MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tgv | 2025-04-01 10:35:20+00:00
Sorry, but comparing Python's total absence of typing to extracting a value from any is quite weird.

> certain properties of the program can't be checked at compile time

Neither can you check if a number is positive or negative, or if a string is empty or not at compile time, but that doesn't make Go similar to COBOL or Forth. `var v any` declares v to be of the type any, not of any arbitrary type, which is what Python does. Writing `v + 1` gives a compiler error, unlike Python, which may or may not turn it into a runtime error. It is rather different, and especially so when you look at interfacing. Even though you may declare a variable to be an integer in Python, there is no guarantee that it actually is, whereas in Go that is the case, which has significant implications for how you handle e.g. json.

> the compiler won't prevent you from doing it.

It will prevent you from using e.g. an array of strings as if it were an array ints. Python does not. They are quite different.

> You know, it's this kind of comment on USENET forums which prompted the creation of StackOverflow. It's not curious and adds nothing to the discussion.

Ffs.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-01 10:36:06+00:00
Um, no, that quotation means literally the opposite: it is about the climbing, it's not about getting to the top of any particular mountain. What Hillary was getting at is we get satisfaction from learning, training, overcoming difficulties and limitations, and ultimately pushing ourselves to our limits. His limit was Everest, your limit might be Snowdon, but it's climbing it that matters, not just taking the train to the top and taking a selfie.
by lores | 2025-04-01 10:37:14+00:00
It's taxed above a pretty reasonable threshold. You have the option of gifting your money tax-free to your children, or to public-good organisations. Hell, you have the option to spend some of the money you made in your lifetime! You earned it, spend it! See the world! Eat the finest cheeses for breakfast, lunch and dinner! Have a masseur on retainer! The kids sound pretty entitled anyway!
by sensanaty | 2025-04-01 10:38:00+00:00
As someone who's worked on web apps with and without frameworks, yes, we need frameworks, especially if it's a large one or if there's a team of more than a few people involved.

The good ones these days like Vue or especially Svelte are barely any different to how you'd do things the "vanilla" way except they provide some sane QoL features like components (anyone who says web components are the answer has very obviously never used web components) and sane data flow management to and from said components.

I mean, more power to you if you want to handle complex states without the features a lib like Vue or Svelte provide you, but in my experience you eventually end up with a homecooked framework anyways, even for apps that aren't that complex. And at that point you're just doing React or Angular or Vue, but worse in every conceivable way. Yay for going at it vanilla, I guess?
by BoorishBears | 2025-04-01 10:38:50+00:00
None of the other selling points are any more applicable to the average dev...

And it didn't just start out that way, the only package is still a cli tool that will then diff your files.

Overall, it really doesn't make sense to paint this all as some now discarded origin story, especially when you're in the comment section of a major launch that's based on shadcn and selling itself on the exact same story.

But if that's how you see it, let's agree to disagree.
by bryanhogan | 2025-04-01 10:38:51+00:00
Yes, React is huge, but I also see it used for everything and everyone when it's really not the right tech-stack in many situations.

Just need a simple interaction free site? Use Astro.

Need some interaction? Use Svelte. Larger project? SvelteKit.

Need a more established solution? Use Vue.

Working in a huge team and need a highly opinionated framework with strict conventions? Use Angular.

More than 99% of websites would be sufficient with Astro though. And when just some interactivity is needed it is always possible to add Svelte / Vue / Solid / Alpine / HTMX on top of Astro.
by TFYS | 2025-04-01 10:39:01+00:00
I'm starting to think that current forms of democracy have become outdated and impossible due to the effects of social media and the levels of wealth concentration. When liars can spread their own truths through social media, and there exists such concentrations of wealth that they're able to buy the platforms, manipulate the algorithms, use bots etc. to boost the lies, it's become too hard for the average person to figure out what the actual truth is and base their decisions on that. The fact checking and bias in dispersed traditional media that we used to have was not perfect, but it was better than what we have now with the combination of concentrated traditional media and social media.

