MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Guide: Figma for developers (without paid account)
by agilek | 2025-05-12 12:00:37+00:00
Hey, I’m a designer and work a lot with developers who access my designs in Figma. I put together a "quick guide" that might help others.

Honestly, I still see no to little value in dev mode in Figma and I think the most of the FE developers can do the work without it (at least until Figma decides to remove inspecting on the free plan, lol :D)

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Install the desktop app

- Better performance than in browser, especially for large files

- Supports local fonts (no extra work needed)

- Keyboard shortcuts work properly

- Offline access to previously opened files

- Less distractions than browser version

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Create a Figma account

- you can't do much without it (it's free)

- As of the latest update, it's basically unusable without an account: you can only view files

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What you can do as a viewer on a free account

- View comments

- Add comments (including mentions and image uploads)

- See layer dimensions (width, height)

- Measure distances: Select a layer, hold Alt (or Option on Mac), and hover another element

- Inspect layers and copy properties (dimensions, content, colors, typography, etc.)

- Export assets (SVG, PNG, JPG, PDF)

- Run prototypes

- Use built-in voice calls

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What you can't do without a paid seat

- Use any Dev Mode features, even if added in design mode

- Includes annotations (used to be free until May 2025) - Accurate measurements

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Dev Mode trial tip

Ask for edit access on a file — you’ll get 3 days of Dev Mode access while waiting for approval.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 12:01:31+00:00
I think that using browser as the way to, essentially, deliver desktop LOB apps to the users seamlessly, updates and all, makes perfect sense. Writing those apps in HTML/CSS/JS, not so much - it's forced on us because that's the only stack that browsers have historically supported, but even with all the app-centric additions to HTML over the past two decades, it's clearly not designed for them first and it shows.

I hope that, in the long term, wasm and canvas (or something similar) will gradually take over this niche. Frameworks like Avalonia already let you write a desktop app and then surface it in the browser, today. This stuff is still rough around the edges, particularly wrt accessibility, but there's nothing unsolvable there in principle, it just needs time and effort (and money).
by aurareturn | 2025-05-12 12:02:15+00:00
The world's richest country needs to accept a donation for a new airplane because they're supposedly trying to save money. And the president plans to keep it after his term!

If this isn't bribery, I don't know what is. This is how classic 3rd world country bribery/corruption looks like.

Maybe Trump does care about the well being of ordinary Americans. But his actions sure looks like he's also profiting himself through things like launching a crypto shit coin, selling NFTs, dining with oligarchs (who knows what kind of deals they have), helping his oligarch friends manipulate the market, accepting a plane donation from a country.
Breaking into Tech: Job-Ready Developer Training from Ace Web Academy
by Kiran-Infasta | 2025-05-12 12:03:19+00:00
Ace Web Academy provides industry-aligned training in Full Stack Development, DevOps, AI, and more — with real-world projects and job placement support. Designed for students, working professionals, and career switchers, the programs focus on hands-on learning and live mentorship. With both classroom and global online options, it's an accessible pathway into tech careers. Curious to hear feedback from the HN community — thoughts on structured training vs. self-taught approaches?
by wewxjfq | 2025-05-12 12:03:23+00:00
I'm a disagreer and I have to disagree with the authors: disagreeing is not trolling, it's countering trolls. Trolls usually flood the zone with comments that seem elaborate but are ultimately low effort. They know persistence is key, so they don't bother much with replies that counter their claims; rather, they focus on those in agreement to manufacture consent.

