, not currently logged in to Google, and I use an ad blocker. First result was a Home Depot home repair article that looks genuinely useful. Then relevant YouTube videos, Reddit threads, an iFixIt link, a link to the Portland government website. I see zero things I would explicitly call an "ad" on the first page.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-29 15:28:25+00:00
It's true— fundamentally, nothing about a build realizing partway through that it needs more stuff breaks the Nix philosophy, assuming the build is holding a hash for whatever it is it wants to pull so that everything stays hermetic. It's a bit annoying to not know upfront exactly what your build graph looks like but honestly it's not the worst— like, you already don't know how long each derivation is going to take.

In any case, the tvix devs have definitely understood the assignment on this and are making not only ifd a first class citizen, but also the larger issue of allowing the evaluation step to decompose, and for the decomposed pieces to run in parallel with each other and with builds— and that really is the game-changer, particularly with a cluster-backed build, to be able to start work immediately rather than waiting out a 30-60 second single-threaded eval.
by wisty | 2025-04-29 15:28:38+00:00
I think you're mistaken?

The grammar translation method is seem as obsolete, but Duo isn't that. You don't learn rules formally (e.g. memorise explicit and formal rules on how to conjugate a verb in the past continuous tense, and what all these rerms mean) then apply them.

If anything, people constantly complain about how Duolingo just gives them sentences and doesn't give long explanations about the grammar, you just have to pick it up. Very modern.

People also complain about how duolingo has "nonsense" sentences, because it deliberately drip feeds vocab in similar categories which is actually the right way. You learn one fruit, one colour, one body part, etc at a time; so yeah occasionally you might get something like "tom has a purple apple on his nose" but there's a reason for this.

The only real faults with Duolingo is that it focuses on listening and reading, so you need to practice speaking and writing elsewhere. It does have an AI chat, but it's... kind of bad IMO.

And that most courses only cover a year or two of learning. And that there's very few languages. But if you want to learn enough to get started in more immersive learning, IMO it's fine.

And there's people who complain that they spend so much time metagaming to try to win the weekly leaderboard that they actually hurt their learning, but if you really need a cartoon owl to give you a cartoon gold medal then maybe you shouldn't blame the app ...
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-29 15:28:45+00:00
That was the promise of "The Cloud".

Data centers are big and scary, no body wanted to run their own. The hypothetical cost savings of firing half the IT department was too good to pass up.

AWS even offered some credits to get started, first hit's free.

Next thing you know your AWS spend is out if control. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. Instead of writing better software, which might slow down development, just spend more money.

Ultimately in most cases it's cheaper in the short term to give AWS more money.

Apart of me wants to do a 5$ VPS challenge. How many users can you serve with 5$ per month. Maybe you actually need to understand what your server is doing ?

I'm talking non sense, I know.
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-29 15:28:53+00:00
The difference is AWS is the backbone of the modern Internet and Amazon is a dominant force in retail, which gives him a cash-printing machine.

Zuck has one website that's been a has-been enshittified hellscape for going on almost 10 years now, another he very well might be forced to sell, and a pivot to a "metaverse" that's nothing but one big bonfire of cash. Meta may be R&Ding the shit out of VR/AR, but there's no guarantee they're going to be able to cash in.
by blululu | 2025-04-29 15:28:58+00:00
Agreed in practice, but there is a key difference: sales tax is uniform for all products, import tariffs are not. As a customer I want to effectively compare prices between different options. For sales tax you can simply assume a uniform 9% bump. For tariffs the fee varies for comparable products. I would prefer knowing the full price ahead of times but I absolutely need to know the relative price ranking.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-29 15:29:05+00:00
My only criticism is that die-hard django devs constantly brush aside the admin and can't stop telling people not to use it. I think it's a huge mistake.

It's extremely well-designed and extensible, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel when so much time and effort has been put into it.

They will complain of things like "eventually you will have to start over with a custom solution anyway"... but whatever gripes they have, could just be put into improving the admin to make it better at whatever they're worried about.