If we don't want to use the state to protect democracy by limiting it, then we either need to limit the concentration of wealth so that no small group of people has the power to spread the lies, or we need new forms of democracy that are resistant to such things.
by creata | 2025-04-01 10:39:12+00:00
> enshittification

Tangentially, what does enshittification mean now? Quoting Wiktionary, at one point it meant "The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits" (coined by Doctorow), but now people seem to use it to mean... things becoming shit?
by sltkr | 2025-04-01 10:39:13+00:00
The API feels wrong. The object that was passed to pub() is the object that should be received by the callback passed to sub().

The use of EventTarget/CustomEvent is an implementation detail; it should not be part of the API.

As a result, every callback implementation is larger because it must explicitly unwrap the CustomEvent object.

Essentially, the author made the library smaller by pushing necessary code to unwrap the CustomEvent object to the callsites. That's the opposite of what good libraries do!

The mentioned nano-pubsub gets this right, and it even gets the types correct (which the posted code doesn't even try).
by lmeierhoefer | 2025-04-01 10:39:13+00:00
We are not doing RLHF but fine-tuning directly on a reward function. Our task was around improving a coding agent, coding in JSONata(https://jsonata.org).

GPT4o is quite bad in this, as there are not too many JSONata snippets on the internet. We collected 20 coding problems; the reward function then just assigned a scalar value based on whether the code output of the model was syntactically correct or not (Most interestingly, we found that by optimizing the syntax, it also got better at getting the semantics correct)

I think the discrepancy between our result with direct RL and your experience with RLHF comes from the fact that RLHF is built around non-verifiable/subjective domains, where intrinsically, the reward signal obtained by the HF-proxy is weak(er), i.e. for the same training scenario/prompt you need more samples to get to the same gradient.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-01 10:39:59+00:00
> 15-30 million hearings

What level of false positives are you willing to tolerate - US nationals wrongly deported?

How many fatalities (including suicides) are you willing to tolerate in this process?

(fairly easy to imagine hypothetical situation: lawful US national gun owner with Hispanic name is shopped to immigration by his neighbours. ICE come to his house in the middle of the night to deprive him of his rights. Is he (a) legally (b) morally entitled to open fire on them? If not, what do all the 2nd amendment tyranny resistors mean? If so, isn't this going to be a huge mess?)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-01 10:40:37+00:00
>Do you live in a EU country?

I do.

>EU rules are generally good things: rule of law, sane deficit and debt rules etc

Those are all very obscure "rules" And we had such rules even without the EU.

> And in practice states have a lot of sway.

How do states not do what Ursula v.d. Leyen says? What is their say in the matter? Or more importantly, what's their citizens' say in the matter? Since citizens did not elect her to be their representative.

>post-Brexit the quality of government has decreased,

That's because their government is incompetent, not because they left the EU.
by mcv | 2025-04-01 10:41:07+00:00
I don't really think China is an option either. Maybe for the west coast, but I really don't think they can do much for the eastern half of Canada. Though EU+China might do it.

Problem is, China might be happy to see the US invade Canada, because then they can finally take Taiwan. And that's the real danger of Trump's foolish aggression: by weakening American's alliances, he's giving China more space to assert itself and take what they want.
by nottorp | 2025-04-01 10:41:14+00:00
Where's this Ghiblification? I'm still getting real cat photos in my FB feed. At least I hope they're real.

Could it be that all the "AI" evangelists are in their own bubble and desperately trying to make money off each other?

Like when mobile free to play gambling apps ("games" they said) had ads, but only for other mobile free to play gambling apps.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-01 10:42:44+00:00
I mean, IF THE CABLE WAS PRACTICAL, it could make a lot of sense. It's a two-way street; the UK (and the European network to which the UK is somewhat interconnected) also has lots of renewables, and of course the sun comes out at different times in both places. As mentioned in the article, the UK also tends to overproduce wind power at night. The framing that it's Canada supplying the UK in the article is overly simplistic/wrong; it'd be mutual supply.

