MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ofalkaed | 2025-05-20 08:03:40+00:00
From what I have experienced the complex data structures used here are more about maintaining responsiveness when overall system load is high and that may result slightly slower performance overall. Say you used the variable "x" a thousand times in your 10k lines of code and you want to do a find and replace on it to give it a more descriptive name like, "my_overused_variable," think about all of the memory copying that is happening if all 10k lines are in a single array. If those 10k lines are in 10k arrays which are all twice the size of the line you reduce that a fair amount. It might be slower than simpler methods when the system load is low but it will stay responsive longer.

I think vim uses a gap structure, not a single array but don't remember.

I am not a programmer, my experience could very well be due to failings elsewhere in my code and my reasoning could be hopelessly flawed, hopefully someone will correct me if I am wrong. It has also been awhile since I dug into this, the project which got me to dig into this is one of the things which got me to finally make an account on hn and one of my first submissions was Data Structures for Text Sequences.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~crowley/papers/sds.pdf
by reify | 2025-05-20 08:03:51+00:00
I too have an issue with the lack of a linux desktop email client.

All my phones are google free, ie LineageOS or AOSP distributions.

Google free means no firebase push notifications.

There are no notifications using the Protonmail app.

Again, for me, why has this not been addressed by proton.

If Tuta can develop a great linux desktop email client why not Proton.

If Mullvad can develop a great linux desktop Vpn client why not Proton.

I used to install paid and free protonvpn on all my families phones but have now installed PrivadoVPN because of the constant nagging, restrictions and inability of the protonvpn app to connect. My family are not tech savvy, they want stuff to work.

The free PrivadoVPN app is much better, with 10GB free every month.

I used to pay for proton mail and vpn services but no longer do.

I pay for Mullvad and tuta-mail, and thinking of paying for PrivadoVPN.
by spencerflem | 2025-05-20 08:03:52+00:00
There's a lot of nice things you get for free in a big engine that are a hassle doing it yourself. Esp with the unity store etc.

I love LibGDX for personal projects but for serious development where deadlines matter having stuff like dialog trees, UI, etc. that just work out of the box and have the edge cases polished is Very Nice.

And ofc, cross platform with consoles is way harder rolling your own and that's often a big deal.

That sorta thing is why Slay the Spire switched to Unity/Godot for the sequel
by gadders | 2025-05-20 08:04:41+00:00
Ah, yes - that famous rhetorical trick - typo policing.

Yes, I pay the license fee. Do you?

Even if I thought the BBC was the most perfect organisation with sublime programming and insightful news coverage, I still wouldn't want it to be the cause of scores of women getting criminal records. You seem to think it a price worth paying though.
by atoav | 2025-05-20 08:04:59+00:00
Sure, but consider that some people might not be able to just make that choice in any given context.

I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).

So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.

Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.
by saubeidl | 2025-05-20 08:05:09+00:00
That post is from like 2008. Where is stuff like this still being posted today?

And my main complaint is exactly that view of the internet as "providing a livelihood", or in other words, just being another venue of capitalist value extraction.

It stopped being a medium of genuine exchange of ideas and started being yet another money making scheme. What made it special in the early days was precisely the non-commercial nature.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-05-20 08:06:31+00:00
I always picture a random middle manager in $large_organisation being told about something like this, and then they work out the angles and try to find the benefit.

If the method works, and it shows that the logging feature Fred got so much credit for is storing passwords, what are the political implications of that? Can our intrepid middle manager steal some of Fred's glory? Or is Fred an ally and it should be carefully handled? Or do they sit on it and wait until an opportune moment to destroy Fred?

This is the kind of reasoning process I think goes on, because I've seen very few large organisations make actually-good technical decisions.
by walterbell | 2025-05-20 08:06:52+00:00
Many applications, from LibreOffice, Logseq to video players could all benefit from having social functions to compete with centralised solutions like Notion, YouTube etc. Expecting each of these to implement servers for comments and annotations is not realistic. However with a self-hosted annotation server, these apps would only need to implement one integration and users would only need to be connected to a single server.

