MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johntarter | 2025-05-03 20:22:42+00:00
It was a problem to Warren Buffet and he used a parable in the past to explain the issue:

A perpetuation of this transfer will lead to major trouble. To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that’s how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.

Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading outlet, Squanderville.

The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there’s a quid pro quo–but to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).

Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off–or simply service–the debt they’re piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying. Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of Squanderville.

At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat–they have nothing left to trade–but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest. It can be argued, of course, that the present value of the future production that Squanderville must forever ship to Thriftville only equates to the production Thriftville initially gave up and that therefore both have received a fair deal. But since one generation of Squanders gets the free ride and future generations pay in perpetuity for it, there are–in economist talk–some pretty dramatic “intergenerational inequities.”

Source: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/growing.pdf
by palata | 2025-05-03 20:23:05+00:00
Hmm... I see a rant against the state of software (bad software, AI diarrhea, ...) and TooBigTech having control over everything. I can agree with that, but it has nothing to do with the "passwords vs passkeys" question.

The rant against passkeys? I don't get it. Just like one can use a password manager controlled by TooBigTech or KeePass, one can use a passkey controlled by TooBigTech or a Yubikey. I find it great to authenticate directly with my Yubikey (over FIDO2) instead of using my Yubikey to decrypt a password and copying it in a form.

And then there is the part that is completely wrong about security. They say that they "can't trust their phone" so they don't want to keep the passkeys there. But that is not correct: if the passkeys are encrypted and the key is stored in a TPM, then that's effectively similar to having a security key (you have to trust the TPM, just as you have to trust the security key of course).

And then there is the nonsense:

> I can set up KeePass Portable on a USB key, run it in Linux via WINE, place it inside an encrypted VeraCrypt container, copy to any which file sharing service, if I want.

If the device where you enter the password is compromised, then the password will be compromised as soon as you enter it on that device. No matter how much you show off with your funny setup with WINE and VeraCrypt. A password manager doesn't protect against that, so passwords can be exfiltrated as they are used. Whereas a FIDO2 authentication requires the passkey every time. E.g. I need to physically touch my Yubikey for it to sign the challenge. It could be MitM, but it is visible ("I touched my Yubikey and it didn't work, what happened?").

Authenticating over FIDO2 with a security key is strictly superior to entering a password in a field, period.
by danenania | 2025-05-03 20:23:18+00:00
Is it relevant? This is not a post about AI coding, and Plandex is not a startup that "went from X to AI-powered X". It also has very little to do with adding AI features to a product... it's a general purpose coding agent, not a tool for building AI features specifically.

I mean, I discuss AI a lot on HN. Do I need to include a disclaimer on every comment?
by throwaway7783 | 2025-05-03 20:24:03+00:00
I have repeated this elsewhere. APIs for UI tend to diverge from APIs in general in practice.

For applications that are not highly interactive, you don't quite need a lot of tooling on the BE, and since need to have a BE anyway, a lot of standard tooling is already in there.

React style SPAs are useful in some cases, but most apps can live with HTMX style "SPA"s
by throw09093 | 2025-05-03 20:24:48+00:00
> At that time the price of electricity on the official market was in the negative at around -1€/MWh.

> Current evidence therefore points to a problem in the synchronisation of the grid. All sources feeding power into the grid must be synchronised at the same frequency, 50 Hertz. To facilitate this synchronisation, stable base-load power is required, which is normally provided by nuclear and other large gas and hydroelectric facilities. These sources act as a natural buffer against disturbances

So:

- price is negative, so solar automatically disconnects not to pay for providing electricity

- nuclear is overloaded at unexpected time, it also disconnect due to safety.

Seems like a bug in accounting software for solar power plants. It disconnected too many power plants too quickly! I bet like 40% of solar plants are using the same software for managing connectivity.
by musicale | 2025-05-03 20:25:36+00:00
There is a difference between invention and innovation. Apple is often late to the party (mp3 players, smartphones, tablets, smart watches, wireless earphones, ...) but when they arrive they often shake things up with category-defining products.

There is a good argument to be made that Apple introduced the modern smartphone (Android switched to multitouch and a virtual keyboard in response to the iPhone[1]) and app store ecosystem.

It is an extraordinary achievement, especially considering the skepticism expressed by dominant incumbents such as Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, etc. in 2007. iPhone would, at best, have less impact than Windows Mobile.

