MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What Features Would You Want in a Minimalist Browser?
by gokulnair2001 | 2025-05-14 04:37:39+00:00
I’m building a fast, simple, and private browser. No bloat, no tracking—just you and the web.

What features would you love to see in a browser like this?

If this sounds like your kind of browser, then join the waitlist: https://www.zerobrowser.co/
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-14 04:39:04+00:00
A simple request for feedback is not evidence of narcissism or lack of empathy. Could be anxiety. Could be curiosity. Could be zeal. Could be any number of things. It's certainly not an "extreme lack of decorum" though.

It's okay to avoid giving feedback if you don't want to. I can think of a few ways to answer that question in a neutral or positive fashion to defuse the situation and legally protect the company.
by mastazi | 2025-05-14 04:39:11+00:00
> In Australia, coffee would normally be consumed as a dark roast

I live in Sydney and I mostly drink espresso shots (no milk), the roast is very noticeable to me due to the type of coffee I drink.

I would say at least half of all cafes that I've tried use a light roast for black coffee, and dark roast for milk-based drinks.

Italian-style cafes and non-specialty big chains, use dark roast for everything. But that's becoming less and less common especially in fancier establishment.

This is based on my experience in the CBD, Lower North Shore and Inner West. YMMV
by bschwindHN | 2025-05-14 04:39:13+00:00
Everyone has their own opinions, but to me an Americano is the worst form of black coffee. Espresso blends are typically on the darker side (more bitter), and often include Robusta beans in their blends to produce more crema. Robusta doesn't have a particularly great flavor on its own, some (including me) liken the taste to burnt rubber.

I think the clearest way to show someone how different "black coffee" can taste is to go to one of the extremes - pour over, hot or iced, with a light-roast bean from Africa, perhaps with a Natural or Anaerobic Natural process. You can get some pretty insane flavors out of a bean just by the processing it goes through after picking the coffee cherries. They can sometimes blur the lines between coffee and tea flavors.
by theamk | 2025-05-14 04:39:43+00:00
Depends on a place.

I've worked in places with very strong product management, where every single detail must be approved by a PM. I've also worked in places where engineer has a lot of autonomy - "John from FOO dept is spending too much time wrangling the daily data updates. Can you help him, here is his email? Our higher-ups allocated two weeks for that, but we can extend this if needed." - and from then on, you are in full control of the design and implementation, subject to your team's rules (because no one wants a system with bus factor of 1).

For me, I've found that the latter places are much nicer to work in. The interview question seem to focus on latter situation too.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-14 04:39:45+00:00
I don't go to the ballpark to have baseballs thrown at my head or balls, but that's something that can be reasonably expected to happen at some point while playing baseball (not often but certainly something that happens several times a year, intentional or not), so taking precautions (batting helmet and cup) beforehand makes sense.

If you're not going on the web to have ads lobbed at your head, and you can reasonably expect there to be a ton of ads, so taking precautions and installing an ad blocker makes sense.
by whycome | 2025-05-14 04:40:07+00:00
I'm still convinced that Luigi's capture happened via similar parallel construction. I suspect they knew where he was as soon as the crime occurred (or shortly thereafter).

It also reminds me of the fact that the Titanic was only discovered because Robert Ballard funded the submersible robots via the US Navy looking for specific wrecks.

https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-...

> "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard told National Geographic. "But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/titanic-w...

> Ballard met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-05-14 04:40:13+00:00
> serious inability to read the requirements.

Which requirements were not met?

- Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app

- Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality

Seems like both were more than met to me.

Inspiration from existing tools is subjective. I would have assumed that spending time on the UI for a backend position was not the best way to show off my skills in a take home test.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-14 04:40:55+00:00
It would seem that Freud and his confreres designed psychotherapy to supplant and replace the Sacrament of Penance in the Catholic Church, which had been lost to Protestants, over 300 years since the Reformation swept Germany and the rest of Europe.

It is instructive to Catholics like me, especially during the pandemic, when priests insisted that Confessions must be heard in-person, not over the phone, not over Zoom. There were priests hearing "Drive-Thru" confessions from people in cars during the lockdowns!

But it's interesting to see many sacraments get re-invented, because fundamentally, humans need this kind of connection and this kind of unburdening, and if they can't do it with a priest, they'll pay good money to a professional, and if they can't pay good money to a professional, they'll just pour out their souls into a keyboard interface...
by JadoJodo | 2025-05-14 04:40:55+00:00
This (and other terrible interviewing processes) seem like the epitome of a problem being tackled from the wrong end: Trying to filter things coming OUT of the hiring funnel instead of filtering the things going IN to the hiring funnel.

