MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-29 10:13:07+00:00
More or less.

I once used an aggregator app to summon a handyman to my place. My request was simple: move two pieces of furniture around my very small apartment.

So I find a reputable service within the app, I schedule it, and they send a guy. He shows up to my door breathless, with some kind of sob story about a vehicle breakdown. I dismiss that out of hand and he gets to work. He did a fine job and it didn't take very long.

Then we get to the point of settling up, so I announce I'm going to pay in the app. He looks really disappointed and says he usually takes cash. I realized at this point that he was ready to shake me down, and also he would incidentally be discovering where I stashed my cash, when I reached for it with him there in the room. So disappointed. So I send the money out in the app and I show the confirmation screen to the guy. And I felt so bad that I followed up with a tip in the same fashion.

But at the end of the day he was just a garden-variety cash-in-hand scammer and I had no reason to feel guilty, because I had unwittingly outwitted him by trusting the app. And the company had no qualms about it.

Another time, I had a very short cab ride to the laundry. And it did not take long for the driver to spin a gigantic tale about his auntie addicted to gambling used up all their savings and they was really hurting for money. I was shifting uncomfortably wondering why I was hearing this. So the cabbie parks the car and his POS machine shuts off. He's like "oh it's out of order" so here he is, shaking me down and expecting me to go fetch cash to put in his grubby hands.

I stared him up and down, started taking photos, and got out of there. I discussed with dispatch. They said if he's not accepting cards and I intended to pay by card, I owe him nothing.

So again a cash-in-hand sob-story scammer was foiled. The cab service was crazy enough to assign him to pick me up additional times. This is why I ride Waymo, folks!!!
by pta2002 | 2025-04-29 10:13:27+00:00
Portugal has mandatory electronic receipts. By this I don't mean email receipts, I mean that all receipts have a code on them that is then also available to be looked up on the government's side (e-Fatura is the app for this) for tax reasons. I think it's fairly simple though, just registers the total amount, the seller, and how much VAT was paid.

However I assume this can work offline with the data being uploaded later though, as basically all the small supermarkets and shops were still open here (_incredibly_ chaotic though), and on the big supermarkets card payments were working (TBF, even the free wifi was working there, I guess they probably have some satellite connection).
by throwanem | 2025-04-29 10:13:59+00:00
Nothing in the general case. Just lately or since some time last week, I think they are 'a drug on the market' of widely variable quality, and it isn't really a role in which I would expect or wish to see someone cast himself who has incontrovertibly worthy accomplishments he can own under his own name.

What accomplishments? For one thing you have, if I correctly recall the history of HN's lead moderator role, put up with me for nearly some ten years now! If you think this is some small or mean accomplishment, I think I might still be able to put you in touch with my ex-wife who, if answering the phone this decade, I confide remains still very prepared to disabuse you. Oh, we were neither of us any great prize in those days, but what can you do? In any case, I hate to see you sell yourself so short.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-29 10:14:18+00:00
So, it's basically somewhat of a podcast that's almost entirely in English?

Dunno, I guess you could listen to it. But you also need rote practice to calcify what you learn. That's what Duolingo is good at.

Everyone who has spent 5min learning Spanish knows what tener means. The hard part isn't knowing what it means, but rather practicing it so that you hear it, read it, and conjugate it on the fly.

Reading a grammar book end to end doesn't work either because you need the practice.

