MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-05-03 21:52:12+00:00
As verbose as Java is, it was even worse 20 years ago. If Kotlin, or C# 3.5+ were the OOP lingua francas at the time, maybe there would have been less need to create something else.

But still, "why not"? The first "alt-lang" I remember was "boo", on the dotnet platform. IDK if they actually meant to popularize it, but it had some cool features C# (and J#) didn't have, so, why not?
by tphyahoo2 | 2025-05-03 21:52:35+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

"Is it a good idea?"

No, not "obviously one crush" and nor are there no consequences if one were to try.

https://archive.md/qlbDM#selection-49.0-49.64

("Georg Ritter von Flondor, and what his unhappy life can teach us")
by latexr | 2025-05-03 21:53:28+00:00
> DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero

If you’re talking about Garak torturing Odo, that seems different than the 24 case because in that instance Garak was explicitly working for “the bad guys”. And even so he was doing the torturing reluctantly and only doing so because the alternative was the torturing being done by another operative which wouldn’t restrain themselves. In other words, in that instance the show was explicitly treating torture as bad.

> made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

Technically it wasn’t the disease which defeated the Founders, though I supposed one can argue it debilitated them enough. Even so, despite the results I didn’t feel like the show was necessarily approving of Section 31 (the main characters actively tried to defeat them).
by lmm | 2025-05-03 21:53:28+00:00
Every webapp built with something other than GraphQL ends up with an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of GraphQL. Yes, a book tracking app absolutely needs GraphQL.

Do you need a separate frontend framework? No, probably not, and that's exactly the problem that Next solves - write your backend and frontend in the same place.

Do you need a complicated build process? No. You want your build process to be just "run npm". And that's what something like Next gets you.

"Monolithic RoR app with HTML templates on VPS" would introduce more problems than it solves. If Next-style frameworks had come first, you would be posting about how RoR is a solution in search of a problem that solves nothing and just overcomplicates everything. And you'd be right.
by rorylaitila | 2025-05-03 21:53:43+00:00
I should have added the context "it's a big problem in relation to sales" which is becoming quite an arms race to ever greater automation and "personalization" one-upsmanship. There is a lot of FOMO and not automating. In the long run I don't think most of the sales automation will actually work the way people think, so in that sense, it won't be a problem.
by tmnvix | 2025-05-03 21:53:52+00:00
I've been curious for a while now. One thing that gives me pause though is how Phoenix LiveView apps perform when you're dealing with high latency. I'm aware that many apps will be serving primarily the US market and so might not recognise this as much of an issue. I'm also aware that I could deploy 'at the edge' with something like fly.io. Still, when I run a ping test to 100 different locations around the world from NZ, the majority of results are 300ms+. That seems like it would have a pretty noticeable impact on a user's experience.

TLDR; Are most Phoenix deployments focused on a local market or deployed 'at the edge' or are people ignoring the potentially janky experience for far-flung users?
by someone7x | 2025-05-03 21:54:05+00:00
Back at THQ we published this. The story goes that there’s some language in the deals between Pixar and Apple that forced Disney to publish a Mac version of all Pixar-based games.

There was Mac hardware that was only used for testing Pixar games; the testers there are the ones that told me the story.

Also I remember now some tester made a Redman/Methodman music video with video clips from the first game and was of course fired.

Unsolicited oral history of the Incredibles games I guess.
by Aeolos | 2025-05-03 21:54:08+00:00
GraphQL APIs can easily DOS your backend if you don't configure extra protections (which are neither bulletproof nor enabled by default), they suffer from N+1 inefficiencies by default unless you write a ton of extra code, and they require extra careful programming to apply security rules on every field which can get very complex very fast.

On the plus side, it does have offer communication advantages if you have entirely independent BE and FE teams, and it can help minimize network traffic for network-constrained scenarios such as mobile apps.

Personally, I have regretted using GraphQL every time.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-05-03 21:54:24+00:00
The problem is with the first step. If the angels owns 1%, and the founders own the other 99%. When taking more money, it should be the founders selling a portion of the 99%, not diluting the angles percentage.

