MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by craftkiller | 2025-04-23 14:14:13+00:00
For me its mainly:

- the ability to update every page on my site at-once in a uniform fashion (want to change the page layout or add a link in the footer, either you're manually editing a hundred HTML files or a couple lines in a single template file) - Syntax highlighting. My blog has code blocks so I would have to manually invoke a syntax highlighter for each code block (and every time I update the code I'd have to do it again). - auto-invoking graphviz and gnuplot. Similar to the code blocks, I write graphviz dot and graphviz blocks as code in my blog posts and have my static site generator render them to images. If I was manually writing the HTML then I'd either end up committing the built binaries (rendered images) to git (which, of course, is bad practice but ultimately inconsequential when talking about small SVGs for the few charts/graphs on my blog) or I'd have to have a "build" step where a script invokes graphviz/gnuplot to output the images which is the first step on the road to a static site generator. - Avoiding name collisions with internal anchor links (the kind with the `#` symbol that scrolls the page). I use these for footnotes and code block references. I could manually assign names for these for each blog post, but when combining multiple blog posts into a single list-view for the home page, there is the risk that I might reuse the same `#fn1` anchor across multiple blog posts. Using a static site generator, I don't need to concern myself with naming them at all and I have my static site generator assign unique names so there are no conflicts.
by _factor | 2025-04-23 14:14:47+00:00
Across dozens of studies, the evidence is clear: Exposure by itself produces a predisposition to engage.

Just seeing drugs/alcohol/sex in media increases the likelihood of trying them by 25-50%, further increasing with number of exposures.

It’s nice to have ideals that information should be free, even better to fight off abuse (what your parents did to you), but that does not make it the right direction to go in.

This coming from a child psychiatrist’s mouth.

You want your kids to stay away from drugs? Don’t even show it to them until their brains are formed. Don’t even acknowledge they exist. You’ll breed curiosity, and they’ll be statistically more likely to say yes when offered.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-23 14:14:53+00:00
I'd say the real problem is trying to be all things to all people. Why should Facebook be a place to keep up with your friends' activities and a place to watch short videos from random people and a place to organize virtual clubs and....

Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-23 14:15:32+00:00
Note the original paper by Baumol and Bowen:

"On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems" (1965)

https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1816292

>It is largely for this reason that performing arts organizations in financial difficulty have often managed to shift part of their financial burden back to the performers--and to the managements, who also are generally very poorly paid by commercial standards.

Imho the paper continues to function after you patch it with your favorite calling, design-driven industry or organizational structure :)
by loxs | 2025-04-23 14:15:48+00:00
Well, you can be a purist, or you can be practical. I write code, users run it, I get paid... While you are fixing the "modern web technologies". And I give you this, things are getting much better and I hope one day we'll run JSX natively in the browser without a build step ;)

And no, knockout.js is not better than React :)
by seansh | 2025-04-23 14:16:02+00:00
This looks fantastic! I’ve been seeing a growing number of tools trying to bring more interactivity to programming tutorials and for good reason. Screencasts are too passive, and it’s easy to get lost halfway through. Books and blogs don’t really show how code evolves over time either.

I’m working on a solution too, called CodeMic [1] where instead of bringing the environment to the web, it brings video and workspace sync into the IDE so viewers can follow along directly inside their own editor.

You’ve done an impressive job integrating everything, including the Console for example, that’s especially tricky to pull off in an extension for VSCode, Emacs, or Vim.

[1] https://CodeMic.io
by gryfft | 2025-04-23 14:16:13+00:00
I think for much of the HN crowd, many efficacious engagement hacks will have a sort of "paradoxical reaction." [1] Changes that are "minor" frustrations to average consumers can be dealbreakers to us. For instance, I switched away from Chrome entirely when they took away the rolodex-style tabs on mobile. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction 2. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40772009
by steve-chavez | 2025-04-23 14:16:17+00:00
> If my DB structure changes, I have to force new app versions on every platform because I didn't insulate back-end changes with an API.

To avoid the above problem, it's a standard practice in PostgREST to only expose a schema consisting of views and functions. That allows you to shield the applications from table changes and achieve "logical data independence".

