MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wongarsu | 2025-04-01 12:57:33+00:00
Because its main selling point isn't its only selling point. At $work we use Tauri because of the great Rust<->JavaScript API it offers. We wanted an Electron-like JS Frontend that could seamlessly use our existing IPC to talk to a long-running service, as well as being able to offload heavy work to native code. Tauri fits that beautifully.

For our use case don't care too much about the kind of webview it uses and would be fine with shipping a larger binary. Servo integration could be interesting to have one known webview to target if cross-platform consistency ever becomes a challenge
by thomassmith65 | 2025-04-01 12:57:38+00:00
Ach, I'm having trouble getting the distinction across:

It's not hard to write and understand an ANN. It's like a one or two day project. LLMs, I assume, aren't all that much harder: fewer LOC than most most GUI apps.

It's also not hard to understand why ANNs and LLMs work. It's only conceptually one step further than "write millions of programs randomly and stop when one actually works"

The part that we don't understand, and that will take many years to understand, is what behaviours and abilities we can expect from a massive, trained LLM.

The fact that (A) it is so easy to understand how to create an ANN, and (B) it takes so few LOC to create one, really underlines the point: the interesting, complex behaviour is something that 'emerges' (from simply adding more nodes to the spec) and that nobody today has any hint of how to code procedurally.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-04-01 12:57:54+00:00
That’s interesting. I’d love to read those papers, if you remember what they were.

I do wonder if an in-house aesthetic can become ‘tacky’ in the age of global media - can trends ‘die’ when there are still billions more people to reach? And will a creative org structure like this be able to move fast enough should that happen? I don’t think we know the answer to that yet.

I personally believe (maybe optimistically!) that this will be an important question even though Netflix’s natural conclusion is to move towards the subscription-retaining, low-creative products like sports that you mentioned.

The problem with those entertainment products is that they have intrinsic value: if the provider is adding little value besides distribution, some (or lots) of users will pirate that content. Super apparent in sports media.

Maybe it’s a naive hope, rather than a belief, but I hope / believe that because of this, companies like Netflix will be ultimately forced by users to have more idiosyncrasy in their production pipeline and output. It’ll be really interesting to find out!
by ipsento606 | 2025-04-01 12:58:31+00:00
> a single component outweighing an entire app feels fundamentally broken

It just doesn't to me, understanding that in react-land, a single component and an entire app will have roughly equivalent size, if you're not pulling in any other dependencies.

No one (I hope) would ever use react for a single button, so it feels like an unhelpful comparison.
by bluGill | 2025-04-01 12:58:55+00:00
The problem is choice. I don't care about Japanese/tacos - either would be fine, but Argentine would be better (I have no idea if it is even a thing, but if it is I want to try it). I don't want a chain (well maybe a local chain) - I have plenty of McDonald's near my house if I want that, I want something I can't get near home. Maps will put right at top all the big chains that pay for that top spot and I need to scroll through them. More than once I've seen something that might be interesting but then the map scrolls/resizes and I can't find it anymore.
by pscanf | 2025-04-01 12:59:52+00:00
Exciting simulations! :) And an excellent explanation.

From time to time I get episodes of sudden tachycardia¹. It's a very strange feeling: one second everything is fine, the next my heart jumps in my throat and starts beating at 230 bpm (not a typo). After a while, just as quickly as it came, the tachycardia goes away and I'm back at whatever HR I was before the trigger. If it doesn't go away by itself, breathing in deep and holding my breath typically does the trick. It's like a light switch! A bit scary, but also very fascinating.

Thanks for explaining so well what goes on "under the hood"!

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paroxysmal_supraventricular_ta..., I believe.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-01 12:59:54+00:00
Those were just six examples. There are many more.

But OK yes, Netflix produces a lot of volume because that's also what its viewers want. Are you saying that's a bad thing?

