MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brutusborn | 2025-04-29 10:30:09+00:00
Looks like they're using French nuclear to help black start the grid [1]. Solar and wind systems could have caused the instability issues that led to the Spanish Nuclear requiring isolation. It will be interesting to see the final investigation, but my bet is that "induced atmospheric vibration" is a PR deflection from a badly designed and operated system [2].

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF... [2] I'm not necessarily blaming the engineers, but the politicians who force those engineers to put square pegs in round holes. For example, I can imagine politicians making a short term decision to skimp on energy storage while increasing renewable penetration. Surely renewable systems must be less reliable without storage given the lack of rotational inertia?
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-29 10:31:06+00:00
On a asimialr vein, Microsoft's OneNote, which is of course part of the famed and expensive Office suite, still doesn't support Find and Replace. But, they do have a meticulously written official support article that suggests you can copy the text you want to replace with, and then do Find, double click the text it finds, ctrl+V, and repeat...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-...
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2025-04-29 10:31:20+00:00
The reason is the App Store (and Play Store) value things like DAU (as a proxy for "quality"), IAPs (because they get a cut), no real interaction (too risky), etc. The end result is "real language learning" doesn't align with "launching a top mobile app". This is also the reason none of games are hard (can't let people uninstall) and nothing unique shows up anymore (it's impossible to compete)

Source: Did mobile dev for ~5 years + launched failed B2B that gives data on how to game the Play Store
by pbmonster | 2025-04-29 10:32:27+00:00
> "Hi my name is _, I like the color _, My hometown is in _, how are you today?" Is not a real conversation.

That's... "first two weeks"-level of language lessons, right? No reason not to progress to children's stories and newspaper articles in time.

We basically never did speaking with a partner, I think our teachers realized that most students will learn little from that. It was always student teacher interactions, but in a way that required everybody to pay attention/participate. The teacher would ask a question, waited a few seconds so everybody could begin forming a response, and then pick a student to answer.

Not listening and mentally preparing an answer risked getting picked, failing, and getting admonished/ridiculed - and the teachers were (naturally) pretty good at calling on students who had drifted off. If you were paying attention, you also constantly compared your prepared response with what other students were answering, which made you think about correct grammar, ect.

I think if you have the resources to do 5 hours of language lessons a week, this is the best way. If you're learning independently, your way is probably more effective in terms of time and money. I've saved your other comment, I really should get back into Spanish...
by gnfargbl | 2025-04-29 10:33:42+00:00
The side effect of this process is that if [security firm] is doing their job then the systems do actually get hardened and the number of breaches is reduced as a result. In other words, this machine works as intended.

A common challenge is assessing whether [security firm] did actually do their job, or whether there just weren't any tigers around here in the first place. Hence, SOC2.
by jamager | 2025-04-29 10:34:39+00:00
No, it is because Duolingo is an addictive trap optimized for "engagement" (not learning) that requires you an absurd amount of time to progress very little, because it is explicitly designed to be ineffective with the looks of being effective (that's how they make money).

Want alternatives? Among apps, LingQ, for example, or LanguageTransfer. Among not apps, Lonely Planet phrasebooks and StoryLearning graded readers.

There are really many good options if one bothers to search.
by j45 | 2025-04-29 10:35:25+00:00
Speed of iteration is for speed of feedback and insight from the business/market into the product.

That can be a mix of how you see it, how the business works and how the code does anything.

It is important to understand I’m not referring to dynamically vs statically typed languages or not. It’s a distraction. Code runs fast on pretty much anything these days, and dynamically typed languages have pre-compilers.

These are sometimes matters of personal experience, interpretation, preference and opinion masquerading as facts.

Most languages have to abstract from to the web using a framework and that additional interpretation is where a lot is lost.

Featuritis is the disease, solving problems solely based on customer input (who are strangers) is important. Problems are rarely a single feature, but a sequence or group of them.

The irony of bash scripts is they can be some of the most durable and well lasting parts of a project while everything around it might change and evolve quicker. So if there’s some bash scripts being called by a language in the beginning.. so what.

My original point about Laravel is I have not seen as tightly integrated of any ecosystem to ship solutions and product where so much time is not lost in the product side of it (accounts, billing, migrations, etc). While I’m relatively new to it, at the very least it’s a worth comparison to show the holes in others.
by collingreen | 2025-04-29 10:35:31+00:00
I think it's an arrogant and naive mistake to think nobody reading hacker news has ever built anything complex, regulated, mission critical, or intended to last.

A more useful line of conversation might be discussing the vastly different requirements and environments (both physical and bureaucratic) that span our industry. Right now I'm a one man dev team slinging multiple products as fast as I can, trying to find revenue as the runway burns up. It would be silly to think everyone is in my same position with my same tradeoffs and I don't expect that to be particularly controversial.