For more details, see https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/explanations/schema_isolat....
by ramraj07 | 2025-04-23 14:16:22+00:00
Sounds like he was doing an xray diffraction experiment? The last time (in my opinion) XRay diffraction based structure results meaningfully changed scientific discourse that affects human life was probably in the 80s or 90s. While it's important work it's no more important for Healthcare than some physics guy doing things with a random metal alloy. The point is there are interesting things but one shouldn't delude that this is the thing that's keeping us from unleashing human health prosperity.
by Keyframe | 2025-04-23 14:16:33+00:00
This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?

I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
by rob | 2025-04-23 14:16:35+00:00
Yes, without an active subscription.

https://docs.stadiamaps.com/geocoding-search-autocomplete/bu...

> Can I Store Geocoding API Results?

> Unlike most vendors, we won't charge you 10x the standard fee per request to store geocoding results long-term! However, we do require an active Standard, Professional, or Enterprise subscription to permanently store results (e.g. in a database). Temporary storage in the normal course of your work is allowed on all plans. See our terms of service for the full legal terms.
by anfractuosity | 2025-04-23 14:16:46+00:00
I didn't think a single photosite was directly converted to a single pixel, there's quite a number of different demosaicing algorithms.

Edit: Upon doing some more reading it sounds like a photosite or sensel, isn't a group of sensors, but a single sensor, which can pick up r,g,b,.. light - "each individual photosite, remember, records only one colour – red, green or blue" - https://www.canon-europe.com/pro/infobank/image-sensors-expl...

I couldn't seem to find a particular name for the RGGB/.. pattern that a bayer filter consists of an array of.
by tjoff | 2025-04-23 14:16:46+00:00
Zero cost is an antifeature.

It is just centralizing the web. You can do a lot with a $4 droplet if a single board computer isn't your cup of tea. Not "buying" into icloud/cloudfare is alone worth that cost. Also much more meaningful stack to learn.

Nothing against the post/author, I just feel the creativity to "exploit" features of the giants that is put in place just to undermine alternatives is misplaced.
by XorNot | 2025-04-23 14:17:08+00:00
US oil and gas is not constrained to being sold solely within the US, nor is it publicly owned by the government.

It has never mattered that the US is technically energy independent, because it's not independent of a number of other resources, and it cannot sustain the sort of cost increases which reductions in global oil and gas supply would lead to: because again, threesome resources aren't publicly owned - the higher revenues flow to the oil companies, not the tax payer.
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-23 14:17:09+00:00
The claim the parent was addressing was that Docker helps with reproducibility. It doesn't. Docker does nothing at all in this regard.

If you want a reproducible Docker image, you're on your own. For example, the most common problem is that many build scripts out in the wild download stuff willy nilly without verifying anything. I've seen NPM package post install scripts do the craziest things. Catching all of that is harder than most would give credit for at first glance, considering that tons of build scripts are written in Turing complete languages. Help from tooling is essential.

When you have to fight the tool to achieve reproducibility, not choosing to do so isn't "using a tool poorly." It's simply using the tool as is. Especially when the vast majority of Dockerfiles out there happily run something along the lines of `apt install foo`, again, without verifying anything.
by derefr | 2025-04-23 14:17:29+00:00
I feel like, despite the apochrycality of it, there’s a theologically-valid interpretation of the quote: namely, the same principle behind putting on your own breath mask first on a plane in an emergency.

The Bible-compatible spin on this might be something like: if you don’t “help yourself” in the absolute strictest sense — feeding yourself, say — but only set out to help others, then you will fail to help others, as your body will fail you before you’ve done a single useful thing. It is not sainthood, not martyrdom, to refuse to do the small work required to accept the “gifts of God” (like a breath mask that keeps you alive long enough to do the work required to save your own children.)
by ksec | 2025-04-23 14:17:48+00:00
10 years after introduction, Swift is now 6.1 and soon to be 6.2. May be another revision or two before finalising on 7.0 ? Then may be Apple could rewrite everything in Swift 7 ?

I know this sounds fun or cool for a lot people on HN. But I much rather they kept Objective-C and keep refining old codebase for the past 10 years instead.

