MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by washadjeffmad | 2025-05-03 19:39:28+00:00
It's not unwarranted. With the recent popularity of remakes and rereleases, there's been tension between fans, their multi-year/decade labor of love projects, and the studios hoping to remonetize dated franchises.

A friend and old-school RuneScape player told me he was quitting over this: https://www.ibtimes.com/runescape-devs-backtrack-hd-mod-ban-...

Bethesda signaling their blessing might not have happened if others hadn't made such spectacular messes of their own relaunches.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-05-03 19:40:21+00:00
That seems like a false dichotomy. AI doesn’t decide what kind of code to write. That’s still up to the human (for now). Jetbrains also has to have some kind of AI offering, if only because otherwise users will migrate to competitors that do.

It’s an interesting question whether we’ll need an IDE at all in the future. I used to program in Vim with minimal help. Maybe one day I’ll program in Vim with maximal help from an AI. It would be nice to say "find where authentication happens" and it pulls up all instances of auth code. But that’s also another example of a feature that can go into an IDE: case sensitive search, regex search, natural language search. So I’m skeptical we won’t be using IDEs in the future. And if all of this is a part of an IDE, then that’s squarely in Jetbrains’ wheelhouse.
by fzysingularity | 2025-05-03 19:40:35+00:00
We (at https://vlm.run) use n8n internally for a lot of automations and it’s been great (Reddit/HN scraping), slack automations, cron jobs for sales etc.

We also made a custom node for popular document/image/video ETL jobs like document-to-markdown, audio/video transcriptions with VLMs (Vision Language Models).

https://github.com/vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vlm-run/n8n-nodes-vlmrun/v/0....
by palmotea | 2025-05-03 19:40:51+00:00
> As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.

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.

Detecting swears just seems over-compliated.
by daemonologist | 2025-05-03 19:42:04+00:00
Just looking at job postings data it seems like: no, but it's been relatively stable (or only slowly getting worse) since early 2024.

Looking at Indeed data, most of the decline in postings was in 2022H2 and 2023, with only ~10% annual decline since then: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE . In other countries the movement wasn't as sharp but has more or less caught up with the US by this point.

HN's own "Who's Hiring/Looking" posts follow a similar but perhaps slightly rosier trend - pretty flat since late 2023: https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/ (Note: this site counts only top-level looking/hiring comments, to reduce noise from replies)
by kinnth | 2025-05-03 19:42:29+00:00
Buffet reminded me a lot of Angela Merkel.

They stood clearly and simply for good moral judgment, fair systems and looked at the bigger picture to carry most people forward. They also based all their decision in facts, truth and science. They learn't their trades (economics & politics) over time and weren't afraid to adapt as times changed.

Their slow and steady presence did more for equality and fairness than many others. We will need to find these values again after the current times have played out.
by mieubrisse | 2025-05-03 19:44:15+00:00
To provide a different perspective: this was caught, acknowledged as a problem, rolled back quickly, and written up in a post-mortem.

Given that nothing can be done perfectly, this seems like the best way OpenAI could have handled it.

What if building AI is like airplanes: everybody's afraid of it, so the industry gets really good at rolling lessons into the product and the end result is actually fine?
by blincoln | 2025-05-03 19:44:17+00:00
Have you tried HDMI output from the computer running Anukari to an HDMI capture dongle on a second system, so that all of the recording overhead is offloaded?

I'm very rusty at music, but I always had a big soft spot for unusual/unique synthesis methods. I'll be buying a copy as soon as I'm back at a desktop system :).
by godelski | 2025-05-03 19:44:25+00:00
Our mathematical models of reality (i.e. Physics) is not the same as reality. So yes, by the same logic "quarks" are mathematics, but only in the same way that a "cup" is English. The quark was a great example, considering we can't observe it and purely rely on mathematical models, but the same argument would still hold true for a bowling ball. Physics is our description of reality, not reality itself. Our description of reality highly leverages the language of math, as that language was developed to enforce rules of consistency. Much the same way we design our programming languages, which is why programming language people study so much more math than your typical CS person.

