MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by albedoa | 2025-04-11 15:31:03+00:00
If that is true, then TFA seriously missed the mark:

> Alongside the changes in browser styles, page auditing tools like Lighthouse now flag cases of <h1>s without defined font-size as bad practice.

Then when listing what to expect:

> Lighthouse will flag a warning if <h1> is used without a specified font-size.

And under the section "Fixing the Lighthouse warning":

> Lighthouse has recently inherited a check based on Chromium's DevTools warnings for sites that don't specify a font-size for <h1> elements.

Then it uses top-level h1 selectors in its examples of recommended styles. I mean you might be right about when that warning will appear, but the article doesn't seem to think you are.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-11 15:31:18+00:00
Universities concentrate experts, and that leads to local economies. That's why SF is right outside of Stanford. Google wouldn't be there if that wasn't where Stanford grads lived. The stories about the Chinese government's tremendous efforts to repatriate skilled professionals (like giving them entire factories to run) come about as a result of the fact that they're working against a strong default of staying in the same place.
by JustSkyfall | 2025-04-11 15:31:19+00:00
I've been looking for a clean temporary email service for a while now, so I decided to build my own!

I wrote the SMTP server from scratch in Rust - SMTP's a surprisingly simple spec, so if you've got the time then I'd recommend trying this out yourself!

GitHub: https://github.com/SkyfallWasTaken/vortex.email
Ask HN: Using Bluebird Promises in 2025?
by awaitasyncplz | 2025-04-11 15:31:29+00:00
Halp, I am writing in desperation. My company's customer-facing API bits are written in nodejs, and our VP insists that we are not allowed to use async/await, and must instead use Bluebird promises [1].

The rationale is that native promises have different, and worse, performance characteristics... Which I think is maybe technically true. Something about the event loop and microticks.

And they've had to fix various latency issues over the years due to people using native promises instead of Bluebird in our codebase.

But our code is full of boilerplate, harder to read and maintain as a result and I'm struggling to accept that this is the right tradeoff for a growing team (~30 devs working on this codebase)

I also just can't believe that a lot of other shops are doing this, or that we're the only ones running into these performance issues.

Maybe it's our use-case? I kinda doubt it. We're an observability/analytics product so there's a fair bit of data transformation going on. But we don't have a ton of concurrent users (think dozens).

I'm hoping that this thread can attract some performance-conscious nodejs engineers who can help shed some light on how your apps aren't slow or blocking all the time despite using native promises.

Thanks, and Happy Friday!
by sitkack | 2025-04-11 15:31:51+00:00
It isn't "an idea", it is a justified response.

Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all your art is really what broke people.
by CompuIves | 2025-04-11 15:32:09+00:00
Oh wow! Unexpected and cool to see this post on Hacker News! Since then we have evolved our VM infra a bit, and I've written two more posts about this.

First, we started cloning VMs using userfaultfd, which allows us to bypass the disk and let children read memory directly from parent VMs [1].

And we also moved to saving memory snapshots compressed. To keep VM boots fast, we need to decompress on the fly as VMs read from the snapshot, so we chunk up snapshots in 4kb-8kb pieces that are zstd compressed [2].

Happy to answer any questions here!

[1]: https://codesandbox.io/blog/cloning-microvms-using-userfault...

[2]: https://codesandbox.io/blog/how-we-scale-our-microvm-infrast...
by fsflover | 2025-04-11 15:32:45+00:00
> Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays

Yes, they did have huge refund and shipping time issues and I don't trust their time estimations anymore. They almost went bankrupt and couldn't issue refunds for a long time. However this is irrelevant today, as their devices are finally available to order and AFAIK the refunds were issued. There were never issues with security, backdoors (unlike Lenovo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...), nonfree software or the like.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-11 15:32:46+00:00
Phone me when someone else lands an orbital class rocket or offers a cheaper ton to LEO. Until then you're complaining about the lowest bidder. And you're going to have a hard time convincing me that the lowest bidder is doing anything but saving their customers money on a service they were already intent on purchasing, and had previously been spending 2x - 10x for: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/753q6s/economic_comp...
by eks391 | 2025-04-11 15:32:57+00:00
An Application Programming Interface provides data to a requester. They are built/shaped by the provider and so the provider usually has documentation for a user to know how to pull and parse it, with example snippets.

