MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hxtk | 2025-06-02 12:46:42+00:00
This isn’t something I’ve found with NextJS, but I also haven’t tried a lot of other, similar frameworks because I’m mostly a backend and SRE person who just learned NextJS so I could throw together pretty UIs to demo my backend ideas, so maybe I’m missing things that are well known among front-end specialists.

My experience is that a basic deployment is very easy—it’s like a ten line Dockerfile to build a distroless nodejs container of the standalone build and if you deploy it, it just works.

Then, as performance demands grow, there’s increasingly more complexity in the efforts that must be taken to squeeze additional performance out of it. An easy win is to host the static resources more efficiently with a static file server or better yet a CDN.

A more complex performance optimization is to implement caching.

At some point you start thinking about how to separate the middleware execution from the app so that it can be hosted in more regions or at the edge.

Vercel provides all of those optimizations for free in terms of operational complexity, and charges a lot for it monetarily, but it’s not all that surprising to me that when I host an application it takes some effort to get performance and feature parity with a dedicated hosting provider for that service, just like how I am not surprised that RDS is a little more complicated, more performant, and more reliable than renting the equivalent EC2 and installing Postgres from the package manager.

Caveat: as a backend dev, I’ve never written anything that relied entirely on NextJS as the server side, so I’m approaching this with a certain amount of baseline complexity already assumed. I’ve not touched NextJS static sites or incremental static regeneration.

Do other frontend frameworks make it much easier to incorporate those performance optimizations? My impression is that it’s not all that hard to deploy NextJS, it’s just hard to manage the complexity of optimizing it to the extent that Vercel’s hosting does.
by einpoklum | 2025-06-02 12:46:44+00:00
> Simple... Do what others cannot to deliver success to the internal goals of the business.

This is not simple at all:

1. The "things which others cannot" are, typically, not the tasks you are given. So you would be neglecting the work you've been actually given to work on other things which you believe are important.

2. Things which people can't do are typically considered as irrelevant-to-do, and thus not a goal. When you do those things, it is likely that their positive impact is not recognized by most people.
by calrain | 2025-06-02 12:47:38+00:00
I've been testing using AI coding agents by asking an AI acting as a software designer to build a set of kanban style cards as .md files in a directory, designing the work we talked about into cards for AI developers.

It works quite well, and then you can review the cards (as files) and then ask another AI agent running as whatever role is suitable for that card, to pick up the card by name and do the work.

But there is no kanban board, it's just .md files in a folder.

I am continuing to test this, as transfer of context between AI sessions is an interesting challenge, and leveraging md files as if they are kanban / agile style cards, is interesting.
by nmcfarl | 2025-06-02 12:49:29+00:00
I read a lot, I have 2 e-readers and stacks of paper books, and an iPad Pro.

And it has been at least five years since I read a book on the phone, or iPad, though a couple years ago I read part of a PDF book on the iPad.

I think this stuff is really down to personal preference. And the kind of reading you do and where you do it.

My iPad never leaves home, and as such, it’s always going ahead to head against the e-reader, and losing except in the case of PDFs.

I do occasionally find myself with too much time and in a place with just my phone and not my laptop case (which almost always has e-reader in it, along with my laptop), and in those cases, I generally read hacker news.

Paper books get read when I cannot find an electronic version - which is fine, better than any other form except the e-reader.

But that’s me and my devices and my usage patterns and hangups. It’s not my wife, It’s not my kid, and it’s probably not most of you.
by thrance | 2025-06-02 12:50:11+00:00
You're mistaking invertible matrices for reversible computing, which are two unrelated concepts*. You can devise a reversible implementation of ReLU (and of anything else for that matter), using ansible variables. Like in addition:

add(x, a) = (x + a, x - a), and add†(y, b) = ((y + b) / 2, (y - b) / 2)

It's a well known thing in thermodynamics that a reversible process doesn't increase entropy (heat). So in theory, a reversible computer consumes no power whatsoever, as it doesn't leak any. In practice, most power leakage in real life computers is due to wire resistance, not the irreversibility of computations. Also, even with a perfectly reversible CPU, you would need to expend some energy to (re)initialize the state of your computer (input) and to copy its results out (output). Alternatively, once a computation is done, you can always "uncompute" it to get back to the initial state without using any power, at the cost of time.

If you want an example of a real invertible computer, look into quantum computers, which are adiabatic (reversible) by necessity, in accordance with the laws of quantum physics.

* Actually, you can represent reversible gates with invertible matrices, and that has quite profound implications. A gate/operation is reversible if and only if its corresponding matrix is invertible. But let's not get into that here.
by Aldipower | 2025-06-02 12:50:19+00:00
Thanks a lot! The scotsman is cool and his t-shirt too. :-D T-Shirt says in German "Little pig".

