MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Costs of Graphical User Interfaces [pdf]
by nativeit | 2025-05-04 00:26:43+00:00
As seen in Tantacrul’s latest deep-dive[1] on Finale (music notation software), specifically the portion where he explains why the design team he was part of for Paint 3D chose to include specific toolbar buttons for undo/redo, even though they were attempting to be minimalistic in their design to allow maximal workspace.

1. https://youtu.be/Yqaon6YHzaU
by rafram | 2025-05-04 00:28:35+00:00
Site seems to be down - I can’t get the article to load - but by far the most maddening part of Vertex AI is the way it deals with multimodal inputs. You can’t just attach an image to your request. You have to use their file manager to upload the file, then make sure it gets deleted once you’re done.

That would all still be OK-ish except that their JS library only accepts a local path, which it then attempts to read using the Node `fs` API. Serverless? Better figure out how to shim `fs`!

It would be trivial to accept standard JS buffers. But it’s not clear that anyone at Google cares enough about this crappy API to fix it.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-05-04 00:28:51+00:00
I ran R1-8B for both anemll[0] and mlx[1][2] models on an M4 Max.

Prompt: "Tell me a long story about the origins of 42 being the answer."

anemll: 9.3 tok/sec, ~500MB of memory used.

mlx 8bit: 31.33 tok/sec, ~8.5GB of memory used.

mlx bf16: 27.17 tok/sec, ~15.7GB of memory used.

Memory results are from activity monitor across any potentially involved processes, but I feel like I might missing something here...

[0] https://huggingface.co/anemll/anemll-DeepSeekR1-8B-ctx1024_0...

[1] https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Lla...

[2] https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Lla...
by gosub100 | 2025-05-04 00:30:13+00:00
"wasn't able" is dubious. Of course, there are repercussions for not moving out on the date, but it's not an imperative. If the landlord had to move his stuff to the curb, or it delayed closing on a house, that causes a cascade into another transaction. The world doesn't stop, of course. If the landlord is forced to pay movers to put your stuff in storage and send the bill to the tenant, those costs can, in theory, be passed on to the moving company. The details depend on the contract, obviously.
by quantadev | 2025-05-04 00:31:52+00:00
imo, even if the only "interactivity" a web app has is just a login page, then even that alone is enough to warrant using a framework rather than doing direct DOM manipulation (or even worse, full page refreshes after a form submit).

It's not about using the most powerful tool always, it's about knowing how to leverage modern standards rather than reinventing and solving problems that are already solved.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-04 00:32:04+00:00
> with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services

The Chicago political machine is calling. They want your jobs. All of your jobs.

Wait until you’re doing a great job but have the wrong political take on a situation.

Make sure you’re regularly doing favors for people and giving out what freebies you can so you stay in office during the next cycle.

It sounded great in the post, but democracy is hard so don’t expect an easy answer.
by nativeit | 2025-05-04 00:33:45+00:00
I’ve used Notion since its beta, and I mostly like it. My only complaints are that it’s frequently very heavy and slow, and its data exports lack several key basics in functionality (ie—best case is markdown and CSV files, so no databases with preserved relationships in open languages).

Sadly, I am pretty well locked in. Does anyone know how this compares for workspaces with >100k items?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-04 00:34:21+00:00
But why would you do that when you are guaranteed to fail?

It's very twee of people to believe that solving homelessness is a matter of resource allocation, or if we were all just more philanthropic, or if only there were more services and we could get to people where they're at.

But it's never a matter of these things. Being homeless has many advantages, many perks, and indeed there are non-negligible percentages of homeless people who prefer to be that way. And if you try to talk them out of it, they will resist. And there are also non-negligible percentages of homeless people who don't know how to be anything but, and when it becomes a way of life for them, they are technically feral, and it is simply a monumental effort to change them into "housed people" who can actually manage a stable household. That's a big ask for so many people, including those who do not struggle with mental health and addiction issues.

The root causes of homelessness are manifold and varied. There may be a dozen identifiable root causes here; are you going to attack all of them equally? Even your unlimited resources cannot. You need to work with a willing population here. Many homeless people are simply unwilling. Many others are not so selfish that they wouldn't share those resources with others, and that's a huge problem. Section 8 regularly chases people out after they've let in undesirable guests. SNAP has to close out people who are sharing their food resources. If you've got unlimited resources, then who's going to tell you that you need to allocate them judiciously to get the best impact?

One huge reason that people are out on the streets is because, 50 years ago, they may have been institutionalized. And that can't be done presently, so they are held by "virtual restraints" such as drugs and clinics. And so, if you really wanted to get people off the streets, would you ramp up imprisonment and incarceration? Would you lower the standards, to institutionalize people who cannot care for themselves?