If you're going to accuse someone of confusing the map with the territory, you really should make sure you aren't making the same error.
by mb7733 | 2025-05-03 19:44:48+00:00
> I don't really ever find myself having to do that. I guess it's been a long time since I worked in an environment which did not use an "only merge to main after passing CI" workflow, and back then we weren't using git, anyway.

You _never_ have bugs that slip through the test suite? That is extremely impressive / borderline impossible. Even highly tested gold-standard projects like SQLite see bugs in production.

And once you find a regression that wasn't covered by your test suite, the fastest way to find where it originated is often git bisect.
by quantadev | 2025-05-03 19:44:57+00:00
I think the confession that "Figma‑ or Gmail‑class apps still benefit from heavy client logic" is a telling one, and the reason I politely disagree with your thinking is that it relies in the app staying small forever. But that's not what happens. Apps grow and grow and grow.

I've heard people say they just want "Pure JS" with no frameworks at all because frameworks are too complex, for their [currently] small app. So they get an app working, and all is good, right until it hits say 5000 lines of code. Then suddenly you have to re-write it all using a framework and TypeScript to do typing. Better to just start with an approach that scales to infinity, so you never run into the brick wall.
by musicale | 2025-05-03 19:45:10+00:00
As GP notes, retro web workflow isn't terrible for simple sites. Editing static html seems like something that anyone can learn, and html editors still seem to exist (including the editing mode built into most browsers.) Then you just need to find a hosting provider (maybe github, or neocities, or wherever.)

For more complicated web sites something like squarespace makes a lot of sense if they can manage technical complexity (web frameworks), business issues (payment systems), and the constant security patch treadmill.

It's a shame that self-hosting isn't viable for non-experts, due to management complexity and constant security issues.

I do understand the appeal of just using discord though.
by danenania | 2025-05-03 19:46:19+00:00
You could try my project Plandex (https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex) — you can use it to explore/understand/chat with just about any codebase, including massive ones up to 20M tokens.

Here's an example, chatting with the SQLite codebase to understand how transactions are implemented: https://plandex.ai/_next/static/media/plandex-sqlite.0ee6cb2...
by TechnicJelle | 2025-05-03 19:46:48+00:00
Hey all, I'm the developer of this app.

This was literally my first ever Flutter app and it honestly sucks.

I made it before I found out that Obtainium exists.

Even so, I'm glad I made it, because I learnt a lot while making it.

It is unlikely that it will be finished or even worked on any time soon.
by wild_pointer | 2025-05-03 19:47:40+00:00
That's the problem with all the pdf editors available out there. I guess adding stuff is much easier than editing existing stuff which you didn't add, and can be laid out in a gazillion ways, because PDF is a format for viewing and printing, not for editing.

I had a period when I worked with lots of documents. I could only find one fairly decent PDF editor which deserves to be called that way. I could use it to open any PDF and delete an existing element, or change text in an existing field. Sometimes things behaved funny, for example a text field can have each letter in a separate block, but I assume the tool did what it could within reasonable effort. It worked fine for me overall.
by timmg | 2025-05-03 19:48:38+00:00
I'm having a hard time understanding how we can move the bulk of our energy to renewables without some kind of massive storage system. The wind can die for long periods. It can get abnormally cloudy for long periods. There's nighttime and winter.

I'm no expert, but is there any storage system that is practical that can store the amount of energy we'd need to have most (all) electricity come from renewables?
by dehrmann | 2025-05-03 19:48:50+00:00
Not to diminish any of his accomplishments, but read his quotes and story as being a product of his time. He famously missed out on a lot of solid tech investments because of his background as a value investor. Value investing doesn't exist the same way it did when Berkshire started making a name for itself. Tech investing also isn't them same as 1997, 2004, or 2010.
by qudat | 2025-05-03 19:49:31+00:00
Having a server provide an island or rendering framework for your site can be more complex than an SPA with static assets and nginx.