If you have some good insight about when Oracle products are particularly well suited to the task I think many folks would love to read and discuss it. If you just want to act like you're the only one taking your job seriously then I suggest you just save your keystrokes and everybody's time.
by lazide | 2025-04-29 10:36:06+00:00
The part you are missing is ‘paid by whom’. Unlikely the power companies or regulator is going to be paying that amount here. It’s all the poor saps who didn’t have sufficient backup capacity.

There will be costs/losses by the various power companies which weren’t generating during all this of course, but also fixing this is by definition outside of their control (the grid operators are the ones responsible).

I’m sure public backlash will cause some changes of course. But the same situation in Texas didn’t result in the meaningful changes one would expect.
by zmibes | 2025-04-29 10:36:15+00:00
My experience of it in Lisbon was undramatic. I was able to buy medication from the pharmacy. Life continued as usual more or less apart from some inconveniences, people playing cards in the street and a sense of everyone stepping away from the tech. Eyes were rolled as the reflexive suggestions of "putin" were inevitably voiced, more to make conversation than anything else. I met neighbours that I'd never talked to before, and reconnected with some I hadn't talked to for years. People played guitar on their balconies rather than spotify bluetooth speaker pop. The neighbourhood cheered as it came back online but part of me, selfishly, would have liked a few more hours of blackout.

Would have been a very different story if it were a week rather than a day, but I was left with a sense that this complex community of locals and foreigners is stronger than I previously suspected.
by cristyansv | 2025-04-29 10:36:57+00:00
I'm sure you're doing it with good intentions, but it's a bit sad that children will now grow up with so few rights over their privacy.

As someone who grew up on the internet, I feel that the freedom it gave me to explore the world at my own pace allowed me to develop my personality. The thought that every second of my online life will be logged in an app and accessible to my parents honestly sounds horrible.

I respect every parent's decision regarding how they raise their children, but I invite you to reflect on whether growing up under this level of surveillance is something you would have wanted for yourselves.
by mentalgear | 2025-04-29 10:36:58+00:00
I like it! Really fun and fluent, though maybe the keyboard navigation (e.g. radio boxes, etc) could be improved.

I like the turtle, but maybe you want to rethink the jetpack flames from it's behind approach. Also, maybe a slight more "shiny" version, a la Duo, would match nicely.

But overall, great work !
by sylware | 2025-04-29 10:37:05+00:00
And some critical rust issues for games are not dealt with: on tiny glade with the devs did hit a libgcc issue on the native elf/linux build, and we did discovered that the rust toolchain for elf/linux targets does not support the static linking of libgcc (which is mandatory for games, any closed source binary). The issue is opened on rust github since 2015...

But the real issue is the game devs do not know the gnu toolchain (and llvm based) does default to open source software building for elf/linux targets, and that there is more work, ABIs related, to do for game binaries on those platforms.
by TuxSH | 2025-04-29 10:37:30+00:00
> People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.

Gimmicks and ease-of-hacking also matter IMO.

With the Switch, I believe we are seeing the "threat model" (from Nintendo's PoV) shift from on-device hacking to emulation, which is far more scalable and resilient to vuln fixes (system only needs to be hacked "once" to get crypto secrets and to dump code). This enables large-scale piracy and high financial stakes, see the ToTK debacle.

On the other hand, there's no (?) handheld system with 3D like the 3DS; and playing DS/3DS games on emulator feels a bit awkward.

The only thing I'm using my hacked Switch 1 is to dump/restore save files. Thanks to cloud saves and local save transfer, my other Switch units don't need to be hacked.
by xx_ns | 2025-04-29 10:37:56+00:00
Yes.

I'm a security researcher - no quotes. I write detailed, highly technical write-ups for all of the issues I discover, including reproduction steps, root cause analysis and suggestions for fixes. I follow all responsible disclosure guidelines + any guidelines that the company or entity might have for security disclosures.

It's disheartening when you put this amount of effort into it, it gets silently patched, and you get no recognition or even a "thank you". But I don't let it bother me too much. I'm doing this research mostly for myself and because I find it interesting. The fact that I'm disclosing the issues is me being a good citizen, but I shouldn't expect a pat on the head for every issue I disclose.

Being ignored always sucks. But it's still infinitely better than doing all of the above and being threatened with a lawsuit (which has, unfortunately, happened as well).
by tatersolid | 2025-04-29 10:39:25+00:00
Outlook also recently changed the default “report message” action in the UI to be “report phishing/malware” instead of “report spam”. This was a terrible design choice; phishing reports from my org’s own user base has increased 4x since the change which is a lot of false positives.