Personally I've not run into something I couldn't make work in the admin without having to start over. My own usecases have been CRUD for backoffice users/management and I've had great success with that at several different companies over the last ~15 years.

People will say "it's only for admins you trust" yet it has very extensive permissions and form/model validation systems heavily used in the admin and elsewhere, and they are easily extensible.
by seanwilson | 2025-04-29 15:29:43+00:00
Cool! I have a palette editor tool that lets you visualise how the hue, saturation and luminance varies over the palette using the HSLuv colorspace (ignore the UI mockup on the left):

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/?style_dictionary=eyJjb2xvci...

I.e. from the first to the last color, the hue increases in even gaps, and the luminance goes from quite dark then gradually brighter up to yellow, then gradually darker again.

> An LCH rainbow colour palette can be created by choosing fixed chroma and luminance values and varying the hue

> Yellow is given the highest luminance, as it only looks yellow when bright.

I find it interesting how hue and luminance are sometimes conflated when talking about colors. "Blue" usually means "blue hue, low to high luminance", and similar for a lot of other colors like green. But "yellow" usually means "yellow hue, high luminance", similar for orange.
by Liquix | 2025-04-29 15:30:05+00:00
FWIW it's possible to replace the streaming services with something like Jellyfin+Radarr+Sonarr or Kodi+RealDebrid to cut the bill down to <$50/yr, and you also get access to media on all streaming services. leaves plenty of room in the budget for things that can't be self-hosted (like a proper search engine). some may cite ethical concerns but i don't think HBO execs making money hand over fist are concerned about ethics at all
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-29 15:30:07+00:00
In comparison, when I shipped a Mac desktop application:

We used Sparkle, https://sparkle-project.org/, to do our updates. IMO, it was a poor choice to "roll their own" updater.

Our application was very complicated and shipped with Mono... And it was only about ~10MB. The Windows version of our application was ~2MB and included both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. WTF are they doing shipping a 250MB screen recorder?

So, IMO, they didn't learn their lesson. The whole article makes them look foolish.
by duped | 2025-04-29 15:30:16+00:00
I mean Microsoft has always had a reputation for shipping bad software, what that reflects on their developer teams is up to the audience. Personally I'd say it's reflective of a bad engineering culture that doesn't care about quality or craftsmanship due to lack of an incentive to ship good software but every incentive to ship software at scale, quality be damned.

Like in this article alone, that's a change that should never be made. It's an understandable bug but it's indicative of carelessness, both managerial (how does this hold up to code review?) and QA (why is no one asking why login splashes take 30 seconds?).
by victorbjorklund | 2025-04-29 15:30:34+00:00
NFT:s never had any real value. It was just speculation hoping some bigger sucker will come after you.

LLM:s create real value. I save a bunch of time coding with an LLM vs without one. Is it perfect? No, but it does not have to be for still creating a lot of value.

Are some people hyping it up too much? Sure, an reality will set in but it wont blow up. It will rather be like the internet. 2000s and everyone thought "slap some internet on it and everything will be solved". They overestimated the (shorterm) value of the internet. But internet was still useful.
by Clubber | 2025-04-29 15:30:42+00:00
This isn't sales tax, this is tariff. Not sure if they are any laws regarding that or not.

It might be like shipping and handling: $20. The shipping is probably $5, the handling is $15. The handling is just a fee they charge to sell it to you. They want you to think it's shipping that's why they put "shipping" first. Uber Eats calls it "taxes and other fees," which are mostly fees, but they want you to think it's taxes, that's why they put "taxes" first.

Many business are scummy like that, we've just gotten used to it.

The point being, they are signaling a price hike and they are trying to attribute it to tariffs, which maybe or may not be true down to the penny. If they were exact in what the tariff was, people can easily calculate their cost, which Amazon doesn't want. I'm sure they will sneak in some extra profit in there at some point using similar tactics as described above.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-04-29 15:31:21+00:00
This implementation recurses on the call stack and calls that out as a feature. A built into the language tree walk which overflows the stack on large trees is perfect for C++, get a paper over to WG21.

