MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-05-21 03:50:39+00:00
It's really hard to bring a case against one of the most powerful and valuable companies on the planet. The strategy here was obviously to throw every possible complaint out, knowing that not all of them will work. You don't go to court expecting a full sweep, you expect to land a hit. Bringing ten claims is giving them ten chances to win. Which Epic did, and ultimately, the downstream effects of this will end up upending the mobile app economy entirely.

I think the outcome here was inevitable, but I'm certainly annoyed how long it takes. Epic has lucked out in the fact that Apple very unwisely angered the judge, which is a really, really bad idea. It's common for nothing to actually change until all of the appeals are exhausted, and this case probably has another five years of appeals and motions and stuff ahead of it. (Google v. Oracle, another huge big tech case, took 11 years!) But YGR is clearly so irritated at Apple's bull---- she decided to make things effective immediately.

Apple's game of course, is about protecting the 30% cut at all cost. Once it is dead and buried and the appeals are over, I suspect Apple will look to globally unify it's rules again, so you'll probably see things pioneered in the EU, like third party stores, and things pioneered in the US, like anti-steering rules, eventually get applied globally once they start having to compete fairly on IAP costs.
by vgatherps | 2025-05-21 03:51:41+00:00
I wish that there was a useful “freeze” intrinsic exposed, even if only for primitive types and not for generic user types, where the values of the frozen region become unspecified instead of undefined. I believe llvm has one now?

Iirc the work on safe transmute also involves a sort of “any bit pattern” trait?

I’ve also dealt with pain implementing similar interfaces in Rust, and it really feels like you end up jumping through a ton of hoops (and in some of my cases, hurting performance) all to satisfy the abstract machine, at no benefit to programmer or application. It’s really a case where the abstract machine cart is leading the horse
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-21 03:51:49+00:00
I think the upsides of Deno having its own isolated ecosystem are way overstated.

In practice, it would stay a small group of hobbyists responsible for doing weird things like maintaining ports of npm libraries that deno users want, like official SDKs.

It’s a grim end state if you’re trying to be more than that. And it seems to only appeal to people with a weird vendetta against Node/NPM which is also a crappy user to cater to.
by johnny_________ | 2025-05-21 03:52:36+00:00
I ponder this a lot, but the interface of "MIT technology Review" is unbearably overdesigned, its got that annoying narrow smartphone format where you can't zoom out, and then all these fancy graphics. Can't we have crisp, easy-to-read HTML? The format annoyed me so much I didn't read the article because this kind of design makes me doubt the source. Alas
by Jordan-117 | 2025-05-21 03:53:11+00:00
I think there's a sliding scale in both cases. Vanilla prompting something like DALL-E 3 and uncritically accepting what it spits out is the AI equivalent of dime-a-dozen smartphone snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or an ocean sunset. But like your description of professional photography, there are more intricate AI approaches where an expert user can carefully select a model, a fine-tune/LORA, adjust the temperature or seed, inpaint or layer different elements, and of course have the artistic vision to describe something interesting in the first place.
by ziofill | 2025-05-21 03:55:23+00:00
I used a “trick” to make YouTube work in my favour. For a few days I purposefully watched and liked/subscribed a bunch of videos about things that I think make me a better me (jazz piano lessons, philosophy conversations, math/physics/CS lectures, etc) until the feed only contains those. If I notice it drifting because sometimes it tries to pull something on you, I make sure I thumb down the new shit and retrain it a little. Has been working well so far!
by alephnerd | 2025-05-21 03:55:51+00:00
Why not China. China spends 1.73% of it's GDP on subsidizes compared to 0.4-0.6% for France and Germany [0].

At least Germany and France open factories across the EU. Chinese manufacturers did not until the EU began tariffs actions.

Furthermore, Chinese dumping in solar destroyed Germany's original lead in PV manufacturing, and China continues to force foreign manufacturers like VW to partner with Chinese SOEs.

European nations may as well demand the same as well then.

And Chinese dumping is something all nations are fighting - especially other developing countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, etc.

[0] - https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publi...
by erickhill | 2025-05-21 03:56:02+00:00
Can't help being a little nitpicky, but the CDTV was an A500, not A1000. So it was 1987 tech inside a stereo box + CD player, not 1985.

But at the end of the day it really didn't matter. I remember seeing a CDTV at a store and it wasn't even in the computer section. It was in the stereo department sitting in the middle of the sales floor in just a stack of boxes. You had to know what it was all about when you saw it. The sales guys didn't know what to do with it, sadly.
by ggm | 2025-05-21 03:57:54+00:00
I think in hindsight it would have been amazing to have senior students in the team exercises, but really what would have been even more excellent would have been industry placement. Things like not having this is why my 1982 degree failed the bar for BCS chartered engineer status.