Regarding "midi notes" Sim'n Tonic himself is saying this to the Midronome: "Note that only these MIDI messages are simply forwarded when they are received, their timing is not changed. So if your DAW sends them with a lot of latency and/or jitter, the Midronome will forward them with the same latency/jitter. Actually this is a problem I plan on tackling as well [...]"

So the Midronome does not solve the problem of inaccurate midi notes coming from a modern DAW. The USAMO does by the way.. But only with one midi channel at once. And of course, coming back to the actual topic, the Atari hasn't a problem at all with accurate midi notes, it is absolutely tight at all 16 channels. So it seems there is indeed nothing comparable to the Atari nowadays. Maybe it will in the future.
by kkfx | 2025-06-02 12:50:29+00:00
It happened mostly that available devices fails to target a reasonable usage and industry do not want it anyway.

The reasonable usage means A4/B4 size, to read most common pdfs, to be loaded locally via USB or LAN not by some third party proprietary service, driverlessly, no app needed. A FLOSS base to let's say synchronize with Zotero or some personal note tool, that part developed by a community thanks to the FLOSS base.

Another reasonable usage is 6-7" maximum for those who want paper like notes, again locally sync-able with a desktop/mobile not needing any third party or special software in the middle.

A third reasonable usage is as a desktop secondary monitor to be used to read without burning our eyes, or with raster graphic apps no special software needed as well, just a standard displayport/HDMI.
by diggan | 2025-06-02 12:51:16+00:00
> hosting static assets on a different origin it can become difficult

What's the alternative? Hosting the static assets on the same place as the backend? Usually adding the CORS headers is enough to solve that (on the backend side), the frontend is still just HTML,CSS and JS running from nginx.

Is it common to do a different type of deployment with Next.js? It's a pretty basic deployment scenario (having the frontend on a different origin than the backend it communicates with), so not sure why that'd be so difficult with Next.js compared to basically anything else.
by manbitesdog | 2025-06-02 12:51:44+00:00
Cool stuff. I'm the CTO of Stargazr (stargazr.ai), a financial & operational AI for manufacturing companies; we started using transformers to process financial data in 2020, a bit before the GPT boom.

In our experience, things beyond very constrained function calling opens the door to explainability problems. We moved away from "based on the embeddings of this P&L, you should do X" towards "I called a function to generate your P&L, which is in this table; based on this you could think of applying these actions".

It's a loss in terms of semantics (the embeddings could pack more granular P&L observations over time) but much better in terms of explainability. I see other finance AIs such as SAP Joule also going in the same direction.
by ben_w | 2025-06-02 12:52:05+00:00
> (I suppose it depends on whether you see the training process more like model learning, vs. more like model being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)

It can be anywhere on the continuum between them; and the rules need to consider the gap between what happens by default vs. what is considered (economically and/or morally) desirable, which need not be a linear function of the position on that continuum.

The least creative AI model possible returns the nearest match in the training set verbatim. (e.g. Google).

The most creative model possible can from the training data construct a coherent set of vectors that span the n-dimensional space of concepts in that training data, including hypothesising about missing implicit dimensions in the way that we figured out non-Euclidian geometry by going "we can't prove this bit, what if it's wrong?"

I don't know where any given LLM is on this continuum, only that they're certainly not at either end.

I think that economically, we were already far beyond the point where copyright helps actual economic productivity (as opposed to rent extraction) even 50 years ago — easy mass production left us with a small number of massive hits each year, at the expense of most creative people making almost nothing. More recently, micro-payments and subscriptions, models like patreon etc. or YouTube ads, allow a lot of small people back into the market, but even then, it looks like copyright rules are often ignored as "fair use" (even when it isn't) or abused to attack rivals, or even just processed automatically (I think Tom Scott had an example of his own videos being claimed by someone else?)

But people don't only care about money, they do also care about morals — and a lot of people are very upset that human creativity is now SaaS.
by bjackman | 2025-06-02 12:52:37+00:00
Yeah maybe I should have mentioned that despite my enthusiasm I haven't bothered to install NixOS on my laptop or anything! I might one day, but that will be "for the love of the game" not because I expect it to save me any time. Until then, an incredibly basic dotfiles manager is perfectly good enough.

But for setting up appliances, test machines, it's perfect. If I ran cloud VMs I'd also consider it for setting those up.
by koonsolo | 2025-06-02 12:52:56+00:00
So you are in favor that Ukraine doesn't use offensive actions, lose the war, Russia takes Moldova next, maybe entire Georgia, and then tests NATO with the baltic states?

It's a bit naive to think you should avoid escalation now to risk an even higher risk in 20 years.

Russia can stop this war at any moment. It's fully their decision if they want to shoot nukes or not. None of the consequences of military operations of Ukraine should be placed in their shoes. And you claim you are not blaming Ukraine, but on the other hand you actually are.
by davedx | 2025-06-02 12:53:08+00:00
I read a lot.