It might look sinister if someone drops a reply and leaves, but that alone tells you nothing. In my experience, there is always Brandolini's law at play:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

If a reply takes a lot of effort and if you suspect the other side isn't arguing in good faith, one reply already feels like a waste of time and there's no reason to go for round two.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-05-12 12:04:25+00:00
For temperature dependent effects there are things like self-compensated strain gauges (where their temperature related deformation counteracts that of a target material), or dual side measurement (sandwich a bar between two strain gauges, strain cause compression on one, elongation on the other, so +-/-+, while temperature compresses or elongates both (++/--), cancels out.)
by K0balt | 2025-05-12 12:04:30+00:00
Sort of?, if you are sufficiently well rounded and can implement solutions from start to finish. It’s sort of Art adjacent, or entrepreneur adjacent. Still, I’d encourage strongly to learn carpentry, as in the rough construction level carpentry for anyone who is likely to focus on anything extremely cerebral. It is empowering to know you can build your own shelter, and construction carpentry tends to be a touching grass type of outdoor activity.

Programming also is kinda iffy as a trade in the “I just got dropped off in the middle of BFE and I need to eat” kind of way. It sort of requires a bunch of fragile situational trimmings that are not really under individual control … so I’ve looked at software as a profession, really. It doesn’t quite pass the doctor test. Not everyone needs a programmer, but everyone needs shelter.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-12 12:04:52+00:00
The person taking out the loan doesn't need to judge the statistical risk or develop an algorithm to compute it, just the individual one.

It's like the insurance when you rent a piece of equipment. The insurance is $8 every time because they judge that to be the statistical risk. Sometimes I'm doing something sketchy and take them up on it. Sometimes I'm not and I don't. The problem is a very simple one on my side but very complex on theirs.
by Galanwe | 2025-05-12 12:05:02+00:00
From my experience speeding up pytests with Django:

- Creating and migrating the test DB is slow. There is no shame in storing and committing a premigrated sqlite test DB generated upon release, it's often small in size and will save time for everyone.

- Stash your old migrations that nobody use anymore.

- Use python -X importtime and paste the result in an online viewer. Sometimes moving heavy imports to functions instead of the global scope will make individual tests slower, but collection will be faster.

- Use pytest-xdist

- Disable transactions / rollback on readonly tests. Ideally you want most of your non-inserting tests to work on the migrated/preloaded features in your sqlite DB.

We can enter into more details if you want, but the pre migrated DB + xdist alone allowed me to speedup tests on a huge project from 30m to 1m.
by jve | 2025-05-12 12:05:09+00:00
Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place.

Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well.

While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
by speleding | 2025-05-12 12:07:14+00:00
The baby bells actually took with them part of Bell Labs, renamed to Bellcore, that survived for another decade or so. I interned there whilst doing my MSc, it was still a great place for a while, with serious research.

Wikipedia tells me it still exists in some form, albeit under a different name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv
by Lerc | 2025-05-12 12:07:15+00:00
>I personally don't really see the point in giving meaning to the Q, K, V parts. It doesn't actually matter what Q, K, V do, it's the training algorithms' job to assign it a role automatically.

I was under the impression that the names Q K and V were historical more than anything. There is a definite sense of information flowing from the K to the Q because the V going to the next layer Q comes from the same index as the K.

I agree that it's up to the training to assign the role for the components, but there is still value in investigating the roles that are assigned. The higher level insights you can gather can lead to entirely different mechanisms to perform those roles.

That's very much what most model architectures are, efficiency guides. A multi layer perceptron with an input width the size of context_window*token_size would be capable of assigning rolls better than anything else, but at the cost of being both unfeasibly slow and unfeasibly large.

I'm a little surprised that there isn't a tiny model that generates a V on demand when it is accumulated with the attention weights, A little model that takes the Q and K values and the embeddings that they were generated from. That way when there is a partial match between the Q and K causing a decent attention value it can use the information of what parts of Q and K match to decide what V information is appropriate to pass on. It would be slower, and caching seems to be going in the other direction, but it seems like there is information that should be significant there that just isn't being used.
by lukan | 2025-05-12 12:07:47+00:00
Allende was probably using the most promising approach that I know of and yes, that was killed of.