Sometimes people get home from an exhausting stressful day at work and they just need to relax with some mindless entertainment. And that's OK. Not everything has to be art.
by swizzler | 2025-04-01 12:59:54+00:00
I was using straight filesystem backups for a while, but I knew they could be inconsistent. Since then, I've setup https://github.com/prodrigestivill/docker-postgres-backup-lo..., which regularly dumps a snapshot to the filesystem, which regular filesystem backups can consume. The README has restore examples, too

I haven't needed to tune selfhosted databases. They do fine for low load on cheap hardware from 10 years ago.
by munchler | 2025-04-01 13:00:03+00:00
It can do GUIs well, although it takes some finesse to manage user state in an immutable-first language. Check out Fable for building web apps: https://fable.io/

I don't have much experience with Scala, but I think the two languages are pretty comparable in their respective ecosystems. The biggest difference I'm aware of is that Scala has typeclasses and F# does not.
by mason55 | 2025-04-01 13:00:04+00:00
This works for things in the past but not things in the future.

If I say I want something to happen at 8pm New York City time on January 7, 2028 and then the DST rules for NYC change, I likely still want it to happen at 8pm. Converting to UTC and back to local time loses that information and it will happen at the wrong time.
by syhol | 2025-04-01 13:00:05+00:00
"Don't retract bookmark sub-menus after drag and drop" - The 17 year old issue (2008) was locked for comments recently, so I don't have any other way to celebrate. I've been subscribed to this issue for over half of my life. I can't say I really care about it anymore, but it feels momentous enough to warrant sharing.
by DannyBee | 2025-04-01 13:00:28+00:00
No, this story shows that if you ask your boss out on a date, and they say no, and your boss gets in trouble and you are the star witness, they will try to use your idiocy against you.

Why do you insist on making this about one-way false claims of sexual harassment, etc, that didn't happen, when it's about something that did happen.

This guy did ask his boss out on a date. Which is just ... beyond stupid. Yet somehow you insist on making this about things that did not.

You seem to have a serious axe to grind.
by raphman | 2025-04-01 13:00:28+00:00
Hmm, my first guess would have been that you have been a target of "brushing" [1]. In a Reddit thread from 2020 [2], multiple people mention that they received surgical masks they did not order.

[1] https://www.bbb.org/article/news-releases/20509-amazon-brush... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsa/comments/hpe8s1/just_got_a_su...
by tzs | 2025-04-01 13:00:46+00:00
> I've read somewhere that generating a single AI image draws as much power as a full smartphone charge.

To put that in perspective, using the 67 kJ of energy for a smartphone charge given in Saigonautica's comment you can charge a smartphone 336 times for $1 if you are paying the average US residential electricity rate of just under $0.16/kWh.

You could charge a smartphone 128 times for $1 if you were in the state with the most expensive electricity (Hawaii) and paying the average rate there of around $0.42.

Saigonautica's battery is on the large size. It's a little bigger than the battery of an iPhone 16 Pro Max. A plain iPhone 16 could be charged 470 times for $1 at average US residential electricity prices.

For most people energy used to charge a smartphone is in the "this is too small to ever care about" category.

We can do a similar calculation for AA rechargeable batteries, and the results might be surprising.

$1 of electricity at the US average residential rate is enough to recharge an AA Eneloop nearly 2300 times. Of course there are inefficiencies in the charger and charging, but if we can get even 75% efficiency that's good enough for more then 1700 charges.

That really surprised me when I first learned it. I knew it wasn't going to be a lot...but 1700 charges is I think more than the number of times I'll swap out an AA battery over my entire lifetime. I hadn't expected that all my AA battery use for my whole life would be less than $1 worth of electricity.
by rchaud | 2025-04-01 13:01:54+00:00
This is the textbook definition of survivorship bias.