I continue to believe the first 12-18 months after graduation are vital. I still can't believe some of the things I thought about s/w before I entered the workforce and I can't believe some of the things I got away with over the years since.
by dnautics | 2025-05-21 03:57:55+00:00
> it's not progressing in a consistent direction

I've maintained a project in zig since either 0.4 or 0.5 and i dont think this is the case at all. supporting 0.12 -> 0.13 was no lines of code, iirc, and 0.13->0.14 was just making sure my zig parser could handle the new case feature (that lets you write a duff's device).

zig may seem quirky but it's highly internally consistent, and not far off from C. every difference with c was made for good reasons (e.g. `var x:u8` vs `char x` gives you context free parsing)

i would say my gripes are:

1. losing async

2. not making functions const declarations like javascript (but i get why they want the sugar)
by somenameforme | 2025-05-21 04:01:21+00:00
You're spinning in 180s fast enough to make somebody dizzy. It's clear that what's happening isn't some "triumph of individual liberty". So why is it happening? Economics is often given as a reason, but that's also not supported by data.

There is an extremely strong inverse relationship between fertility and income. And the reason for that, as you seemingly were already acknowledging yourself not long ago, is culture. We live in a wasteful culture where people are trained to want new things, and especially expensive things, solely because of advertising and culture.

Poor kids with Jordans that they can't tell apart from regular shoes blind, and mid class kids with the $1000 phones that they couldn't tell apart from a free-with-plan one for what they use them for, are the same sort of nonsense. These people are seen as gullible exploitable idiots by the corporations selling them product, and that is how all of society should see them, because it's true.

And I think people chase these things under some fantasy that it'll make them happy. But it never does - not beyond the length of time that e.g. you stick to a consistent argument, so they're left chasing carrots forever. Always planning to start that family once they finally catch that carrot. But they never do.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-21 04:02:16+00:00
> Power is potential, the ability to affect or effect, control[0]. Violence can be powerful, because a dead foe can't hurt you. Nonviolence can be powerful, because a dissuaded foe can't hurt you.

I was going more for the "be the change you want" perspective than what perceived power can accomplish. Ultimately, power is an illusion and consumes rather than enables.

> Who you are determines what you do.

Technically this is correct. However, it ignores choice and the value of personal growth found in honest introspection.

> What you do reflects who you are.

Very true. And if one chooses to do something different than what would have been done as an earlier version of oneself, does that not reflect growth?

> The path you are walking on, whether to your design or not, requires power to prevent straying.

Choice is not power, even though it is powerful, unless the assumed one of the multitude of definitions cited is the first:

The ability to do or undergo something.

Which is incongruent with the implication of what I originally quoted:

The lesson is clear, that if you want a world you want to be a part of, then you must become powerful and choose to use that power for good.

So which is it?
by GunjanWalecha | 2025-05-21 04:02:50+00:00
For product design methods and collaborative exercises: https://www.aha.io You can use component libraries like skeleton UI:https://www.skeleton.dev/ or Schadcn: https://ui.shadcn.com/, so you don't have to design the components an style guides yourself. If you are interested in reading just one book and be confident about your design decisions, read : The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-05-21 04:03:18+00:00
Growth is trivial to achieve when you are starting from zero. My footnote very much alludes to this. This is incidentally what the US did to powers like Britain a century and a half ago.

I just find it amusing that in this theory of trade China has found a way to do all the work while the US does nothing and takes all the value. Perhaps all that extra money is not as easy to claim as the OP suggests.

Maybe economies are changing and purely physical goods are becoming less valuable...
by mynameisash | 2025-05-21 04:03:39+00:00
Norman talks a good deal about cognitive load and that good design is intuitive. Ideally, you shouldn't notice good design because it's near invisible.

OTOH, I recall Tufte going on and on about cutting the "data-ink ratio" to the point of making graphs that we generally understand at a glance suddenly very unintuitive. I can dig into the book again if necessary, but I recall he essentially argued that box-and-whisker plots became just a few dots. There's meaning conveyed by the boxes and the whiskers, and changing that convention - even if it uses more ink than absolutely necessary - adds significant cognitive load.
by neilwilson | 2025-05-21 04:05:59+00:00
There can’t be or China et al wouldn’t be selling their stuff for mere promises.

People don’t swap bananas for apples. They sell them for money, and money is retained for its own benefit. Failing to treat money as its own exchange product is the problem.