The stake should remain the same, but double in value. That's the risk of early investment being paid out.

I'm really surprised it doesn't work that way.
by withinboredom | 2025-05-03 21:56:52+00:00
> the development happens on the lead developer's feature branch

Oof. This makes me cringe so hard. I once took over a project (but the developer didn't know they were getting fired) and the guy was doing everything on his laptop, from his laptop. Deployments and builds were from his laptop. Even dependencies weren't checked into the code (using global installs of them on unknown versions). The owner had me come in because after talking to several people realized he was in a bad place.

It took me ~2 months to learn everything and document all the things. Then the owner fired him. That guy kept development back for so long by simply not documenting/sharing code and configuration. Now there's an entire team with a healthy development flow. But wow, I had some flashbacks reading that...
by mulmen | 2025-05-03 21:57:20+00:00
I’m glad you let him send his message.

AI is the future whether you like it or not. Teaching him to use that tool effectively will serve him far better than shaming him for engaging the world in a way you find uncomfortable but is acceptable to society.

Consider if you would prefer he write the letter by hand to give the script that literal human touch. If not why is it ok for the computer to make the letters but not the words?

In this case the meaningful gesture is sending the message at all. He asked the AI to do a thing. That was his idea. AI just did the boring work of making it palatable to humans.

Much like driving and everything else automation takes away writing is something most people are profoundly bad at. Nothing is lost when an AI generates a message a human requested.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-03 21:57:48+00:00
Based on their mention of "coax" I bet they have a Linux box w/ a modem doing dial-up PPP to an ISP, and a 10Base-2 NIC that they used to attach another PC. The Linux box was doing IP masquerading (NAT) to share the PPP connection w/ the machine(s) on the 10Base-2 LAN.

Having the IBM AT a a serial terminal would let somebody run CLI-based software on the Linux box (like Lynx, an IRC client, FTP, etc). You'd just be using a shell account on the Linux box.

I did stuff like this in the early 90s at home and later at a company I worked at (sharing a single dial-up connection over 10Base-2 with 5-ish Windows 95 PCs).
by npteljes | 2025-05-03 21:58:29+00:00
I hate the same about how media presents news regarding to nations. Russia attacks instead of Putin's army attacks, Brussels denies instead of EU officials deny, etc. It irks me so much, especially in a world where we pretend to do away with racism. Because what these headlines end up reinforce are just stereotypes. Which just keeps the people in their bubbles, wasting the chance of them learning something new about the world.
by Animats | 2025-05-03 21:58:30+00:00
BYD has had active suspension in their Yangwang U9 supercar for two years now. It's over the top.[1] It can sense and jump potholes. Drive with one wheel missing. Dance to music. Do tank turns. There's even a LIDAR watching the road surface for bumps.

That's not just adjustable damping; that's a fully powered suspension.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIKAn8yDkpA
by sepositus | 2025-05-03 21:59:06+00:00
> I believe we are wired like this

Absolutely, and I think because of this we'll never see the desire go away completely. However, I'm imagining some dystopian future where human touch is so rare that people _forget_ how much it means to them. It's like scrolling through the endless slop of Netflix and then coming to some rare gem of a film where you're reminded what genuine art is.
by ajross | 2025-05-03 21:59:18+00:00
> Any country can become highly successful by enacting free markets.

And the existence proof for that assertion is which country, exactly? Lots of nations lack regulation of some form or another, many of them are "freer" than the US. The US isn't entirely "free" of trade barriers either (c.f. tariffpocalype).

Basically this sounds like a no-true-scotsman in the making. No, it's not that simple.
by colesantiago | 2025-05-03 21:59:25+00:00
> One way it'll avoid enshitification is that I have no VCs or anything like that, it's just me. So I only answer to actual users.

> My plan is to add Google Adsense, but in a way that is non-obstructive/intrusive.

Please do not do Google ads.

Not only that this ruins the privacy of the users and further entrances Google's reach, but it further leads to enshitification which is what we don't want.