[1] https://simpleprogrammer.com/history-internet-part-15-androi...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-03 20:25:38+00:00
> It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.

Depends on the system and country.

Over here in Poland, I've had or witness several encounters with "artificial intelligence assistants" over the past ~5 years[0], that would ignore you hitting 0, and respond to "talk to an agent" with some variant of "I understand you want to talk to an agent, but before I connect you, perhaps there is something I could help you with?", repeatedly. Swearing, or at least getting recognizably annoyed, tends to eventually cut through that.

--

[0] - Also, annoyingly, for the past 2 years we had cheap LLMs that would be better to handle this than whatever shit they still deploy. Even today, hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line would yield infinitely more helpful bot than whatever garbage they're still deploying. Alas, the bots aren't meant to be helpful.
by bartread | 2025-05-03 20:25:57+00:00
> put text on screen

I get where you're coming from but that's actually quite a bit of an oversimplification even for many web apps outside of the 1% for which a lot of modern web development solutions and frameworks seem to have been created.

For one thing it doesn't take any account of input. When someone draws something with Figma or writes something in Google Docs or buys something from Amazon - or indeed any online shop at whatever scale - or gets a set of insurance quotes from a comparison site or amends something in an employee's HR record or whatever it may be the user's input is a crucial part of the system and its behaviour.

For another, we're not just putting text on the screen: we're putting data on the screen. And whilst data can always be rendered as text (even if not very readably or comprehensibly), depending on what it represents, it can often be more meaningfully rendered graphically.

And then there are integrations that trigger behaviour in other systems and services: GitHub, Slack, eBay, Teams, Flows, Workato, Salesforce, etc. Depending on what these integrations do, they can behave as inputs, outputs, or both.

And all of the above can result in real world activity: money is moved, orders are shipped from warehouses, flow rates are changed in pipelines, generators spool up or down, students are offered (or not offered) places at universities, etc.
by room271 | 2025-05-03 20:26:36+00:00
The problem is that people are frequently using SPA JS frameworks for things that are clearly not gmail of figma -- i.e. news websites and other sites with minimal interactivity or dynamic behaviour. If you are genuinely building an 'app'-like thing, then of course you need some kind of JS SPA framework, but too often people are reaching for these tools for non-app use cases.
by code_biologist | 2025-05-03 20:27:29+00:00
Beyond Rails and 37signals, I'm most familiar with him as a car racer, photography enthusiast, and his recent "buy once"/post-subscription software advocacy.

This is an interview with him last year on "one person" approaches to web app development that I liked a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rlATWBNvMw
by danenania | 2025-05-03 20:27:48+00:00
Yeah that's true, but I would still categorize it as an execution problem. If your product (or your AI feature) doesn't work because the models aren't ready yet, it means you failed at design and implementation imho. It doesn't mean there's no plausible AI integration that would make the product more valuable.

It's like if you choose the wrong database and it makes your product slow. It probably doesn't imply you shouldn't be using any database; you just need a different one.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-03 20:28:27+00:00
I stopped reading after this, sorry you totally lost me, im blocking this website:

"However, variable renewable sources, such as solar photovoltaic, do not have this capability. They generate direct current which is converted to alternating current at 50 Hertz, but they cannot react automatically to frequency variations. "

Nonsense. Go to any solar installer and ask him about this capability. or go to your roofs PV inverters manual and look up section about inputting "grid parameters".

Writer is either total ignorant or bad actor.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-05-03 20:28:39+00:00
As somebody with an expert level knowledge with MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Phoenix Framework, etc., and an experience building large-scale enterprise-grade apps using simpler technologies like jQuery, StimulusJS and plain old JavaScript on the front end with a little bit of React thrown in here and there, I found Development cycles to be much faster with these simpler stacks overall. The complexity of the code base never ended up turning to be a liability that it creates significant overhead and bottlenecks for new engineers joining the team to jump in and understand the end-to-end workflows of things.

Fast forward to what I am doing today in my new job. We have a pretty complex setup using Redwoodjs along with several layers of abstraction with Graphql (which I approve of) and a ton of packages and modules tied together on the front end with react, storybook, etc. and some things I am not even sure why they are there. I see new engineers joining our team and banging their heads to make even the smallest of changes and to implement new features and having to make code changes at multiple different places. I find myself doing similar things as well from time to time - and I always can't help but think about the complexity that I used to deal with when working with these MVC frameworks and how ridiculously easy it was to just throw logic in a controller and a service layer and and the view templates for the UI stuff. It all fit in so easily and shipping features was super simple and quick.