Amazon out-priced everybody when it arrived, because it didn't charge any sales tax for years, until the laws had to be re-written to close the loophole. It didn't have the eye-watering sums poured into it that AI has had, nor did it have any significant competition internationally. Things couldn't be more different for OpenAI.
by alnwlsn | 2025-04-01 13:01:59+00:00
Somebody showed me a text-to-CAD AI tool recently, and I can't help but feel that whoever made it doesn't understand that people who use CAD aren't trying to solve the problem of "make a model of a rubber duck" but something more like "make a custom angle bracket which mounts part number xxxyyyy". Sure, you can try to describe what you want in words, but there's a reason machine shops want drawings and not a 300 word poem like you're a 14th century monk. Much much easier to just draw a picture.
by theGnuMe | 2025-04-01 13:02:09+00:00
I'd like to see his notes on Raymond Chandler and why he considers him one of the best writers. Or why does anyone? I guess that would be an essay on literary criticism.

What is interesting is if you read Chandler's Wikipedia entry it has a quote on how he talked about pulp fiction being formulaic and attempts to break free of the formula were trounced but if you didn't try you'd have been a hopeless hack.

This is fascinating in comparison that PGs formulism appears to be a self-styled self-help (?) essay. Is PG stuck or trying to break free? He certainly has an audience. To what quality should we ascribe his writing?
by pyrale | 2025-04-01 13:02:21+00:00
There's a difference between a journalist and an information or an article.

Any journalist or newspaper carries a bias when looking at information. Their ethics and process is what allows them to still publish information that is verified, relevant and to treat topics which they would personally not want to hear about.

If a journalist with a strong bias doesn't check their information and write only what they would like to hear, that's propaganda. But that's not a necessary outcome of having a bias.
by SecretDreams | 2025-04-01 13:02:42+00:00
> Finally, I know exactly what the paper says but maybe you don't: the problem with Dunkelflaute events is correlation. If it's cloudy somewhere and the sun is shining elsewhere, then no problem. These problematic conditions for nuclear are the same: large scale spatial correlated.

Great. We'll just pipe over the energy from Arizona to Michigan, should be fine.

Large scale weather events drop nuclear by 1% long term. What percentage do they do for solar?

I'm not even a solar hater - I love solar... On residential and commercial rooftops. Or in sunny and void of life areas.

I love a mix. And nuclear integrates just fine into the mix. Look at a province like Ontario where 60% of the energy is derived from hydro and nuclear. An incredible and robust baseline power with low downtime and, correspondingly, cheap power for all of the residents of that province.

Even more energy from solar and wind too, with some natty gas as top off. Seems to work just fine for them - and with long winters and plenty of cloudy days, solar as a big component of their energy mix seems pretty silly to push for. You can see the mix live below.

https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html

It was 53% nuclear and 28% hydro at the time of me posting this. 16% natty, 4% wind, and 0.1% solar. The solar was good for 21 MW and the nuclear was good for 9600 MW for perspective. Their nuclear has been safe as hell and has run flawlessly for I think 30+ years.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-01 13:02:57+00:00
It's not true. But if it is, it doesn't matter. And if it matters, what about [my unrelated gripes]!

None of this is relevant to whether it was proper, legal, or risky to plan an attack via Signal.

From your initial comment:

> [the Houthis] have no air defense - False

> [there is] no risk of meaningful counter attack — False

> Understand they literally don't care about opsec — False, the Signal chat referred to some files being transmitted highside (i.e. properly), so clearly they literally do care

> nor is there much reason why they should — False, unless you regard "mitigating the risk of American equipment and potentially pilots getting shot down" as "not much reason," in which case we just disagree on axioms
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-01 13:02:58+00:00
I used to think like you. My job is to ask questions etc. But after a couple decades I see if someone doesn't bother to even think about the idea enough to understand it himself beyond a few words he is not worth engaging with in this fashion. He doesn't really know what he wants. Today I ask a clarifying question he says one thing, next week he changes his mind or forgets and the result slowly becomes a mess

> The primary job of a senior engineer is not to turn formal specifications into code, it's to turn vague business requests into formal specifications.

Converting vibes and external world into specific requirements is product owner job.

