MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jpc0 | 2025-04-29 09:14:17+00:00
I am committing as a user of the app, something I plan to integrate into my life.

It’s not unfair to want to know whether the author plans to make it viable long term or if it is a project that is scratching their personal itch.

If it’s a project that’s only meant to scratch a personal itch and they only plan to support it for as long as they deem it useful and have no intention of open sourcing it in the future that is fine, I personally, and I’m sure other , don’t want to bother with it, that doesn’t mean nobody does but it answers a question and prevents disappointment down the line.

If the author has intentions of supporting it long term then asking about funding or long term development effort assists the author to think about something they might bot have thought about, or at the very least has the author clarify.

I’m fine with paying for polish, many users are.

Here the product is already made and in distribution, asking these questions isn’t preventing the project for getting going, they are the next logical step in the life of a project, arguably some of them should have been asked before “going live” like if you would like to monitise the project.
by bartread | 2025-04-29 09:14:21+00:00
This has given me flashbacks. I went down this rabbit hole prepandemic with a Dell laptop I had for work at the time. I got tired of getting on the train to find my laptop dead.

Back then Windows would default to a crap version of sleep but you could still disable it in the BIOS and by tweaking a couple of other settings, thus forcing it to use proper sleep. I’m pretty sure I wrote a lengthy response on HN about this including the specifics at the time.

That worked well until I got a new Dell laptop that removed support for the good sleep mode entirely.

So then I’d make sure to always leave the machine plugged in and switched on overnight before any travel… which is how I discovered that the machine had a bug where sometimes it would fail to charge whilst plugged in and switched on but not awake, so occasionally I’d still end up with a dead laptop on the train.

So then I’d start up the machine as soon as I got out of bed so it’d get at least 30 - 45 minutes of charging with not much load on it whilst I was getting ready to leave.

I absolutely hate Dell.

For my own use I’ve been buying Apple laptops since 2011 and, although they went through a grim period meaning I kept a machine from 2015 to 2024, I never had this sort of nonsense with them.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-29 09:15:17+00:00
As the press release you linked points out, the black start plan Spain trains on uses nuclear energy supplied from France to re-energize the power plants.

"Luckily", France is at an historically high level of production capacity at the moment and the connection between the two countries was reestablished fast.

According to RTE (French network manager), the interconnection was maxed yesterday at around 3GW of power.

Sadly, while Spain is part of CESA, it's not very well connected. I wouldn't be surprised if one the takeaway from the whole incident is that more interconnections are needed.
by redbell | 2025-04-29 09:15:19+00:00
As a software developer, I’ve occasionally felt ashamed when it takes me hours—or even days—to fix a stubborn bug. But whenever I see that even big tech companies struggle with similar issues, I regain confidence in myself. After all, this is what being a software engineer often looks like: wrestling with unpredictable behavior until something finally clicks.

Just yesterday, I ran into a bizarre bug on Windows where the mouse cursor would move every time I pressed the arrow keys—almost like I was controlling the mouse with the keyboard. It drove me nuts. I checked all the usual mouse and keyboard settings, but everything looked normal. At one point, I even wondered if my machine had been infected by a virus.

Desperate, I Googled "mouse pointer moving on arrow keys". The first result had only one answer, which blamed... Microsoft Paint. I was skeptical—Paint? Really? That couldn’t possibly be it. Still, with no other leads, I gave it a shot. As it turned out, I did have Paint open in another Desktop View, where I’d been cropping a screenshot. The moment I closed it, the problem vanished. Instantly.

I still can’t believe that was the cause—and I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, even though no one was around to see it.

_____________________

1. https://superuser.com/questions/1467313/mouse-pointer-moving...
by kalishayish | 2025-04-29 09:15:28+00:00
A Chrome extension to track your research progress.

You give a title to your research session, and it keeps track of which tabs you have opened, which ones you have read and have not read.

When you want to resume your research, you can simply resume on whichever research session you want, and it will reopen all your tabs as before, so you can continue from where you left.
by dxuh | 2025-04-29 09:16:19+00:00
I tried to make something like this (not power specifically) for a game jam once: https://pfirsich.itch.io/arbitrary-complexity

I took down the servers though, so you probably can't easily try it. I don't know if I added a way to configure the lobby server. I should have! It's open source though. And there is a video about that thing on my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TPgfa7LbiI

The game is bad and nothing of what we planned on doing actually made it into the game. The video is long and boring too. But maybe someone finds this cool and is inspired by this and makes a game like this.