I wouldn't discount react as a framework but I am also starting to some cracks caused by using TypeScript on the backend. This entire Javascript world seems to be a mess you don't want to mess with. This is probably just me with an opinion, but but using Turbo, Stimulus and and sprinkles of LiveView got me really really far very quickly.
by hencq | 2025-05-03 20:29:01+00:00
I remember reading an article about exactly that some time last year: https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-inverter The technology is grid forming inverters, unlike the normal grid following converters. I'm definitely not an expert, but I think the part you're quoting is hinting at the following:

> Grid-following inverters operate only if they can “see” an existing voltage and frequency on the grid that they can synchronize to. They rely on controls that sense the frequency of the voltage waveform and lock onto that signal, usually by means of a technology called a phase-locked loop. So if the grid goes down, these inverters will stop injecting power because there is no voltage to follow. A key point here is that grid-following inverters do not deliver any inertia.
by omneity | 2025-05-03 20:29:20+00:00
Tangential but I noticed a certain common conflation between pre-rendering and server-side rendering. Very often plain SSR is all it takes for good SEO performance, SSR in this case simply being rendering the page on-demand before serving it to the user.

Pre-rendering (as popularized by static site generators) is the additional step that increases complexity significantly, sometimes security issues too when session-protected cached pages are mistakenly served to the wrong users.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-03 20:29:33+00:00
I don't think anyone's disputing that classical neural activity is primary. But the question quickly becomes: what decides and coordinates that neural activity? It is it just an emergent effect of each neuron firing on instinct, producing an output for every input? Or is there some non-local coordination (quantum coherence) that calculates and ensures a correct firing sequence?

Last I checked the evidence was pretty slim for the later. But it's not zero. (Check out Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory). We've seen quantum coherence in microtubules, during photosynthesis, and superradiance in proteins. But no direct evidence of non-local effects in a living brain. Yet.
by anna81 | 2025-05-03 20:29:56+00:00
I've seen a lot of temporary SMS services either require sign-ups, are full of ads, or don't work consistently.

So I built TempNumberPhone.com — a free, fast, and simple tool to get temporary numbers from the US, UK, and Germany. No sign-up or personal info required.

It’s useful for verifying platforms like Gmail, Facebook, and others without exposing your real number.

Feedback is welcome! Also open to ideas on how to improve it.
by knorker | 2025-05-03 20:30:07+00:00
Ok, we clearly have an extremely different definition of the word "the" workhorse of open source.

It doesn't mean "more than zero projects are Java based". Nor does it mean "most (opensource?) Java applications are based on open source". That latter is borderline circular, only Oracle legal shenanigans makes it not circular.

> and Java dominates enterprise space

I said nothing about enterprise. Clearly Java is HUGE in enterprise.

> so it is a huge open source workhorse

That sentence took a strange turn. Enterprise, and then back to open source?

> just more obscure than Linux, gcc etc.

Obscure? I'd expect Java to be about as strong a brand as Linux. Among developers in general I'd expect gcc to be orders of magnitude more obscure. There's no programmer out there who has not heard of Java, but many have never heard of gcc.
by anonymousiam | 2025-05-03 20:30:09+00:00
In a system of micro-inverters, they need something to synchronize with. There needs to be a "truth" reference, so they can push their power onto the grid by slightly leading the phase of that.

If some critical mass of PV micro-inverters exceeds the traditional generators, they'll push so hard that the grid itself will change phase, and blackouts are the result.

One possible solution might be to use a better oscillator in the micro-inverter and limit the rate of phase shift. Unfortunately, the grids of the world have been moving in the opposite direction and now allow more drift than in the past, so where do you draw the line?

https://medium.com/@brandonvar/power-grid-stability-issues-a...
by dismalaf | 2025-05-03 20:31:33+00:00
Rails can be API only and use any frontend you want.

Hotwire is the default and they develop it because DHH wants to, but they're not putting up any barriers to you using whatever you want.

Also, DHH doesn't seem to care about how big it is. His stated goal is for it to forever be a framework that's usable by a single dev.
by philjohnson | 2025-05-03 20:32:09+00:00
Scrolling is now fixed! And just updated so that if you click outside modal it closes. Working on update now so you can edit text you've already added.