Case-in-point: Modern job sites (cough LinkedIn). Every job listing has HUNDREDS of applicants within an hour of the job being posted. It's ridiculous. It should not be _that_ easy to apply for a job.

The outcome is what we are seeing today: A company posts a job, is inundated with 100s/1,000s of applications. In order to filter out the 80% of applicants who aren't deeply interested in the role, the company deliberately assigns busywork/road blocks to slow down the process.

The other 20% of applicants will then spend days/weeks/months in the hiring process on intro videos, take home challenges, etc. Basically anything that can be throw at the applicant that isn't time with a human.

The takeaway for each can be broken down into:

- 80% of applicants: didn't spend anything, didn't get anything, don't care

- 19% of applicants: spent time doing some/all of the busywork, _aren't_ hired, end up very frustrated at the amount of time/energy/resources that was spent only to be discarded

- The 1%: spent time doing some/all of the busywork, _are_ hired, feel great!

I'm not sure what the exact solution is, but I know that:

a) it's a race to the bottom (with the bottom being full automation on BOTH sides of the hiring process),

b) I'd much rather spend a fair bit of time putting together applications for 5 jobs and be seriously considered than spend very little time on 50 jobs only to be immediately rejected or handed an assignment before I even talk to a real human being

c) hiring teams hate the status quo, too.
by chii | 2025-05-14 04:41:01+00:00
For the same price, airbnb usually provides more than hotels (but with higher variation in quality).

Hotels tend to be pretty consistently good when it is over a certain price point, and at any higher price point, all you get is better views/location (and may be some amenities such as gym or pool) - aka, quality caps out and just becomes expensive.

Airbnb prices are quite correlated to quality. High priced airbnb (for example, a holiday lodge) can be _very_ good for the price. But airbnb is a sort of buyers beware type deal.
by flobosg | 2025-05-14 04:41:08+00:00
Broadly speaking, think of codon-anticodon pairings, but with actual letters mapped to them.

any style of life/ is prim ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ the faery is rosy/ of glow
by wrs | 2025-05-14 04:41:24+00:00
But if you believe in your manual heuristics enough to ship them, you must already have a body of tests that you're happy with, right?

Also seems like this is a case where generating synthetic data would be a big help. You don't have to use only real-world documents for training, just examples of the sorts of things real-world documents have in them. Make a vast corpus of semi-random documents in semi-random fonts and settings, printed from Word, Pandoc, LaTeX, etc.
by vintermann | 2025-05-14 04:41:45+00:00
Well, in my hobby of genealogy it's all about building a knowledge graph. Not just the obvious of who are children to which parents etc, but also where great-grandpa was in 1920.

People reach for a database, and of course you need that, but for one thing the data certainly doesn't always come in a nice tabular format, and moreover you often don't know which piece of knowledge will become relevant for a question you care about - maybe two people worked together at the Kings Bay Mining Company, and then the was there accident in 1962, but uncle Hans was inspector at Wilhelmsen etc. Often you make progress because you remember niche geographical or historical information.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-05-14 04:42:30+00:00
>same mistake Google did

This made me realize that their original strategy was to extract the promise from the fat long tail of their respective supply ("unique experience" for abnb, "relevant search results" for goog). But then the Septembers are apt to become eternal if you can't keep it at a level manageable by humans, like a dang-or-2

From TFA

>I want to be a luchador!” he tells me, then immediately regrets it.

(dang is probably quite great at minimizing regrets a la Jeff, the insta ones most of all)

>Leave it to the subconscious to highlight what matters.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-05-14 04:43:22+00:00
There are times when "just trust me bro" is okay. Semianalysis articles are one of those times. You are free to pull the contrarian "source please" shit, but the reality is that they are far more accurate at most types of GPU, Cloud, or AI analysis than almost anyone on this websites or anywhere else.

Just trust them bro. Unironically.
by kasey_junk | 2025-05-14 04:43:45+00:00
Sour coffee frequently means the grind is too coarse for the bean or the coffee is not brewed long enough. Both of those are more common problems when working with lighter roasts.

You might experiment with the same bean and different grind settings to see if that helps with the taste you don’t like. Though age of the beans messes with this too which is maddening. Generally speaking though lighter roasts are more fiddly to brew so get messed up more frequently.
by sham1 | 2025-05-14 04:43:59+00:00
> Next up: Restaurants for people who don't like food!

This might come off as overly snarky, and if so, that isn't my intention, but isn't a restaurant for people who don't like food just fast food?