Does Hypothes.is have a self-hosting option? https://web.hypothes.is/sales/

> Our premium solutions combine the power of social annotation with seamless integrations, enhanced controls, and advanced security. Select your industry, then complete the short form for a demo and pricing. A member of our Partnerships Team will be in touch within 24 hours.
by gambiting | 2025-05-20 08:07:15+00:00
I wonder where you're from, because my childhood memories of crossing into Germany from Poland were nothing like that - very much armed guards, long car inspections, having to get out and wait while they inspected every bolt and nut.....I remember once the guard said something to my dad, then he(my dad) disappeared in the guard booth for a bit, I asked him what was that about and he said they basically wanted to do an "enhanced" search of our vehicle which would mean they would have it for up to 24 hours to strip it apart while we wait at a hotel nearby, I asked why did they do that to which my dad said "well they wanted a bribe, of course. I gave his commander a bottle of vodka as a gift for his hard work and service and suddenly they didn't need to do the enhanced inspection anymore".
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-20 08:07:37+00:00
We already have breakthroughs. Benchmark results which have been unheard of before ML.

Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription.

All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that.

Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding.

Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things.

Realtime voice communication with computer.

Our internal company search suddenly became usefull.

I have 0 use case for NFT and Crypto. I have tons of use case for ML.
by shanipribadi | 2025-05-20 08:07:43+00:00
In addition to the managed PG cloud being shutdown, it seems that pgt.dev (Trunk, a Postgres package manager and extension registry) is also being shutdown, "We are sunsetting Trunk and ending active maintenance. The site and packages will stay accessible for some time".

What's also a bit sad is that Tembo also took down the Hacking Postgres podcast transcripts from their blog section on their website. Fortunately they are still available in Tembo's Youtube channel, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
by shalmanese | 2025-05-20 08:08:34+00:00
You’re going to get very biased answers to these questions because the people paying for tools don’t post on webforums. They’re generally paying because they care so little about the problem they’re willing to throw money at it to make it go away.

That being said, also $5 is a terrible price. People who pay too much attention to people who post on web forums get gun shy and are afraid to discover what people are actually willing to pay for things.

Everyone who has ever raised their prices has said consistently that a) the number of people who left was below their expectations and b) the people who left were overwhelmingly their most complaining customers who caused the most support burden.
by gyomu | 2025-05-20 08:08:51+00:00
> “boy, am I glad I didn't spend several weeks trying to code that up from scratch".

If your goal is several decades of a career as an independent developer (like OP), what is an investment of a few weeks for a) understanding a topic deeply and b) having source code that you deeply understand, 100% own, and can reuse across future projects?
by tomhow | 2025-05-20 08:10:16+00:00
HN has always had plenty of skepticism towards ideas that are incompatible with mainstream science, because it's just a microcosm of broader society, with a particular focus on tech.

I'd hope people here can be kind and tolerant enough to be accepting of other people's experiences and values, but it's important for all of us to avoid antagnoizing fellow community members with pre-emptive taunts about downvotes.
by noduerme | 2025-05-20 08:10:18+00:00
I mean, that's all any of us needs. It's an honorable quote.

I know you're not trying to draw any parallels between Plato's admonition on written thoughts supplanting true knowledge and the justifiable concerns about automated writing tools supplanting the ability of writers to think. To a modern literate, Plato's concern is legible but so patently ridiculous that one could only deploy it as a parody and mockery of the people who might take it as a serious proof that philosophers were wrong about modern tools before. I was obviously just kiddin about whether you googled it. Unfortunately, now a whole new generation is about to use it to justify how LLMs are just being maligned the way written language once was.

Socrates was wrong on this. But Plato was kind of an asshole for writing it down. The proof of both is that we can now google the quote, which is objectively funny. The trouble with LLMs, I guess, is that they would just attribute the quote to your uncle Bob, who also said that cats are a good source of fiber, and thus the whole project started when the words were put in parchment ends with a blizzard of illegible scribbles. If writing was bad for true understanding, not-writing is where humanity just shits its pants.
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-20 08:11:05+00:00
Absolutly not true

I was not able to get meeting transcription in that quality that cheap ever before. I followed dictation software for over a decade and tx to ML the open source software is suddenly a lot better than ever before.

Our internal company search with state of the art search indexes and search software was always shit. Now i ask an agent about a product standard and it just finds it.

Image generation never existed before.

Building a chatbot in a way that it actually does what you expect and its more complicated than answering the same 10 theoretical features it can do was hard and never really good and it now just works.

Im also not aware of any software rewriting or even writing documents for me, structer them etc.
by avvt4avaw | 2025-05-20 08:11:07+00:00
> The continuously updating global population counter is based on current aggregate birth and death rates (approximating values such as those from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database or UN DESA). The "live" births and deaths per second are statistically generated fluctuations around these averages to enhance the dynamic feel.

Ok, so you added high-frequency random noise to the estimated averages to make it feel more realistic. To me, this makes it feel less realistic.