However I have some difficulty believing an interconnector that long is really practical. The longest one in the world currently is only 750km (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Link).
by nkaz123 | 2025-04-01 10:43:33+00:00
Inspired by Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiynF8NQzgo), I created an alternative to AI agents where to do a task, simply provide a future worker with some details like description, time, and place. Then assuming time travel is invented, someone will come back and do it and be paid based on the interest accrued over the original payment.
by nl | 2025-04-01 10:43:43+00:00
Amazon was founded in 1995 and became cash flow positive in 2002[1], seven years later.

ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022. They are expecting $12B in revenue this year[2].

[1] https://adainsights.com/blog/when-did-amazon-start-making-mo...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/openai-expects-revenue-will-...
Show HN: Endor, run server software in your browser
by angelmm | 2025-04-01 10:43:48+00:00
Hello HN! We are Angel (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=angelmm) and Daniel (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ridruejo), cofounders of Endor.

Setting up development environments is hard. We are building Endor to change that. Point your web browser to Endor.dev, select the components your app needs and hit "Launch". Seconds later it is up and running and you can deploy your code, either from a local folder or directly from your repository.

Everything is executed inside the browser and private by default. When you are done, just delete the browser tab and you are done! It can't get easier than that.

A typical web development stack has many moving parts, including databases, key-value stores, web and API servers, language runtimes and of course the code itself. The components are likely a mixture of containers, manual installations and the odd virtual machine. Setting them up and maintaining them over time is tricky and frustrating, especially if you are part of a team.

We already worked on this problem once with Bitnami (https://bitnami.com/), which Daniel cofounded and I was the frontend lead for. Bitnami packaged OSS applications so they could be deployed with one-click in multiple environments, from local installers to local VMs to all the major clouds and Kubernetes. Bitnami is used by millions of developers around the world and is a fantastic way to get started with any of the hundreds of applications in its catalog. Some of our early users described Bitnami as a "magical experience".

This time, we are looking to capture that feeling of magic by making it trivial to run any server component (including Bitnami ones!) in the browser, whether it is a Redis container, a MySQL VM or a specially compiled PHP binary. It really can't get simpler than following a link. Nothing to install, completely isolated so it doesn't mess with your existing setup, yet easy to use and share with others.

This initial version is still missing important features but is already quite useful for quickly launching a sandbox to test an OSS project you just ran across or run code you got from an AI. Over the coming weeks and months we will be adding significant functionality around networking, persisting data, performance and adding many more applications. We are building Endor to make our life as developers easier. We hope you find it useful too.

Give it a try!

https://endor.dev/s/lamp
by m00dy | 2025-04-01 10:44:27+00:00
This is exactly the kind of innovation we love to see in the Tauri ecosystem! At Cycletop, we’re building an AI driven algorithmic trading platform, and our frontend runs on Tauri. The idea of using Verso instead of Wry? Super intriguing.

Trading UIs demand snappy performance, and a rust powered rendering engine like Servo could mean faster DOM updates, better security, and lower resource usage

I'm just curious, has anyone benchmarked Verso’s rendering speed vs. Wry? And how’s the webrtc support looking? Low latency comms are a must for us.

Excited to see where this goes!

[0]: https://cycletop.xyz
by pcthrowaway | 2025-04-01 10:44:55+00:00
We already have burns here.

Even if you could organize one with space for 100,000 people, it wouldn't be the same. For one, due to fire bans an effigy burn would be unlikely. And it wouldn't be in the desert which is a big part of it.

I'm not at all against the idea of another 7-day burn with a different name as an alternative to burning man though. Host it in BC where drugs are decriminalized and it'll probably be a lot safer for people too (in terms of legal repercussions).
by dspillett | 2025-04-01 10:45:37+00:00
> I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have.