The first 15 minutes of the game were actually about getting the ship moving, first by reading the manuals of half a dozen different ship systems and then following some procedure outlined in those manuals (parts of which were simply incorrect), maybe having to do some things in sync with your other players and stuff like that. I think it would have been cool to add multiple reactors and start them up in sync and stuff. The different ship systems were actually Lua programs that interacted via a message bus. So kind of a unknown computer architecture?
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-29 09:16:29+00:00
Yes. Was at a bus stop with someone telling me to pay your front, and not your back and move forward, while a guy brrings a worldmap to the library lays it on the table in front of him..."Where you from?"

"Congo."

I personally have not known shame for decades. I was ashamed.

Then someone tried to burn down the library.
by maccard | 2025-04-29 09:17:20+00:00
You're right - I should have just said "shader" and left it at that.

> There is some subset of problems that absolutely requires indexing to express efficiently.

Sure. But it's almost certainly quicker to run a shader over them, and ignore the values you don't want to operate on than it is to copy the data back, modify it in a safe bounds checked array in rust, and then copy it again.
by joha4270 | 2025-04-29 09:17:21+00:00
But what prevents you from connecting the stopped power plants to one of those islands and then running it from there? I'm not claiming that is easy, but its not a black start.

It looks to me like the author of this article has fundamentally misunderstood what a black start is. The fact that some power generation remained both on the peninsula, but also on imported power being available means that to my understanding this cannot be classified as a "black start". A lot of overtime, a lot of careful coordination yes, a black start, no
by arghwhat | 2025-04-29 09:20:00+00:00
I have a bit of a different perspective. Sure, Duolingo is suboptimal and won't teach you a language on its own, but I'd say that language classes themselves is no better.

Specifically, I consider the fundamental missing piece to allow achieving language intermediacy or fluency to be confidence and sporadic language use, and you have to be lucky for a language class to give you this. Hearing about grammar and having Q&As is nice, but that teaches language theory, not fluency. Trying to converse about a specific topic with other non-fluent and disinterested individuals does not teach fluency, and not every conversation will be with the teacher - the only (hopefully) fluent person in the room - and even if the option is present, some might be uncomfortable with it.

On the other hand, if you have achieved some confidence and means to exercise the language - which you don't acquire from a language class - then I'd consider Duolingo to be a decent vocab and sentence exercise tool. Some cultures rely on flashcard approaches to teach their written language to locals, so it's not that silly. Duolingo does also have reading and listening comprehension tests.

Furthermore, I'd argue that newer LLM-based exercises might end up being superior to both traditional "pool of random non-fluent people" language classes and duolingo's current model, and arguably the task that large language models are most suited for.

(Note that Duolingo classes differ a lot between languages - my experience is from Mandarin.)
by axelMI | 2025-04-29 09:20:02+00:00
That's true. But current shaders are very simple. The big issue I have with WebGPU is that it's still not supported by all browser (see Safari) while WebGL is nowadays everywhere.

I work on a MacBook and I need to make sure that at least Safari (soooo many issues/ bugs/ specific behaviours it drives my crazy) works fine
by DarkmSparks | 2025-04-29 09:20:07+00:00
Stuff that hooked me:

you integrate it tightly with the engine so it only does game logic, making files small and very quick and easy to read.

platform independent, no compiling, so can modify it in place on a release build of the game.

the "everything is a table" approach is very easy to concept mentally means even very inexperienced coders can get up and running quickly.

great exception handling, which makes most release time bugs very easy to diagnose and fix.

All of which means you spend far more time building game logic and much, much less time fighting the programming language.

Heres my example of a 744 flight data recorder (the rest of the 744 logic is in the containing folders)

https://github.com/mSparks43/747-400/blob/master/plugins/xtl...

All asynchronously multithreaded, 100% OS independent.
by tmtvl | 2025-04-29 09:20:33+00:00
I sometimes work on creating my own programming language (because there aren't enough of those already) and one of the things I want to do in it is 1-based indexing. Just so I can do:

(defvar names (Vector String) #("Alex" "Kim" "Robin" "Sam")) (elt names 1)

...and get "Alex" instead of "Kim".
by panick21_ | 2025-04-29 09:20:34+00:00
I haven't read the book but I'm not really sure I agree.

Tesla were affordable in a car market where the avg new car was the cost of a Model Y/3. And they sold really well.

I don't think we can imply anything about what people would have assumed if they had released a cheaper car. That all depends on positioning and market.

On the high end, they didn't provide enough differentiation with the X/S. Not upgrading them quickly enough and not pushing more into luxury to compete with more expensive German cars and Lexus. But that's not a huge part of the market.

> because tesla is not cost efficient

Tesla is plenty cost efficient, the reality is, nobody can make a huge profit on a cheap car. And most can't get even close.

Tesla with their integrated strategy could have made a compelling 25k car, it would just need more options then the normal Tesla approach.

But its worth doing just to get to scale and capture that large market. Because once you establish yourself their, its gone be harder for others to move in. And then bring cost down over-time.

> Nissan took the affordable ev route long before tesla and wasn't very successful.