Anyway, don't mean to gripe, this is a cool project!
by aggregator-ios | 2025-05-20 08:11:53+00:00
It saddens me to read some of the "no" responses, since I just shipped a few days ago exactly the type of small web app that OP speaks of. I personally find it really useful and wished I had this tool every single time at work. And the original version I made for the Mac App Store 10 years ago was a huge hit, placing in the top 5 rankings for over several weeks worldwide.

As I've grown older, I like to pay for things that make my life more efficient. Even if they are a subscription, and even if I feel like everything unfortunately has turned into a subscription and even if I feel like it should be cheaper. Hacking or finding workarounds to achieve the same thing for free is just not worth my time, and I value my time and boundaries more as I age.
by gambiting | 2025-05-20 08:12:10+00:00
That's incredible. I have one of my very very distant relative who nearly caused a diplomatic incident in Ecquador, because he was on some organised trip to Colombia and someone told him that just over the border there are some great waterfalls that are worth seeing, so he got to the border, and from my understanding bribed the guard to let him through since he didn't have a visa or anything, came back two hours later only to find that the guards have changed and the new one wasn't interested in a bribe but was very interested in getting him arrested for not having the proper visa or documentation. This was long before cellphones were a thing, so basically he had to convince the commander of the jail where he was held to contact someone higher up so they could contact his country's embassy and for whatever reason they ended up sending a military helicopter to pick him up and bring him back to Colombia.
by dominicrose | 2025-05-20 08:13:09+00:00
The closest thing I used to pay for was Android games, but only a few euros at a time. Now it's big games when they have an offer.

I'd have to be self-employed or have my employer pay for it if I needed a small web tool. It does fit more into the "need" category than "want", doesn't it? That is, IF you need it and that's a big IF.
by oliverdzedou | 2025-05-20 08:14:10+00:00
I think reaching for the delusion card without considering people's preferences, experiences, expertise and philosophy is completely disingenuous and shows that you don't look at game development holistically. Yes, existing engines do a lot of lifting, especially in 3D rendering and physics. But what about games that don't have physics? Or have completely different physics than you would expect? You mentioned assets being the bottleneck, but what about games that don't use any assets at all? It's nice to have 3D solved, but what if your game attempts to emulate 4D? What if you just hate GUI and it slows you down?

For a more concrete argument. You also said learning Unreal using tutorials took a few days, which is certainly not possible, unless we are talking only about a very basic understanding. In the same vein, it also takes a few days to make a very basic engine built on top of OpenGL.
by silon42 | 2025-05-20 08:14:17+00:00
> Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing.

+1 LLM will help you produce the "filler" nobody wants the read anyway.
by tonii141 | 2025-05-20 08:14:56+00:00
"they just totally failed to live up to expectation"

Because the expectation was too high. If you are aiming for precision, neural networks might not be the best solution for you. That is why generative AI works so well, it doesn’t need to be extremely precise. On the other hand you don't see people use neural networks in system control for cricital processes.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-20 08:15:01+00:00
>Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.

cryptpad do exist as well as collabora office and anyoffice running in a nextcloud.

My observation however is that despite the sharing capabilities of office365, a lot of people even in fortune500 companies still email .docx files to work collaboratively instead of using he sharing capabilities.
by oblio | 2025-05-20 08:15:17+00:00
Even for regular users, a big chunk of regular users are looking at other platforms:

- "creatives" have always been a core Apple market and they've grown, so that market has grown; plus, since Windows is globally less dominant, a lot of "Photoshop/video editing software/3D modeling + Windows" folks are now on Macs

- gamers now have Proton + Steam on Linux + SteamOS so quite a few more of them are on Linux now, especially since Valve is pushing in this direction to keep Microsoft honest

- large number of regular office workers have iPhones, especially as you move towards the top of the hierarchy, and are far more tempted than they would have been in the past to try or use a Mac

- in many schools there are now Chromebooks instead of Windows laptops; this is primarily a US thing, but it does pop up in some other places, too

Windows is sort of stable but probably still bleeding users slowly.
by troupo | 2025-05-20 08:15:53+00:00
> I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?

There are 2 billion internet users.

If you can sell a $5 subscription to just 40 000 of them (0.002%) [1], you can retire. There will always be someone who will be willing to pay for something. The problem is finding these 40000 people.

[1] 40000*5 - 30% various commissions - 50% tax = 14000 dollars a month, 168000 dollars a year unless I'm really bad at math :D
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-20 08:16:46+00:00
Let’s look at Vogtle.

