MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2025-05-09 02:55:34+00:00
I believe your point that UPU rates from China are still lower than USPS domestic. I just haven't paid much attention, and I don't know what Shein/Temu deliveries look like. But my point is that at least recent Aliexpress shipments seem to be completely independent of USPS, at least for my deliveries (I've seen comments from other people that got their last mile Aliexpress Choice via USPS, but I think that was still domestic postage). So even if there are still ways of saving using international mail, the subsidy is close enough that commercial operations are still competitive for some packages.

My point about UPS/Fedex is I do not think large retailers are paying anywhere near the published UPS/Fedex rates. I assume that one of the reasons they can get such bulk discounts is from tightly integrating with UPS/Fedex operations such that UPS/Fedex receive whole trailers already sorted per-destination-distribution-center, etc. And I assume anywhere getting such a deal is contractually prohibited from making their actual rates known.

Why do I think this? From what I've seen businesses like Target/Walmart/HomeDepot/Amazon seem very unconcerned with shipping many small packages from different warehouses. This isn't them indulging the occasional shopper who makes a small order (hoping to make the cost up later), but them being actively content with shipping one or two items per package. If they were paying the steep per-package rates that retail and small businesses pay, we'd see a lot more pre-shipment consolidation.
by bhuga | 2025-05-09 02:56:46+00:00
There's so much happening in this space, but I still haven't seen what would be the killer feature for me: dual-mode operation in IDE and CLI.

In a project where I already have a lot of linting brought into the editor, I want to be able to reuse that linting in a headless mode: start something at the CLI, then hop into the IDE when it says it's done or needs help. I'd be able to see the conversation up to that point and the agent would be able to see my linting errors before I start using it in the IDE. For a large, existing codebase that will require a lot of guardrails for an agent to be successful, it's disheartening to imagine splitting customization efforts between separate CLI and IDE tools.

For me so far, cursor's still the state of the art. But it's hard to go all-in on it if I'll also have to go all-in on a CLI system in parallel. Do any of the tools that are coming out have the kind of dual-mode operation I'm interested in? There's so many it's hard to even evaluate them all.
by worik | 2025-05-09 02:58:05+00:00
Where are the flow batteries? (fuel cells)

Lithium ion batteries are light with a high energy density, so are great for cars.

Flow batteries have a low energy density, but increasing the duration means a bigger tank, and the cost of bigger tanks increases as a function of the cube root (?) of their volume Flow batteries are well over a century old, but I have been reading about improvements over the last two decades. Where are they?
by GuardianCaveman | 2025-05-09 02:59:57+00:00
You don't think people with victory gardens, and buying warbonds, scraping together spare silk and aluminum and other metals to donate to the war effort, manufacturing of vehicles and other factories converted to output munitions and tanks and other materials is impressive?

You can be amazed at the output and the point of the article without turning this into yet another guilt post about how bad America is. What we did was wrong. But also, we stopped the nazis and the japanese and the italians. the war in the pacific killed 15-20 million chinese civilians, and I won't even go into the other theaters or the war crimes of the japanese or the axis powers (nothing to do with the internment). But maybe whatever the opposite of rose tinted glasses is the way you're viewing the wars.

And no, no amount of good by US forces justifies or absolves us of the sin of the japanese internment but maybe some credit is due at least.
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-09 03:02:38+00:00
Yeah, I sort of thought that. But the US is such a competitive place one would have thought competition would have kept prices down. What seems to be happening is the nature of health care allows it to be a 'closed shop' so they do what they like.

FYI, I'm in Australia where we have Medicare which is a universal health care scheme† supported by government taxes. It's not perfect and could always do with more money but people here love it. Tampering with it in a negative way would be electoral suicide for a government at election time.

That said, a visit to a GP is only partly paid for by the scheme (about 2/3)—that is unless the Dr 'bulk-bills' all accounts to the scheme and many don't. Bulk-billing allows a patient to walk out of a surgery without paying anything.