Perhaps maybe a small tiny sponsor banner may be better.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-03 21:59:31+00:00
You ever watch a plant filmed in time lapse? They're active just like animals. They feel and communicate and are our relatives just the same. Everything on this planet eats a living cousin, save for the photo and chemosynthesizers. Such is life. The similarity of our proteins and other molecules is exactly what makes us nutritious to each other. I sleep just fine. The backyard garden is fruitful. The chimkins are happy and laying eggs. Thankful for the opportunity to enjoy it!
by kergonath | 2025-05-03 22:00:56+00:00
This is surreal. The evil bureaucracy has successfully been doing it since the 1960s. It worked. And yes, it was efficient.

Now, the problem is that if you alienate your neighbours they stop wanting to play nice. Also, bureaucracies do not work when you fire civil servants indiscriminately. It’s not the bureaucracy doing this, it’s the guy who told you that the country would work better without it.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-05-03 22:01:25+00:00
Sorry, but any trick you think you have for detecting AI generated text is defeated by high temperature sampling (which works now with good samplers like min_p/top-n sigma) and the anti-slop sampler: https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler

You'll be able to detect someone running base ChatGPT or something - but even base ChatGPT with a temperature of 2 has a very, very different response style - and that's before you simply get creative with the system prompt.

And yes, it's trivial to get the model to not use em dashes, or the wrong kind of quotes, or any other tell you think you have against it.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-03 22:01:42+00:00
Having a serial terminal was just good fun, too, back in the days when having multiple monitors / computers wasn't common. I ran Slackware on a 486 w/ X Windows so I could use Netscape Navigator and I had an old RS-232 dumb terminal from my dad's old computer connected so I could have a shell open w/ an IRC client or my mail while I used Netscape. (I never liked running Pine in an X terminal. It was abnormal and strange. It seemed more natural on the terminal and it was cool to have two screens!)
by brandensilva | 2025-05-03 22:02:14+00:00
We have been moving to localized cache stores and there aren't any client side loaders anymore outside of the initial cache generation. Think like Linear, Figma, etc

It just depends on what you are after. You can completely drop the backend, apis, and have a real time web socketed sync layer that goes direct to the database. There is a row based permissions layer still here for security but you get the idea.

The client experience is important in our app and a backend just slows us down we have found.
by amluto | 2025-05-03 22:02:22+00:00
> Let’s think about some examples. Suppose an American buys a TV made in China for $1000. Remember that GDP can be calculated as the sum of consumption, investment, government purchases, and net exports:

> GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Purchases + Net Exports

> When the American buys the $1000 TV from China, U.S. consumption goes up by $1000. And U.S. net exports go down by $1000, since “net exports” means exports minus imports. The increase in consumption exactly cancels out the fall in net exports. So the total contribution of the imported TV to U.S. GDP is zero.

This is not how buying a TV works, at least not if you buy through normal retail channels. You pay the store $1000 and you get a TV that the store bought for around $500. If it came from a US company that outsourced manufacturing to China, the US company keeps $250 and sends $250 to China.

The store pays salaries and rent. The brand pays salaries and rent and R&D and such. GDP increases by at least $750, plus a bunch because a lot of those salaries turn into consumer spending.

And this applies to sales abroad, too. When someone in France buys a CPU or GPU or iPhone, the physical product may never touch US soil, but most of the purchase price ends up in the US, and that contributes to the GDP and to the economy in general. A country could do just fine, sustainably, by designing products, paying foreign countries to manufacture them, collecting profits, and spending some of those profits to buy foreign-made goods. No physical goods are ever exported, the trade-in-services numbers may or may not be nonzero, the trade-in-goods balance will be enormously negative, and this is fine.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-05-03 22:02:31+00:00
I still remember the feeling I got when I first read the first paragraph and especially this phrase:

"For one thing, if (a) you had taken 225 million orangutans distributed roughly as the U.S. population is; if (b) 215 winners were left after 20 days; and if (c) you found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha, you would be pretty sure you were on to something."