What sort of mass labor camps and imprisonment looks attractive to you at this point, Mr. Unlimited Resources? Would you also pay for the trains to cart them off to wherever they are designated? It doesn't feel so good to "get people off the streets" when your realistic alternatives have an unsavory edge to them.
by xg15 | 2025-05-04 00:34:21+00:00
> “seeing Nintendo do this is a little disheartening”, adding: “You would hope that a company that big, that has such a storied history, would take preservation a little more seriously.”

I don't see why preservation (outside their own archives) would be a goal for Nintendo. The reality seems to be the opposite: They'd like the branding and memory of old games to be preserved, but please not the game itself - because then they can re-release it for every new system as a "remastered" variant.
by simonw | 2025-05-04 00:35:35+00:00
Yeah you're right, I should have read their comment more closely.

Google's API's have a way steeper learning curve than is necessary. So many of their APIs depend on complex client libraries or technologies like GRPC that aren't used much outside of Google.

Their permission model is diabolically complex to figure out too - same vibes as AWS, Google even used the same IAM acronym.
by Demiurge | 2025-05-04 00:36:00+00:00
Yeah, if you want to work with GeoParquet, and you want to keep your data in that format. I can see how that's easer to use your example. That's not what a lot of geospatial data is in. You might have shapefiles, geopackages, geojsons, who knows? There is a lot of software, from QGIS to ESRI to work with different formats to solve different problems. I don't think GeoParquet, even though it might be the fastest geospatial vector data format right now, is that common, and the article did not claim that either. So, given an average user trying to answer some GIS question, some ETL is pretty much a given, on average. And given that, installing PostGIS and installing DuckDB, both require some ETL, and learning some query and analytics language. DuckDB might be an improvement, but it's certainly not as much of a leap as quote is making it out to be.
by massung | 2025-05-04 00:36:08+00:00
I’ve found the trick is to change your mindset about what you are doing.

Right now (sorry if this is presumptuous) you’re thinking that the next step is releasing a product. Instead you need to believe that the next step is discovering…

…what features you have people love/don’t

…what works/doesn’t

…what they want you don’t yet have

…how to prioritize what you think needs done

Stop for a moment and think of the apps you use most often. I promise they have bugs, and - like all products (software or otherwise) - are held together with a little crazy glue and duct tape. ;-)
by int_19h | 2025-05-04 00:36:38+00:00
In the ideal world, each private company is authoritarian, but there are many competing for your money, and so you get to choose - which effectively approximates something like a democracy.

In the world we actually live in, you often have at most 2-3 companies to choose from, with exact same policies. And if this is something that you actually need, then you're effectively forced into their bullshit.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-04 00:36:43+00:00
At least in the US part time work often not really a thing. A while ago I talked to HR about reducing to 32 hours and they didn't seem to get the idea at all. It's either all in or nothing. In the US there is also the health insurance question.

For my relatives in Germany going part time seems easier and more accepted by companies.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-05-04 00:37:02+00:00
Quite simply: at certain threshold counts of users you will be forced to add many more cloud instances/pods running Rails than you would need running node.js (or Java or go or many others). But it doesn't stop at instances because this will also require more persistent disk / object storage, more logs, more alerts, more notifications from the cloud provider that instance xyz needs to be restarted (due to a firmware upgrade or whatever), etc. etc. All of these have human management overhead costs and most of them increase monthly financial costs.
by londons_explore | 2025-05-04 00:37:19+00:00
I think it entirely depends if you want a 'just works' solution or you're willing to adjust your lifestyle day by day based on availability of sunlight.

Merely a 10 watt panel in the Netherlands has been fine whilst camping for weeks, but obviously I have to severely compromise on modern life - 10 watts powers a lamp for a few hours in the evening and a phone charge each day.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-04 00:37:21+00:00
I think geospatial analytics is important (because of course I would), but to be frank geospatial software has been stagnant for a long time. Every new thing is just a fresh spin on the same stagnant things we already have. This more or less says exactly this?

For geospatial analysis, the most important thing that could happen in software would be no longer treating it, either explicitly or implicitly, as having anything to do with cartography. Many use cases are not remotely map-driven but the tools require users to force everything through the lens of map-making.
by spauldo | 2025-05-04 00:37:55+00:00
A general reason: they take up a lot of space. Not a problem in most of America, but that'd be a deal killer in Japan. If you're not familiar with Japanese neighborhoods, I'd recommend spending some time on street view - it's actually kinda cool. Make note of the parabolic mirrors at the intersections.

