MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-04-29 08:06:50+00:00
> there is no centralized capacity market or centralized incentives for black start

There certainly is in New Zealand, although the dollar amounts are quite small. If your countries regulator doesn't incentivise the capability, I believe that is a fault of your regulator.

Transpower (NZ) says:

We may enter into black start contracts with parties who can offer the black start service compliant with our technical requirements and the Code. Black start is procured on a firm quantity procurement basis (via a monthly availability fee and/or a single event fee for specified stations). Black start costs are allocated to Transpower as the Grid Owner (see clause 8.56 in the Code for details)

FYI: here's a list of other contracted services that are procured to benefit network reliability/restart/resiliancy: https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/information-ind...
by alkonaut | 2025-04-29 08:07:21+00:00
I still don't get it. What I want to do is make software as a hobby that can never be sold. If I start writing some boring SaaS software instead then I'm losing my opportunity to do what I like?

I think it must basically be a funamental question of goals/aspirations to begin with. I never had an aspiration to be e.g. wealthy, retire early, or make very senior positions within my company. Is that the difference?
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-04-29 08:08:18+00:00
I don't have any experience in Rails, but similar experience with Django. I am running several apps on my own, while still working elsewhere full-time.

The largest one has around 250 views, of maybe 80 are just basic admin views. It is basically comparable to an ERP of a medium-side company with various levels of permissions etc. I was able to get most of the functionality into production in just one month -- I was not working full-time at that time. I have estimated it with some friends, and such an ERP in the corporate world would normally take a team two years to do -- one to spec and another to implement.

It has 1-2M monthly page views depending on the season, and the highest hitting pages are read-only and heavily cached, so the server load is minimal. I am further increasing the performance by making those pages static HTML using django-distill and using Cloudflare to cache/serve them.

The key thing is to keep things as simple as possible. I avoid REST/heavy frontend frameworks whenever possible. For most views for most apps, normal HTML form request-response user interface based on Bootstrap is perfectly fine.

I started by sprinkling Javascript when it was really needed, for example client side sorting so I can avoid server load. Now I use AlpineJS/HTMX for the interactivity. It has been great, although much slower to implement.
by frabcus | 2025-04-29 08:08:52+00:00
You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language!

Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network.

Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.
by tobias5 | 2025-04-29 08:09:24+00:00
Happy that you found the Karvonen method first of all. The intensity is just the percentage of the zones. So zone 2 the lower end would be 0.6 and the upper intensity of the zone would be 0.7.

I'm using (0.5, 0.6), => Zone 1 (0.6, 0.7), => Zone 2 (0.7, 0.8), => Zone 3 (0.8, 0.9), => Zone 4 (0.9, 1.5) => Zone 5

If you are able to reach 215 the problem might be that most of the calculations do 220 - age or something similar for max heart rate.
by imiric | 2025-04-29 08:09:33+00:00
IME all "reasoning" models do is confuse themselves, because the underlying problem of hallucination hasn't been solved. So if the model produces 10K tokens of "reasoning" junk, the context is poisoned, and any further interaction will lead to more junk.

I've had much better results from non-"reasoning" models by judging their output, doing actual reasoning myself, and then feeding new ideas back to them to steer the conversation. This too can go astray, as most LLMs tend to agree with whatever the human says, so this hinges on me being actually right.
by whstl | 2025-04-29 08:09:58+00:00
I disagree with this assessment.

After 30 years participating in Gamedev communities I feel like the "don't build an engine" was always an empty strawman aimed at nobody in reality.

The Venn diagram between the people interested in technical aspects of an engine and in also shipping a game is probably composed of a few hundred individuals, most of them working for studios.

The "kid that wants to make an engine to make an MMO" is gonna do neither. It's just a meme.

I shouldn't really care about it myself, but I do because Unity sucked the air out of every gamedev discussion and now there are almost no spaces to discuss anything advanced (even if it's applicable to Unity/Unreal/Godot).
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-04-29 08:10:24+00:00
Right but to waive environmental review, pass laws which push back against frivolous lawsuits, and allow city and state budgets to allocate money to transit you need a coalition that cares. rayiner is very right here, the problem is very few coalitions care. Urbanist/YIMBY groups are coming up that do care and they've taken politics by storm over the last 10 years, but they're still a small coalition.

I do transit and multimodal advocacy in the Bay Area and transit is just a ball that everyone passes one. Low income advocacy groups want stops in low income areas, high income homeowners want high frequency routes, some riders want more police presence, anti-policing advocates hate the police, some residents think it's ableist to have a bike lane take up what could be a bus priority lane, anyone who uses any parking spot that will be decreased protests, disability advocates want transit to have level boarding and pro-accessiblity options on the bus, some folks want free fares, other folks want to meter by distance; I could go on and on. I have talked to activists and members of the public each with these positions.

