MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kjellsbells | 2025-04-01 21:59:11+00:00
WordPerfect was like vi: forbidding entry point, difficult key bindings, and a joy to use once you got it.

Word for Windows even had a mode that replicated the plain blue screen and behavior of WP5.1 for a few years, which I still miss.

WP also ran on the UNIX of the day, with look and feel very much like the DOS version. Tavis Ormandy got it working on Linux[0].

[0] https://github.com/taviso/wpunix?tab=readme-ov-file
by MinimalAction | 2025-04-01 21:59:38+00:00
This post evoked a sense of sadness within me, though I can’t quite pinpoint the reason behind it. In the era where influencers without much depth to their content get to reap the monetary benefits, while those who genuinely showcase their creativity in rather holistic ways are left unrewarded. This trend has been around perhaps for longer than I imagine, but to put it in words made me realize this intensely.

I will do my part and ask my library too.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-01 22:00:17+00:00
> TypeScript is not "real" static typing in the same sense as Go, Rust, C#; the type information disappears the moment you build it.

The type information in both Rust and Go disappears the moment you build it. The generated assembly is completely untyped: if you pass invalid objects to a compiled Rust function that you've dynamically loaded, you will cause problems, even memory safety issues, because Rust does not do any type checks at runtime.

In the same way, if you call Typescript-defined functions from Javascript with the wrong types, you'll get problems. But if you write everything in Javascript, and don't ever use type assertions, you won't have issues. (In practice, I believe there are a couple of other issues you can run into, typically involving variance and mutability, but these are very rare. Also, some older APIs return `any` that should return `unknown`, but that can be fixed.)

It's also worth keeping in mind that all languages have and require schema validation, it just might look different. Both Rust and Go have schema validation libraries - typically they parse the data directly into the correct format, but in Rust you could do something like `let x: HashMap<String, JsonValue> = string.parse()` and get roughly the same effect as Javascript's JSON.parse, it's just that JS/TS has a built-in data structure to represent arbitrary JSON data, whereas Rust does not.

> To be clear, they are not "using" TypeScript, it's more accurate to say they are providing TypeScript bindings.

To be clearer: they are absolutely using Typescript. The functions (and other parts of the code) are annotated using Typescript's extension of JSDoc types, which means Typescript can parse and typecheck this code as if it were "normal" Typescript, including generating type definition files. The .d.ts files in the source code are used to define additional types and interfaces that can be used in the .js files (you can see the first file you linked to import type definitions from ESTree, for example). The type checking step can be seen in the package.json file[0]. This is all explained in the comment from Rich Harris that you linked before.

Using JSDoc rather than conventional Typescript syntax makes writing your source code more complicated, but in this case the Svelte team figured it would benefit them more in the long run to still be writing code that could be interpreted by a normal Javascript runtime. However, it really is just a different syntax for Typescript, and that's how they are using it.

[0]: https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/blob/80557bbc1c8a94c43a95...
by pedantsamaritan | 2025-04-01 22:00:41+00:00
Getting my backup infrastructure to behave they way I'd want with filesystem snapshot (e.g. zfs or btrfs snapshot) was not trivial. (I think the hurdle was my particularity about the path prefix that was getting backed up.) write once pg_dumps could still have race conditions, but considerably fewer.

So, if you're using filesystem snapshots as source of backups for database, then I agree, you _should_ be good. the regular pgdumps is a workaround for other cases for me.
by dli123 | 2025-04-01 22:00:43+00:00
yea there's a ton now that i've stopped trying to keep tabs on them. i agree that most 'vibe-coded' apps are still really, really basic, so we try to lean into that. give some cool apis that make certain things easy, and make it easy to create kinda dumb, but fun apps. the sweet spot is usually some kind of meme, or something with your friends, like https://asim.sh/@rish/s/157178/create-a-cute-gamified-app-ca...
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-01 22:00:44+00:00
This gonna be pretty important in the next years... people, if you plan on printing protest flyers and pamphlets, either get them done in a professional print shop (if you know someone you can trust, that is), or at the very least buy the printer in cash, never ever connect it to the Internet, and only connect it via USB to a Linux computer - macOS and Windows both will install printer drivers automatically that might phone back to the mothership and link your printer ID to some sort of identifier.
by bgnn | 2025-04-01 22:01:06+00:00
This is correct but one of the reasons is the SWE at HW companies are living in their own bubble. They somehow don't follow the rest of the SW developments.

I'm a chip design engineer and I get frustrated with the garbage SW/FW team come up with, to the extent that I write my own FW library for my blocks. While doing that I try to learn the best practices, do quite a bit of research.