For America specifically: they're not a great fit for places where everything is spread out and the road system is sensibly designed. I can drive from one side of Tulsa to the other (on streets, not freeways) in a fraction of the time I could drive across a similarly-sized European city. That's because the city itself is designed for cars. It has straight major streets with 40-45 mph speed limits that form a grid. Neighborhoods sit inside the grid and the streets in them curve with the landscape. In most of the city you have maybe 3-5 traffic lights per mile on the major streets, so unless it's rush hour you get minimal slowdowns. Sometimes I can drive several miles without hitting a red light.

The ideal situation is to have a straight road with no traffic directly between you and where you want to go. Obviously, that's not possible. So you have to compromise. Roundabouts suck, but they're better than almost any other option in places that have twisty narrow streets and lots of pedestrians. Many (most?) American cities aren't like that (at least to the extent European cities are), so roundabouts don't make as much sense here.
by Deathmax | 2025-05-04 00:37:58+00:00
> You can’t just attach an image to your request.

You can? Google limits HTTP requests to 20MB, but both the Gemini API and Vertex AI API support embedded base64-encoded files and public URLs. The Gemini API supports attaching files that are uploaded to their Files API, and the Vertex AI API supports files uploaded to Google Cloud Storage.
by kollmar28 | 2025-05-04 00:39:21+00:00
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by krisoft | 2025-05-04 00:40:10+00:00
I can’t quite understand your comment.

> Assuming a 60hz camera, there would be a 16.67 ms gap between each frame. The car is traveling 1.5 feet between each frame interval.

Ok? So? You are just stating this as if we should understand the implications. I do in fact work with self-driving cars. What you say is true, but it is not a big deal. Why do you feel this maters? Or what is your point?

> A certain amount of exposure time is necessary for the camera to generate even 1 frame or it will be blurry

This is a confused statement. A certain amount of exposure is necessary for the camera to collect light. If you don’t have long enough exposure the picture will be dark, not blurry. Your statement makes it sound as if avoiding blur is why we need exposure time, which is a complete nonsense.

In reality none of this is a problem. There are automotive grade cameras which can collect enough light fast enough that the images are not blurry in practice. Yes, these cameras have a non-zero exposure time. Yes, this adds latency. No, this is not a problem.

> Your off the shelf library introduces a random 1 second delay for some reason and costs you 88 miles in processing time

You mean 88 feet. If my off the shelf library introduces a random 1 second delay i will chuck it in the bin post haste. Use stuff whose performance characteristics are well understood by you and is not terrible.

> Nearly every step of the way you discover you need specialized hardware, software, operating systems, sensors.

I do not recognise the world you describe.
by hnick | 2025-05-04 00:42:02+00:00
Even if the format is understood, it's also very much a case of Acrobat handling extremely badly formed PDFs instead of erroring out if it were strictly adhering. If you've ever seen a save prompt when making no changes, that happened.

"It works on Acrobat" was something we got told a lot from clients sending us PDFs that were broken according to the official spec - we just had to deal with it.
by unknown_user_84 | 2025-05-04 00:42:52+00:00
Indeed. Though the billing dashboard feels like an over engineered April fool's joke compared to Anthropic or OpenAI. And it takes too long to update with usage. I understand they tacked it into GCP, but if they're making those devs work 60 hours a week can we get a nicer, and real time, dashboard out of it at least?
by K0balt | 2025-05-04 00:49:40+00:00
Oh, well, it’s not the first time I have demonstrated my capacity for stupidity. Maybe I read a different comment and answered yours, or maybe II didn’t really read it completely before I decided what it said. Either way, my apologies.

There are solutions, I think, to most of our issues… but the bias to avoid losing more than we are willing to invest to gain hobbles us.
by jsemrau | 2025-05-04 00:50:47+00:00
Makes one wonder if the YOLO algorithm would work better with hexagons.

"Hexagons were an important choice because people in a city are often in motion, and hexagons minimize the quantization error introduced when users move through a city. Hexagons also allow us to approximate radiuses easily, such as in this example using Elasticsearch."

[Edit]Maybe https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372766828_YOLOv8_fo...
by jtwoodhouse | 2025-05-04 00:52:10+00:00
Justifying AI writing with the example of women’s writing is false equivalence and, frankly, demeaning to women.

As humans, women suffer for their work and literally bring the rest of us into the world. AI has no feeling or stake in this world. It has suffered for nothing and merely regurgitates received wisdom. I will take one handwritten note from my mother over the output of a billion-dollar Shakespeare emulator.

Once again for the umpteenth time, why should any of us be bothered to read something someone couldn’t be bothered to write?
by JetSpiegel | 2025-05-04 00:57:58+00:00
The reason why the Iberian grid is not better connected to France might have something to do with French Nuclear not wanting to be bankrupted by cheap renewables from southern countries, this was the word on the street a ehi'e back, when the push for renewables in Spain in Portugal was starting up.