I used to have a Kindle. Eventually it broke. Kobos seem even less reliable, my wife has been through 4-5 of them so far.

After my Kindle broke I switched "temporarily" to using the Kobo app on my iPhone to read. Although the form factor isn't ideal for reading, it's just so convenient that I never bothered buying another eReader. It also has all the advantages of a modern smartphone: touches to turn the page are instantaneous; controlling brightness is familiar and easy; I can copy and paste text into Safari to search anything I'm interested in. About the only environment where an eReader wins is bright sun, and well, I live in Northern Europe.

So yeah, I think I would say, although they're a nice idea - eReaders just aren't strong enough in their own niche to beat out smartphones for a lot of people, which means that niche stays pretty small and prices stay quite high?
by mytailorisrich | 2025-06-02 12:55:08+00:00
Schrems 2 does not do what you claim: the EU-US Privacy Shield is about sending EU data to the US, not about US companies keeping data in the EU. So I still don't know what "precedent" there might be.

Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...
by frereubu | 2025-06-02 12:55:15+00:00
I'm sure it requires a bit of rethinking here or there, but there's a group of houses in Brighton, UK, that did it in the late 90s, a long time after Segal's original ideas: https://www.granddesignsmagazine.com/grand-designs-houses/he...

I've been thinking about doing this, and my main thought is that the insulation standards were probably effectively non-existent at the time, beyond "as few draughts as possible"!

Edit: not sure if these will be geo-blocked, but there are a couple of programmes about that project here:

Build: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/on-demand/...

Revisit 10+ years later: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/on-demand/...
by sebra | 2025-06-02 12:56:17+00:00
I think one reason for the eReader market not being big is that they're so good and sustainable. I bought my Sony PRS-T2 in 2012 and am still using it to this day. It has battery life for weeks, storage space for 100+ books and works just as well as when I bought it. It's really hard for me to motivate buying a new one when the only interesting "new" tech is backlight and I guess it's the same for most eReader owners.

The ~90e I paid for it back in 2012 was for sure good value!
by m_sahaf | 2025-06-02 12:56:40+00:00
That isn't true representative of Supabase. Tables respect RLS by default, unless turned off. This is how Supabase works. Views are not, and that is due to multiple reasons which Supabase documents. Supabase also warns the user of this and asks them to configure RLS properly for views by first changing the invoker. They also report the same issue to the user on their Security Advisor. The fix is as easy as running the SQL statement in the SQL Editor. Supabase also offers "Autofix" next to the warning, which tells the user exactly how to modify the CREATE VIEW statement to enable RLS.

This is not a problem with Supabase.
by calrain | 2025-06-02 12:56:56+00:00
I'm taking a nuanced approach to make it more difficult to 'me too' my idea, even though I am heavily leveraging AI development.

My test is to build a layered business model where the initial development is a unique solution to an old problem, but that isn't what I will sell.

The goal is to build 2 or more layers of innovation on top of each other, so that a direct attack on the product you are selling is more difficult.

In order to sell what I will sell, you will need to implement the multiple layers that sit under that service.

If AI is your end state product, I think you will find it difficult to build a moat.
by StefanKarpinski | 2025-06-02 12:57:39+00:00
The paper "Julia: Dynamism and Performance Reconciled by Design" [1] (work largely by Jan Vitek's group at North Eastern, with collaboration from Julia co-creators, myself included), has a really interesting section on multiple dispatch, comparing how different languages with support for it make use of it in practice. The takeaway is that Julia has a much higher "dispatch ratio" and "degree of dispatch" than other systems—it really does lean into multiple dispatch harder than any other language. As to why this is the case: in Julia, multiple dispatch is not opt-in, it's always-on, and it has no runtime cost, so there's no reason not to use it. Anecdotally, once you get used to using multiple dispatch everywhere, when you go back to a language without it, it feels like programming in a straight jacket.

Double dispatch feels like kind of a hack, tbh, but it is easier to implement and would certainly be an improvement over Python's awkward `__add__` and `__radd__` methods.

[1] https://janvitek.org/pubs/oopsla18b.pdf
by JohnBooty | 2025-06-02 12:59:04+00:00
Wonderful documentary, super recommended watching.

Though, nit pick -- when people say "fix it in post", they're not usually talking about editing.

Editing is an expected, normal, traditional part of the art of filmmaking. You're not changing or fixing the shots themselves; you are cutting and pasting footage sequentially to tell a coherent and compelling story. The YT you linked is a masterful example of how Star Wars was saved through this sort of editing.

"Fix it in post" refers more to making sloppy shots full of errors and then correcting those errors later with CGI.