So maybe folks mean to “report spam” on your emails but “report phishing” instead…
by wtmt | 2025-04-29 10:39:43+00:00
I’ve heard good things about Kagi a lot on HN. I already pay for some services (like email [1], web hosting, etc.) instead of using free/ad supported services.

But I find Kagi to be quite expensive for multiple people (in a family setting) who are not in the first world and/or cannot dedicate such a budget just for search. If and when Kagi becomes larger and is able to reduce its costs and prices, I’ll consider it.

I find DuckDuckGo with Google as a fall back kinda adequate. With duck.ai from DuckDuckGo providing different mini LLMs for some kinds of queries, it gets even better.

[1]: For additional context, I consider something like Fastmail to be expensive in a family setting with multiple people needing their own mailboxes.
by amanzi | 2025-04-29 10:41:06+00:00
Have you looked at the Exchange Online and Defender portals for clues? Especially in the Message Trace section of Exchange Online?

I recently helped troubleshoot a similar issue - we were suddenly getting emails disappearing when sending to M365 customers. No spam or quarantine, just disappearing down a black hole like you described. We sent a test message to a M365 customer who could help run the message trace, and we discovered that the SVG logo in our email signature was being flagged as a phishing attack. We had been using this logo for about a year without any issues, but suddenly Microsoft just decided to block it without warning.
by yorwba | 2025-04-29 10:42:10+00:00
You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation.

Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-04-29 10:42:52+00:00
Upgraded signaling along the Caltrain ROW is in the works, but again you've got to balance the egos of the three big stakeholders. Caltrain is a far smaller problem to CAHSR than e..g Metro North is to Acela. The big issue is going to be the approach to downtown SF — which is still a ridiculous political football.
by abxyz | 2025-04-29 10:43:23+00:00
Looks very good, I believe this type of product is the future (instead of vibe-coding that produces heaps of junk new code). A few thoughts:

* Flowcode is a clever name but since you are positioning yourself as an alternative to code ("Code is messy and complex") the name is contradictory, just call it "Flow" (or "flows" or "Flower" something)

* You are replacing the legacy of code with something new, embrace new ideas that get out of the "one running process" paradigm, e.g: durable functions. There are a bunch of companies in the space (inngest, DBOS, trigger.dev) who are doing very interesting things, copy/steal/leverage all the great things they're doing -- your product's value is the visual programming

* Most developers today are already writing code so getting out of their code flow to do something visual might not fit well, whereas there are lots of non-developers who would love a product like this (see: the success of Make.com, Zapier etc.) because you're offering the AI integration for creating workflows which gives them confidence to go beyond what Make, Zapier etc. offer

If I were marketing this product, my pitch would be reframing programming as something anyone can do when it doesn't involve code, i.e:: your users can become a developer without writing code, AI-assisted visual programming builds production-ready systems without a single line of code. Code is archaic, (visual) programming is the future. Vibe coding is faster horses, AI-assisted visual programming is flying cars.
by xlii | 2025-04-29 10:44:16+00:00
That's true, but "Real Metrics" matter.

Bugs are on the spectrum - some might increase resource usage, or some might crash for a percent of users. Some might always manifest for specific cohort of users and it might not be profitable to fix it for them. It's an ocean of possibilities between "perfect system" and "complete failure".

Sanity test are degrees of magnitude easier than FV and they can assure at least that.
by hoseyor | 2025-04-29 10:45:51+00:00
I fully agree, but this is not exactly a principled community and it is controlled and managed by interests that have censorious authoritarian tendencies when it comes to discussion of meaningful things like this.

The bill does have a nullifying logical flaw in it though for purposes of defense, but I also don’t think that enforcement is really the point of the law. It is very much more likely that feigned intimidation and acquiescence are the intended purpose, i.e., making the currently still painless violation of rights the easiest route for entities to follow.

It has been the MO to undermine, infiltrate, and subvert the fundamental laws in the USA that restrict the government and authoritarians from infringing on the inalienable, God given rights of the people for many decades now.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 10:45:58+00:00
Devil May Cry for the Playstation 5 is written in C#, but not Unity.

Capcom has their own fork of .NET.

"RE:2023 C# 8.0 / .NET Support for Game Code, and the Future"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDUY90yIC7U
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-29 10:46:20+00:00
I don't know, the AI image quality has gotten good but it's still slop. We are forgetting what makes art, well art.

I am not even an artist but yeah I see people using AI for photos and they were so horrendous pre chatgpt-imagen that I had literally told one person if you are going to use AI images, might as well use chatgpt for it.

Also though I would also like to get something like chatgpt-image generating qualities from an open source model. I think what we are really looking for is cheap free labour of alibaba team.

