MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kristopolous | 2025-07-26 00:27:46+00:00
The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years.

Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you.

I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable.

Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid?

I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"
by bartblast | 2025-07-26 00:27:54+00:00
I’m excited to announce Hologram v0.5.0, a major evolution of the full-stack Elixir web framework! This release brings massive performance improvements - we’re talking execution times improved from milliseconds to microseconds in core client-side operations, making it fast enough for real-time interactions like mouse move events.

Key highlights:

- Complete bitstring rewrite with ~50x rendering speed improvements!

- Comprehensive session and cookie management

- Live reload functionality for enhanced DX

- Incremental compilation (2x-10x faster builds)

- New pointer and mouse move events

- HTTP-based transport layer

- CRDT support for future distributed features

Full release notes: https://hologram.page/blog/hologram-v0-5-0-released

Check out the SVG Drawing Demo that showcases smooth, responsive drawing using the new pointer move events - it really demonstrates the performance leap! https://hologram.page/demos/svg-drawing

With over 950 commits since v0.4.0, this release delivers significant architectural enhancements while maintaining the unique developer experience that makes Hologram special.

Special thanks to my current GitHub sponsors: @D4no0, @Lucassifoni, and @sodapopcan!

Support Hologram’s development: If you’d like to help accelerate Hologram’s growth and make releases like this possible, consider becoming a GitHub sponsor. Every contribution helps dedicate more time to new features and community support! https://github.com/sponsors/bartblast

Stay in the loop: Don’t miss future updates! Subscribe to the Hologram Newsletter for monthly development milestones, ecosystem news, and community insights delivered straight to your inbox. https://hologram.page/newsletter
by sashank_1509 | 2025-07-26 00:28:18+00:00
If you have 2 options, get the product for paying a market price, and get the product for free, I think 90%+ of all humans will get it for free. The only thing stopping them is friction and consequences. I’m not as optimistic as you, that the only reason people pirate is because it’s available in their geography (why not use a VPN and buy it then). Some people will pay for stuff, I never use pirated stuff, but I’m pretty sure that group of humans is a rarity.
by ghaff | 2025-07-26 00:29:48+00:00
Presumably, it would be cheaper if I had a fairly modern urban condo but my exurban property is a good $15K+ per year. Heck, I just had a kitchen fire and, even with good insurance, I'll probably be $50K out of pocket when all is said and done. I could probably have done things more on the cheap but didn't really make sense.
by lutusp | 2025-07-26 00:30:18+00:00
> How many of you are working in tech without a STEM degree?

Many tech big names got by without a degree. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs. Larry Ellison.

After a short, successful career in aerospace engineering, I bought an Apple II in 1977. Wrote a best-selling word processor (Apple Writer). Retired at the age of 30. Seventh-grade dropout.

In fact, apart from Elon Musk, I am at pains to find anyone influential who has a degree.

Some may insist that a degree is more common than this narrative suggests, but granted that, it seems there is a weak to nonexistent correlation between technical career success and an advanced degree.

Young people should learn this, before preparing for a career that might not rely on the degree. Or before signing up for a course of instruction that teaches skills no longer in demand -- like computer programming.
by mikert89 | 2025-07-26 00:31:06+00:00
seen many many cases first hand in NYC. Also, as an individual its very hard to sue a company with a huge amount of VC funding. you need a 100k to burn on it to even have a basic chance, and most cases are a legal gray area, most lawyers wont even take the case.

even finding a lawyer with the expertise to handle a case like this is not easy, its a very small world among those types of lawyers
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-26 00:31:24+00:00
As a mobile dev who’s done a little web work, my experience has been the opposite. If you’re writing your apps with native OS SDKs and mostly stock widgets (don’t go reinventing wheels for the sake of branding), maintenance generally isn’t too bad.

Web app projects on the other hand always feel some degree of held together by bubblegum and duct tape. Do so much as breathe wrong and they fall apart (which is part of why the industry has become docker-centric). None of the old web projects I have laying around are trivial to get into good enough shape to develop on again, whereas I can pick up and old iOS app that hasn’t been touched in a decade and getting it running in an afternoon.

I will say however that there’s a class of poorly built cross platform mobile app that I’ve come to abhor, because as you say they’re brittle and break easily on top of generally being unpleasant to use.
by qeden | 2025-07-26 00:31:59+00:00
I made Virby, a Nix-darwin module for configuring a fast and secure vfkit-based VM for building linux packages on macOS. The main advantages it has over the standard `linux-builder` darwin module are:

1. Improved Performance: using vfkit, the VM can boot from a cold start at around 7 seconds, compared to the ~16 seconds it takes linux-builder, which uses QEMU. Build times for the `nixpkgs#hello` derivation take Virby ~8 seconds, but I have yet to benchmark linux-builder's performance on this. 2. Improved Security: the VM configures (by default) a `builder` user accound with minimal permissions (non-root, service account). The SSH keys are generated at runtime (no publicly known host key) and does not accept remote connections, as it binds to the host's loopback interface (127.0.0.1).