Do not mistake software engineers and product people. These are very different things. Sometimes these things are done by the same person if the org has not enough money. Many freelancers working with small biz do both. I often do both at my day job. But this is a higher level role and if you are a senior engineer doing product stuff I hope it is recognized and you get proportionate comp.
by thisdougb | 2025-04-01 13:03:08+00:00
"and your mental effort can shift from managing low-level details to clearly expressing your intent."

I really struggle to understand what people are doing that makes these two things mutually exclusive. Unless the catchment group is people who can't code or understand software engineering. Which is fine. It reminds me a lot of the no-code hype.

I wonder if ai-coding will turn out a bit like ultra processed food. Cheap to produce something that looks like it does the job, but actually is quite bad for consumers.

I don't see anyone producing objective measures on the improved apps. Like bugs per lines if code, feature development time, etc.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-01 13:03:12+00:00
> The political system must be all encompassing. Everything must be within and subject to the political system

Why? This is de facto what we have in America. It’s lead to neo-Peronism. It doesn’t work.

The next Democrat candidate could recapitulate Trump’s January 6th pardons by promising to pardon anyone who burns down Teslas. If the rest of their platform is tenable, and if the Tesla fires are a few years in the past, the electorate might be fine with that. (Or not. Either way, the damage gets done.)

Do that for long enough and the public will demand someone outside the political system to rule over it. If you leave the final word on corruption to the political system, the system will evolve an autocratic element that polices itself.
by grbsh | 2025-04-01 13:03:17+00:00
I think we can have the best of both worlds here. We want the precision and speed of using vi commands, but we want the discoverability of GUI document editors. LLMs may be able to solve the discoverability problem. If the editor can be highly confident that you want to use a given a command, for example, it can give you an intellisense like completion option. I don't think we've cracked the code on how this UX should work yet though -- as evidenced by how many people find cursor/copilot autocompletion suggestions so frustrating.

The other great thing about this mode is that it can double as a teaching methodology. If I have a complicated interface that is not very discoverable, it may be hard to sell potential users on the time investment required to learn everything. Why would I want to invest hours into learning non-transferrable knowledge when I'm not even sure I want to go with this option versus a competitor? It will be a far better experience if I can first vibe-use the product , and if it's right for me, I'll probably be incented to learn the inner workings of it as I try to do more and more.
by aredox | 2025-04-01 13:03:26+00:00
>it was much, much more common for middle class and even fairly poor homes to have musical instruments, pubs to have pianos and so on

That's exagerrated by movies. There were folk songs, but instruments - and players - have always been rare, and played by those who had enough time to learn to play - the poorest of the poor, the crippled and the blinds...

Note that at that time, either there was already a copyright to protect musical partitions, or if learning by ear the teachers had total discretion on who they taught and for how much. There were still barriers to knowledge.

And outside of Europe, any ceremonial/religious music was only taught to the initiated and played on rare occasions (there are interesting stories of Americans, etno-musicologists or even just musicians looking for new musical construction in the vein of Steve Reich, in the 60s, going to Africa to learn rythms with e.g. Nigerians, staying there for years, fully integrated - or so they thought - and bam! for a rare ceremony their hosts suddenly play something they never showed them before and refuse to discuss it afterwards)
by ajross | 2025-04-01 13:03:27+00:00
UB was not introduced to facilitate optimization, period. At the time the ANSI standard was being written, such optimizations didn't even exist yet. The edge case trickery around "assume behavior is always defined" didn't start showing up until the late 90's, a full decade and a half later.

UB was introduced to allow for variant/incompatible platform behavior (in your example, how the hardware treats a divide by zero condition) in a way that allowed pre-existing code to remain valid on the platform it was written, but to leave the core language semantics clear for future code.
by morteify | 2025-04-01 13:04:21+00:00
I think there is an issue with the implementation of search and filtering.

When I open https://mpa.nuejs.org/ and type "kind of rate limit" in the search box, I get 383 search results, and the URL updates to include the query: /app/search/?query=kind+of+rate+limit.