The whole question of language learning basically is: what daily practice are you willing to do? Not just what you want to do in spirit, and not just what you aesthetically prefer, but what you'll actually do.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 10:14:59+00:00
Or take a lesson from languages where this isn't a religious question and do

(defvar names (Vector String) #("Alex" "Kim" "Robin" "Sam")) (first names)

or if being flexible,

(defvar names (Vector String) #("Alex" "Kim" "Robin" "Sam")) (elt names (lowbound names))

Bonus points for adding a macro or function, to make the second form available as first as well.
by whamlastxmas | 2025-04-29 10:15:38+00:00
That process means fuck all because the providers who honor DMCA takedowns often do so instantly, but basically say “you can never host this content here again, ever” and don’t give any fucks about whatever stupid appeal process you do. I had Heroku take down my business with zero notice due to a malicious dmca and did exactly this. They offered zero paths other than “get a different provider”. They also disabled my entire account and all of my sites, not just the allegedly offending site. They refused to even respond to any further inquiries on the matter
by oblio | 2025-04-29 10:15:38+00:00
When I want to make old devs cry I send them this link[1]:

https://forum.dlang.org/

I know it's very simple, I know there isn't a lot of media (and definitely no tracking or ads), but it shows what could be possible on the internet. It's just that nobody cares.

[1] Yes, Hacker News is also quite good in terms of loading speed.
Ask HN: How to fix issue and find the origin of bug in codebase?
by timonpimba | 2025-04-29 10:16:59+00:00
I wondered how you people approach a bug problem in the issue section. I have never done these things. Since last week, I've been trying to understand the bug's real issue/origin. I couldn't solve it. Initially, I used git bisect and looked into commits & code. I still couldn't figure it out.

If I could understand how you approach these bugs and how they are fixed, what method do you use, and how do you look at the code to fix them? Then, honestly, it would be invaluable to me.

Also, if you could please share any resources or articles, I would be very interested in looking at them; I could take some lessons from them.

Thanks.
by gostsamo | 2025-04-29 10:17:26+00:00
I'd agree with the gp. An amazing example for such an attitude was some french edition like "History of the World in Ten Chapters and a Half" which said in the introduction that it will talk about greek and roman history and then the modern times because the Byzantine empire just kept the torch burning. I stopped reading right there. Maybe it is different in the more academic literature, but the pop culture narrative is that the eastern roman empire, the islam world, the chinese, and the mongols were some autocratic religious barberians who worshiped things that they do not understand. If western Europe wasn't leading the way, some people reason, then everyone else shouldn't be allowed to stand above. Politics has the habit of using history to justify its own ends and it is true everywhere and in every century.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-29 10:17:39+00:00
MS are notorious for blacklisting IP ranges from providers like Linode, which makes it impossible for a small biz to run its own commercial system.

I'm not surprised they also keyword block, because Outlook flags Microsoft's own marketing messages as spam.

There really needs to be some kind of global Digital Bill of Rights which provides legal recourse from these giant sclerotic algo-run oligopolies.

MS, Meta, Amazon, YouTube and Apple all have policies that can nuke SMEs on a whim without consequences, often without even noticing, after their algorithms make a wrong decision about imaginary "abuse".
by trueismywork | 2025-04-29 10:17:59+00:00
One advantage or learning by translation is that you can figure out the parts in language that you already know which are missing in the new language. That way you can modify the new language you are learning to suit your needs. Instead of being limited by the limitations of the new language.

For a lot of professionals, this is excellent because they can seamlessly now move between languages without having to translate concepts.

I'm on my 6th language now and most language teachers are absolutely horrid having no sense of how to teach.
by pta2002 | 2025-04-29 10:18:11+00:00
From my personal experience, mostly just in the car. Here in Portugal there was a rather well-timed rail strike today, so a lot of people who would've taken the train drove instead and had a way to get back and listen to the radio. From what I could tell from the radio reporting, handheld radios and batteries were rather quickly sold out.

I've got to give massive props to Antena 1 too, which is the national broadcaster's main radio station, who stopped all normal programming and did an all-day massive report on this situation to keep people informed. From what I could tell they didn't even run any ads during that period, just all-day reporting continuously repeating key information for people who'd just tuned in.
by saagarjha | 2025-04-29 10:19:41+00:00
Caltrain and BART are rarely delayed by a significant amount, and they run frequently enough. Not as much as I'd like, but frequently enough that you're not ever going to be waiting more than 30 minutes. I don't think it's comparable at all to a cross-country journey that may require switching trains and different jurisdictions. Heck, Caltrain shares its own track already and it does just fine, and HSR will mostly have its own track except when it needs to share with Caltrain.
by quitit | 2025-04-29 10:20:09+00:00
There's plenty of reasons to not use a photo or a scan, but some trivial reasons are: translucent, metallic/pearl, and fluorescent paints and pigments.