Its like having a printer with preset documents it can print. You set it on your desk, and others can click a button to have the chosen preset sheet come out. You can get creative by hiding some buttons, making some buttons also require a fingerprint of the user to print the paper, or the printout changes every minute, etc.

But the API printer sits on someone's server and prints objects, or organized data, and sends it to whatever you used to call, or request, from the API.
by m-schuetz | 2025-04-11 15:33:34+00:00
Krita and Photopea. I use image manipulation programs occasionally to work on paper figures and presentations. Years ago, I used photoshop because alternatives like Gimp have abyssimal UX that I can't get over, even for free.

With Krita and Photopea, my need for photoshop, previously paid by my employer, is gone.
by throwanem | 2025-04-11 15:33:49+00:00
It seems filthy rich of you to claim good faith at this time, but I have recently begun to gather that in some quarters lately, it is considered offensively unreasonable to expect working knowledge of any material as a prerequisite for participating competently in discussion thereof. So though your claim is facially false, I ironically can't fairly consider that it is other than honestly made. Your precepts are in any case your problem. Good luck with it, you Hacker News expert.
by Arainach | 2025-04-11 15:33:53+00:00
>Netflix has their content as their moat.

Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*.

That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.
by adzm | 2025-04-11 15:33:58+00:00
I pay $20 a month for the educational discount and my kids get access to every Adobe product. It is an amazing deal.

When you are an adult not in school you probably don't need "all apps" and it is relatively inexpensive to get just the product you use.

Anyway, they are still around because they still have some of the best set of features, and are industry standards, though this may change in the future and in some areas is already in progress (and I welcome that! They need competition to push them)
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-11 15:34:46+00:00
No, it really is.

22nd Amendment:

> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

12th Amendment:

> no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

You can produce the same bullshit arguments for literally any law in existence because language is inherently ambiguous. If someone starts wiggling into, "well technically it's a bit ambiguous whether we're allowed to mow down peaceful protestors with machine guns," it is incumbent upon all of us to say "no, actually that's not ambiguous."

Courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments, and the public attitude should be that blatant accounting tricks like the VP switcheroo are incompatible with both the language and intent of the law.
by znpy | 2025-04-11 15:34:49+00:00
In a way it's nothing new. MOSIX/openMosix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIX, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix) did similar stuff with individual processes. It would probably be even faster as then you would have to only move process memory and its state rather than the whole VM memory (and it state).

I guess it would/could be nice to have something that moves kubernetes pods around rather killing them and starting new ones.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-11 15:34:59+00:00
> You get: the knowledge that your function's output will only depend on its input.

> You pay: you gotta stop using those for-loops and [i]ndexes, and start using maps, folds, filters etc.

You're my type of guy. And literally none of my coworkers in the last 10 years were your type of guy. When they read this, they don't look at it in awe, but in horror. For them, functions should be allowed to have side effects, and for loops is a basic thing they don't see good reason to abandon.
by gibbitz | 2025-04-11 15:35:18+00:00
Isn't being raped in prison the only real deterrent to committing crimes? Sure prison is bad, but doing time is a badge of honor for hardened criminals. Being raped, not so much.

We put gay male rapists in all male prisons so a trans female gay rapists should also go in a female prison. Bad things are going to happen in prison, that's why people should steer clear of those places.

Hand waving conservatives seem to think there is no such thing as a violent woman offender or a female rapist. In their minds the trans female is the only bad person in there and they will somehow dominate all the other prisoners. Not sure how we can disconnect them from this belief. Scared straight at all women penetentiaries for conservatives?
by somat | 2025-04-11 15:35:19+00:00
I never really understood the rational for using fastcgi. For everything I wanted to do it always made more sense to just use custom http servers and proxys.

CGI makes sense, it fills a specific environment, one request, one process, but fastCGI? why? its a server with a different incompatible HTTP. did everyone jump on it just because it had CGI in the name and the associativity CGI == web process was too firmly entrenched in peoples minds.

But I am not really in a web ops role, so who knows, perhaps fastcgi does have some sort of advantage when run at scale.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-11 15:35:20+00:00
The internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations.

Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences.

Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enough people that their bold move was a good thing and that the consequences will diffuse throughout the years on to other people.

This very well could become more expensive to cancel abruptly when you consider the second and third order effects.
by JustSkyfall | 2025-04-11 15:35:38+00:00
The Bluebird devs themselves no longer recommend using it if you can help it:

> Please use native promises instead if at all possible. Native Promises have been stable in Node.js and browsers for around 10 years now and they have been fast for around 7. Any utility bluebird has like .map has native equivalents (like Node streams' .map).