Getting the actual thing built is the last priority on everyone's list. Sure they all want it. But they only want it if their pet concession is on the list. That's the problem.
by foresterre | 2025-04-29 08:10:50+00:00
DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.

I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.

I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".

The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.
by Qqqwxs | 2025-04-29 08:11:37+00:00
It's functionally equivalent to an RTK base station (the configuration script I'm using is even called "RTKbase"[0]), but it's being used for researching GPS-based soil moisture retrieval[1]. Basically the GPS signal bounces off the ground and causes an interference pattern that changes based on the wetness of the soil.

There is actually a permanent survey grade GNSS reciever about 200 m away from the u-blox receiver. But the geography around it (too hilly) means it doesn't work for soil moisture retrieval.

[0] https://github.com/Stefal/rtkbase/ [1] https://gnssrefl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pages/understand.h...
by lelanthran | 2025-04-29 08:11:53+00:00
I think brave search deserves a mention; I've been using it now for years and have better results than with google.

I believe kagi is a lot better than brave search, but because I am having good results with brave[1] I am unlikely to pull out my credit card.

[1] Every search I do also has an LLM response at the top, which is often just enough for me to not even look at the results. Where brave fails is in the image and video search.
by Lio | 2025-04-29 08:11:59+00:00
Jake Zimmerman wrote this excellent blog post[1] on the current state of Sorbet.

I was impressed at recent changes in the Sorbet syntax but also with the proposal that we make code comments available to the ruby VM.

That would allow Sorbet to adopt the rbs-inline comment syntax for both runtime checks and static analysis.

So there does appear to be a way forward on this, which is pretty exciting.

1. https://blog.jez.io/history-of-sorbet-syntax/
by thisdougb | 2025-04-29 08:12:08+00:00
That's a good read, thanks.

I'm really interested in the additional time cost of your switch. As you say, measuring productivity is seems nearly impossible.

But I would expect your 40 developers now have more time to do other things, because AI is taking on some of the workload? So have you noticed developers now doing 'new' things, like experimenting with new ideas, shorter hours, more holidays, or spending more time learning non-core topics? I think that would be visible. The 'Friday for personal projects' becomes 'Thu and Fri for personal projects', for example.

When frameworks became popular ten or so years ago, developers made the 'this will be much more efficient' argument. All that seemed to happen was the time they used to spend thinking/learning the core language (or engineering concepts) was swapped for time learning the framework. So there was no significant productivity gain, despite tasks feeling easier to do.

You list AI management/maintenance tasks that didn't need to be done before. I assume not all of these are 40x across your developers. It will be interesting to see if this management workload becomes similar to infrastructure management, and develops into a new job type providing a shared service. At least maybe during the transition away from flesh-based development to AI development.

I guess your end goal is that AI writes all (literal) code and owns the codebase, directed by people in the company? Do you have a plan to transition developers away from tech roles, is that something that's discussed?
by akimbostrawman | 2025-04-29 08:12:24+00:00
>Apps pretty much uniformly either silently get read access to all your files

This is outdated information. The situation has improved since the publishing of flatkill with flathub loudly warning about permissions and less apps having full R/W access.

Android apps can be configured insecurely too although less severe, still it's the users responsibility to check and modify permission.

In either case it's a substantial improvement from no isolation at all with much easier handling than other sanbox tools or MACs.
by shibbidybop | 2025-04-29 08:12:34+00:00
On WaniKani: that’s correct. In their FAQ (I think?) they link out to an article on Tofugu (aiui run by the same people) which gives you a couple good anki decks to learn hiragana and katakana. I started wanikani without knowing either, and found it manageable at the start by referring back to a hiragana chart. At some point I went through the decks, and after about two weeks I could read hiragana well enough to leave them behind.

Certainly not a complete resource for learning the language, but very effective for learning (to read) the kanji.
by bishopsmother | 2025-04-29 08:12:54+00:00
I'm working on a global roaming[0] AI device for my friend's widow[1]. This is the first week of testing in Mabel's hands (lots of feedback already), and Mabel's first trip abroad with it is next week. Between working on improvements, based on this week's feedback, I'll be writing it up in a blog entry (also to-do: setup blog for [0]).