Other reasons include gamut limitations, interactions with light (as you've noted already), and the point of the exercise is to capture minor details and attempt to understand the artist's original decision making processes. That can involve looking at the artwork under different lighting conditions, from different angles and so on.

Photos of course make good reference pieces, but snapping a photo or downloading a scan of a piece is going to leave many frustrating questions unanswered.

Despite the outcome the goal isn't to reproduce the piece. It's to emulate the process that led to the piece.
by tossandthrow | 2025-04-29 10:20:49+00:00
> ... target language ...

> your native language already have them

It seems like there is a strong underlying understanding that learning a new language is done from a source language towards a target language.

The book I am referring to argues that learning a language is about embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task.

The most natural embodiment og a language is speech.

This is fundamentally another way of looking at language learning than what most people think about having had Spanish in high school or what not.

It might not be for all.
by collingreen | 2025-04-29 10:21:29+00:00
I love your premise here. I think visual programming has such untapped potential even though it has been tried and tried and tried so I hope you crack the code a bit (lol).

I think you're exactly right on the idea of "I just diagrammed all the control flow why can't I just push run". It's kind of crazy to introduce a point of failure (and a menial translation step) by writing code to match the diagram.

Another huge benefit that I learned when reading about drakon (obvious in retrospect) is that good visual programming makes the software development process more accessible to other smart people involved instead of locking it away behind computer jargon and tools (the drakon example was rocket scientists able to now work on, review, and validate the logic and control flow instead of having to just hope it ended up right).

I hate that I'm saying this but this would actually make me feel a lot better about the vibe coding going on right now. If the control flow was right, hand crafted, and easy to review I'd feel a lot better about throwing the implementation details of many individual nodes over the wall to the ai without worrying about the house falling down.
by gabigrin | 2025-04-29 10:22:02+00:00
Haha, thanks!

As for the DOM nodes - as a React frontend developer by trade, the DOM was my first choice for simplicity when I started working on Flyde a few years ago.

I was sure I’d eventually need to switch to Canvas or WebGL, but surprisingly, the DOM has held up pretty well. It’s been performant enough to render complex flows smoothly, and being able to leverage the existing React ecosystem has been a huge advantage.

I do think there's an option for a canvas/WebGL based version in the longer-term future, especially to be able to build interactions like this one - https://xai-primer.com/tool/
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-04-29 10:22:34+00:00
It sucks how Duolingo has gotten so much worse over the years.

It used to be great when it had the grammar notes and discussion forums and comments, and you could actually finish the course and have some recognition.

Now it's just all too game-like and all based around maintaining streaks rather than learning.

Unfortunately some other apps have started to copy this model too like HelloChinese.
by huttiepant | 2025-04-29 10:22:49+00:00
Call me crazy, but I actually believe Duolingo is a huge net positive in education. Yes, it's a game and yes, people learn a language extremely slowly. But wouldn't you rather them spend time on this than Instagram or TikTok?

Education is so misunderstood because most people don't actually want to do it--it's hard! Just like eating healthy is hard (and not as tasty), committing to teaching yourself something is hard. So solving the engagement piece is very important.
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-29 10:23:02+00:00
It's even worse in satisfactory imo, because the game is build around your fabs consuming wildly varying amounts of power throughout their production cycle... And after a power loss, they'll not only need the initial burst (can be handled via batteries) but will also now all be synchronized to have their power spikes at exactly the same moment.

