MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Enginerrrd | 2025-05-11 22:26:57+00:00
I'm not the person you're replying to. But actually I've been getting quite concerned about this for some time. Mostly due to the shrinking world demographics on the horizon. Overall growth is slowing and in most developed economies it will be shrinking. Also, increasing wealth inequality tends to lead to lower overall GDP so if that trend continues I expect lower aggregate growth as well.

I think there is indeed a strong possibility that we may see very poor inflation-adjusted growth from an otherwise reasonable and diverse investment portfolio.

Ultimately, the recipe for growth will just not be so simple in a world economy with a dwindling population. Thats a VERY unique situation so a lot of historical wisdom regarding investments I think may not bear fruit like it did in the past.

My approach to mitigate this is two-fold, first I'm trying to be even MORE diversified. I have investments spread out over domestic and international ETF's, real estate, and I work a public sector job with a public pension. In addition, while aggregate growth may become lackluster, certain industries will still do well. Ive run businesses before and I'm looking to start another business in a very well-targeted industry to add an additional potential revenue stream well into the future. And the second prong of my approach is to increase my savings rate much higher than historically safe targets.

I think there is good reason to be concerned about this and it has very little to do with the current market turmoil. (Although there are some indicators of trouble in that too)
by claytongulick | 2025-05-11 22:27:02+00:00
Increasingly, this is actually an argument in favor of vanilla web components.

The WC ecosystem has grown a lot, and one of the great things about native web components is that they can be consumed by most major frameworks at this point. There are also many mature component sets you can pick from, like shoelace, etc... you can mix and match components from different offerings, something that's not practical with React/Angular (for example).

I can use a select from Ionic, a breadcrumb from Shoelace, and a date picker from Lightning and it'll all just work.

Doing vanilla Javascript development doesn't mean "don't use any libraries" (well, it might to purists, but whatever) it means stick to using standards based technologies with libraries and accelerators.

For example, I use many of the techniques described by the site, but I prefer to use lit-html library (NOT lit framework) for rendering.

Sometimes I use the vaadin router for routing, sometimes the Ionic router, sometimes my home grown one.

I use a little library I wrote called ApplicationState for cross component shared state, because I don't like state being coupled to my DOM structure.

Sure, this requires a deeper understanding than "batteries included" frameworks, but the advantages outweigh the negatives IMHO.
by fooker | 2025-05-11 22:27:09+00:00
I don’t disagree. After all, that’s exactly how I became an expert in whatever I do right now.

You seem to have missed my point though, it was about switching tracks to become an expert in a new thing. A random physics PhD grad might not have a burning passion for fintech, for example but still becomes an expert after three months in the job because of the sheer amount of rigorous training.
by lolinder | 2025-05-11 22:27:16+00:00
This is spot on. Load times do not matter for the kinds of apps that:

* Are exclusively loaded on high speed internet in corporate networks.

* Have a high hours-of-work-per-page-load count.

* Update infrequently.

We're engineers, or at least we like to call ourselves that. Engineering is the process of gathering requirements and building a system that meets those requirements on time and under budget. If your requirements include being able to serve users on 3G networks or users who only load your site in order to read a single piece of content per day, yeah, optimize your load times. But don't attack other engineers for failing to live up to your app's requirements.
by masternight | 2025-05-11 22:27:27+00:00
There is something I like about win32 gui programming. It's a little idiosyncratic, but if you read Raymond Chen's blog you'll see why.

The win32 API has its origins on the 8088 processor and doing things a certain way results in saving 40 bytes of code or uses one less register or something.

I wrote a lot of toy gui apps using mingw and Petzold's book back in the day. Writing custom controls, drawing graphics and text, handling scrolling, hit testing etc was all a lot of fun.

I see in your app you're using strcpy, sprintf. Any kind of serious programming you should be using the length-checked variants. I'm surprised the compiler didn't spew.

You'll also find that the Win32 API has a lot of replacements for what's in the C standard library. If you really want to try and get the executable size down, see if you can write your app using only <Windows.h> and no cstdlib. Instead of memset() you've got ZeroMemory(), instead of memcpy() you've got CopyMemory().

At some point writing raw C code becomes painful. Still, I think doing your first few attempts in raw C is the best way to learn. Managing all the minutiae gives you a great sense of what's going on while you're learning.

If you want to play more with win32 gui programming, I'd have a look at the WTL (Windows Template Library). It's a C++ wrapper around the win32 API and makes it much easier to reason about what's going on.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2025-05-11 22:27:48+00:00
Mazda's target market is quite different from the EV buyers one, at least here in Europe.