I think for some it taps into the same reward neurons as winning £10 on a lottery after paying £1 in week-in-week-out for years. It feels like a win, and that for many overrides any desire to properly analyse the matter (did I actually save, with the coupon, or save 5% on something that has been marked up 20%? (or buy something I didn't really want at all?!)). Same with BlackFriday, many of Amazon's “prime day” offers, and so forth.

[Also not American, I'm a UKian/ex-EUian, it is not uncommon to see the same here, just not in the big way some Americans tend to go with almost anything]
by glimshe | 2025-04-01 10:45:45+00:00
Let them do it.

We have no right to tell people they have to learn to climb to get to top of the Everest.

I can't draw but I want to create my Art using AI. What I now see is a bunch of people who associate their self worth with a rare talent and don't want others to join the party. I want to resolve the issues around copyright for training, but once this is out of the way I want to draw exclusively through AI because it's the only way I can do it. And I LIKE IT.

I'm a skilled pianist. The funny thing is that I heard similar criticisms about computer music a couple decades ago. "No playing skill needed". Despite knowing how to play, I'd rather do computer music nowadays anyway. Please stop telling me what I can and can't do!
by maxloh | 2025-04-01 10:45:46+00:00
IMO, this framework is built for use cases normally handled by React-based static site generators. For instance, a simple marketing site for a company. In these use cases, React is obviously an overkill. You wouldn't want your users to download, parse, and execute 2.8 kB of the React runtime just for simple buttons, tabs, and routing.

However, I don't find this framework suitable for more complex state-driven applications. If you want to build X's front end with this framework, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. It won't take an hour before you hit the framework's design limitations.

Just choose the right tool for the right job.
by occamschainsaw | 2025-04-01 10:45:46+00:00
Is it just me or does Gemini fail the 4D tesseract spinning challenge? That solution looks like a 3D object spinning in 3D space. It seems Claude's solution is better (still difficult to interpret). For reference, this is what a 4D rotation projected to 3D should look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract
by wetoastfood | 2025-04-01 10:46:33+00:00
Many people today are booking flights for others, be it families, business leaders, or traditional travel agents. They’re communicating preferences and asking about preferred travel times, budget, seat selection, and more. When you book for and with someone else, these preferences get learned and you no longer have to ask if they prefer an aisle seat—you just pick it.

The booking experience today is granular to help you find a suitable flight to meet all the preferences you’re compiling into an optimal scenario. The experience of AI booking in the future will likely be similar: find that optimal scenario for you once you’re able to articulate your preferences and remember them over time.
by philjohn | 2025-04-01 10:48:02+00:00
Except the farming changes is far more nuanced than that.

The reason farms are worth so much at present, despite low margins, is because of the inheritance tax loophole that was introduced in the 80's, at the behest of the landed backers of the Conservative Party. This turned farmland into a prime investment vehicle as a way to shelter assets from inheritance tax.

Is the proposed change (and thresholds, plus half rate with interest free payments spread over 10 years) perfect? No - it'll still catch some small family farms - but it's telling that the highest level of opposition has come from some very wealthy landowners, such as those using their "farmland" for grouse hunting, rather than making food.

The tax break in the 80's was a textbook market distortion, if we believe in the power of free markets, the value of the farmland will now fall, which means fewer family farmers will need to pay inheritance tax.
by indemnity | 2025-04-01 10:48:05+00:00
I have a few use cases and a few servers for them: My router/firewall is a NUC PC plugged straight into the fibre ONT. It also runs DHCP and DNS (both my home zone and acting as a caching resolver with a huge cache for the wider internet which means really snappy DNS lookups compared to using ISP servers).