I mean not really. They dipped their toe into it and never moved beyond the initial generation. So I don't think its a fair comparison.

> And now other brands and the supply chains are catching up, making ev versions of their cars, with the desirable features and established manufacturing.

The established manufacturing doesn't totally hold up. Because building EV is so different that upgrade cost are huge and some of the best competitors use new factories as well.

I do agree that Tesla failed to provide some features that they really could and should have provided. Like a 360 view around the car for example.
by noisy_boy | 2025-04-29 09:20:52+00:00
> I have had much harder time fixing badly written Angular projects (all versions) than such written in React.

What is the inherent issue with Angular? Data fetching is done by services, components use them, components' presentation logic is in html/scss files. If a component is particularly simple/low level, it takes data as input which can passed by the higher level component with help of services. I have found this to be very easy to reason about as long as the structure keeps in mind what each bit's role is in the big picture. Separation while keeping logically connected things close e.g. the component and its html/scss are usually kept together.
by rafaelmn | 2025-04-29 09:20:53+00:00
LOL how does the AI keep track of all the places it needs to update once you make a logic change ? I have no idea what you're doing but almost nothing I do is basic CRUD - there's always logic/constraints around data flow and processes built on top.

People didn't move away from PHP3 style of code because it's a natural human tendency - they moved away because it was impossible to maintain that kind of code at scale. AI does nothing to address that and is in fact incredibly bad at it because it's super inconsistent, it's not even copy paste at that point - it's the "whatever flavor of solution LLM chose in this instance".

I don't understand what's your background to think that this kind of thing scales ?
by fhd2 | 2025-04-29 09:20:56+00:00
It's a weird example. I think a better example might be the trust factor in service relationships.

To my clients, my company is not ...

1. ... the cheapest. I think we're maybe upper middle ground in terms of cost/value, but arguably not the best bang for buck _in the world_.

2. ... the best. We might be _one_ of the best available to them, but most likely we're not. I think we're "pretty good".

But we do have something other companies do not: Their _trust_. Most of our business comes from recommendations, so we start on high trust. Then, as we work together, we build even more trust over time. They could probably find a service provider that's both cheaper and better if they looked hard enough, but they wouldn't be able to trust them as much. They could of course take that gamble, but the existing trust arguably gives us an edge.

Doesn't change the point of the article, which I think makes sense. Just a pretty odd example, as you pointed out.
by davedx | 2025-04-29 09:21:26+00:00
For sure. I've worked at orgs where we disabled package vulnerability scanners because they created a constant stream of upgrading busywork. So many "vulnerabilities" are things like "JavaScript prototype pollution in this package that does something in your build toolchain". So much noise and so very little signal, the incentives of these scanning and vuln tracking companies just aren't aligned well I don't think.

Nowadays I tend to more rely on tech news to hear when there's an actual serious vuln I need to address.

(Note I'm not advocating everyone do this. Do your own risk assessment).
by maccard | 2025-04-29 09:21:28+00:00
GC isn't something to be afraid of, it's a tool like any other tool. It can be used well or poorly. The defaults are just that - defaults. If I was going to write a rhythm game in Unity, I would use some of the options to control when GC happens [0], and play around with the idea of running a GC before and after a song but having it disabled during the actual interactive part (as an example).

[0] https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/perform...
by wolvesechoes | 2025-04-29 09:21:33+00:00
Modelica, which is a DSL for modelling DAE systems, has a facility of automated conversions. You can provide a script that automatically modifies user's code then they upgrade to newer version of your lib, or prints the message if automatic migration is not possible.

It is very strange that more mainstream languages do not have such features (and I am not talking about 3rd party tools; in Modelica conversions are part of the language spec).
by thrance | 2025-04-29 09:22:22+00:00
To be fair, even though I never had trouble in school and was generally a good student, I had a very poor and surface level understanding of fascism (what it is, what causes it) until I actually decided to learn about it a few years ago. I wonder how much of it is simply due to public education's incompetency (I live outside the US) or because of a willfulness to not engage with the root causes of fascism (material conditions, etc.) from fear of repercussions by the right-wing.
by daitangio | 2025-04-29 09:22:37+00:00
I have used yahoo search for two months on my mobile phone: it worked and it is still active. I have a similar experience using Bing.

Google is stronger but not so much as it was in 2000 (when the other search engines were...terrible).

Today the Search engine is nothing without 'support site' like:

- StackOverflow - Reddit - Wikipedia

and news.ycombinator.com :) of course
by bananapub | 2025-04-29 09:23:32+00:00
another vote for Kagi - it's just very pleasant to use. It's fast, the results are great, it's quite cheap for a tech-employed-Westerner, and it's just really quite nice to have such a simple business relationship for this. I pay them some small amount of money to me and in return they simply buy indexes of the web and let me search it. There's no tension about them wanting me to use it more to see more ads and the incentive is for them to implement features that I, the person who gives them money wants, and if they turn to shit I simply stop paying them and use someone else.