[0] https://walledgarden.ai/r/wgd [1] https://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/news/people/twice-wed-fyl...
by janalsncm | 2025-04-29 08:13:01+00:00
It’s both. For an increasing number of tasks, it’s too cheap. People will be able to do simple things on their own hardware. Things OpenAI would love to charge high margins on. There’s probably an 80/20 rule on the horizon.

And for others, it’s too expensive. The frontier is constantly being pushed, so they can’t stop improving or they will fall behind. Google at least makes their own chips so they can control their costs somewhat.
by alkonaut | 2025-04-29 08:13:28+00:00
The big difference for me is that what's actually fun (hard technical problems like e.g. writing an OS kernel, a db engine, a path tracer, an LLM from scratch...) is mentally challenging, and might progress your career, but it's not actually in any way sellable.

To make something sellable, you usually have to make it not-so-technical and not-so-complex. Simply because of the time constraints of hobby work and solo work. Your effort would go mostly to the market analysis and your product would need more polish meaning that for a personal project, it would usually be trivial (You can sell a shopping list iOS app, but you can't easily sell a 5 year hobby project making an OS). The sellable OS would be a 500 man-year product. What yo do by coding a kernel for 5 years is possibly that you can improve the product that is yourself.

So unless you actually enjoy the goal of marketing/selling/running a business, then the Shopping list iOS app won't be a good hobby.
by eloisius | 2025-04-29 08:13:36+00:00
> The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary

This is both insane and common. Last year I was in Athens with a friend. The line to buy tickets at the acropolis was huge but staff were telling everyone if you buy it online you don’t have to wait at the kiosk. My friend googled “acropolis tickets” and bought a ticket from what looked like the official site. Turns out they were not official. They priced the tickets such that you’d think they were the real Thing too. The real ticket is like $20 for only the acropolis, $35 for the entire site. She got the $35 one, and only later found out that this scam reseller was selling the limited ticket at the full ticket price.
by trymas | 2025-04-29 08:13:55+00:00
You definition fits a lot of fields.

> Yet another example of how <startups/stock brokers/etc> serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from <startups/stock brokers/etc> folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
by Arnt | 2025-04-29 08:14:09+00:00
Sorry, my bad.

I don't think I've ever seen a tariff being applied to consulting, have you? I remember a contract that escaped tariffs because the subject was excepted from an exception from an exception, which suggests that slightly different work would be covered, because the deepest exception would not apply. But in the event, my/our consulting was covered by the deepest exception.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-29 08:14:53+00:00
How warm is "too warm"? I find cold beer, and cold soft drinks as well, quite repulsive. I usually try to order without ice entirely, and if I receive any bottles or cans, I permit them to come to room temp before consumption.

Refrigeration is sort of a scourge to those who enjoy food. We are so used to simply freezing our esophagus and not tasting anything! Food is kept cold because it lasts longer, not because it tastes better.

Sure, refrigeration makes restaurants and grocery stores possible. But it also presents challenges to cooking and it's very resource-intensive -- think about it -- basically everyone everywhere is always running their refrigeration -- that's a huge load on any system.
by schrectacular | 2025-04-29 08:15:14+00:00
Wanton is not "yun tun" in Mandarin, it's "hun tun" (馄饨) but it does have a lot of local variance; most people I know in the north tend to say "dun" but the two sounds are pretty similar if said fast. Neat article though and I agree that food terms are impossible to translate, especially as single terms. They need context.

Slightly surprised they didn't mention "spit/saliva/drool chicken" (口水鸡) but I guess there is only so much room and way to many examples!
by znpy | 2025-04-29 08:17:08+00:00
My two cents: I tried learning a bit of German through duolingo in the past and I agree, it's completely useless.

Recently I started taking Spanish classes and it's nice. Classes teach me grammar and a relatively small set of words, duolingo is teaching a few more words.

The amount of advertising is too much imho, and the paid subscription is too expensive (as in, not worth what I'd be getting).

So overall... Yeah it's a bit weird that duolingo as a company stays afloat at all.
by andruby | 2025-04-29 08:17:13+00:00
Indeed. Runtime is typically a lot faster than Rails. Response times in dev mode are <1ms which is fun to see coming from Rails :)

My personal dev speed however is a little slower in Phoenix than Rails. And I've been using Rails for almost 20 years and Elixir for 10.

There are categories of problems that are much easier in Elixir (High concurrency, low latency, etc) and for those I would always pick Elixir. If you're planning "just" a crud like web application, Ruby will probably get you to product-market-fit faster. There are (well maintained) gems for almost everything.
by sph | 2025-04-29 08:17:14+00:00
I have been a software engineer for almost two decades and it's taken me three tries at reading and rereading the instruction on how to set Kagi as default search on iOS, because I missed the fact that I had to allow permission to use the extension WHILE browsing google.com for it to work, as it has to intercept the query to rewrite the URL.