My NAS is an eight core server with 64GB ECC ram running a ZFS pool with 8 12TB WD Red Pro drives for storing my collection of curated Linux ISOs, running TrueNAS SCALE, running always-on services inside containers:

- PostgreSQL for a bunch of personal project databases

- TeslaMate collecting data from our EVs into the PostgreSQL database

- Plex for serving up media to the Apple TV

- Tailscale exit node so I can access my home network on the go

- Step CA for managing my personal certificate authority used to issue everything I want to have TLS for with a certificate easily (LetsEncrypt doesn’t work for private network servers)

- Tarsnap for periodically backing up all data, documents and configuration I really do not want to lose

- UniFi controller managing my UniFi APs (four of them)

I’m sure I will have more use cases in the future, but it’s really handy to have always running infrastructure and storage at home you can rely on!

And I don’t spend much time tinkering with it now that it’s set up, it’s just maintenance mode.

From time to time I adjust a few configs or upgrade a hardware component here and there but it’s been stable like this for years (apart from the TrueNAS CORE to SCALE migration which was a bit of a shitshow due to moving from FreeBSD to Linux, had to rebuild all jails into Docker containers).
by globular-toast | 2025-04-01 10:48:08+00:00
None of those things you mention have been forgotten. Many people do all of those things not because they have to but because it is incredibly rewarding to learn and grow these skills. Convenience doesn't bring happiness. People will actively seek out challenges even when they seemingly have none.

The trouble with things like climbing is there are only so many mountains to go around. We already can't walk in many places because of cars. I don't look forward to the day that similar vehicles can go up mountains. The existence of mass-produced clothing doesn't affect your ability to do your own knitting, though.
by sensanaty | 2025-04-01 10:48:56+00:00
> I deal as DevOps/SRE daily with these services, and finding one that will do a first load under 10s is close to impossible

I am currently in Indonesia on extremely flimsy and slow wifi at 1-2 bars that maybe tops out at 50mbps on a good day if no one else is on it and the gods align to grace me with a decent speed. Day-to-day, it's around 25mbps.

Doing a hard refresh of Linear (not affiliated in any way other than using them for work, but I know they use React), a complex project view that includes many graphs and other things like that, the full load time for everything on screen is 5.6 seconds with ~15MB of content loaded (this includes images and interactive graphs). DOMContentLoaded finishes at 360ms and the full interactive load is finished at 600ms, with me being able to click on tickets and navigate to them at the roughly 1s mark or less. Back home Linear load instantly for me with full interactivity, and the cached version of it even here in Indonesia is similarly fast.

It's not the frameworks slowing things down, it's usually all the bullshit that the business forces on its users that the devs have 0 say over. The app I work on loads really, really fast on dev builds that don't have any of the idiotic tracking BS enabled (for example on staging builds, which aren't even fully optimized builds compared to regular prod builds), but because the marketing, data and sales teams want their google analytics and 7 other tracking softwares, the whole thing slows to an unbearable crawl as we load in dozens of MB of packages each bigger than the Vue library controlling the whole thing.
by tipiirai | 2025-04-01 10:49:02+00:00
Author here: You’re right that Nue shines for simpler sites—like marketing pages, blog, and documentation. But calling it just a static site generator misses the mark. This latest release (check mpa.nuejs.org/app/?rust) handles a Rust-powered SPA with event sourcing over 150k records—far beyond ‘simple.’ For state-driven apps, Nue’s model-first approach keeps things clean and scalable—limitations are there, sure, but they’re not the foot-shooter you might think. Right tool, right job—totally agree—just saying Nue’s toolbox is bigger than it looks!
by Agraillo | 2025-04-01 10:49:18+00:00
With eInk screens it's an interesting story. Because when your page is shown, there is no need for CPU at all for keeping it, so in an ideal world for such devices every page flip is a micro-cycle of waking up from the deep sleep, doing a job and going back to sleep. With such a lifecycle it's even better to measure the battery life not in hours but in page flips. When KOReader supports going to the deep sleep between flips then the difference between it and the bundled software should be small. But if for some reason there's no going to DS between flips, the battery life will drop significantly and back to time units per charge.