One other reason is, SW was only FW till not long ago, which was serving the HW. So there was almost no input from SW to HW development. This is clearly changing but some companies, like Nvidia, are ahead of the pack. Even Apple SoC team is quite HW centric compared to Nvidia.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-01 22:01:58+00:00
I think DEI is largely a debate about what constitutes merit. E.g. Is it about hard work or performance. If performance, what metric.

This is most obvious in school admissions. People argue if admissions should be blinded to race, or calibrated to take into account effort.

However, Nobody is arguing that merit doesn't exist, as in a straight F student that can't read should be admitted to Stanford.
by ThalesX | 2025-04-01 22:02:36+00:00
> if you also want news to include "to what effect"

I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.

> News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".

I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions.

Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.
by themadturk | 2025-04-01 22:03:31+00:00
I like KOReader, but gave it up in favor of the default software on my Kobo Clara BW, mainly because of library navigation. I prefer to keep all my books on the device, but the only way to find them (as far as I can tell) is by author. I haven't had the time to go through my whole library to fix the author sort, and it became a real problem to find books I already possess that I want to read.

Fortunately I didn't delete KOReader, so all my setup is still there if I find a reason to go back.
I am a solo founder developing this new social media platform
by shannontkwong | 2025-04-01 22:03:32+00:00
Hey everyone! I am a 19 y/o founder taking a gap year to build Airdel - a social media platform startup. I’ve noticed many of today's social media platforms aren't action-oriented nor optimized for real-time collaboration which is important for people who have personal goals, are working on impactful real-world missions and projects (Humanitarian events e.g California wildfire victims, Emergency healthcare deliveries, climbing Mt.everest, working on research/patents or even just building cool projects). That’s why I’m building a social media platform that connects your needs with people who can help— whether it’s industry stakeholders, professionals, or individuals with a common solution to your problem.

Airdel contains a feed where you can post your mission progress, updates, and achievements, an online directory where you can search for needs and missions to collaborate and partner with others on, and a professional working platform with productivity tools to collaborate on missions until completion. The platform tracks the entire life of your mission/project from start to finish which is recorded on your personal profile. Collaborators can be anonymously reviewed, allowing others to judge trustworthiness for future collaborations.

People who have signed up are in the humanitarian, healthcare, tech, science, business, entertainment, sports and creatives sector needing specific urgent solutions, connections, and resources. These span from NGOs, Institutions, Individuals, Suppliers, Sellers, Organizations and government.

Let me know what you guys think! I will be answering every one of your questions. Shoot!

Landing page: www.getairdel.com Interested in helping out? Contact me shannon@getairdel.com

Best, Shannon
by cbozeman | 2025-04-01 22:03:52+00:00
> I have great confidence in our abilities to create more work for each other.

This is because we have a lot of people who don't like the idea of having to go work while others sit around on their ass getting checks. I get it. It's the most natural thing in the world, but we've got to evolve past it and we've got to evolve past it right now. Not 50 years from now, not 10 years from now, right now.

A shitload of people are going to be out of jobs very soon. Sooner than anyone thinks, actually.

And there's really only two paths this goes. We institute Universal Basic Income and some kind of program or programs to help you learn a skill that doesn't lend itself to automation well... or... the wealthy continue to horde everything and half the population starves to death... which doesn't happen, because when people get hungry, they start to kill the wealthy. And frankly even with a swarm of murderdrones, good luck stopping 200,000,000 people from killing you.

Evolving towards Star Trek's Federation is the way to go, I just hope rich people aren't too damn stupid to do it.
by themanmaran | 2025-04-01 22:04:15+00:00
That was the cost when we ran Llama 90b using TogetherAI. But it's quite hard to standardize, since it depends a lot on who is hosting the model (i.e. together, openrouter, grok, etc.)

I think in order to run a proper cost comparison, we would need to run each model on an AWS gpu instance and compare the runtime required.
by ajot | 2025-04-01 22:04:26+00:00
I've used CoolReader in the past, and recently suggested its sucesslr LxReader[0] to my partner, while I like the simplicity in MuPdf[1]. What do you think are the biggest advantages of Book Story? I might give it a try.

[0] https://gitlab.com/coolreader-ng/lxreader

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.artifex.mupdf.viewer.app...
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-01 22:04:32+00:00
> owing to the relative freedom it affords players

That's really not "true". The 3D games at the time let you go anywhere, view anything. Myst only let you move to predefined locations.

The difference is that you didn't have enemies trying to kill you all the time, or extremely difficult bosses to defeat in order to advance to other levels. Instead, Myst let you generally explore most of the game as you wished. You could explore quite far without technically "advancing" because you could ignore the puzzles. This made the game quite fun if all you wanted to do was look around.