Does that make sense? The art of stitching shots together, versus shooting crappy shots and CGIing them later.
by Bayart | 2025-06-02 12:59:48+00:00
It's a reflection of the lack of money. Those substances are comparatively cheap, not habit forming and don't build up long term tolerance. A lot of them are pretty easy to DIY (though not LSD-25). The typical LSD user will buy a $10 blotter once in a while. The money flow is not worth mentioning in the broader scope of illegal substances trafficking.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-02 13:00:42+00:00
The main problem here is more that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a tiresome, self-absorbed, self-promoting windbag who seems to have a penchant for saying absurdly over the top things while coating them in a fine layer of just enough technobabble to make them seem sort of plausible if you squint, all to get some attention and make some bucks.

That's fine, but it's not worth in any way taking him seriously or giving him more eyeballs.
by bko | 2025-06-02 13:01:05+00:00
> If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.

I think it might just be the organization or people. I know a lot of engineers that don't want to progress to management or other "strategic" roles. They're happy doing what they're doing and they often complain about a culture that expects them to grow in these very narrowly defined bands that eschews technical ability.

Framing it this way as though to truly "value" an employee you have to expand the scope and nature of his work does more harm that good. I think it's more about having an honest conversation with management and set expectations. Management often doesn't want to mess up something if it's going well so may not take initiative.
by kkfx | 2025-06-02 13:01:09+00:00
> Do you have something we can read about that?

I'm slowly collecting projects of some condos, homes and shed, along with their docs about resources needed to build them. From the little I've examined just the common areas (elevators, stairs, hallways etc consume more than single family homes roofs and perimeter walls. If they are more than 7-8 stories they consume more ALSO to sustain their own structure.

AFAIK very little literature exists on that topic, you can find things like https://archive.is/jIr8J or https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2... etc but nothing more. And that's anyway is just the "building" part alone; aqueduct in cities and wastewater treatments also demand much more resources than small spread aqueducts exploiting from little local sources. Large covered areas means soil consumption due to watertight cover who suffocate the humus of the soil making the soil evolving in sand, creating liquefaction problems like sinkholes and the mere mass subsidence.

> Flying via eVTOL to the neighbor or to the store, compared to walking down the street or down the hall, seems a lot less efficient.

The fly yes. The energy and resources to build a road, keep it up, evolve it when the climate change makes people move does consume much more. Useful life of the vehicle itself change much (beside the battery) also keep in mind that food is not produced in the store, it need to be moved there and the higher density the greater distance need to be covered moving goods. Making efficient the last mile ignoring the rest of the supply chain is not really green.

We are in a changing world, we can't keep up ground infra, a flying vehicle means just ability to move in a certain radius, a ship similarly means ability to move on water for a certain range maximum, roads and rails means being tied to their design or spending immense amount of resources to build new ones.
by cgearhart | 2025-06-02 13:01:24+00:00
I think there was some debate on this, actually. I did a lot of research on the subject in the late 2010s and it seems like there were those who felt like limiting the branching factor was the goal, while others felt like fast eval to guide search in order to prune the tree was better.

For what it’s worth, “prune the tree” is still the winningest strategy. MCTS in AlphaGo/AlphaZero scored some wins when they came out, but eventually Stockfish invented the efficiently updatable neural network that now guides their search & it’s much stronger than any MCTS agent.
by thrance | 2025-06-02 13:01:34+00:00
Your g is not reversible though, its input space must be the same dimension than its output space. On the other hand, you're correct in that any irreversible function can be extended to a reversible one, although the process isn't always straightforward. The general way is to do somthing like:

f: V -> V

g: V x A -> V x A

with g(x, a) = g(f(x), b) for some value(s) of a. And b cannot be set to x, because then you can't find a back with g', and your function is not invertible.
by cortic | 2025-06-02 13:01:58+00:00
I purchased one for £24, 11 years ago, and still use it. Ironically from amazon (code B006GTOYDS) - can't find it in way back machine still have it in my purchase history. Before they started killing the competition. Miles better than the kindle to read in daylight and battery life still lasts weeks... cheap isn't always throwaway.

In contrast, i know people who have went through many kindles in this time and spent a small fortune on them.
by duckerude | 2025-06-02 13:02:05+00:00
See also: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/can-the-standard-library-s...

A file descriptor can't be -1 but it's not 100% clear whether POSIX bans other negative numbers. So Rust's stdlib only bans -1 (for a space optimization) while still allowing for e.g. -2.
by billy99k | 2025-06-02 13:02:41+00:00
exactly. I've been a consultant for a large company for 7+ years. We had a very large conversion project and I am the subject matter expert on one of the internal systems involved. My effort during the launch was minimal, because I knew the system so well and any data needed, I had already built tools years ago for extracting/manipulating it.

My value (and effort), was seen as high from upper management. I also learned to schedule teams, slack, and email messages accordingly. Even if I get something done very fast, I can easily manipulate the perception around it.