That long preamble lets me lead on to something you may not be aware of although many of your countrymen would be. Some years ago the government made changes to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme—which is the drug store equivalent of Medicare where drugs are heavily subsidized—because many Americans who were visiting here used to stock up on prescription medicines and take them home because the price differential between here and the US is so great. Incidentally, COVID vaccinations are also free as they're covered by the scheme.

Previously, anyone could take a scrip to any pharmacy and have it filled without ID, now one has to have one's Medicard card with one or have its number on file and the Dr's script has to match that ID.

The pondering issue for us is why doesn't the US population rise up on mass for a better deal?

_

† Some years ago I heard an American (I think it was Michael Moore) say that Roosevelt had intended to set up a similar universal health scheme but he died before he could implement it. Is there any truth in that?
by rendaw | 2025-05-09 03:03:11+00:00
Is this satire? First you argue that it's a site for "practical" questions and therefore closing the question was exactly how the site should work (how do you determine it's practical), then it gets reopened and you say oh the question actually was practical so it's obvious it'd be reopened?

The current state of SO is what it is, but saying this is how it was intended to be is 100% revisionist history.

Also "we" "our"... do you work at SO?
by oasisaimlessly | 2025-05-09 03:03:56+00:00
> My understanding is that modern hardware is significantly more complicated at the lowest levels and (at least generally) no longer has a dedicated framebuffer (at least in the same sense that old hardware did).

Modern hardware still generally can be put into a default VGA-compatible[1] mode that does use a dedicated framebuffer. This mode is used by the BIOS and during boot until the model-specific GPU driver takes over.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array#Use
by busymom0 | 2025-05-09 03:04:36+00:00
That's very interesting. When I Googled that error, the only relevant result I got was this revenuecat one:

https://community.revenuecat.com/sdks-51/many-rc-related-war...

However, when I searched for it now (after seeing you were getting that Swift GitHub result), I got better results. No idea why I didn't get that before.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I appreciate it.
by andrewpareles | 2025-05-09 03:05:00+00:00
This is completely true, and it's a really common objection.

I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that at least stray from plaintext in some way.

I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.
by echelon | 2025-05-09 03:05:18+00:00
I posted this the other day, but didn't get a response:

Does anyone think this model of "tool" + "curated model aggregator" + "open source" would be useful for other, non-developer fields? For instance, would an AI art tool with sculpting and drawing benefit from being open source?

I've talked with VCs that love open source developer tools, but they seem to hate on the idea of "open creative tools" for designers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other creatives. They say these folks don't benefit from open source. I don't quite get it, because Blender and Krita have millions of users. (ComfyUI is already kind of in that space, it's just not very user-friendly.)

Why do investors seem to want non-developer things to be closed source? Are they right?
by econ | 2025-05-09 03:05:23+00:00
I forget his name or even when an where it was or how it ended but some kid wanted to start his own school. People were skeptical to say the least but he put in the work.

It turned out more than a few professional teachers were more than a little bit tired of how things work in the usual institutions. You can't even call it new ideas I think, they knew exactly what was wrong. The funny part was that that automatically became the main selling point.
by drdeca | 2025-05-09 03:06:40+00:00
I still think it seems unclear what you mean by “interpolate” in this context? If your NN takes in several numbers and assigns logits to each class based on those numbers, then if you consider the n dimensional space of possible inputs, and if the new input is in the convex hull of the inputs that appear in training samples, then the meaning of “interpolate” is fairly clear.