Its reputation is that of a brand for people who really like cars, who can appreciate the care put into proper engineering and a wonderful manual transmission; or people with an eye for a "conservative" kind of quality. It's basically the new Volvo, but sportier.
by treetalker | 2025-05-11 22:27:49+00:00
You wrote:

> I was waiting …

I think your instinct and expectation were correct. The article reads:

> The info provided by Biomass will be a critical step forward.

I think it should read "The info provided by Biomass would be a critical step forward." ("Would" should be used because it's discussing a hypothetical situation contrary to fact — contrary to fact because the restrictions impede the collection of the desired data.)

My guess is that it's either sloppy editing or LLM-generated text.
by XCSme | 2025-05-11 22:28:06+00:00
I can only speak for myself (I made UXWizz): I feel like interest has always been there for different platforms, most are still too simple or too complex and hard to set up and use.

In my case, I am simply focused on the self-hosting niche, trying to make the best self-hosting experience. I have an advantage here, because most other tools earn their money from their cloud version, so they don't really want you to self-host, thus usually provide different "open-source" versions and rarely provide support for it.

Also, because "cloud-focused" analytics are built for scale, they are actually not optimal for tracking smaller amounts of traffic (most websites don't have millions of visitors per month), so they use more resources for running scale-proof stacks.
by rincebrain | 2025-05-11 22:28:26+00:00
People are, indeed, almost always leaving the situation.

But at least in my experience, it's still the case in the past few years that every time someone has told me they were "quitting this job", versus "excited about this new job", it was specifically about their direct manager's effects on the situation.

(Sample sizes for any individual small, of course.)

Either way, I still think the saying is useful for intentionally reminding people of how much influence your direct manager can have on your work experience, because I've found a lot of people, particularly new hires, don't appreciate how much your experience can vary across managers.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-05-11 22:28:27+00:00
> Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types

What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.
by querez | 2025-05-11 22:29:13+00:00
>> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

> As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve.

Google did set up such a lab. The mission of Google Brain was literally to hire smart people and let them do work on whatever they want. ("Google Brain team members set their own research agenda, with the team as a whole maintaining a portfolio of projects across different time horizons and levels of risk." -- https://research.google.com/teams/brain/). Unsurprisingly, Google Brain is the place that originated the Transformer that powers the current AI craze (and many, many, many other AI innovations).
by YZF | 2025-05-11 22:29:29+00:00
Afaik this is always best effort, e.g.: https://clickhouse.com/docs/operations/settings/settings#ins...

"For the replicated tables by default the only 100 of the most recent blocks for each partition are deduplicated"

This doesn't work under failure conditions either (again afaik), e.g. if the clickhouse server fails.
by eptcyka | 2025-05-11 22:29:30+00:00
People sometimes know where they want to get, often that place can be described with buzzwords. They don't always know how to get there. Clueless managers often don't know how to get there, they might only have an inkling as to what are some of the properties of their desired state.

They will talk about that subset of things, they cannot do anything else for they are not aware of the how, much less the whole picture. Once the teams deliver a state with the desired and the unspecified and undesired properties, the team and the manager get angry.
by rasz | 2025-05-11 22:30:06+00:00
IBM brain rot adopted by Microsoft.

Why are device-independent bitmaps upside down? Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210525-00/?p=10...

I think you had to wait for WinG or maybe even DirectX to get normal 1:1 mapping.

OpenGL is so old it had same stupid ideas about coordinates.
by grafmax | 2025-05-11 22:30:20+00:00
Concentration of wealth is a concentration of power. We should hold accountable those with the deepest pockets and the greatest influence on climate policy: the fossil fuel cartel. Calls to cut government spending by withholding relief from those on the margins of decision-making miss the forest for the trees. Justice would have those paying to destroy our future pay for the consequences of their cynicism and misanthropy.
by kjellsbells | 2025-05-11 22:30:39+00:00
Every time I try and automate Excel it pushes me towards TypeScript, which I accept is probably the future for Excel automation...except that when you really need to do middling to advanced Excel, Microsoft's Typescript engine throws up its hands in despair and I am forced to pull out VBA.

I really wish the VBA IDE got some love, but I guess that will never happen.
by rzwitserloot | 2025-05-11 22:30:42+00:00
I assume you meant with the AOT argument: "The initial few minutes of a JVM's existence, which would be the entire lifetime if you're using java the way you use e.g. your average executable in your `/usr/bin` dir".

Saying "java programs will be faster" is perhaps a bit misleading to those who don't know how java works. This will speed up only the first moments of a JVM execution, nothing more. Or, I misread the JEP, in which case I'd owe you one if you can explain what I missed.

As a java developer this will be lightly convenient when developing. We go through JVM warmup a lot more than your average user ever does. Personally I think I'm on the low end (I like debuggers, and I don't use TDD-style "what I work on is dictated by a unit test run and thus I rerun the tests a lot during development". But still it excites me somewhat, so that should mean your average java dev should be excited quite a bit by this.