You still have to deal with all the tooling you are talking about, right? You’ve just moved the goalpost to the BE.

And just like the specific use cases you mentioned for client routing I can also argue that many sites don’t care about SEO or first paint so those are non features.

So honestly I would argue for SPA over a server framework as it can dramatically reduce complexity. I think this is especially true when you must have an API because of multiple clients.

I think the DX is significantly better as well with fast reload where I don’t have to reload the page to see my changes.

People are jumping into nextjs because react is pushing it hard even tho it’s a worse product and questionable motives.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-03 19:49:32+00:00
I'm thankful that I don't work on projects that have SEO needs. SSG (for JS frameworks specifically) feels too unstable for me. I get the value, I understand why people need to do it, but it just makes everything more complicated. Also, I'm not sure if you can have an offline site with SSG? They might be compatible but I'm not sure. I know some SSG is essentially "SPA with the first page rendered already" so maybe that can work offline?

I looked at InertiaJS and it feels like too much "magic" for me personally. I've never used it so I could be wrong but it feels like too many things you have to get working perfectly and the instability in the JS ecosystem makes me worry about adding too many layers.
by runeblaze | 2025-05-03 19:50:02+00:00
Yep my phrasing was not the best :X. You might know better ("couple years"). However my anecdotal observation is that the end result is that fintech drifts FP (heavy concurrency + immutability, ledgers and all) than your "average" tech. I genuinely don't know why, maybe correctness guarantees and ledgers are just so important.
by jbarrow | 2025-05-03 19:50:12+00:00
Wonderful! Inserted form-fields show up in Preview and Acrobat, which is not a trivial task. I run a little AI-powered tool that automatically figures out where form fields should go (https://detect.penpusher.app) and robustly adding form fields to the PDF was the hardest part.

Fwiw, I do see the issue with being unable to scroll down across both Safari and Chrome.
by locallost | 2025-05-03 19:50:47+00:00
There are things I don't like about him, and the way he is idolized by people that want to accumulate money. But I will say you can't really throw that "all that money and he's still mortal" thing at him because in reality he lived really below his means. So the money part is interesting, why did he try to get so much if he didn't really need it? I think (without really knowing anything about him), that he wanted money like everyone else to be independent, but at one point it turned into a game to see how much he can win.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-05-03 19:51:09+00:00
New Orleans has been a "different place" for a long time...

My great-great-uncle told me about driving there with a buddy during college--in the 1920s.

I think one of the early Harriet Potter books included the reference to a man who spent a year there in his youth and had the indiscretion to have experimented with alcohol.

Just a very different place from the rest of the US South, and AFAICT, different from any other place in the US
by cbracketdash | 2025-05-03 19:51:36+00:00
Scrolling is broken. Also for modals, it'd be nice to be able to click anywhere on the screen to close it (or pressing Esc) rather than just pressing "cancel".

Also for text, different fonts is a necessary requirement (and bolding, italics, underline, etc).

Also, it seems like I can't edit text boxes after creating them... I can't even tell if I've selected the text box (an outline would be nice).

Also the confirm modal for deleting a page is realllly annoying. You should just have it automatically delete the page and create an undo feature. (Basically store the original PDF, and store all the "actions" a user makes in an array, and then undo/redo the actions to the original pdf).

Also the arrow to close the page overview on the left side of the screen is very unintuitive. Why does the entire page shift to the left? The only reason I'd use that feature is to see my centered page more clearly. On this topic, a zoom feature is super important too.

Overall, the concept of a privacy-based PDF editor sounds really cool! Just note that for users to actually make a serious switch to this, you must at least match 1/4 of the quality of other PDF services like ilovepdf.com or smallpdf.com.