It's kind of similar to the actual freedom in Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom, where you don't need to advance in the game to explore the world.
by davidsojevic | 2025-04-01 22:04:35+00:00
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SerpApi is the leading API to scrape and parse search engine results. We deeply support Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Bing, Baidu, and a lot more.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for more Junior and Senior FullStack Engineers. We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company (before Covid!).

We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

We very strongly value transparency, do open books, have a public roadmap, and contribute to the EFF.

Apply at: https://serpapi.com/careers
by Havoc | 2025-04-01 22:04:48+00:00
The same dynamics play out in everything from YouTube to onlyfans. A very small group make tons of money and are very visible and the other 99% make no money but nobody notices them. And that’s slanted perception pulls in more people driving up supply

But yeah books seem particularly brutal. The vast majority of my books were acquired at just over a dollar. Amazon daily sales and lots of patience. Even the big names have discounts that deep. I’m glad to have them but that is pretty brutal economics
by worik | 2025-04-01 22:05:00+00:00
> My only point is that it's clearly a much harder problem than you pretend it is.

Ouch! I am well aware that it is a hard problem.

I am also aware that we are very smart monkeys.

We do not need the social disruption, and material misery among plenty that we have. It is a choice - a negative choice (a choice to take no action) maybe, but a choice nonetheless.
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-01 22:06:00+00:00
As a kid, I imagined silica gel was a special treat. It seemed like the ultimate ‘DO NOT EAT’ dare. I put one in my mouth, waiting for superpowers or disaster.

Turns out, it just tasted like disappointment and regret. 10/10 would not recommend, but at least I lived to tell the tale!
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-01 22:06:55+00:00
That's a part of it. The other part was the federal government not enforcing anti trust law for decades, enabling consolidation. Matt Stoller writes extensively about this at https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ and in his book "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy." Consolidation and monopolies are good for shareholders and management, competition is good for consumers and labor, broadly speaking.

Business consultants exist for a purpose that can be described as "how can we squeeze this enterprise or deal for as much as we can?" Sometimes that's squeezing your customer base through anti competitive practices. Sometimes thats offshoring (labor arbitrage). Sometimes it is M&A (realizing "efficiencies"). Sometimes it is squeezing your existing labor pool as hard as you can. Or a combination of the above.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-01 22:07:12+00:00
> What do you mean not their fault? I've seen wrong parts delivered by suppliers, so yes responsibility of an engineer who puts together a circuit is definitely checking that the parts are correct.

A student is far from an engineer.

> Again _never_ the equipment's fault?

The exact words the failed mentor used are not what matters here.

> In my experience this does not get accepted in industry.

This being the entire situation or the actions of the improperly used junior employee? Blaming the non-expert that was refused help is scapegoating.

> Simply saying "it wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't just give you an A.

It should give you more time.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-01 22:07:23+00:00
Competing on price is something all business do anyway, at least as long as there is competition.

What McKinsey and the rest of the scumbags have taught CEOs is to be aggressive, cheating and ruthless at cutting costs no matter what. That's how we ended with almost all manufacturing and associated know-how getting shipped over to China (sometimes literally - they bought an entire steel manufacturing plant in Germany's Ruhrpott, tore it down and reassembled it in China [1]!), that's how we ended up with the clown show that is Boeing, that's how we ended up with "employee loyalty" not being a thing any more in either direction.

[1] https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/wiwo-history-tatort-dortmund...
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-01 22:07:36+00:00
> finalize() is actually is a very hard mode;

> Deprecated now, so perhaps no need?

Yes. Worth mentioning existence and “do not touch it”, but no need to go deep. Same with clone. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that you can use the core library without shooting yourself in the foot. As for wait/notify/notifyAll, I’d expect the correct usage patterns from mid-level.
by probably_wrong | 2025-04-01 22:07:57+00:00
> I hear of companies building bots that do outreach with human voices.

I asked Gemini today how to use my (paid) credits to get more RAM. The conversation was roughly like this: "You have to click on this option". "That option doesn't exist". "You are right, that option doesn't exist. You should consider paying for an upgrade".

My theory about chatbots is that, in general, they are only replacing humans in tasks in which no one really cares whether the problem is solved at the end: if I'm unhappy about my internet connection and the company has a monopoly, then all my call does is ensuring that the company doesn't spend more than legally necessary on a problem they never intended to fix.