> This is a good thing, the people working on Bluebird and promises have been able to help incorporate most of the useful things from Bluebird into JavaScript itself and platforms/engines.

> If there is a feature that keeps you using bluebird. Please let us know so we can try and upstream it :)

> Currently - it is only recommended to use Bluebird if you need to support really old browsers or EoL Node.js or as an intermediate step to use warnings/monitoring to find bugs.
by unfocused | 2025-04-11 15:36:00+00:00
I'll try and explain it simply with no technical information.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, allows you to interact with software using pre-defined agreements, or contracts.

Think of API as a set of legal contracts. I use this analogy when explaining it to lawyers.

If I give you $5, and I say give me an Apple, you will give me an Apple, as expected by the predefined contract, that I receive an Apple.

If I end up receiving Broccoli, then what we have here, is a bug. Or, in other words, the contract has been broken.

Now apply this to other domains in commerce - e.g. I give an ID of an item in a store, and I get back the name of the item, it's price, and if it's stock.
by heisenbit | 2025-04-11 15:36:06+00:00
Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the private sector except the most dire circumstances.
by zer00eyz | 2025-04-11 15:36:14+00:00
> I ask because watching cloud providers like AWS slowly reinvent mainframes just seems like the painful way around.

When AWS was the hot new thing in town a server was coming in at 12/24 threads.

A modern AMD machine tops out at 700+ threads and 400gb QSFP interconnects. GO back to 2000 and the Dotcom boom and thats a whole mid sized company, in a 2u rack.

Finding single applications that can leverage all that horsepower is going to be a challenge... and thats before you layer in lift for redundancy.

Strip away all the bloat, all the fine examples of Conways law that organizations drag around (or inherit from other orgs) and compute is at a place where it's effectively free... With the real limits/costs being power and data (and these are driven by density).
by alnwlsn | 2025-04-11 15:36:15+00:00
At least leaded soldering wire is mostly contained in a large chunk, but I really don't like leaded solder paste. Which is like leaded peanut butter, and easily spread around.

All the new parts are designed based on a lead free process anyways, so you might as well get used to working with lead-free solder to begin with.
by kowabungalow | 2025-04-11 15:36:26+00:00
I think the biggest issue is that you have to put the assets somewhere and usually that meant a relationship to US currency. China has to go further with a proposal for how it is going to do a US proof global system. Telling the EU to stand up in unity will only work when the proposal makes the same kind of sense to the EU in the longterm as whatever the US is doing makes sense to the Republicans.
by azemetre | 2025-04-11 15:36:29+00:00
Poppycock. Being able to collectively bargain against the government is more than legal, it should be encouraged.

They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for themselves against the US government. If Congress and the executive branch can't agree with labor terms with workers at the table, that's bad.

Not having unionized federal workers is way way way worse.

One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?
by throwanem | 2025-04-11 15:36:33+00:00
"Teenage boy wish fulfillment" is well beneath any reasonable standard of criticism, and I've addressed that with about as much respect as it deserves.

There is much worthy of critique in Heinlein, especially in his depiction of women. I've spent about a quarter century off and on both reading and formulating such critiques, much more recently than I've spent meaningful time with his fiction. I've also read what he had to say for himself before he died, and what Mrs. Heinlein - she kept the name - said about him after. If we want to talk about, for example, how the themes of maternal incest and specifically feminine embodiment of weakly superhuman AGI in his later work reflect a degree of senescence and the wish for a supercompetent maternal figure to whom to surrender the burden of responsibility, or if we want to talk about how Heinlein seems to spend an enormous amount of time just generally exploring stuff from female characters' perspectives that an honest modern inquiry would recognize as fumbling badly but earnestly in the direction of something like a contemporary understanding of gender, then we could talk about that.

No one wants to, though. You can't use anything like that as a stick to beat people with, so it never gets a look in, and those as here who care nothing for anything of the subject save if it looks serviceable as a weapon claim to be the only ones in the talk who are honest. They don't know the man's work well enough to talk about the years he spent selling stories that absolutely revolve around character development, which exist solely to exemplify it! Of course these are universally dismissed as his 'juveniles' - a few letters shy of 'juvenilia' - because science fiction superfans are all children and so are science fiction superhaters, neither of whom knows how to respond in any way better than a tantrum on the rare occasion of being told bluntly it's well past time they grew up.