And as many have noted. macOS is now huge. And apart from continuity I dont know any recent macOS feature that made any different for me. We are now close to yet another remake for UI with Vision OS styles.

May be they will do a big clean up when they stop supporting x86 Mac. But I wont be holding my breath.
by otikik | 2025-04-23 14:17:48+00:00
Well the way I see them I don't think they are a unit at all.

And the end pixels are "physical things". Like ceramic tiles on a bathroom wall.

Your wall might be however many meters in length and you might need however squared meters of tile in order to cover it. But still, if you need 10 tiles high and 20 tiles width, you need 200 tiles to cover it. No tension there.

Now you might argue that pixels in a scaled game don't correspond with physical objects in the screen any more. That's ok. A picture of the bathroom wall will look smaller than the wall itself. Or bigger, if you hold it next to your face. It's still 10x20=200 tiles.
by iambateman | 2025-04-23 14:18:17+00:00
I think the divide between HN and the world is significant, here.

For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.

A lot of the world needs Chrome to keep working well for them.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-04-23 14:18:39+00:00
This after they cut 15,000 employees (over 10% of the workforce at the time) last August? How many times in a row can you cut 10%, 20%, of the workforce without impacting ability to deliver? Either these people were doing nothing of value (in which case leadership is incompetent) or they were doing something of value and the company performance will be impacted by their departure (in which case leadership is incompetent), so which is it?
by c0n5pir4cy | 2025-04-23 14:18:50+00:00
Probably also important to note, is that ByteDance and TikTok are also currently being investigated by the European Commission. Although for different reasons under the Digital Services Act - so it's not like they are targeting US companies specifically with the law.

Also the commission is known to fine European entities all the time for various reasons, one of the recent ones I can think of is Pierre Cardin and it's partners for restricting cross border European sales.
by 0hijinks | 2025-04-23 14:18:51+00:00
>> Unsurprisingly, the combined solver performed the best, solving the puzzle in an average of 4.77 moves. The quantum solver was next, with an average of 5.32 moves, while the classical solver came in last place with 5.88 moves on average.

This effect is pretty neat. From the paper [1], the quantum solver can only do what they call "square root SWAPs", which is like a tile swap that relies on certain superposition rules. The classical solver can only use standard tile SWAPs. The combined solver can do both. A little over half the puzzle states are solved faster by the classical solver, but certain tricky states benefit from this new "move type". So the game had this quantum-like computation option tacked on, but certain initial positions just don't benefit from it.

I don't see any sort of "applications" section in the paper. They talk about how I guess you could build the puzzle thing with "arrays of ultracold atoms in optical lattices", but that still doesn't answer the question. My takeaway is that even problems which benefit dramatically from quantum algorithms in some cases (in a future where that's cheap and widely available) should have careful algorithm design built on other heuristics.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22287
by vFunct | 2025-04-23 14:19:09+00:00
It doesn't need a battery at all. Just have it connect directly to a Mac to use as a virtual Mac display. It's what I use my Vision Pro for as its primary use case, to have an ultra-wide monitor in front of me without taking up any physical space. I use it for hours every day as my primary programming platform.

I really have no other use case, and don't need the VR/AR features. The virtual ultra-wide display of the latest VisonOS updates, which has the area of 2 4k monitors, is just amazing for coding. It's an incredible user experience and worth every penny for the Vision Pro for that alone.

Throwing away some of the AR/VR features and using it as a virtual display only would make it lighter and smaller. I could use something that doesn't block me from taking a drink while I code, for example. I couldn't care less about video games as well.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-23 14:20:06+00:00
It is hard to say either way I think…

Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.

Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.

And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
by bitbasher | 2025-04-23 14:20:06+00:00
"Fully-owned" when it's relying on GitHub Pages, Hugo, Obsidian and Cloudflare to function.

Two of which are services operated by a corporate entity and one of which is a closed source piece of software.

The only thing "owned" here is the fact that the entire blog is simple markdown and the domain name. However, that doesn't mean it's very portable. It's not impossible, but it's a lot more work than I would want to do.
by akadeb | 2025-04-23 14:20:18+00:00
I agree, it's still pricy. The cost works out better with `gpt-4o-mini-realtime-preview-2024-12-17`.