Some nice features that may not be obvious:

- you can shitcan entire sites, e.g. everything to do with Pinboard or Facebook - you can uprank sites in the results that tend to be useful, e.g. MDN - you can add shortcuts to the search box - it has "lenses" which limit the search results in slightly abstract ways, e.g. "small web" or "academic"

They also did a bunch of work so you can do searches from incognito windows, and they can verify your subscription without knowing specifically you who are.

Also, as some more anecdata, I can't tell if Google has got worse or Kagi better, but a year ago I'd find my useful using Google a few times a month for something niche (usually source code-related), but over the last few months Google hasn't been any better even for that, so I've basically stopped even that minimal use.

Anyway, it's very good, but in that way that just makes me a bit happier in life for using it, rather than being acutely exciting.
by cookiemonsieur | 2025-04-29 09:23:33+00:00
> He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his.

This is the first time in my life where a western outlet doesn't try and obfuscate the fact that many of the "discoveries" made by europeans in the the renaissance period have taken inspiration from the close to 800 years of Islamic scientific research (who themselves never failed to credit their predecessors).

Typically, when you study the history of science in the west, it starts at ancient greece (who have no contemporaries) then there's a massive blackout of 800 years and poof ! The "light" is magically turned on.

Fair play to the author for not being biased.
by Tor3 | 2025-04-29 09:24:08+00:00
internet_points posted good advice a comment or two above. Duolingo _is_ ok as a starting point, but (as was said before), move on as soon as possible. As a poster above did, I also spent way way too long on Duolingo, chasing the 'streak'. And got nowhere. I already had a foundation when I started, but I got no farther in a year or more of daily Duo. All progress stopped. When I finally switched to graded input instead, and deleted everything Duo from my devices, things finally picked up again. I could have used the time I wasted on Duo to get input instead, it's something which actually works (when the input is compelling and something which can be mostly understood).
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-29 09:24:10+00:00
As much as I hate Oracle, there are huge advantages to Java. Java is strongly typed, free, and runs damn near anywhere. It's pretty much the go-to language when people think about OOP and for good reason. It has some excellent open source IDE support and it's widely used in the industry. With the current OpenJDK setup, it's also free of Oracle's licensing issues. It runs fast and can support most algorithms you'll probably ever study, without the manual memory management troubles of something like C++.

I was taught C# in uni for very similar reasons except the entire uni ran on Windows and the Microsoft platform, which made doing assignments on Linux rather inconvenient. With the status of dotnet core, I'd say Java finally has a good competitor when it comes to teaching OOP languages.
Show HN: Kodo – Temporary, real-time translation chat app for my upcoming trip
by jonathanleane | 2025-04-29 09:24:17+00:00
Hey HN,

My wife and I are heading to Thailand soon, and while we're learning some basics, I was thinking about those quick, everyday interactions where a language barrier can be awkward – asking for directions, ordering street food, chatting with a vendor, etc.

I didn't want the friction of firing up a dedicated translation app each time or dealing with account signups for something temporary.

So, I decided to build Kodo Chat as a little side project to scratch my own itch. The idea is a super simple, temporary chat room focused purely on real-time translation between two people.

How it works:

One person ("host") visits the site, selects their language, and gets a QR code and a shareable link. The other person ("guest") scans the code or opens the link on their phone, selects their language, and they're connected in a temporary room.

Messages sent by either person are translated (currently using OpenAI - gpt-4.1 by default, but configurable) and displayed along with the original text on the other person's device.

Rooms and user links expire automatically (via Redis TTLs), so there's no persistent data or accounts needed.

It's built with Expo (React Native Web) for the frontend, Node.js/Express/Socket.IO on the backend, and Redis for session/room management. The UI is pretty basic right now (using React Native Paper), and the translations are only as good as the underlying AI model, but it seems to handle simple conversational stuff reasonably well in testing.

It solved my immediate need, and I thought others might find it useful, so I've open-sourced it.

Live Demo: https://kodo-frontend.onrender.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/jonathanleane/kodo

Would love to hear any feedback, suggestions, or criticisms you might have! Especially curious if anyone else has faced similar communication hurdles while traveling and what solutions they've found.
by virgilp | 2025-04-29 09:24:19+00:00
As a general rule, one should presume that they now less about running a business than the people that actually do that. There are exceptions but as with all rules, exceptions don't invalidate the rule.

"they should stop" is a fine rant to express your personal taste preferences, but objectively speaking, I would bet on Coca-Cola having good reasons when tweaking the recipes. If that happens, it's probably more necessary than a layman realizes.