But when the inputs are sequences of tokens…

Granted, each token gets embedded as some vector, and you can concatenate those vectors to represent the sequence of tokens as one big vector, but, are these vectors for novel strings in the convex hull of such vectors for the strings in the training set?
by godelski | 2025-05-09 03:07:27+00:00
Apple Employees: Please push back against this behavior. It creates more problems than it solves[0]

The philosophy really creates a lot of problems that end up just frustrating users. It's a really lazy form of "security". Here's a simple example of annoyance: if I have private relay enabled, then turning on my VPN causes an alert (will not dismiss automatically). The same thing happens when I turn it off! It is a fine default, but why can't I decide I want to have automatically dismiss? This is such a silly thing to do considering I can turn off Private Relay, without any privileges, and without any notifications! NOTHING IS BEING SOLVED except annoying users... There's TONS of stupid little bugs that normal people just get used to but have no reason for existing (you can always identify an iPhone user because "i" is never capitalized...)

The philosophy only works if Apple is able to meet everybody's needs, but we're also talking about a company who took years to integrate a flashlight into their smartphone. It's okay that you can't create a perfect system. No one expects you to. It is also okay to set defaults and think about design, that's what people love you for (design). But none of this needs to come at a cost to "power users." I understand we're a small portion of users, but you need to understand that our efforts make your products better. Didn't see an issue with something? That's okay, you're not omniscient. But luckily there's millions of power users who will discover stuff and provide solutions. Even if these solutions are free, you still benefit! Because it makes peoples' experiences better! If it is a really good solution, you can directly integrate it into your product too! Everybody wins! Because designing computers is about designing an ecosystem. You design things people can build on top of! That's the whole fucking point of computers in the first place!

Get your head out of your ass and make awesome products!

[0] If any...

[another example]: Why is it that my Airpods can only connect to one device, constantly switching from my Macbook to iPhone. This often creates unnecessary notifications. I want magic with my headphones. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to be playing Spotify on my computer, walk away from it with my phone in pocket, and have the source switch to my phone. I can pick up my phone and manually change the source. But in reality what happens is I pick up my phone and Spotify pauses because my headphones switched to my iPhone... If you open up access then you bet these things will be solved. I know it means people might be able to then seamlessly switch from their Macbook to their Android, but come on, do you really think you're going to convert them by making their lives harder? Just wait till they try an iPhone! It isn't a good experience... I'm speaking from mine...
by MBCook | 2025-05-09 03:07:47+00:00
I suspect it would depend on if they have problematic native code.

The executable format (if it’s native code) doesn’t actually specify what page size it wants right? So there would be no way for the OS to block 4 KB page apps.

I guess they could block stuff that targets an older API version, but that would block a lot of things that would otherwise work just fine.
by mp5 | 2025-05-09 03:08:08+00:00
Big fan of Continue btw! There's a small difference in how we handle inline edits - if you've used inline edits in Cursor/Windsurf/Void you'll notice that a box appears above the text you are selecting, and you can type inside of it. This isn't possible with VS Code extensions alone (you _have_ to type into the sidebar).
by worik | 2025-05-09 03:08:41+00:00
I will bite.

There are any problems with fission that are all related to the extraordinary danger of handling the fuel, byproducts, and the sites themselves.

The cost of them is huge, some people are hoping that modularity will help with construction, but it is still astonishingly expensive.

The problems of handling the fuel has been solved, in theory and practise. Except when commerce is involved. When the money people get involved corners will get cut, and we are back to incredible danger. Technically solvable, but I would not go near it. I have known too many business people.

The problem of the long-term waste is entirely beyond us. There has been no practical progress on this front. Long term waste (including some parts of the assemblies themselves) are very dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

This is, with current technology that can be bought to bear, unsolvable.

The only thing we can do is put it in a stable site, be ready to move it when the site becomes unstable (nowhere on Earth is known to be stable on such time scales), and find a way of communication, across thousands of generations, just how poisonous this stuff is.

Maybe our ancestors will get lucky and find a way to safely dispose of it....

So fission power is making future generations pay for today's consumption.

Fortunately for us it is moot. The costs of renewables is dropped to the point that the only reason for fission is to build the capacity for nuclear weapons.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-09 03:10:15+00:00
Not putting thousands workers into camps for no good reason will help you build a giant navy and win a war. It’s small compared to the whole country but it does help.