"I don't know if socialism has a point as such. "

And since many different people used the word for very different things .. definitions are not clear. But people can be treated as slaves whether the factory is owned by a multinational cooperation, as well as a state run factory.

So what does it even mean, workers control the means of production?

Not a trivial question at all and it boils down who has power. And often or rather allmost always it developed to: not the workers working there.

But even if you would make a iron socialist law, that this should be the case. The workers always decide what they build - then you wouldn't have central planning anymore. And why should other workers decide to give their products to that factory?

Ah, they could negotiate contracts. Like in a free market?

Or they cannot and then it just means, they don't really control their means of production.
by anthk | 2025-05-12 12:08:15+00:00
This is about software emulated FP. OFC NetBSD used the FP module in CPU's since long ago.

Also, FP is not math, it's just a kind of math. And even Forth users will use a fixed point before going into float. With 32 bits, they will just scale the point and call it a day.

And seasoned Forth users will just use quotient arithmetic and output fractional parts as two items in the stack.
by bradrn | 2025-05-12 12:08:55+00:00
> Sign language […] does have something map-like that the author writes about.

Not really, no. Sign languages have basically the same structure as spoken languages. (Exceptions are fairly minor, e.g. the use of space for anaphora in ASL.)

> That the language does not have written form is not helping.

Again, no. There are a number of well-established sign language writing systems, including SignWriting [0] and Stokoe Notation [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokoe_notation
by NikolaNovak | 2025-05-12 12:09:10+00:00
Hmm, how is that calculated? Therapist I'm currently seeing is $150/hour, on the outskirts of Toronto (cheaper cost of living / office space), and is empathically not on the high end of training (i.e. no PhD etc). I've never ever seen one below triple digits, so the notion of average, in Toronto, being $55 doesn't seem right.

Ahh, here we go; Indeed.com includes "Stretch Therapist", Occupational Therapist, Respiratory Therapist, Weight Gain Therapist, Massage Therapist, Care Co-ordinator, and everything else that includes the term "Therapist" in it.
by lepicz | 2025-05-12 12:09:30+00:00
lol, i significantly improved my vacation by reverse engineering the virtual desktops on windows :) best memories of last year: reverse engineering is hellovafun!

learned a lot of interesting thing, namely there is an undocumented messaging underlying the RPC in windows: https://csandker.io/2022/05/24/Offensive-Windows-IPC-3-ALPC....
by lopis | 2025-05-12 12:09:44+00:00
It depends what you mean by language. I think you're using a very narrow definition in your comment. We already have evidence that some whales use sounds to identify other whales, i.e. "names". We also have building evidence that their vocalization contains some sort of words. If you expand language beyond spoken language, there is evidence of clear communication of complex data, like bees explaining others where to find food with basically little dance moves.

A large part of our "intelligence" is actually the ability to not needing to know everything, because we live in a society. I don't need to know how to build a vehicle or how it works to be able to learn how to drive it. Most animals don't have that luxury. And an important requirement for that is being able to communicate complex ideas with your peers, and pass them on to the next generations.

Maybe if intelligence alien life is completely different than what we find on Earth, this isn't necessary. Like if they don't live in the same plane of existence. But if it is comprised of physical conscious individuals, it's highly likely that they would have some sort of language.
by simultsop | 2025-05-12 12:10:15+00:00
In a utopic scenario, yes, you fix type-checking and you can live happily ever after.

In an interoperable environment, when additional programming languages/teams are in play, which is very frequent nowadays. You have the problem of centralizing types/entities/schemas, reused types, partial types, and union types, and you can keep the story on.

At some point, instead of typing being an invisible tool, it becomes the tool. Then you superset the tool to other languages, because they are in an immutable state. Another language will emerge with dynamic typing in decades then people will take the same spiral and spend more time to reason wages.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 12:11:28+00:00
Look at WPF (or its more modern incarnations like Avalonia or Uno) for a decent example of what a GUI framework designed for desktop apps from the get go can look like.