Good luck!
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-03 19:52:03+00:00
I think it is you who is blinded by your prior biases. It's not that I have 'some data', it was a mountain of data, and it was my full time job to analyze it specifically for behavioral information with a number of other researchers also doing the same, and we'd compare notes with other research orgs in other companies. I have a feeling that I've thought about this topic far more than you have.

At this point we'll just have to agree to disagree.
by rvz | 2025-05-03 19:52:10+00:00
You are more than correct. Lots of these companies struggling for VC money end up having to rebrand and scream about being 'AI-powered' as the last chance for survival.

Somehow they are also believe they are 'AI companies' contributing to AI research all of a sudden, but are just an API call away to someone else's AI model.

Like previously when everyone was an 'internet company' then a 'technology company', then 'robotics company' now an 'AI company' and soon a 'quantum computing company', then they really are confused on what they actually do.
by philjohn | 2025-05-03 19:52:12+00:00
I have an east/west array on my roof, as my house is positioned with the front facing west.

In the winter it's outperformed by a south facing array (northern hemisphere) but in the summer the east array gets a ton of sun before midday, and crucially, it's getting a ton of sun when the temperatures are a bit cooler, so it performs very well.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-05-03 19:52:34+00:00
>> Objective hazard is risks that cannot be reasonably mitigated. Things like rockfall where a rock breaks off and falls on your head at random, or unpredictable avalanches

Those risks can be mitigated. They can't be reduced to zero, but they can be made less severe.

Avalanches don't typically happen randomly out of the blue any more than thunderstorms do in the midwest. In the midwest, you know days ahead of time that there is going to be a risk of thunderstorms the same way that you know days ahead of time when there is going to be a high avalanche risk. You know the amount of recent snowfall, you know what the weather is going to be, and you know how to recognize avalanche terrain.

Rockfall does not occur completely randomly. If you go to a place overlooking something like the bowling alley on a warm summer afternoon, you will see and hear rocks the size of cars or small houses bouncing down the slopes. If you go on a cold winter morning before the sun hits the snow, you won't see or hear that because everything that is frozen in place will stay frozen in place. You choose the time of your climb to mitigate risks from rockfall, avalanches, and weather. Mitigate does not mean reduce to zero.

Yes, mountaineering can be risky. Everyone decides their own level of involvement. Climbing a walkup in bluebird weather has less risk than driving to the grocery store. Attempting to climb K2 kills 25% of the people who do it. Mountaineer's choice. If you've got kids and you try to climb K2, you're selfish and I feel sorry for your kids. If you're a single guy who wants to risk death, go for it.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-05-03 19:52:35+00:00
This is the same reason that computers suck.

Every program you ever run will precisely follow the same set of rules, because it is those rules.

There's a missing piece that no one has really managed to implement on computers: backstory. The reason why a program's rules are written is much more important than the rules themselves, yet we haven't found any way to write the reason why.

The most important feature of backstory is that it's dynamic. The meaning of a story can be completely changed by simply replacing its backstory. Whether it's a computer program or a societal organization, a decided system must be ignorant to its backstory. There is no place in a decided system to implement context. It turns out that this is a core feature of computable systems: they are context-free.

---

I've been working on a way to change this, but it's such an abstract idea, it's been hard to actually find (and choose) where to get started.
by jorams | 2025-05-03 19:52:46+00:00
Thanks for the link. That is specifically about LibGen and Anna's Archive, and links to the general agreement that when a court orders one ISP to block a pirate site, others will also block it. I suppose in situations where Sci-Hub forwards you to LibGen (does it still do that?) that means you'll be blocked regardless of the blocking status of Sci-Hub itself.

I am still unable to find any news about court orders relating to Sci-Hub in particular. The biggest ISPs appear to not publish their block lists unfortunately. I did find that Delta publishes their list[1] of blocked sites which includes only sites for which I can also find news about court orders, and does not include Sci-Hub.

I queried the KPN DNS servers and they return a KPN IP address for LibGen, but a DDOS-Guard IP address for Sci-Hub, so that leads me to believe KPN doesn't block them either at least.