I am not all that experienced in it, but I gather that lambda-style java deployments (self contained simple apps that run on demand and could in theory be operating on a 'lets boot up a JVM to run this tiny job which won't last more than half a second') have looong ago moved on from actually booting JVMs for every job, such as by using Graal, an existing AOT tool. But if you weren't using those, hoo boy. This gives every java app 'graal level bootup' for as far as I can tell effectively free (a smidge of disk space to store the profile).

For the kinds of java deployments I'm more familiar with (a server that boots as the box boots and stays running until a reboot is needed to update deps or the app itself), this probably won't cause a noticable performance boost.
by richwater | 2025-05-11 22:30:58+00:00
> Democrats never passed a law to force anyone to get vaccinated

This is revisionism at best, disinformation at worst.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/04/1048939858/osha-biden-vaccine...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_administration_COVID-19_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_mandates_...
by int_19h | 2025-05-11 22:31:21+00:00
It was indeed ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) - Connection, Command, Recordset etc - and this is also the API used by Access.

Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without having confusing naming for its APIs, so the one before ADO was called DAO (Data Access Objects).

There was also some very confusing layering in play. ADO didn't work with the database directly - it was a layer on top of either ODBC or OLE DB, depending on the database.
by rincebrain | 2025-05-11 22:31:34+00:00
At least personally, I've resigned myself to games being purely digital and most of my games aren't carts for the Switch, but I believe a number of the smaller indie games were basically just download codes in a box, or a cart that required downloading some of the core functionality. (I wanted to say it was Goat Simulator for Switch that I was thinking of, but I can't find any proof of this.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/NSCollectors/comments/dzquth/physic... is a thread about this, and it lists that the Spyro collection only allowed you to access the first world of each game in the collection without a download.
by ZoneZealot | 2025-05-11 22:32:03+00:00
I thought their transparency report was quite clear https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/transparency/

> 5. Cloudflare has never modified the intended destination of DNS responses at the request of law enforcement or another third party.

That's accurate, the DNS responses for these domains previously did, and still do, point to Cloudflare's WAF/CDN.

They haven't said anything like '...never blocked access to customer content...'.
by gU9x3u8XmQNG | 2025-05-11 22:32:37+00:00
There's another huge constraint that the article and a lot of responses do not seem to mention:

- Compliance and,

- Regulation.

In Australia, for example; we have very strict requirements for manufacturers - and it seems mostly out of regulatory incompetence that vendors like Tesla are able to deploy and bypass in the way they do.

I've been told, by stakeholders in industry, that the systems that facilitate the software of vehicles to align with such requirements historically were strictly controlled.

(The same applied to the hardware)

Whilst it's also over simplifying it;

- I am not excited at the prospect that `developer-a` can `git commit` functional changes to my vehicle.

I'm not sure you should be, either!
by scrubs | 2025-05-11 22:33:25+00:00
We appear to be living in an age were one's choices are 100% goverment all day all the time, or none. You're 100% Trump or not. You're pro-gun or not. You're pro-women rights or not. Well, I'm not having any of this simplistic baby pablum.

Government != corporation despite the fact they both need money. I'm for a well-funded government that I can hold accountable for their roles and responsibilities, ditto on the private site. See for example the Intel thread floating around on HN; there we see a corp losing their competitive grip.

Good lord: it will not kill America to have a decent linear combination of good and competent goverment and corporations. We need both.
by momoschili | 2025-05-11 22:33:36+00:00
The vast majority of US grad students already pass tests on chapters 1-9 (the ones that are taught) before they even begin their "true" graduate career (aka their "masters"). Most graduate E&M (Jackson) and Thermo/Stat (Landau) mech classes cover their individual topics to an even greater level of detail than these materials.

As for the uncovered subjects, it turns out quantum mechanics occupies a large space of the "new physics" that graduate students are trained to do.

There are definitely an incredible amount of utility and knowledge to be gained from the classical field theories, and obviously many outstanding and new problems that I think need more attention as well. At the same time let's not understate the utility of quantum mechanics that most grad students are specializing in.

You are speaking out of turn.
by casenmgreen | 2025-05-11 22:33:58+00:00
It can be read in two ways.

The most natural way is as you have read it.

However, it is also valid in the sense of "this is a setback, but it's not all that bad". (You might write, "Still, this isn't the worst setback ever.")

You would need to read enough to realize by later lack of a description of the worst setback to realize the former, most natural way, is not in use.
by YZF | 2025-05-11 22:34:00+00:00
Right. I think this is fundamental though. You can minimize the chance of duplicates but not avoid them completely under failure given ClickHouse's guarantees. Also note transactions have certain limitations as well (re: partitions).

I'm curious who your customers are. I work for a large tech company and we use Kafka and ClickHouse in our stack but we would generally build things in house.
by DownrightNifty | 2025-05-11 22:34:15+00:00
Mega cool!