The world is not run by interest rates. It’s run by monetary flow, retained in its own right for insurance, status and mercantile purposes.
by rhdjsjebshjffn | 2025-05-21 04:06:35+00:00
I'm not sure how nvidia's driver track record would have helped them, but drivers nor linux nor software in any way has ever really been nvidia's strong-suit. but even with the popularity of it CUDA cannot explain nvidia's success alone; you also need the demand of butcoin and the secondary-but-farcical imitation of LLMs but also the inexplicable lack of awareness of alternatives that need explaining...
by CJefferson | 2025-05-21 04:06:51+00:00
I agree, I'd go further and say I wonder why primitive types aren't "frozen" by default.

I totally understand not wanting to promise things get zeroed, but I don't really understand why full UB, instead of just "they have whatever value is initially in memory / the register / the compiler chose" is so much better.

Has anyone ever done a performance comparison between UB and freezing I wonder? I can't find one.
by hansvm | 2025-05-21 04:07:10+00:00
The city bus uses tires with a harder rubber and dimensions such that the pressure at the road is less, plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.

To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity. Volume lost per mile driven is basic high-school arithmetic, and the only real questions are regarding data quality and whether the self-imposed constraints (e.g., examining real-world wear rather than wear given optimal driving or something) are reasonable.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-21 04:08:23+00:00
None of what I said detracts from China's success in eradicating extreme poverty.

That said, the majority of Chinese households are still significantly less well off than their peers in other upper middle income countries as stats have shown multiple times.

I don't see why anyone would be so virulently opposed to moving some industrial subsidy spend to expanding healthcare, revamping the current insurance system, providing better quality schools to reduce the cost burden lower tier Chinese households have when spending on education, increasing rural retirement pensions, reforming Chinese income taxes to be less regressive, etc.

Raising household disposable incomes by $2000 a year would help increase GDP growth from 4% to 5% (back of the napkin math) - and that too in a sustainable manner. And this is something that is fairly doable by expanding social services and welfare accessibility. This would also solve much of the overproduction problem that has lead to trade wars globally.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-21 04:09:47+00:00
I mean, unless we're turning electricity into Uranium, nuclear obviously isn't storage.

But when it comes to reliability, storage absolutely is the alternative to generation like nuclear. China already has 57GW of pumped hydro storage (about equal to their whole nuclear fleet), and they added 42GW of new 2.5hr battery storage just in 2024 alone. Given the declining price of both types of storage, it's likely that these will dominate nuclear when it comes to short- and medium-term grid reliability.
by monkeycantype | 2025-05-21 04:10:30+00:00
I apologise if my comment comes across as mean and snarky, and I can see how it does so I'm sorry. I wasn't my inention to mock the poster.

I have always been interested that we cannot see infrared, but some reptiles can, we cannot because our eyeballs are flooded with warm blood, there is no way for our bodies to distinguish signal from noise.

This made me think of the scrotums purpose to maintain the testes slightly below body temperature, which then amused me with the idea that it might therefore be able to function as a kind of infra red, body light retina.

so I was mocking some primal hunter ideas, but certainly no one posting on this page
Show HN: I made a All-in-One app for Freelancers
by sdidi | 2025-05-21 04:11:38+00:00
I made a web app for Freelancers or anyone else who needs a platform to manage projects, communicate with clients, send invoices, and organize files seamlessly. I'm a freelancer, and I was always frustrated with juggling Google Drive, email, Trello, and chat—all over the place. So, I decided to build this solution. https://collabodev.lucination3d.com
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-21 04:11:42+00:00
I foresee a slightly different outcome: If companies can genuinely enhance worker productivity with LLMs (for many roles, this will be true), then they can expand their business without hiring more people. Instead of firing, they will slow the rate of hiring. Finally, the 250 USD/month license isn't that much of a cost burden if you start with the most senior people, then slowly extend the privilege to lower and lower levels, carefully deciding if the role will be positively impacted by access to a high quality LLM. (This is similar to how Wall Street trading floors decide who gets access to expensive market data via Reuters or Bloomberg terminal.)

For non-technical office jobs, LLMs will act like a good summer intern, and help to suppress new graduate hiring. Stuff like HR, legal, compliance, executive assistants, sales, marketing/PR, and accounting will all greatly benefit from LLMs. Programming will take much longer because it requires incredibly precise outputs.

One low hanging fruit for programming and LLMs: What if Microsoft creates a plug-in to the VBA editor in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) that can help to write VBA code? For more than 25 years, I have watched non-technical people use VBA, and I have generally been impressed with the results. Sure, their code looks like shit and everything has hard-coded limits, but it helps them do their work faster. It is a small miracle what people can teach themselves with (1) a few chapters of a introductory VBA book, (2) some blog posts / Google searches, and (3) macro recording. If you added (4) LLM, then it would greatly boost the productivity of Microsoft Office power users.
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-21 04:14:11+00:00
I feel embarrassment for the designers and engineers who did the work for YouTube Shorts -> Hide -> “Okay we’ll hide them for a week!” I just cannot imagine having to be party to that kind of hot garbage.