But they're the honest ones. Why not? So it goes. It's a conversation I know better than to try to have, especially on Hacker News; if I don't care for how it's proceeding, I've no one but myself to blame.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-11 15:36:55+00:00
I'm not afraid of losing my job as an engineer. I can babysit an agent to build software and my expertise will still matter. I'm upset because that's not fun. I chose this career because programming is fun for me. I put up with everything else and I get to code and eat.

Now I'm not sure what I like doing if the bot does my coding. Who am I? My whole identity is built around being an intelligent programmer but if intelligence is commodified and programming is obsolete then I don't know who I am anymore or what to do for fun

:(

Making a living is a concern but.. it almost feels like one of the more shallow ones. I can stack bricks for money but if AI takes the fun out of programming what am I supposed to do for fun
by ty6853 | 2025-04-11 15:36:59+00:00
That's not true in most the USA. Shopkeepers privilege allows them to confine you and/or the goods, which depending on state only requires something akin to "reasonably believed you were stealing." In my state a shopkeep can confine me until police arrive on pretty flimsy evidence, which if in the country could be a very long time. It is better just to find stores that don't do it and shop there - - I stopped shopping at walmart after I was confronted by gigantic bouncers accusing me of stealing (yes in the hood Walmart is very aggressive with shopkeepers privilege, if you live in wealthy area and refuse they much more likely to just let you go).

You could try to stop them but if they are hurt in the process it could very well end in a lengthy trip to prison.
by curiouscavalier | 2025-04-11 15:37:18+00:00
Yep, the procurement process (and related) requires a lot be baked into pricing. I’d also be curious what the fully burdened rate of in-house staff is compared to consultants. I’ve seen situations in the gov (not DoD) where despite high consulting rates, the full cost of hiring was even higher per hour.

But I’m loath to defend the big firms. Generally, quality plus the ever push for expanding scope leaves a sensation of waste. The solution is just going to need more than simply tossing them out.
by csours | 2025-04-11 15:37:19+00:00
ctrl+f "moat"

Hmm. So why can they have a 3x markup?

What is the moat? Who will overpay by $1,000?

1. People who are required to use a product with very specific certifications.

2. People who want to use a product with a desirable backstory.

In the first instance the US military requires testing and certifications that are costly to achieve, creating a moat for military suppliers.

In the second instance, some podcast listeners are willing to significantly overpay for generic supplements due to the backstory and their trust in that podcaster.

I am curious what the market breakdown is for this device - how many do they sell for case 1? how many do they sell for case 2?

Also, if they don't sell very many, then their manufacturing capital costs, design and supply chain overheads per phone will be very high.
by tylertreat | 2025-04-11 15:37:32+00:00
The underlying engine is actually completely decoupled from yaml as it's really just structured data. We chose to stick with yaml for the "interface" since that is ultimately what it's managing—Kubernetes manifests. Personally, I tend to prefer keeping the configuration true to the underlying thing being configured rather than abstracting it away with DSLs, but I realize it's not for everyone.
by mattskr | 2025-04-11 15:37:53+00:00
Controversial take: I'm happy they went monthly paid subscription. You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford the $1,500+ up front cost? The seven seas were the only option.

HOWEVER, 60 a month is too high for a product quality that is tanking. I was okay with it the first few years, but PS and Illustrator's performance noticeably have gone straight to shit for absolutely no benefit except for a little stupid gimmicks that offer zero productivity boosts. Indesign, they've mostly left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie. There are no more kingdoms to conquer. Simply find performance boosts, that's it. The reliability of my files and getting work done is more important than anything else. Truly. That's what Adobe USED to stand for. Pure raw UI intuitive productivity and getting shit done. Now, it's a fucking clown show that cares about their social media and evangelism.

I hear on the video side they've super dropped the ball, but I'm not much for motion graphics outside of Blender.

Stop with the bullshit "telemetry" garbage that bogs down my computer and AI scrapping of our data. Old files that used to run fine on my older computers run like shit on my new one. I know damn well there's bullshit going on in the background. That's 80% of the issue. The other 20% of problems are running of the mill stuff.

I am perfectly happy paying for functional, productive software. 60 bucks a month for that is fine as a freelance graphic designer and marketer. However creative cloud is quickly becoming dysfunctional and unproductive. That's the problem.