Things like these haven't taken over the world because they didn't have the ease of app delivery that browsers provide, and attempts to bolt them onto browsers (Silverlight etc) didn't work out because they didn't work out of the box for most end users.

These days though we have enough bits and pieces directly in the browser (wasm, canvas, WebGL etc) to recreate something like Silverlight that "just works" in any modern browser. Take a look at https://eremex.github.io/controls-demo/ for an example of what's possible.
by artdigital | 2025-05-12 12:12:02+00:00
I find Windsurf almost unusable. It’s hard to explain but the same models in Zed, Windsurf, Copilot and Cursor produce drastically worse code in Windsurf for whatever reason. The agent also tends to do way more stupid things at random, like wanting to call MCP tools, creating new files, then suddenly forgetting how to use tools and apologizing a dozen times

I can’t really explain or prove it, but it was noticeable enough to me that I canceled my subscription and left Windsurf

Maybe a prompting or setting issue? Too high temperature?

Nowadays Copilot got good enough for me that it became my daily driver. I also like that I can use my Copilot subscription in different places like Zed, Aider, Xcode
by megamix | 2025-05-12 12:12:15+00:00
I agree with that, the physical labor has been studied and experienced for quite some time now. But we need to look forward and see if there might be changes we cannot comprehend yet.

For example, we cannot yet google the software eng retirement age or the like. Assuming we started in 2005, average dude 25years old then hasn't retired yet and we don't know either where he/she's gone in 2035/45.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-12 12:12:33+00:00
It suffers from being the Flutter language, it was already given as dead outside Google, had it not been for Flutter.

I also advise watching the Angular documentary, where they briefly describe being forced to adopt Dart by management was a friction point, only sorted by letting them go with TypeScript, and AngularDart be its own thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRC9DlH45lA
by MrGilbert | 2025-05-12 12:13:51+00:00
I don’t know about the consoles, but I'm a Windows Developer with over two decades of experience.

In contrast to MacOS, I can run Windows on pretty much every x86 machine available. Thanks to EU reseller laws, I can also obtain a cheap license. Finally, I have to pay a small one-time fee for a developer account at Microsoft, in contrast to the recurring fee Apple is charging.

So… that's apples and oranges to me.
by Stratoscope | 2025-05-12 12:15:04+00:00
Thank you! It means so much to me that you and so many others used what my team built.

In all fairness, others in this thread have noted that the form design process back then was simpler than today. We didn't need to worry about mobile, high DPI vs. low DPI, and trying to get things to fit on any size screen.

I do see some comments from @90s_dev that sound intriguing. If they are able to get that '90s development experience to work on our modern varieties of displays and devices, that could be quite something!
by swiftcoder | 2025-05-12 12:15:10+00:00
The problem here is that there are a bunch of other situations in life for which being inebriated is a reasonable proxy. Sleep deprivation, extreme stress, social isolation, etc.

New parents often suffer from all of these! If you are a shithead when drunk, are you also going to be a shithead to your wife and newborn child when they most need you to be level-headed and calm?

Similarly for any sort of dangerous job. If I'm going to be sailing offshore for weeks alone with someone, you can be damn sure I'm testing ahead of time how they handle stress.
by conartist6 | 2025-05-12 12:15:38+00:00
I'll try to keep it productive though, since I imagine that businesses will continue to demand tools like this and it's foolish of me to think that someone won't make them.

You asked how you could make it better. You need to think of yourself as having two sets of customers. One set is the decision-makers, and the other is the people being decided on. If you were to be successful it would be by bridging that gap between those two groups. I can only imagine that it would involve pairing decision-making with systems of accountability, transparency, and justice, as we do in governments -- as is necessary to do in any civic system that wields power.

To expand:

- Accountability: Who ensures the rules are meant to be fair not discriminatory? What do you do when the real problem is that the rules need to change?