However, when I paste that URL directly into a new tab, I only see one result instead of 383.
by stevage | 2025-04-01 13:05:01+00:00
>Isn't the fact that customers paid money to pre-order the book a good indicator that there's a market for this book?

Not necessarily, depending on where those pre-order customers came from.

Imagine you're launching a book and you reckon if you get 100 pre-orders that means you'll be able to sell 10,000 books down the line. So you convince 100 of your mum's baking club friends to buy your book on SQL. See how you just broke the value of the pre-orders as indicative of future market success?

I'm not saying that's exactly the case here, but the fact that the kickstarter completely plateaued suggests there is limited organic, word-of-mouth growth.

I honestly don't know, I'm just curious and that's why I asked a question.
by nemo44x | 2025-04-01 13:05:21+00:00
They do. But there’s a line between arbitrary and fair. One of the things players want most is for outcomes to not be random/arbitrary and for skill to be judged fairly. That good shots are rewarded and bad shots penalized. The game already has a lot of that baked in so no need to make it more so.

TPC Sawgrass is the closest to a perfect pro course (PGA National second I guess) since it was designed specifically for it. I think a course perfectly optimized for pro play would be very different from what most people would expect.
by 7thaccount | 2025-04-01 13:05:22+00:00
F# is beautiful, but I could never crack the nut and get fluent in it. I think the big problem is I only know a little C#, so it is difficult to figure out the object oriented methods that F# depends on. It was the same thing with Clojure and Scala for the JVM. I have zero interest in first learning C# or Java, just to use those platforms.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-01 13:05:30+00:00
Not compliant enough to browse the open web without experiencing glitches, but compliant enough for your own frontend code that you test against Verso/Servo.

I imagine most users will continue using Tauri with native webviews. But if consistency between different webviews ever becomes an issue you now have the option to ship a Verso webview to have more cross-platform consistency
by pjc50 | 2025-04-01 13:05:45+00:00
The funny thing is that you can write very similar code in C#, so maybe you don't need to switch which language you're using as a CLR frontend.

using System.Linq; using System; var names = new string[] {"Peter", "Julia", "Xi" }; names.Select(name => $"Hello, {name}").ToList().ForEach(greeting => Console.WriteLine($"{greeting}! Enjoy your C#"));

LINQ is such a good library that I miss it in other languages. The Java stream equivalent just doesn't feel as fluent.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-01 13:05:52+00:00
I only host 3rd party daemons (nothing custom) and only on my local network (plus Tailscale) so Docker’s great for handling package management and init, since I get up-to-date versions of a far broader set of services than Debian or ubuntu’s repos, clean isolation for easy management, and init/restarts are even all free. Plus it naturally documents what I need to back up (any “mounted” directories)

Docker lets my OS be be boring (and lets me basically never touch it) while having up to date user-facing software. No “well, this new version fixes a bug that’s annoying me, but it’s not in Debian stable… do I risk a 3rd party back port repo screwing up my system or other services, or upgrade the whole OS just to get one newer package, which comes with similar risks?”

I just use shell scripts to launch the services, one script per service. Run the script once, forget about it until I want to upgrade it. Modify the version in the script, take the container down and destroy it (easily automated as part of the scripts, but I haven’t bothered), run the script. Done, forget about it again until next time.

Almost all the commands I run on my server are basic file management, docker stuff, or zfs commands. I could switch distros entirely and hardly even notice. Truly a boring OS.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-01 13:05:55+00:00
The author seems to ignore the main case for conversational interfaces - which is not to replace the software, but the software user.

Not telling your car to turn left or right, but telling your cab driver you're going to the airport.

This is our usecase at our startup[1] - we want to enable tiny SMBs who didn't have the budget to hire a "video guy", to get an experience similar to having one. And that's why we're switching to a conversational UX (because those users would normally communicate with the "video guy" or girl by sending them a Whatsapp message, not by clicking buttons on the video software)

[1] https://www.onetake.ai