This is a political problem, having Mitteleuropa depend on power from Putin is apparently OK, but on lazy southerners is verboten. Hopefully this blackout changes that (but I'm not holding my breath).
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-04 00:58:06+00:00
It's not odd at all to identify "hidden references" to a lot of things. The Hebrews weren't so big on astrology, but the Jews had more or less had centuries of contact with expert astrologers from Babylon, and that's where many "Western" concepts were codified.

On the other hand, astrology pervaded everything the Greeks and Romans believed. So much so, that I'd say that metaphors comparing Jesus to sun-gods such as Apollo were rife in the Apostolic Age. It is not difficult to find some pericopes where Jesus' supernatural qualities can be drawn parallel to Apollo, Dionysus, Zeus, et. al. Nor is is a mere coincidence that "Sun" and "Son" are pronounced the same way.

There are a ton of references to someone "entering the house" especially Jesus, and I feel that this had astrological significance to Hellenic readers, with well-established concepts of what an "astrological house" was.

My mind was blown even further when I approached a hypothesis about the Bethlehem Star and its true nature, and the true nature of those "Wise Men from the East" who were following it. It's like, modern astronomers are all gratuitously missing the point by trying to track the thing down using modern criteria. Poor guys.
by tczMUFlmoNk | 2025-05-04 00:58:08+00:00
> but for anything that costs over 5-figures it makes sense to have an attorney review it

Can you say more about this? I've never retained an attorney, but it's a skill that I would like to have. What is this process like, to get their services for a short, bounded engagement? How do I get started finding an appropriate provider?
by dbreunig | 2025-05-04 00:58:20+00:00
I was struck by this as people suggest alternatives that refute the headline (QGIS, PostGIS, GDAL, etc): nearly every one emerged in the early 2000s.

Strongly agree with your sentiment around maps: most people can’t read them, they color the entire workflow and make it more complex, and (imo) lead to a general undervaluing of the geospatial field. Getting the data into columns means it’s usable by every department.
by laborcontract | 2025-05-04 00:58:20+00:00
Google Cloud Console's billing console for Vertex is so poor. I'm trying to figure out how much i spent on which models and I still cannot for the life of me figure it out. I'm assuming the only way to do it is to use the gemini billing assistant chatbot, but that requires me to turn on another api permission.

I still don't understand the distinction between Gemini and Vertex AI apis. It's like Logan K heard the criticisms about the API and helped push to split Gemini from the broader Google API ecosystem but it's only created more confusion, for me at least.
by maxxen | 2025-05-04 00:59:08+00:00
Im inclined to agree, but unfortunately a huge amount of the existing data and processes in this space does not assume a spheroidal earth and come provided with a coordinate reference system. Ultimately there are also some domains where you got data that you explicitly don't want to interpret using spheroidal semantics, e.g. when working with a city plan - in which case the map _is_ the data model, and you definitely want the angles of a triangle to sum up to 180.
by sinuhe69 | 2025-05-04 01:01:50+00:00
>>That experiment [Chinese Crisper babies] on humans was widely decried as misguided.

Misguided? No, it’s criminal! It was widely criticized as deeply unethical, unprofessional and irresponsible. The guy was considered a rogue scientist and he was put in jail for many years.

So clearly it was not just ‘misguided’.
by D-Coder | 2025-05-04 01:02:13+00:00
> the fact that no one is living unnaturally long or in some kind of cryosleep or AI simulation probably means one thing: It's simply not possible

_Yet_.

If you looked at the Wright Brothers aircraft, what real use is there for a vehicle that carries one person, maybe 50lbs of cargo, and moves at 80 mph?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-04 01:02:28+00:00
That depends on whether or not you can fly.

When I took climbing, as a teenager, our instructor was very serious about getting the best stuff: shoes, ropes, crampons, carabiners, gloves, jackets, etc.

Not cheap, but he put it as “do you want to die?”.

Same with diving gear.
by t-writescode | 2025-05-04 01:02:36+00:00
Not OP; but when I was thinking about using Next.JS, and doing a deep investigation, I came to the decision that, for server-side rendering, I'm quite happy to use Kotlin and Ktor (my backend is also Kotlin - I have a lot of client-types, which is why they're separate), and I've been quite happy with Ktor's html dsl + htmx for speed.

And Kotlin + Ktor feels very good to write in on serverside. Fast, easy and fluent to write in, like Ruby; but with Java's ecosystem, speed and types.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-04 01:05:20+00:00
> the DOT head should be mostly concerned about the people who could have been killed instead of the contractor

You can't do anything about the past, but you can do something about the future.

The DOT head should be looking at both things. But at that point in time there's nothing they can meaningfully say about what happened except by making a serious promise to investigate. On the other end, the harm from incorrectly blaming the wrong people is something they can try to prevent.

It probably was tone-deaf but when you say their underlying concerns are wrong I disagree.