I mean, it's not like fast food is going to be that high quality overall, and is really meant to be eaten quickly without necessarily enjoying the experience.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-14 04:44:30+00:00
as a generic aside, this seems like it's more of a "LAN of Things" project than an IoT device. It seems it would work fine if the upstream IP dialtone cut out for a while (though i'm guessing you wouldn't be doing too much video conferencing if that happened.)

but the core functionality doesn't require a server in the cloud, so by definition it's not IoT. just a nit though. it's still a cool little hack, no matter what you call it.
by dakr | 2025-05-14 04:47:24+00:00
There is a lot of handwaving going on here. The below, however, is an egregious misunderstanding of how percentages work. That, or it betrays very sloppy work. Doing it right would actually make the specific case they make stronger.

"There are also potential opportunities to leverage the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is 35% faster than in a typical glass fiber."

This is just wrong. The speed of light in a fiber is ~2/3 slower than in a vacuum. That means that the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than in a fiber, not 35% (~1/3) faster!
by brokenmachine | 2025-05-14 04:47:33+00:00
On an Ubuntu 24.04.2 machine:

dpkg -l | grep microcode ii amd64-microcode 3.20231019.1ubuntu2.1 amd64 Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs ii intel-microcode 3.20250211.0ubuntu0.24.04.1 amd64 Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs ii iucode-tool 2.3.1-3build1 amd64 Intel processor microcode tool
by lyu07282 | 2025-05-14 04:48:10+00:00
> I think you're way underestimating people who don't agree with you.

No I have enough experience to know that I usually over estimating people, everyone is the product of their environment and material conditions, saying that I don't have much expectation of people doesn't mean I don't empathize with them.

Your thinking is scattered, disorganized, surface level and not well thought-through. You are missing crucial information and you are looking for a simple argument to a complex problem you erroneously believe to be simple and common sense.

> I've spent plenty of time on this topic.

And yet you don't understand why democrats oppose voter ID laws and neither do you understand why republicans support it. You don't know how many people don't have an ID and why. You don't understand how election fraud happens and how much of a problem it is. You don't know how elections work in the US and how abusing no-voter-id would look like.

> And yet I can't find any convincing argument.

Because you first have to understand what the argument is about.
by noduerme | 2025-05-14 04:48:14+00:00
Honestly though, I think this is a structural and training issue, not a matter of who or what is answering the phone. Someone somewhere recently chained together a bunch of AI models to see what would happen if they emulated various departments in a large company, and they immediately learned how to pass the buck to each other and obfuscate the fact that nothing really got done. I don't think effiency, customer service or interdepartmental cooperation are really the problems the C-suite are trying to solve for by adopting AI anywhere they can. Or even productivity writ large, for that matter. Viewed through the lens of short term gains, AI looks like a way to cut costs and maintain at least the same level of bloat. In its current form, I'm suspicious as an investor of any company that treats it as a panacea for their structural and hierarchical maladies.
by thaumaturgy | 2025-05-14 04:48:21+00:00
Okay, but basic interpersonal skills are a prerequisite for anybody in a senior or team lead position, or any position that will involve code reviews.

I'm sympathetic to how awkward it can feel to provide honest feedback to a candidate, but look: we're all people here. I think we forget that sometimes when we're assembling hiring processes. As a candidate, you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization. And if you're involved in the hiring process in any way, you ought to be equipped to handle that.
by chii | 2025-05-14 04:48:36+00:00
at the level of chinese gov't, the "cash" is going to pay for hardware. And it's american hardware currently leading the frontier, and the sanctions on it have made it hard to officially procure large amounts of compute from nvidia.

So the chinese gov't will need to also invest in hardware production - and surely they are furiously doing so (and getting limited success, but success none the less).

The american chip sanctions is, in my view, an own-goal. In the short term, it might cause some pain, but in the medium to long term, it is the kick that the chinese market would need to adapt. Necessity is the mother of all inventions after all. It might take 10 years, but i have no doubts that china can reach a level equal to that of TSMC.

If the US administrations (both current and previous) had any brains, they should've seen this. They should've put subsidies into chips so that chinese production will not be competitive, and chinese firms will lose money if they go domestic. And the export of such hardware would balance the trade deficits.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-14 04:48:51+00:00
The definition of "IoT" requires neither Internet access nor cloud server functionality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things

The core idea of IoT is that everything is capable of communicating on some network, whether that device is a fridge, a coffee maker, a dishwasher, a speck of dust, or a light bulb. The idea is that networks can connect more types of "things" than just general computing devices. The type of network and the reach of said network is sort of immaterial.

The author has created a specialized widget which communicates over a network. By definition, that is IoT.
by ordu | 2025-05-14 04:49:02+00:00
Compiler can figure that out, but the thing is compiler needs also to understand lifetimes at the site where this function is called. In general case compiler will not look into the code of a called function to see what it does, compiler relies on a function declaration.

That `longest` if defined without explicit lifetimes treated like a lifetime of a return value is the same as of the first argument. It is a rule "lifetime elision", which allows to not write lifetimes explicitly in most cases.