When all it should've been is a "custom search engine" option like Firefox does.

Calling it "unobvious" is PR newspeak for jumping through the hoops to set up a Rube Goldberg machine to do a basic search.
by pamaury | 2025-04-29 08:17:54+00:00
I 100% agree with this comment. In fact, it is very common to receive reviews at top conference which say "you should submit to a smaller/more specialized venue". Those "more specialized" conference are indeed both more interesting AND less valued by universities. Sometimes universities will not even agree to pay the travel cost to supposedly "smaller" conferences!

Another issue I have observed is that, exactly like the article highlights, conference reviewing has become about rejecting papers and not accepting them: there are too many decent papers! This is very perverse because it may only take a negative review from an unfamiliar reviewer to get a paper rejected. And even if your paper is considered decent, it will often be necessary for at least one reviewer to "champion" your article. This means that if your paper happens to be reviewed by one of the "top researcher" in your field, this person not championing your paper is a death sentence. And if for some reason this researcher does not like your work, you just have to pray that they will not review your paper. But of course, reviewers get to bid on the papers that they want to review so this person is very likely to review your paper every time.

All of this means that in our modern conference system, the role of few loud gatekeepers is highly exaggerated and they get to shape a lot the output of "top conferences". This is really more of human problem, but the lack of hierarchy in academia means that those people can get their way without major opposition for a long time...

Note of course that this is *highly* dependent on the field that your work in. There are still many fields of CS with very reasonable community.
by mistercheph | 2025-04-29 08:18:10+00:00
LOL, gotta love "just get better at picking search keywords bro..." as the retort in defense of google's trash results.

Here's an easy one for you: Try googling "div" after you scroll past the ads, AI overview, wikipedia summary, and maps results, and finally get to the first result it's.... w3schools, which nobody has ever wanted to be the result of their search query ever.

Kagi's first result is for the DIV ticker, and there is legitimate ambiguity in the search term, and the second result is for MDN.

Kagi can't guess perfectly what I'm searching for, but it won't triple down on a potentially bad guess like google does (imagine you are looking for the div ticker, search, and have to scoff and add another keyword) and it won't ever return links to universally despised trash websites that are actually just abstract financial instruments to perform arbitrage between cost of SEO and adsense revenue.
Ask HN: Is there hope for Microsoft 365 support?
by joaopbnogueira | 2025-04-29 08:18:12+00:00
The company I work for (25friday.com) has been hit with what seems to be a keyword blacklist on Microsoft 365 email.

In short, if we send out any email to clients using Microsoft 365 as their email provider containing the textual content "25friday.com" anywhere on the email subject, body or readable attachment (e.g. pdf) the emails fall on a "blackhole" and are neither bounced nor reaching the recipient (they are not in spam or quarantine either).

As you might imagine this is a huge problem for us as email is our primary means of communication with our clients and we need to be careful to never include any mention of our domain in any email we send to them.

For recipients using personal Outlook emails, the emails are received and sent to spam with a spam score of 9 (maximum score).

We've reached Microsoft support and they seem as clueless as we are. They have no idea why this is happening and they are unable to provide any information or progress on the ongoing issue. This has been going on for about a month now.

A few things we have tried:

- We have checked our SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records and they are all set up correctly and passing.

- We have checked our email sending reputation and it is good as far as we can tell.

- We have tried sending emails from different email addresses and domains, but the issue persists.

- We have setup our own Microsoft 365 account to be able to submit false-positive reports on the security portal, but the submissions disappear into the void and we never receive any feedback.

- We have tried some deliverability testing tools and they all report that our emails are being blocked by Microsoft 365, but not by any other email providers.

- We are not on any known/public blacklists

Note that we are using Google Workspaces, but that does not seem to be the issue. The domain itself has been live since 2018 (since the company was founded) and we have never had any issues with email deliverability before. We don't send spam or unsolicited emails. The closest I could think of is a mailing list we have with about 300 subscribers containing mostly client emails but also some emails of people we invite to our events. We send out an approximately monthly newsletter to this list, but we have never had any complaints or issues with it before (we're using Pipedrive for that).

Tangential but I believe that it might be related: if I set my website address as 25friday.com on my LinkedIn profile, the link gets overwritten to a LinkedIn error page. My guess is that since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, they are sharing the same blacklist.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated. We're really affected by this and without any recourse to escalate this issue.