[1]: https://www.delta.nl/geblokkeerd/
by eek2121 | 2025-05-03 19:52:53+00:00
IMO intent is everything.

Selling at a loss isn’t bad. Selling at a loss to build marketshare or kill competition usually is.

The issue is that previous companies usually use this aspect to build marketshare, so there is no other way to compete. Other tactics include lobbying, patent bullying, etc.

Shoot, as bad as Uber is, just look at how taxis in major cities were formed.

Then look at labor laws in other countries.

Under the current legal/political structure for any modern country, there is no winning without exploitation, which is why I refuse to start my own business.
by izacus | 2025-05-03 19:53:19+00:00
Quite simply: Because you can't have one without the other and you're living in a dream world if you think that your kind of outcome is even possible with a setup where a private megacorporation takes over the role of prosecutor, court and police.

No matter how you scream, if you demand Google play the cop, they'll play the cop in the easiest, cheapest possible way in situations where anything is unclear. The situation in this very topic was exactly caused because Google is trying to play a cop while crushing small devs underneath their anti-fraud measures.

There are no better outcomes in this situation. Not on Play Store, not on AppStore, not on any other store. Megacorps can't be cops, courts and enforcers at once and do a good job of it.

Let's talk more when you decide that perhaps policing should remain in hand of governments where it belongs.
by noodlesUK | 2025-05-03 19:53:44+00:00
I completely agree with the sentiment that we don’t need SPAs and similar tech for news sites and dashboards and the myriad crud apps we use on a day to day basis but I think what you’re proposing is throwing the baby out with the bath water. How would a site like google maps, which I’m sure we can all agree is extremely useful, work in a Web 1.0 style world? It needs to dynamically load tiles and various other resources. The web being a place where we can host and instantly distribute complex cross-platform interactive software in a fairly secure sandbox is a modern marvel.
by inetknght | 2025-05-03 19:53:47+00:00
> The whole idea of "race to the bottom" implies at least some portion consumers are going to choose the inferior product

Yup.

> directly contradicts the original claim that British consumers have rejected US chicken

No it doesn't.

> the US needs to force them to buy it

Why let the US force foreigners to buy an inferior product?

Better solution: block inferior products from being imported. Then people choose to purchase not-inferior products.
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-05-03 19:53:47+00:00
> The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food.

USDA Organic label is rampant with fraud, and just having thr USDA label on it isn't a guarantee of trust. Similarly, the AHA endorsing oils blatantly bad for the heart is also similar example how labeling doesn't promote trust necessarily. Labels can and do lie, quite often even.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-03 19:53:47+00:00
That money has already been committed to charitable use for the most part, or already donated. He is essentially managing billions of dollars on behalf of charitable causes. Seems like a pretty good use of his money management skills.

Besides all that he has advocated for that money to be taxed away from him for decades.

He pretty famously lives below his means in a normal suburban house and drives around in a car that most software engineers could afford (Cadillac sedan).

From a societal perspective, I’m not sure you could ask for much more from any one man.
by lxgr | 2025-05-03 19:53:48+00:00
Some hydroelectric plants can pump water back up and both absorb excess supply and provide stabilization during demand spikes.

I have no idea if it’s feasible to fill longer-term gaps during extended cloudy/windless days and nights using that alone, though. Other than that, there are already large-scale battery plants deployed in some cities.

Another approach is to control the demand side: When air conditioning or heating with electricity, minutes usually don’t matter, and dropping/providing extra load at very short notice should be feasible in a smart grid.
by philjohn | 2025-05-03 19:53:59+00:00
It already is on wholesale markets - in the UK you can get on Agile Octopus which gives you half hourly prices. When there is a glut of renewables on the grid you can end up being paid to use energy.

This highlights the need for grid scale storage (be it batteries, pumped hydro or something else) to balance Solar PV, and to bridge gaps when the wind isn't blowing.