Yep its constrained to the system prompt but I pass in conversation history with each new session to keep it relevant. It also supports tool calling which is clutch.

Have you tried Hume AI? They've got a neat suite of APIs that give you more control on each session.
by heycerebro | 2025-04-23 14:22:53+00:00
Cerebro is a knowledge management platform designed for lifelong learners, creators, and curious minds overwhelmed by the internet’s information flood. It helps you save anything—articles, videos, podcast clips—and then uses AI to organize and contextualize it. Instead of a messy archive, you get a living system that surfaces what’s most relevant, when you need it.
by pkphilip | 2025-04-23 14:23:24+00:00
This is a real issue with most vehicles these days. I have a pal with a Triumph Street Twin which gave the message in the console and they couldn't figure out what was causing it. The bike would go into limp mode indicating as though there is something wrong with the engine.

They tried for months to diagnose why the message was coming up and they couldn't figure it out.

It would be great to have a motorcycle with as little electronic magic as possible to allow it to be repaired easily
by piltdownman | 2025-04-23 14:23:47+00:00
They had a lot of anarchy and counter culture, particularly amongst East German Engineers, simply as part of the social fabric and societal makeup of East/West Germany pre-Unification.

Unfortunately the basis of 'startup culture' in 21st Century America is 'move fast, break things' and 'scale first, apologise later' which is anathema in a highly regulated and bureaucratic culture like present day Germanys'.

Give that their post-WW2 success came from regulated financial services provisioning, and high-precision machining and engineering products shipped out of the Rhine river basin, it's not hard to understand why Berlin's mindset is distinctively not that of the American Pioneer in the West.
by hylaride | 2025-04-23 14:24:04+00:00
Killing it was the right call for the wrong reasons. But because it was the wrong reasons, it meant that no attention was paid on investing the tech into a new plane or resources.

Diefenbaker being "suckered" by the Americans is not what really happened (the CBC mini-series on the Arrow has some really cringey scenes about that angle, as well as portraying conservative party ineptitude and American arrogance). The more you read into Diefenbaker, the more he comes across as vain and susceptible to overreacting to slights (perceived or real), in over his head on the international stage, and ignorant of cold war realities (despite it being his government that had Canada form NORAD with the US).

It did set the stage for Canada's mercurial relationship with the United States, as Canada tended to over-react and over-compensate our opinions in both directions since then. This still continues to this day.
by mrob | 2025-04-23 14:24:05+00:00
The old Internet, even with all its "unsafe" content, felt far more friendly than the modern Internet for two big reasons:

1. Everybody who was there actively wanted to be there. You could easily live your life without Internet access and most people did. This also meant you could take a break and disconnect without feeling like you were seriously missing out.

2. Web design hadn't been relentlessly optimized for extracting money from you. There was no A/B testing or engagement metrics. Commercial web sites existed but they weren't designed by expert psychological manipulators like modern ones. Amateur web sites were purely amateur in the original sense (something done for the love of it) with no possibility of monetization corrupting this positive attitude.

I don't see any chance of returning to that state of affairs.
by bix6 | 2025-04-23 14:24:06+00:00
Awesome! I setup something similar recently for my website and love it. I go Cursor with Hugo to GitHub to Cloudflare. I saw many Wrangler mentions so want to look at that at some point?

It’s funny because we could ostensibly switch to any git hoster but it’s really only GitHub and gitlab huh? And Cloudflare is hard to beat.
by musicale | 2025-04-23 14:24:42+00:00
Contempt for stable kernel data structures and APIs (and forget about any sort of kernel ABI) might make things easier for certain kernel developers, but it offloads a constant maintenance burden onto many other people, such as eBPF, driver, and kernel extension developers.

This sort of asymmetry is why system modules, and platforms in general, should absorb pain in order to benefit their many clients, rather than doing the opposite.

Could be worse though - some platforms (cough, iOS) are happy to break user apps every year and offload a constant maintenance burden onto many thousands of app developers, when a more stable ABI would save developers (and users) billions of dollars in aggregate.