Dyson sphere program is the by far most forgiving in that regard. You can overdraw to something like 200% before it becomes really problematic, and even that quickly resolves itself the moment you get more power online
by inferiorhuman | 2025-04-29 10:23:09+00:00
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge

Mainline BART. e-BART uses standard gauge diesel trains and the half billion dollar Oakland Airport shuttle is a completely bespoke cable car monstrosity.

withstand wind shear

Specifically on the Golden Gate Bridge. Which may or may not be true. The track gauge is perhaps the most standard thing about BART cars.
by ithkuil | 2025-04-29 10:23:20+00:00
I got my first cell phone as a full bearded adult so I do remember the times where you carried cash and the time you could actually meet people in places without having to constantly update one's position.

I don't think it's just a generational divide.

I do understand the privacy and self-determination problems of a cashless society but I have to admit I'm just to weak-minded to care about that in practice; the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
by joaopbnogueira | 2025-04-29 10:23:38+00:00
We don't even have any sort of login on our main page, the redirects we have are mostly around apex domain to www.25friday.com, http to https and the likes.... This is a pure company landing page with the typical business description, career application page, articles etc.

We do have subdomains for internal tools of course, but those should not even be publicly accessible (behind an auth proxy).
by estsauver | 2025-04-29 10:23:47+00:00
I don't think this is all that well documented anywhere. I've had this problem too and I don't think anyone has tried to record something like a decent benchmark of token inference/speed for a few different models. I'm going to start doing it while playing around with settings a bit. Here's some results on my (big!) M4 Mac Pro with Gemma 3, I'm still downloading Qwen3 but will update when it lands.

https://gist.github.com/estsauver/a70c929398479f3166f3d69bce...

Here's a video of the second config run I ran so you can see both all of the parameters as I have them configured and a qualitative experience.

https://screen.studio/share/4VUt6r1c
by Someone | 2025-04-29 10:23:59+00:00
Possibly they refer to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172527 “I received a link to a Google doc on slack recently, but the owner had forgotten to share permissions with me. Though I couldn't view the doc when I clicked it, I did notice that I could view the first page of the doc in the link preview. It was very high res and I could view the text clearly.”.

If so, pasting that link into Slack may reveal its first page.
by Pinus | 2025-04-29 10:25:14+00:00
Is this the same Oracle/Cerner system ("Millennium", I believe) that, despite protests from the medical staff, was deployed "big-bang style" in the Swedish region of Västra Götaland, with much the same results? (And where during a press conference, where the management was explaining how nearly everything was going to plan, a doctor, who had somehow sneaked in, got up, shouted something to the effect of "you’re lying, it’s a bloody disaster!" and stormed out.)

(That was not an outage, though — as far as I understand the system was working, it just didn’t actually work...)
by Tor3 | 2025-04-29 10:25:16+00:00
That was simply an example of what's actually used in schools teaching adult immigrants of all ages! It was not something I pitched as an alternative to Duolingo. (Though it must be said that this particular school I mentioned has a very good track record in churning out able speakers, though this is not something a casual learner would want to try. It's basically full time. Very, very hard.)

For language learning there are more good options now than ever before. Not all of them are equally good for everyone, we're all different after all. I, for example, have always been utterly unable to learn by memorizing stuff (word lists or whatever), but I know people doing the exact same who can actually transfer that to active use. I never could. On the other hand I'm good at learning by reading and listening to input, as long as I can get the gist of it. I learned Italian to a survival level by first using phrasebooks so that I could book hotels and order food, and at the same time I listened to people for hours every day, for weeks and months at the time (because I was surrounded by people). Then I came across a shelf chock full of Peanut comics, in Italian. Ideal material. You see the story, you read the text, you understand what they're most probably saying, and after a shelf-meter of that I had grasped quite complex Italian grammar (some of which doesn't exist in my native language). Then I continued with Calvin and Hobbes books, with text in addition to the actual comics, and then newspapers and books. And all the time listening, and speaking with people in shops and elsewhere. That's an approach which works for me. This was all before Youtube and net resources.