Agree with you regarding fonts, bolding underlining etc. and having instant page deletion with undo/redo. Will definitely be adding soon.

Fixed the arrow closing the preview pane so that the page stays centered.

I plan on adding a lot more features so that it's on par with ilovepdf.com and smallpdf.com. The libraries I'm already using support many of the features they have, so it'll be easy to add them while keeping everything fully in the browser.

Thanks for the feedback!
by dahart | 2025-05-03 20:32:12+00:00
> The economics are the same for a startup and established company, no?

No, I don’t think so at all. A startup founder and a startup investor are starting from completely different places and have completely different risks from a minimum wage Walmart or McDonalds employee, and they usually occupy different social classes.

Workers in a co-op are part owner, so they become, in part, the capitalists. They might be fractional capitalists, but they are part worker and part owner. That’s fine, and it’s not what Marx was worried about. Marx was worried about the plight of the laborer who gets no share of the ownership at all. Startup founders are sometimes also owners, they are capitalists. Investors are more pure capitalists, they use their money to buy ownership of companies in hopes of making more money. Stock purchases are also a way to be a fractional owner in a way, that’s one way to look at it. Most minimum wage employees don’t have any stock, most of the lower class doesn’t have any stock.

Nobody said that owners don’t take risks in capitalism. They do take risks with their capital when they invest.

> Your margin is my opportunity

Tell that to the low-paid & minimum-wage workers across the country. Somehow competition has failed to result in the minimum wage going up on its own. Somehow competition hasn’t eliminated the working poor.

BTW most of the ultra rich capitalists are wildly in favor of generational wealth, since it benefits them and their families. Historically it was true that the majority of ultra-wealthy people had inherited their wealth, despite all the rags-to-riches and startup stories we’re told.
by wtallis | 2025-05-03 20:32:28+00:00
> a specialized low-power unit in an iGPU is going to be practically indistinguishable from a NPU, except that it will probably be easier to target from existing GPU API's.

Possibly, depending on how low the power actually is. We can't really tell from NVIDIA's tensor cores, because waking up an NVIDIA discrete GPU at all has a higher power cost than running an NPU. Intel's iGPUs have matrix units, but I'm not sure if they can match their NPU on power or performance.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-03 20:32:29+00:00
Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else.

It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile phones or Internet, and thus, on average, for every lost customer that switches to a competitor, they gain one that switched from a competitor.
by Propelloni | 2025-05-03 20:32:56+00:00
Gnome's Papers and, of course, KDE's Okular sign PDF without a hassle. If you need to edit PDFs, too, MasterPDF [1] is a solid choice. Not quite PDF X-Change in power or Acrobat Pro in looks it is sufficient for daily tasks.

The real obstacle to digitally signing is bad support for Linux by the card reader vendors, as usual.

[1] https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/
by apexalpha | 2025-05-03 20:33:55+00:00
I’m not sure if it’s originally his but a small talk by him about getting a car made an impression on me and since watching it it’s become a good motivator to stay in shape.

This seems like a good moment to share it.

https://youtu.be/0fMRHpguTPM?si=75lLHzDynMCKhT9H
by dan_can_code | 2025-05-03 20:34:19+00:00
Next.js has introduced some keywords such as 'use server' and 'use client' that you enter in the file at the top. Much like 'use strict'. If you attempt to use server code in a client file for example, it will get caught by the ts compiler / Linter.

But for sure the lack of clear lines for where the server ends and the client begins has always been a pain of these kinds of framework offerings.
by egypturnash | 2025-05-03 20:34:20+00:00
I’ve had a Wordpress blog since 2012, and many years of a Livejournal before that (when timeline filters were pretty much nonexistent) and I don’t think I ever felt this fear. Sometimes I had art to share. Sometimes a serious post about something that was on my mind. Sometimes just the results of a “which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle are you” quiz that half my friends had already posted.

Worrying about this “pressure” is a great way to be that guy with three posts about their new static site generator and nothing else.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-03 20:34:52+00:00
> As a user, the typical SPA offers a worse experience.

Your typical SPA has loads of pointless roundtrips. SSR has no excess roundtrips by definition, but there's probably ways to build a 'SPA' experience that avoids these too. (E.g. the "HTML swap" approach others mentioned ITT tends to work quite well for that.)

The high compute overhead of typical 'vDOM diffing' approaches is also an issue of course, but at least you can pick something like Svelte/Solid JS to do away with that.