Or for a possibly more useful comment, constant space tree traversal is genuinely quite difficult to implement. I don't know a general solution to it (other than walk from the start N times, quadratic style), would be interested to hear of one.
by pavlostze | 2025-04-29 15:31:42+00:00
I recently launched a mobile app that helps Bluesky users track who follows or unfollows them, and manage their followings—including features like bulk unfollowing.

It’s useful for anyone looking to curate their feed or clean up after mass migrations from other platforms.

Product Hunt launch link (if you want to check it out or support): https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tracker-manager-for-bluesk...

I’d love to hear what others think—especially if you're building on the AT Protocol or interested in Bluesky tooling.

Happy to answer questions!
by angry_moose | 2025-04-29 15:31:57+00:00
I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.

I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.

For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.
by orwin | 2025-04-29 15:32:38+00:00
Yes. Let's compare SwissLife, a private healthcare insurance, to French 'securité sociale' healthcare bit.

For every 100€ put in french national healthcare, 89 to 93 (depending on the year) are spent on healthcare. The rest is used for distribution and administrative tasks (and during a short time, debt repayment).

What do you think SwissLife give it's insured back for ever 100€ they are paid? Between 12 an 15% are administrative costs (they have more expensive lawyers and contest more claims), 2% R&D (??for some reason, probably to claim tax rebates), and between 5 and 12% are dividends. So between 81 and 71 euros are given back. Do that seem more efficient?

But that won't last, each time private companies compete with public one, the EU commission had to create new rules, like ARENH for electricity, or worse, the separation between SNCF, SNCF reseau, SNCF fret/geodis to prevent economies of scale and local optimisation (that killed small train stations and most french fret). Now that SNCF fret managed to come back (under a new name) and outcompete everyone, again (mostly because train fret died), they just broke it again for spurious reasons. Liberalist fuckers just don't want exception to their rules, and since they can't economically bully state companies like they bullied Lip and probably any worker cooperative that became too big or too well-known, they use their political weight to send them to the ground instead.
by 3Samourai | 2025-04-29 15:32:57+00:00
I have sent them the following explanations, but they have not replied in six days.

---

I’ve had two different errors:

1. It asks for my phone number, I enter it, and get: “You have reached the maximum number of attempts. Please try again at a later date.” but I never received any verification code.

2. Or I get a verification link, open it on my phone, and before I can fill anything in, I get: “Try later.”
by reaperducer | 2025-04-29 15:32:58+00:00
Grid operators are currently mostly against renewable

As someone who moves a lot, it's always curious to me that grid operators vary so widely on this.

Some places (like where I am now), the grid operator hates renewables and especially rooftop solar.

Other places, the grid operator will actually subsidize rooftop solar because it they say it reduces the amount of generation it has to do, thus saving money on infrastructure and maintenance.

Of course, each location has wildly different climates, but the regional politics aren't that different, so I don't think it's about ideology.
by rvz | 2025-04-29 15:33:25+00:00
Imagine if that was Meta that had over 1B users with their messenger desktop app update functionality that did just that. The loss would be in the hundreds of millions.

> But agree that senior gatekeepers should know by heart some places where review needs to be extra careful. Like security pitfalls, exponential fallback of error handling, and yeah, probably this.

The lesson here is much better use of automated tests (The app likely has no tests at all) and proper use of basic testing principles like TDD would prevent such junior-level embarrassing bugs creeping up in production paid software.

That is the difference between a $100 problem vs a $200M problem.

See the case of Knight Capital [0] who lost $460M, due to a horrific deploy.

[0] https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...
by skeletal88 | 2025-04-29 15:34:06+00:00
In the EU, when I go to some online shop it first lets me chooose my language (and country), then it displays all the prices with the correct VAT amount.

You in the US keep saying "we are so special, so it is impossible to change things for the better in any way". While other countries also have complex rules for similar things yet they still manage to provide a better experience for shoppers, citizens, sick people - everyone.