But `longest` can return a second reference also. With added lifetimes the header of the function says exactly that: the lifetime of a return value is a minimum of lifetimes of arguments. Not the lifetime of the first one.
by bcoates | 2025-05-14 04:49:13+00:00
From the article: It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience."

I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn't imagine anything more dire than literature being reduced to a mirror reflecting back the (presumably young and intellectually deprived) readers sad little life back at them.

I was privileged enough to grow up in what I'll call the LeVar Burton school of literary interpretation: books are a window into a world entirely unlike your own where you can be Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly. What’s more interesting: every book being about being a dull little high schooler, or any book being about anything: Farm animals reproducing the Russian revolution, European nobles murdering each other over random points of honor, being totally psyched for war and finding out you’re a giant pussy, navigating the world of being a mentally unstable prep school girl in the 1960s... entire universes of totally inaccessible experiences made possible through the magic of the novel.
by anahas | 2025-05-14 04:49:30+00:00
Sure you could but now you have two identical models running in the browser, one of which needs to be loaded in.

Ideally they would expose the model via a browser api like they do for the prompt api.

FWIW I asked someone on the chrome team about this and they don’t plan to expose native embedding APIs citing lack of dimensionality standards as the reason.
by flobosg | 2025-05-14 04:50:10+00:00
Wow! Happy to read that the Xenotext went on. I’ve been following Christian Bök’s work for more than a decade and he never fails to impress me. Ulver’s musical rendition of his “Vowels” poem is just beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw
by permo-w | 2025-05-14 04:50:39+00:00
is it a skill issue that it doesn't just plug and play into my laptop? is it a skill issue that swiping from the left goes back to the previous page and swiping from the right also goes back to the previous page? is it a skill issue that google translate requires me to have the google search app installed? and that the google search app puts a big fuck off search bar in the middle of my home screen, of which the only simple way to remove is to delete the app?
by anonymousiam | 2025-05-14 04:51:27+00:00
I worked with a lot of engineers in my 40+ year engineering career. One thing that most engineers don't like is ambiguity. I didn't like it either, until mid career when I was thrown into an environment where the customers didn't really know what they wanted, and it was impossible to explore all of the solution space within time and budget constraints. I ended up thriving in this environment, but I watched as many qualified and experienced engineers floundered and over-stressed themselves. The attrition rate in this environment was about 80%. To survive, I had to use intuition, speculation, and innovation -- things I had not used much in my previous engineering roles. I sadly watched while a lot of really good engineers chose to move on, or were assigned to less relevant roles.

In this case, I perceive that the author (Jose) was looking for firm requirements, and did what he could to elicit them, but the Kagi folks were just looking for innovation and a demonstration of competency. They didn't care as much about the details of the submittal as they did about seeing what the candidate would do without specific requirements.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-14 04:51:45+00:00
Triggering based on the webcam is very smart.

I can think of at least 5 different companies that have tried to launch similar products, including a couple local startups. Most of them had some sort of manual control which everyone gets tired of after a couple days. The few people I saw try to use the manual lights would forget to turn it off, which turned it into a false alarm system, which quickly taught everyone to ignore it and peek their head in anyway because it was on so frequently that everyone knew it had no actual correlation with the person being in a meeting.
by nine_k | 2025-05-14 04:52:00+00:00
What they were looking at was not the code, but the attitude. They likely don't want an engineer with a propensity to do too much, unless it's a 100x coder who can do "too much" with a lightning speed. Usually they want he candidate to show the ability to quickly do as much as needed, and not more, and, crucially, to understand how much is needed.

So yes, this is a culture fit test as much (if not more) as a design and coding test. Some people who are great at design and coding would fail it, and it's how this filter is intended to work.
by rixtox | 2025-05-14 04:53:17+00:00
I remember arguing with Ron on the TC39 disposable proposal that I think Go's `defer` is a better pattern than C#'s `using`, and he tried to convince me the otherwise.

I was surprised to see they choose Go instead of C# for the TypeScript compiler port. Microsoft has been trying to make ECMAScript look more similar to C#, and their Windows Universal SDK has made a lot of efforts to provide a seamless transition for developers to port their code between C# and TypeScript. And yet they still think porting TypeScript compiler to Go is easier to do than porting it to C#.

Despite my different tech view with Ron, I appreciate and respect the great work he has done to TypeScript & ECMAScript. And I wish him the best with his next adventure.
by DougN7 | 2025-05-14 04:53:29+00:00
Wow. That’s a really important message. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that at all when I read it. I just read about some dude that wanted to party with the rich kids. And I was trying to pay attention and got good grades. The issue might be that I simply wasn’t emotionally intelligent at the time to understand, and I think that was the case for most of us. Or maybe just me…