We should all be taking full advantage of the amazing capabilities of the pocket supercomputers we all carry around with us at all times (even if the companies who make them don't want us to or don't care about us). Anything less would be silly! Now Linux and Windows users (the majority of iPhone users) can do easily do so, and that's great.

To install your own personal homebrew apps without Apple's approval, use AltStore (Windows) or SideStore (Linux):

https://faq.altstore.io/altstore-classic/how-to-install-alts...

https://docs.sidestore.io/docs/installation/linux
by belorn | 2025-05-11 22:34:24+00:00
The page you get when DOMContentLoaded is finished is a white page with no content. The page is only loaded in a very technical sense for sites like bbc.com.

Google page speed (https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-bbc-com/yxcpaqmphq?...) use two other terms. First Contentful Paint, that is the first point in the page load timeline where the user can see anything on the screen, and Largest Contentful Paint, the render time of the largest image, text block, or video visible in the viewport, relative to when the user first navigated to the page. For bbc.com, those sites around 1 second mark.

Other measuring aspect is Time to First Byte, which is the time between the request for a resource and when the first byte of a response begins to arrive. For bbc.com that is 300ms.
by int_19h | 2025-05-11 22:34:28+00:00
.NET with Windows Forms - either C# or VB.NET, depending on your taste - is very similar in experience, and is still a fully supported stack today even in the most recent .NET versions (so you get e.g. high-DPI support, dark mode etc) with new features added regularly: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/wh...
by trhway | 2025-05-11 22:35:47+00:00
>Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers

The iPhone on wheels paradigm shift has been stated like a decade ago and as usually the incumbents just can’t cross it while at the same time the new companies are successfully exploiting it.

Not surprisingly it coincides with EV transition - both are enabled by cheap electronics and EV voids incumbents’ ICE tech moat.
by scripturial | 2025-05-11 22:35:49+00:00
At minimum, these days, if you dont use strncpy instead of strcpy, you’ll have to suffer through every man and his dog (or AI tool) forever telling you to do otherwise. (For me this is one of the main arguments of using zig, a lot of these common pitfalls are minimized by using zig, but c is fine as well)
by Rantenki | 2025-05-11 22:36:11+00:00
That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.
by tim333 | 2025-05-11 22:36:31+00:00
I'm not sure David Gerard, the author is very good at this stuff. He's spent the last several years moaning about cryptocurrency in a not very deep way and now seems to have pivoted to moaning about AI and VC without a deep knowledge or either. He also pops up as a Wikipedia editor moaning about stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928248

For an alternative take check out say the FT "AI frenzy leads US venture capital to biggest splurge in three years" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928248

(for amusement here he is going on about bitcoin being a pump and dump when it was $16 in 2011 https://newstechnica.com/2011/06/18/bitcoin-to-revolutionise...)
by akoster | 2025-05-11 22:36:37+00:00
I agree! I still sometimes use LibreOffice Base for quick prototyping [0] or Microsoft Access if I am on Windows. It uses HSQLDB by default but you can connect to several external JDBC, ODBC and ADO compatible databases, though I often use DBeaver for that purpose. [1]

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

[1] https://dbeaver.io/
by typewithrhythm | 2025-05-11 22:36:39+00:00
This is only half the story, working for a major vendor, we sell both hardware and software, the whole way up to a full customisable well integrated platform. The manufacturers are deliberately choosing less capable systems, or taking thing piecemeal.

Most of our customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money... They tend to either want either a set of features checked off (only for existence, not quality), or something along the lines of get as close to a rivian with thirty cents per unit more than we paid last year.
by XCSme | 2025-05-11 22:37:04+00:00
Yeah, but free as far as I know.

You usually have:

All-in-one analytics: Posthog, Matomo, UXWizz (I made it!)

Simple analytics: Plausible, Umami

Qualitative analytics (heatmaps/recordings): Hotjar, Clarity, FullStory, Mouseflow, LuckyOrange, etc.

I think Clarity also added more analytics features, but you're still sending all your data to Microsoft.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-05-11 22:37:35+00:00
A close family member worked at Bell labs during the cold war era. According to them,

<paraphrase>

The reason is very simple. There was a big picture motivation: the war, followed by the cold war. Once the big picture motivation wasn't there anymore, that sort of organizational structure(or lack of it) does not work the same way. What ends up happening is what a sibling comment has noted:

> My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.

</paraphrase>

You might say, but `grep` wasn't used for war! Correct, but it came up as a side effect of working on much larger endeavours that tied into that bigger picture.

This has been true for most of recent human history. You might know this already, but Fourier was part of most of Napoleon's expeditions, and his work on decomposing waveforms arose out of his work on the "big picture": ballistics.