We are wanting for them / anyone to create open source tool so that anyone can then use it, thus reducing the monopoly of openai but that is not what most people are wishing for, they are wishing for this to lead to reduction of price so that they can use it either on their own hardware for very few cost or some providers on openrouter and its alikes for cheap image generation with good quality.

Earlier people used to pay artists, then people started using stock photos, then Ai image gen came, and now we have gotten AI image pretty much good with chatgpt and now people don't even want to pay chatgpt that much money, they want to use it for literal cents.

Not sure how long this trend will continue, when deepseek r1 launched, I remember people being happy that it was open source but 99% people couldn't self host it like I can't because of its needs and we were still using API but just because it was open source, it reduced the price way too much forcing others to reduce it as well, really making a cultural pricing shift in AI.

We are in this really weird spot as humans. We want to earn a lot of money yet we don't want to pay anybody money/ want free labour from open source which is just disincentivizing open source because now people like to think its free labour and they might be right.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2025-04-29 10:46:35+00:00
Nintendo are selective with their enforcement, and homebrew is never a particularly interesting target when they also have to contend with pirates, who (in some cases) actually are making money off it. Serious emulator and homebrew developers are however very paranoid about avoiding flagrant copyright violations because they create a vulnerability that the likes of Nintendo could choose to enforce if they ultimately piss them off too much, and also simply out of pride in doing things properly. Marcan is among the serious ones. Sadly not everyone is. It is a routine occurrence for emulator developers that they have to deal with people who think that leaked source code etc is something they should consult and pretend they didn't — exactly the kind of attitude that would send chills down the spines of legal counsel.

I want to caution also that the claims here about violating Nintendo copyrights have been known for some time, that part is not new. The open-source plagiarism is the new part and the most upsetting.
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-29 10:47:04+00:00
> Given most languages since at least C have 0-based indexing.

As I mentioned I started Basic on C64, and schools curriculum was in Pascal. I didn't learn about C until I got to college.

> One is "mentally add/subtract 1" and another is "gain a deep understanding of how memory management works in Rust."

In practice they are, you start writing code. At first you trip on your feet, read stuff carefully, then try again until you succeed.

Then one day, you wake up and realize I know 0 indices and/or borrow checker. You don't know how you know, you just know you don't make those mistakes anymore.
by joaopbnogueira | 2025-04-29 10:47:23+00:00
Yes, I have.

Message Trace is an interesting one.

If we send an email without the 25friday.com keywords everything works fine, the message is shown on Message trace as delivered and the recipient gets the email with SCL 1 (all good here).

As soon as the very same email is appended with a www.25friday.com, Message Trace still shows the outbound email, also as delivered, but the recipient (if a Microsoft account) never gets the email. We used one of these emails (EML) to create a submission on the defender portal of a false positive, but they always simply disappear with 0 feedback (and the problem still occurring).

We also had a signature with the www.25friday.com link on it and took it out after realising it was causing emails to go to this black hole, so that at least we can still send emails, but we keep having to be careful to never sending any content (or attachment) that somehow mentions the 25friday.com domain.
by 63stack | 2025-04-29 10:48:57+00:00
Sqlx is completely lacking in the query composability department, and leads to a very large amount of boilerplate.

You can derive FromRow for your structs to cut down the boilerplate, but if you need to join two tables that happen to have a column with the same name it stops working, unless you remember to _always_ alias one of the columns to the same name, every time you query that table from anywhere (even when the duplicate column names would not be present). If a table gets added later that happens to share a column name with another table? Hope you don't ever have to join those two together.

Doing something CRUD-y like "change ordering based on a parameter" is not supported, and you have to fall back to sprintf("%s ORDER BY %s %s") style concatenation.

Gets even worse if you have to parameterize WHERE clauses.
by robocat | 2025-04-29 10:50:24+00:00
For our SPI an important optimisation was to selectively force critical JavaScript to be inline (and avoid script defer or async).

The standard browser heuristics were incorrect in our circumstances: which led to suboptimal page loading in the browser (the heuristics slowed down the critical part of page load). To indicate to a browser that JavaScript is on the critical path, you need to use inline scripts. It also required a ton of work to avoid giving the browser a chance to context switch.

Part of our loader code would request the same JavaScript from two locations (from both a CDN and from our host) and only evaluate the first response and cancel the redundant request. The JavaScript files were relatively small so the device the browser was running on was rarely bandwidth constrained. The primary reason was to make the page load reliably (files sometimes fail to load - requesting the same file from two locations really upped the reliability. The CDN didn't always win the loading latency race for a variety of reasons.

There's a lot of optimisations that can speed up page load but some require doing what appears odd unless you've very carefully profiled real customer browsers.