Compared to anything in finance I've read up until then, it felt like I just found the right guy.
by daxfohl | 2025-05-03 22:02:51+00:00
FWIW I was mostly on the compliance side, so didn't have all that much direct exposure to the transaction side of things. But from the exposure I did have, I didn't see a huge difference. A transaction is a transaction. And the transactions were at the DB layer, so I wouldn't think the atomicity primitives built into the Clojure language would be all that useful.

Like anything, the middle tier should be largely stateless anyway, so using Clojure atomicity primitives in business logic may even be an anti-pattern.
by twodave | 2025-05-03 22:03:42+00:00
We used NextJS on a couple of projects where I work and are already phasing them out. The reasons are manifold, but a few key factors:

* difficult auth story. next-auth is limited in a few ways that drove us to use iron-session, such as not being able to use a dynamic identity provider domain (we have some gov clients who require us to use a special domain). This required us to basically own the whole openid flow, which is possible but definitely time we didn’t expect to have to spend in a supposedly mature framework.

* because the NextJS server wasn’t our primary API gateway we ended up having to proxy all requests through it just to add an access token to avoid exposing it on the client. The docs around this were not very clear, and this adds yet another hop with random gotchas like request timeout/max header size/etc.

* the framework is very aggressive about getting you on their cloud, and they make decisions accordingly. This was at odds with our goals.

* the maintainers aren’t particularly helpful. While on its own this would be easy to look past, there are other tools/frameworks we use in spite of their flaws because the maintainers are so accessible and helpful (shout out to Chillicream/HotChocolate!)
by danenania | 2025-05-03 22:04:05+00:00
That’s fair. I think the OP put it in a much more dismissive way than you did though.

If you’re building a product and it’s not working, pivoting in the direction of AI could definitely be rational—not because of the hype, or at least not only because of that (it doesn’t hurt). But because it could give you a better chance of building a more useful and differentiated product.

Implying that any entrepreneur who does this is just following the herd is pretty uncharitable imo. Again, it would be like saying that about people pivoting to web in the early 2000s or mobile in the 2010s. Not every trend is fake.
by rpgwaiter | 2025-05-03 22:04:37+00:00
Idk why you’d want to get used to it. I’m very lucky to have a job that doesn’t mandate AI use, and as far as I can tell I haven’t been hit by any work AI emails. My social media bubble on Mastodon is extremely anti-AI, I pretty much never have to deal with slop.

On the rare occasion I see some GPT garbage, I either block the sender, or if I know a human is involved I explain how insulting it is and let them know they’re one slop message away from blocked.

Getting used to it is a surefire way to make your communication experience much worse.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-05-03 22:04:43+00:00
Yep. The ORM situation in JS is not great. There’s no one go-to, and it seems like the question often prompts a patronizing response about how ORMs aren't really necessary. Kysely is really great, but it’s not an ORM.

My take: the JS ecosystem tends to avoid abstraction for whatever reason. Example: they don’t believe that their web framework should transparently validate that the form submission has the correct shape because that’s too magical. Instead the Right Way is to learn a DSL (such as Zod) to describe the shape of the input, then manually write the code to check it. Every single time. Oh and you can’t write a TS type to do that because Reasons. It all comes off as willful ignorance of literally a decade or more of established platforms such as Rails/Spring/ASP.NET. All they had to do was steal the good ideas. But I suspect the cardinal sin of those frameworks was that they were no longer cool.

I have a hard time relaying this without sounding too negative. I tried to get into SSR webdev with TS and kept an open mind about it. But the necessary ingredients for me weren’t there. It’s a shame because Vite is such a pleasure to develop with.
by ramoz | 2025-05-03 22:04:48+00:00
I don’t understand your integration of performance and cloud costs here.

“Deployment economy” is also new.

Rails has a very strong track record of matching internet scale.