All AI is doing is making it easier for you and I to be ignored at scale. So while I don't doubt that some doctors will diagnose people from my phone, they will be shit solutions to the wrong problem.
by nullocator | 2025-04-01 22:08:00+00:00
If your world view is one where the most important thing is the share price, agreed. In terms of providing value to their customers I'm less convinced day by day. In terms of consistently providing quality content, Netflix has absolutely fallen off a cliff in putting out well made, well written movies or series. They also seem to be amongst the worst in the industry in on cancelling series, to the point that often times they will announce the cancellation within weeks of a series release, which I guess is good if you want to know which shows not to bother with, though in general you probably shouldn't bother with any of them.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-01 22:08:39+00:00
Yeah, they’re kind of conflating two things. BYD is way up globally, Tesla is way down in Europe. But that doesn’t mean that BYD is taking over Europe; the European market is increasingly dominated by VW AG and BMW.

It’s also kind of regional; if you’d visited Ireland, say, you’d probably assume Hyundai was either the largest or second-largest, but Europe-wide it’s not that big. There are European markets (notably the UK, which still ends up in many European stats for this) where BYD is a big deal.
Show HN: Oxy – build SQL bots and automations easily
by ryi | 2025-04-01 22:09:10+00:00
Hey folks! We just launched a yaml-based open source framework for building SQL bots and automations called Oxy. You can build an answer engine for your team, automate report generation or deep dive analysis, etc. In short, we wanted to make it easier for analysts to build with LLMs. Would love to hear your thoughts!
by h0l0cube | 2025-04-01 22:10:05+00:00
Maybe. I'm not sure if FPTP necessarily leads to authoritarianism, but there's a whole bunch of countries that sill use the system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Cou...

I think, though, that the US won't go full top-down authoritarian, because a large enough portion of the population is armed. Should some kind of coup ever be attempted, it could well spark a civil war – which is still doom, but not a subjugating kind of doom.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-01 22:10:21+00:00
> by drawing closer to even less trustworthy business partners.

_Is_ China less trustworthy, though? I mean, it hasn’t threatened to invade bits of Europe, so there’s that.

FWIW, I don’t think that US brands other than Tesla are seeing hits of the same size (though, with the exception of Ford, they’re kind of rounding errors anyway, and Ford isn’t relevant in the EV market). Tesla has special problems; no other US car manufacturer CEO, or for that matter Chinese car manufacturer CEO, has recently been prancing around on TV doing Nazi salutes, and no other US car manufacturer CEO is part of Trump’s government. I’m not sure that Americans understand the degree to which Trump is disliked in Europe, particularly in Western Europe where most of the market for electric cars is.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-01 22:10:46+00:00
That's fair. Now if we go with this line of thinking, and push a little bit past the obvious, the seeming difference in earning potential between authors and entertainers - whether YouTube influencers, classical athletes or singers, combined with clear winner-take-all dynamics of the latter groups, is how the world tells us...

... we need more human connection.

It's not just whether or not the content is lighter, more engaging, or hyperoptimized. It's not just that. Maybe what's common between all this, and other high-engagement creations like high-outrage news reporting, is the same instinct: seeking out what's important, by proxy of what we expect others will also seek out and talk about. So, in short, seeking connection.

Just random musings, no real conclusion here.
by wrs | 2025-04-01 22:11:16+00:00
I didn't get that impression. I think she just wants the readers to not have a misconception of how much she's getting paid for the book they're (hopefully) enjoying.

I hear a lot of similar sentiments from musicians whose fans think they're making any money by touring or streaming. And they get the same advice I'm seeing in this thread: you can't just be a musician anymore, you have to also be a social media expert, marketer, bookkeeper, recording engineer…in other words all the stuff the music label / publisher used to do so you could focus on the actual artwork.
by tqi | 2025-04-01 22:11:47+00:00
> I don't think AI will have much of an impact on management consulting, since it's really just executive insurance. If anything, management consulting might be the perfect use for generative AI in its current state.

I think your second point is actually the reason why this will have a big impact on the industry, since McKinsey et al generally operate on a billable hours basis, and automation / AI will exert significant downward pressure.

Initially, I imagine they will staff smaller teams at a higher hourly rate (mostly by replacing some number of analysts and associates with automation/AI). Long term, I can imagine some firms will attempt to make up for the loss of revenues by expanding into SMBs ("Own a struggling Plumbing business? Get help from McKinseyAI!") or by dramatically reducing the size of their staff (as you noted, their product is mostly executive insurance, and for that you really only need the Partners).
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-01 22:11:58+00:00
I had a similar thought, randomly generated in 'strength'/points and positions. Pawns on first row are impossible, and last row turn to Queens (or whatever).

There must be a 'relative position' though in the mix of the algorithm, because on some levels the pieces are scattered in the four corners and some others they are on 'perfect-knight-stepping-sequence' so I could take 5-6 pieces in 5-6 moves and then exit.