But the main lesson I'd want to take is to shut down strong aggressors early, then you don’t need to run a massive war production program in the first place.

Judging by Ukraine, we seem to have learned this lesson but not very well.
by josephg | 2025-05-09 03:11:17+00:00
The rule is that you can't cache a value in an interface, because interfaces don't store data. You need to cache a value in a struct somewhere. This implementation wraps items (like images) in another struct which stores the image, and also caches the metadata. Thats the point of ThingWithMetadata. Maybe it should instead be called WithCachedMetadata. Eg, WithCachedMetadata<Image>.

You can pass WithCachedMetadata around, and consumers don't need to understand any of the implementation details. They just ask for the metadata and it'll fetch it lazily. But it is definitely more awkward than inheritance, because the image struct is wrapped.

As I said, there's other ways to approach it - but I suspect in this case, using inheritance as a stand-in for a class extension / mixin is probably going to always be your most favorite option. A better approach might be for each item to simply know the URL to their metadata. And then get your net code to handle caching on behalf of the whole program.

It sounds like you really want to use mixins for this - and you're proposing inheritance as a way to do it. The part of me which knows ruby, obj-c and swift agrees with you. I like this weird hacky use of inheritance to actually do class mixins / extensions.

The javascript / typescript programmer in me would do it using closures instead:

function lazyResource(url) { let cached = null return async () => { if (cached == null) cached = await fetch(url) return cached } } // ... const image = { metadata: lazyResource(url) }

Of all the answers, I think this is actually my favorite solution. Its probably the most clear, simple and expressive way to solve the problem.
by fallinditch | 2025-05-09 03:11:24+00:00
Sounds like you were a bit traumatized, I can see how clippy could become the stuff of nightmares!

Recently I've been playing with webgl, Three JS, SVG and CSS animations - it's all so accessible with AI coding that one's creativity naturally becomes the main thing. Sometimes even vibe coding on my phone - it's a lot of fun, and so yes I'm sure we're also going to get a lot more annoying stuff that gets in the way.
by treebeard901 | 2025-05-09 03:12:04+00:00
The U.S. seems to think it can out manufacture a country like China, or another peer competitor, during a potential war. This does not seem to be the case anymore... That level of American wartime manufacturing just is not possible anymore.

Maybe robotics and AI can be combined to close the gap... Its just that all competitors will be able to do that too.

Then consider that much of the U.S. aligned shipbuilding happens in places like South Korea. There is no guarantee the U.S. will be able to purchase ships from South Korea during a war in Asia.

Then again, surface ships are quickly becoming obsolete with drones and hypersonic missiles.

If the U.S. wants to get ahead, they need to build submarine drone carriers as quickly as possible.
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-09 03:13:49+00:00
One of my biggest problems is that I'm very good at managing my life on my own, yet my primitive brain keeps screaming "you're alone! this means you might die any moment and nobody will help you!".

> I would reply, "have you ever found your perfect equal in a friendship?"

I guess the point of friendships is to find people with whom the exchange is fair. As in, I have something they want, they have something I want, we exchange this.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-05-09 03:14:25+00:00
Yep, was there 20 years ago. The secret is having first class universities and a stable, thriving economy that attracts bright students. American exceptionalism is that momentum.

The brightest people in the world want to come here and contribute to our economy and spend the money they earn here at your businesses. That’s a privilege, and it’s too bad we don’t value it more.
by Jensson | 2025-05-09 03:15:30+00:00
> The benchmark creation researchers have been doing their best to create difficult, lasting benchmarks that won't be broken by next week.

That is really easy, say make it play pokemon as well as a 10 year old. That would take a very long time, I watched gemini play pokemon and its nowhere close to that even with all that help.