I get that companies are designed to soullessly seek optimization of revenue. But there are humans who work at them and those humans do have free will to be party to it or not.
by valleyer | 2025-05-21 04:14:26+00:00
This is great! Well done.

I've used the realtime API for something similar (also related to practicing speaking, though not for foreign languages). I just wanted to comment that the realtime API will definitely give you the user's transcriptions -- they come back as an `server.conversation.item.input_audio_transcription.completed` event. I use it in my app for exactly that purpose.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-21 04:14:58+00:00
Eh. It works, and works fairly well. I looked at all kinds of alternatives, and this was the one that seemed the most practical.

There’s a reason that there’s so little support for this kind of thing out there. It’s deceptively simple.

I’m a Swift app developer, not a backend guy. I just need a system that delivers the data I need, at an acceptable performance, and this does it.

It’s part of a system that aggregates about 35,000 records, from about 50 servers, and scrubs a lot of really filthy data. This part is for adding missing timezone info.

The deal is about “frontloading” all the data scrubbing, so that the system can quickly return an arbitrary amount of uniform data, on demand, and that can run on the cheapest hosting possible, without a need for tecchies.

It works a treat.
by MinimalAction | 2025-05-21 04:15:23+00:00
This addiction is real. I found it quite shameful that somehow with all the determination to be the best version I would like to be and do things of meaningful nature, I fall into the trap of scrolling through reels almost everyday.

Reading and writing has been a way to indulge myself meaningfully. I really don't know effective ways to remind myself that this consumption of useless content is a waste of time and creator of frustration. How do you all manage it?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-21 04:16:22+00:00
> Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words.

The Romans believed that philosophy had to be done in Greek because Latin wasn't suited to the field.

There is a speech (letter?) by Cicero railing against the belief, in which he demonstrates that it's possible and in fact easy to use Latin for all of the concepts that are supposed to be restricted to Greek.

Apparently nobody learned anything from this.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-21 04:16:57+00:00
Great feedback Al, and you hit the nail right on the head "what am I going to do with this information", though, tbh, for many people the data from their sleep tracker leaves them with the same question... "so I didn't get enough deep sleep, what can I do about that".

We have developed a headband that monitors sleep in real-time and increases restorative function. So less of a "what can I change", we ensure the sleep you get is as restorative as possible.

My next post (I think) is going to be about sleep hygiene, and where the current "rules" fit in.

The gist of my thinking here is that sleep hygiene rules don't define how restorative your sleep will be any more than your warm-up defines how good your workout will be. The current thinking around wind-down periods, diet recommendations, etc is the same as a warm-up or fueling yourself for a workout.

We're focused on the workout itself. What makes sleep actually restorative.

Does that make sense?

I've also struggled with sleep my entire life, which is how I got into this space. I'm sorry the article let you down, but I completely get what you're saying. I had the same concerns before I published it, "am I really saying anything", but I think it's important for us to open this conversation, even though we don't have a solution for YET! We're close, and part of this is to understand who our tribe are, who's looking for this solution, or are we off the mark with the language.

When I speak to many people about what we do, I often hear back "oh, you help people fall asleep", or "you make people get more sleep", it's REALLY hard to get people out of the mentality that more sleep means better sleep.
by donatj | 2025-05-21 04:17:37+00:00
We got bought out a number of years ago. We'd been pretty liberal with our code up until this point as I'm sure many tiny companies are, but our new owners were very insistent on locking down "Intellectual Property" to exclusivly company controlled hardware locked behind SSO ready to lock anyone out at a moments notice...

You are putting a pretty basic CRUD app in Fort Knox. We're not building anything super proprietary or patentable, it's not rocket science. Anyone could rebuild something roughly analogous to our app in a matter of weeks.

The code isn't the value. Our connections, contracts and content are our value. Our people and our know how is the value.

The code is almost worthless on its own. The time and thus money we've spent has been far more in finding and fine tuning the user experience than in "writing code". These are things exposed to anyone who uses our app.

You could genuinely email all our code to our direct competitor and it wouldn't help them at all.
by h2782 | 2025-05-21 04:17:55+00:00
The linked article leans hard into blaming KYC, when clearly improper data handling and security by Coinbase is the true cause. This is something we've seen repeatedly with crypto exchanges: Abysmal data protections and security. Wealth is not new, and financial institutions have managed this information fine. There is an issue specifically in the crypto space with poor security practices.
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-21 04:18:00+00:00
That does follow psychological marketing logic.

Guitars are - essentially - a luxury item, brand guitars especially so.

If you are a 'prestigious' manufacturer, and you raise the price only on the imported stuff, not the all-American one, you are comparatively 'devaluing' the local-made guitar as compared to the ones that are made abroad.