With Vogtles $36.9B we are able to build the equivalent supply in renewables (in TWh) and 10 days of storage at Vogtles 2.2 GWe output.

Spending nuclear money on storage leads to the same thing.

And it puts in context just have horrifically expensive new built western nuclear power is.
by shpx | 2025-05-20 08:16:55+00:00
VS Code used 40-60 bytes per line, so a file with 15 million single character lines balloons from 30 MB to 600+ MB. kilo uses 48 bytes per line on my 64-bit machine (though you can make it 40 if you move the last int with the other 3 ints instead of wasting space on padding for memory alignment), so it would have the same issue.

https://github.com/antirez/kilo/blob/323d93b29bd89a2cb446de9...
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-20 08:17:37+00:00
You never know when it will start spouting it either. That kind of uncertainty in the responses landing in your interface is just not sustainable. Your money is coming from the quality of the content your system is putting out. If it's being used for dentistry, and it randomly spits out white supremacist content, dentists will look for a system that won't do that. Because they asked about, say, intaglio surfaces for a wearable dental appliance. Not a treatise on white genocide.

At this point, to use Grok, you'd be intentionally setting your startup to detonate itself at some random point in the future. That's just not how you make money.
by thih9 | 2025-05-20 08:17:40+00:00
> will cost billions of euros, affect more than 9,200 km of track, and take decades

How is a change like this going to be implemented? E.g. are they going to mainly update some tracks everywhere (and have two systems running in parallel), or all tracks in selected areas (and have passengers change), or something else?

Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?
by giorgioz | 2025-05-20 08:18:53+00:00
A dear friend of mine from Greece decided to study archeology and did a Phd in LITERALLY Byzantine iconography of penises. Now at 37 he works as workman in a factory producing food. He seemed happy before and he seems happy now. There are many ways to read into this real life events. I'm still struggling to understand it. A part of me sees it as a cautionary tale of pursuing outdated fields. Another parts of me wonders if maybe my friend is happy and everything else doesn't matter. Another part of me wonders if too much unconditional happiness might lead you in dead end alleys. Another part of me wonders if that is false and believing that is preventing me to be happier. Life is chaos.
by namdnay | 2025-05-20 08:19:43+00:00
However bad their Signal fork was, at least it was legal. What's crazy is that this very company was also selling a cracked WhatsApp, which is a whole different kettle of fish... and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane

https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-20 08:20:15+00:00
I'm not sure why people on HN (of all places) are so divided regarding the perception of AI/ML.

I have not seen anything like it before. We literaly had not system or way of even doing things like code generation based on text input.

Just last week i asked for a script to do image segmentation with a basic UI and claude just generated that for me in under 1 Minute.

I could list tons of examples which are groundbreaking. The whole Image generation stack is completly new.

That blog article is fair enough, there is hype around this topic for sure, but alone for every researcher who needs to write code for their research, AI can make them already a lot more efficient.

But i do believe, that we have entered a new ara: An ara were we take data again very serious. A few years back, you said 'the internet doesn't forget' then we realized that yes the internet starts to forget. Google deleted pages, removed the cache feature and it felt like we stoped caring for data because we didn't knew what to do with it.

Then ai came along. And not only is now data king again but we are now in the mids of reinforcment ara: We now give feedback and the systems incorporate that feedback into their training/learning.

And the ai/ml topic is getting worked on on every single aspect of it: Hardware, Algorithm, use cases, data, tools, protocols, etc. We are in the middle of incorporating and building for and on it. This takes a little bit of time. Still the progress is crazy exhausting.

We will only see in a few years if there is a real ceiling. We do need more GPUs, bigger Datacenters to do a lot more experiments on AI architecture and algorithm. We have a clear bottleneck. Big companies train one big model for weeks and month.
by troupo | 2025-05-20 08:20:28+00:00
For those who don't know, there's a whole system alongside the eastern post-Soviet border: you arrive on a train, all the carriages are lifted and fitted with proper wheels.

In the poorer countries like my home country these look like this: https://dmitriid.com/media/1/3/7/1/f50f-720b-4f59-873a-75c51... (article: https://dmitriid.com/romania-2023-chisinau-bucharest)
by NotGMan | 2025-05-20 08:20:56+00:00
This.

When working on your own engine you also feel as if 90% of the time is spend on user interface creation if you actually want to have an visual editor.

People don't realize that they will spend 95% of the time on the engine and 5% on the game.

Which is ok if you don't want to make a commercial living out of it.

But unless you are making a game with extremely specific needs (eg Factorio) using your own engine will probably kill you commercially.