- Transparency: Can people understand why a decision was really made, or is how the system sees them a secret? If your goal is truly to help people then you need to enable them to help themselves by allowing them to understand the nature of their relationship to the decision-maker.

- Justice: When the system gets it wrong, there must be recourse. If someone is about to lose their livelihood over a paperwork error, there needs to be a system of judicial review that they can engage. The real world is messy, and if you want to create value in the real world you need to engage with the mess instead of trying to oppress it with a system of absolute rules.
by Doxin | 2025-05-12 12:15:47+00:00
I've got no experience with the original "The Clapper", but I had a DIY solder kit for a clap-switch. From what I could figure out that thing would look for two transients with a fairly specific amount of non-transient in between. So clap-clap would trigger it, but not clap...clap or clapclap or clapclapclap. Applause would not trigger that thing. But to be fair neither would trying to activate it without some practice first.
by dangus | 2025-05-12 12:15:57+00:00
This whole topic is a massive eye roll.

In what universe is windows defender “resource-crippling?” There are windows laptops that will sip battery for an entire workday plus extra hours while running defender the entire time. So clearly it’s not “resource-crippling” if it can run on a laptop with a single digit wattage power draw.

And then we’ve got the “I need to control my system I’m too smart for antivirus” folks all over this thread.

Well, if you’re so smart why are you using a consumer OS designed for idiots?

(I like OP’s tongue-in-cheek work and post a whole lot better than the neckbeard army describing how Windows is broken and totally doesn’t work and how we have to disable updates and antivirus because we are power users I guess so we just do that for no reason)
by LordGrignard | 2025-05-12 12:17:36+00:00
of course. I wasn't trying to be "correct" or trying to be nuanced here. My goal was to make the lazier people reading the comment to be more intrigued by the line (which itself i did not invent by myself just paraphrasing the book as seen above), in order to be pushed towards opening the link and reading it.

(i apologize in advance but this really feels like an "uhm akshually" on your part )
by monkeydust | 2025-05-12 12:17:59+00:00
Practical use-case.

I am looking for a way to throw an address at a planning authority (UK) and download the associated documents for that property. Could this or another tool help?

e.g.

https://publicaccess.barnet.gov.uk/online-applications/appli...

As pure random example.

A property can have multiple planning applications and under each many documents.

What I have found useful (saved me time and potential lost £££) is to take the documents, combine to single pdf and provide to Gemini 2.5 Pro and then ask it to validate against agent specification for a property.

Over the weekend found a place that was advertising a feature of the house that was explicitly prohibited through planning decision notice.

Called the Agent up on it who claimed no knowledge but said this would have come up through solicitor checks, which it would have done, much later down the process with more or my money spent and considerable time lost.

Of course all this possible without LLMs but just makes it easier/cheaper to check at scale.
by kaycey2022 | 2025-05-12 12:18:07+00:00
Its all of that to some extent or the other. LLMs don't update overnight and as such lag behind innovations in major frameworks, even in web development. No matter what is said about augmenting their capabilities, their performance using techniques like RAG seem to be lacking. They don't work well with new frameworks either.

Any library that breaks backwards compatibility in major version releases will likely befuddle these models. That's why I have seen them pin dependencies to older versions, and more egregiously, default to using the same stack to generate any basic frontend code. This ignores innovations and improvements made in other frameworks.

For example, in Typescript there is now a new(ish) validation library call arktype. Gemini 2.5 pro straight up produces garbage code for this. The type generation function accepts an object/value. But gemini pro keeps insisting that it consumes a type.

So Gemini defines an optional property as `a?: string` which is similar to what you see in Typescript. But this will fail in arktype, because it needs it input as `'a?': 'string'`. Asking gemini to check again is a waste of time, and you will need enough familiarity with JS/TS to understand the error and move ahead.

Forcing development into an AI friendly paradigm seems to me a regressive move that will curb innovation in return for boosts in junior/1x engineer productivity.