Now there are so many options.. at least for popular languages. Graded input is what I would recommend. What's more important than anything is that it's interesting. And it's important not to fall in the trap of learning about a language instead of actually learning the language. The former is easy, and interesting.. but won't teach you the language.
by forinti | 2025-04-29 10:25:16+00:00
Devs get Oracle's best side. They don't know how lucky they are. PL/SQL is a fine language and Oracle throws everything and the kitchen sink into the APIs available inside the database.

As a sysadmin/dba I get to handle the nasty side of Oracle: the bugs, the patches that fail, the redundant tools, the wordy documentation that always feels like a never-ending advert.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-04-29 10:25:44+00:00
> Maybe it's just because they have such a gigantic user base for everything they do, that 80% is the best business value.

I was thinking about something similar recently. 80% of features take 20% of the time. For the hobby stuff I program, I want to make the best use of my time, so I skip the last 20% of features to make more room for stuff that matters.

I call it PDD: Pareto-Driven Development. Looks like you think Microsoft is similar.
by exodust | 2025-04-29 10:28:43+00:00
I don't remember pushback against CSS, but I do recall it was common for websites to dabble in CSS for styling fonts but still use table layouts. That's not pushback, just practicality.

If you wanted a solid predictable grid, you used table layouts. Particularly for tight and complex layouts. It wasn't uncommon for the navigation section to be a table layout even if other parts weren't. "Pixel perfect" was the name of the game. There emerged some pushback against the elimination of pixel-perfect design, not CSS.

Around 2000, remember spacer elements?

<spacer width="332" height="1" type="block"></spacer>

They never caught on. Pixel GIFs were more common and predictable.

Until flexbox went mainstream in 2014, CSS float layouts were an exercise in balancing spinning plates. Empty divs didn't behave the same as divs containing content, and it sucked. We'll never get those hours back, but at least we were paid.

The idea that early CSS gave us wonderful "zen garden" layouts doesn't align with my experience. Then again, I was making information media sites not fun arty sites.
by tsukikage | 2025-04-29 10:30:00+00:00
> A custom toolchain compiles a .py file into CPython ByteCode, translates it to a custom assembly, and produces a binary that runs on a pipelined processor built from scratch.

> Runs a subset of Python

What's the advantage of using a new custom toolchain, custom instruction set and custom processor over existing tools that compile a subset of Python for existing CPUs? - e.g. Cython, Nuitka etc?
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-04-29 10:30:07+00:00
Completely agree, when Duolingo started, I took the Spanish course and actually got something out of it. The lessons, comments were super helpful. I've tried it again last year and I couldn't believe my eyes that most of it is gone. It feels exactly like an addictive game, making you focus on the game part of it, not learning. And the fact that you can buy out of failures is just WTF.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-29 10:30:08+00:00
I just wrote this in another comment, but the hardest part of language learning is the daily practice.

Learning how the language works is the easy part. But only through the daily practice part do you develop the skills to read, write, and speak on the fly.

So the question comes down to: what are you willing to do every day to get that practice in? Especially when you're a noob well under the level needed to do (or stay interested in) more interesting things like read the news.

That's what Duolingo helps people with. And it's already compatible with the things you mention, like reading comics.

You might be falling into the trap of looking at people who aren't motivated to do anything but use one app on their phone and then pretending they'd otherwise have the motivation to learn through an ideal you have that requires more motivation.

When I started Duolingo I didn't even see myself as someone who would or could learn a language, so trying to read comics in Spanish was never on the table (much less a phrasebook, ugh), not an alternative that Duolingo was shutting down. Yet after months I realized I could incidentally read BBC Mundo. I'd wager most people are in this camp since Duolingo is such a "might as well" opportunity very much unlike your proposed alternatives where you assume everyone is super motivated.