Cloud is highly optimized for traditional server applications. From my experience with Next.js - this is the opposite. A lot of deployment components that don’t naturally fit in, and engineering required to optimize costs.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-05-03 22:05:27+00:00
If you "screw up and succeed" by gaining many users/customers, any Ruby or Python framework provides orders of magnitude fewer requests-per-second on the same VM or hardware than a comparable solution deployed with node.js, go, Java, C# (Including DotNet Core on Linux), or rust. And this will quickly ballon your cloud compute costs to keep up.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-03 22:05:47+00:00
The "so what" is that we already have hundreds of examples of places where biological materials find an amazing balance within whatever energy/cost/resource-availability envelope they were evolved in -- but where artificial materials (perhaps outside that energy/resource envelope) have proven to be hugely superior. I'm just hypothesizing that there's no reason to believe that biological computation will prove to be the exception.
by jparishy | 2025-05-03 22:06:12+00:00
I work on geospatial apps and the software I think I am most excited about is https://felt.com/. I want to see them expand their tooling such that maps and data source authentication/authorization was controllable by the developer, to enable tenant isolation with proprietary data access. They could really disrupt how geospatial tech gets integrated into consumer apps.

This article doesn't acknowledge how niche this stuff is and it's a lot of training to get people to up to speed on coordinate systems, projections, transformations, etc. I would replace a lot of my custom built mapping tools with Felt if it were possible, so I could focus on our core geospatial processes and not the code to display and play with it in the browser, which is almost as big if not bigger in terms of LOC to maintain.

As mentioned by another commenter, this DuckDB DX as described is basically the same as PostGIS too.
by netsharc | 2025-05-03 22:06:20+00:00
Feh, Merkel created conditions for the rise of right wing fascism... IMO.

She and her finance minister championed austerity uber alles, squeezing the middle and lower class across the EU, and then she said refugees were welcome. I agree with the idea of helping people fleeing bombs and bullets, but after decades of saying there's money, we need to watch our budgets, suddenly there's money? Nooo fucking wonder the populist right managed to grasp on to the disillusionment of the lower/middle class.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-03 22:06:33+00:00
> Also, it's sad to hear that the QWK format's creator died in a swatting incident in 2020, of all things.

Oh, man. That sucks. I knew about that tragedy[0] but I never read deep enough to realize that Mark Herring (the gentleman who, arguably, was killed in the incident) was the creator of the QWK format.

It was already a horrific story. Now it just feels that much closer to home. Ugh. RIP Mark Herring.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Tennessee_swatting
by analog31 | 2025-05-03 22:06:37+00:00
Regular people (including me) think the same thing about why software projects take so long. In fact I consider engineering to be a form of bureaucracy. And I've had long conversations about it with friends who are developers, but it's still hard for an outsider to fully grasp why it's so hard. In turn, they can't understand why my job can't be replaced by AI.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-05-03 22:08:03+00:00
Even the BBC war chest appears to be dwindling. Or at least it’s become harder to produce things on their own. The latest seasons of Dr Who are produced in collaboration with Disney.

But yes, they would have had bigger reach, and we might not have gotten this far without the BBC. I just want the ABC to have got a more significant chunk.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-05-03 22:08:33+00:00
The issue isn’t that 20ms is an unreasonable slice size. The issue is you can’t perform an arbitrary slice.

Imagine a game that runs at 50Hz/20ms frame. Unusual but let’s go with it because the exact value doesn’t matter. Ideally this update takes AT MOST 20ms. Otherwise we miss a frame. Which means most frames actually take maybe 15ms. And some may take only 5ms. If you drew this on a timeline there would be obvious sleeps waiting for the next frame to kick off.

If you take an arbitrary sequence of 20ms slices you’re not going to capture individual frames. You’re going to straddle frames. Which is really bad and means each pixel is measuring a totally different body of work.

Does that make sense?
by freetonik | 2025-05-03 22:09:18+00:00
I’d rather have sluggish UI with proper feedback than potentially inconsistent states which I often experience with modern SPAs. At least that represents reality. Just today I was posting an ad on the local classifieds page, and the visual (client) state convinced me that everything was fast and my photos are uploaded. Turned out all state was lost and never reached the server, and I had to redo everything again.