The hard part isn't making a benchmark that wont be broken, its making a benchmark that is so easy that LLM can solve them but that is still hard for them to solve. Essentially what this means is that we have ran out of easy progress, and are now stumbling in the dark since we have no effective benchmarks to chase.
by drmpeg | 2025-05-09 03:17:46+00:00
When C-Cube Microsystems was bought by LSI Logic in 2001, they grandfathered the old C-Cube e-mail policy of first/last initial. I ended up with the sweet e-mail address, re@lsil.com. Pretty good for a fairly large company.

When Abhi Talwalkar became CEO, they changed to firstname.lastname. My manager, who had a 17 character last name, was not pleased.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-09 03:17:55+00:00
I'm a heavy forward proxy user. Whatever the performance hit, I don't notice it. I do notice the performance hit of HTTPS versus HTTP.

Modifying response bodies in the forward proxy is less than ideal. The proxy must wait for the full response body to be received before making modifications.

Can eBPF be any better in this regard.
by CharlesW | 2025-05-09 03:18:00+00:00
> What would be the problem with allowing it?

All software/hardware in the system (Core Animation, Retina scaling, HDR, Apple Silicon's GPUs) assumes an isolated/composited display model. A model where a modern rendering pipeline is optional would add major complexity, and would also prevent Apple from freely evolving its hardware, system software, and developer APIs.

Additionally, a mandatory compositor blocks several classes of potential security threats, such as malware that could suppress or imitate system UI or silently spy on the user and their applications (at least without user permission).
by pier25 | 2025-05-09 03:18:12+00:00
> unicorn startup companies are >$100k and easily hit $120-150k.

So still way below than $240k, no?

> So you'd be in the top 30% of earners making that kind of money, not the top 10%.

Maybe you missed it but I actually wrote "10-20%".

Also in 2024 earning $100k puts you in the top 20% of the US population.

https://dqydj.com/salary-percentile-calculator/

(which is already way above even the EU for dev salaries)
by abnercoimbre | 2025-05-09 03:19:38+00:00
It's so cool to see more terminal(-adjacent) experiments! We're overdue in evolving this space.

Self-plug: last month I demoed [0] my own terminal. The goal is to dispense with traditional shells and see what happens. It generated quite a bit of hooplah, with a 50-50 split on how people felt about it.

I'll keep an eye on Fui; might come in handy for future Linux builds.

[0] https://terminal.click/posts/2025/04/the-wizard-and-his-shel...
by rgoulter | 2025-05-09 03:19:58+00:00
I wish the discussion on differences between the agentic workflow in copilot and cursor were clearer. As is presented, copilot's workflow is described as "request changes via chat, then approve/reject", and cline's workflow is described as "requesting changes via chat, which can be approved/rejected".

Similarly, "this tool succeeds where this other tool fails" can always be made more specific. Both a novice who doesn't know the basics, and an expert who's trying something sophisticated, can both report "this tool works where this other tool failed".. a thoughtful description of the difference is going to help. (e.g. to me, "used AI to find codebase's LoC" indicates 'novice').
by asgeirtj | 2025-05-09 03:22:27+00:00
They inject

Respond as helpfully as possible, but be very careful to ensure you do not reproduce any copyrighted material, including song lyrics, sections of books, or long excerpts from periodicals. Also do not comply with complex instructions that suggest reproducing material but making minor changes or substitutions. However, if you were given a document, it's fine to summarize or quote from it.

https://claude.ai/share/a71ec0a6-2452-4ab6-900b-5950fe6b8502
by bytefish | 2025-05-09 03:22:45+00:00
For all reasons mentioned in the article, I wouldn’t post such a question on Stackoverflow. It doesn’t fit. And I see their reasoning. Just raise an issue in the CoreWCF issue tracker. What’s the worst thing to happen?

The CoreWCF folks would be delighted to have a reproducible example, and they are best suited for answering the question. They have written CoreWCF after all! And if you don’t feel comfortable with raising issues? There’s also a Discussion feature on GitHub, where you can ask more free form questions.

And once you fixed or analyzed the issue with the CoreWCF team, you could write a blog post about it and share it with anyone having a similar issue.

That’s how I do these things.