The nix-darwin module provides options to configure the VM/service, including: - memory - cpu cores - host port - disk size - rosetta support: enable rosetta in the VM, allowing x86_64-linux builds - on-demand mode: launchd listens on the host port for incoming SSH connections, and when one is received, the vm-runner application boots the VM and proxies the SSH connection. After a configurable period of idle time, the VM shuts down. - debug logging: enable debug logging for the daemon and VM processes.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-26 00:32:06+00:00
I tried to order McDonalds for pickup today. I got tired of twiddling with the website. I tried the app, disabled all the permissions.

Instead, McDonalds kept trying to pop up and demand my location, even after I put a zipcode and started my order. This repeats 3 times throughout my small order. Then I get to checkout and somehow I pop right back up to the map screen, where I am once again asked for location permissions. this was some 2 minutes into choosing a restaurant and picking my order.

I just uninstalled at that point and chose another eatery. Apps can get every bit as aggressive with permissions as they can with ads if their incentives really align with gaining them. That was a bizarre experience, but not the only one where I was badgered for permissions that the app really didn't need.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-26 00:32:22+00:00
This works for some websites, not all. And often it results in significant loading times, because you're loading tons of unnecessary data. In many cases it is much better to send requests more frequently, similarly to how a server side rendered website would behave. Instead of fetching 10,000 products, just fetch a page of products. Much faster. Have endpoints for filters and searches, also paginated. This can be fast if you do it right. Since you're only sending minimal amounts of data everything is fast. The server can handle lots of requests and clients don't need a powerful connection to have a good experience.

Network requests themselves are not slow. Even a computer with a bad connection and long distance will probably have less than 500ms round trip. More like 50 to a few hundred at most. Anything beyond that is not the client, it's the server. If you make the backend slow then it'll be slow. If you make the request really large then the bad connection will struggle.

It's also worth mentioning that I would much rather deliver a good service to most users than make everyone's experience worse just for the sake of allowing someone to load the page and continue using it offline. Most websites don't make much sense to use offline anyway. You need to send some requests, best approach is simply to make them fast and small.
by ncruces | 2025-07-26 00:32:34+00:00
Thanks for taking the time!

I was the original contributor of the SIMD code, and got this… pushback.

I still don't quite understand how you can marry ”pointer provenance” with the intent that converting between pointers and integers is “to be consistent with the addressing structure of the execution environment” and want to allow DMA in your language, but then this is UB.

But well, a workable version of it got submitted, I've made subsequent contributions (memchr, strchr, str[c]spn…), all good.

Just makes me salty on C, as if I needed more reasons to.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-26 00:34:09+00:00
I am expressing neither support nor opposition to any particular policy position in that comment, merely putting forth the general principle that any time you find yourself to be an outlier you should very carefully examine how that came to be. It's a natural extension of Chesterton's fence.

I think it also follows from such a principle that in general the relevant reasoning should be explicitly articulated when discussing the topic.

> It's one thing to recognize that it happens, another to recognize the practice as legitimate, virtuous, or even desirable.

Suppose that a thing is explicitly chosen by the majority of the world's population, or dictated by the majority of governments, or imposed by the majority of cultural norms. I am suggesting that dismissing it in favor of your own reasoning is fine, but that doing so lightly is arrogant and misguided.
by kragen | 2025-07-26 00:34:41+00:00
Your comments are clear enough; they're just mistaken.

Lisp dialects generally do not support mathematical functions, despite supporting the functional-programming idiom, which is inspired by mathematical functions. Rather, they support procedures, which in most Lisps are called "functions". In Scheme, however, the Lisp they chose for the course, they are called "procedures", an intentional choice to avoid creating precisely the kind of confusion you are experiencing. Lisp "functions", like procedures in most other languages, can fail to terminate, can raise an error, can have side effects, and can depend on mutable state.

Mathematical functions cannot do any of these things. If they could, it wouldn't make much sense to take their Laplace transforms!

The five chapters of SICP (I recommend http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/index.xhtml) are:

- 1 Building Abstractions with Procedures

- 2 Building Abstractions with Data

- 3 Modularity, Objects, and State

- 4 Metalinguistic Abstraction

- 5 Computing with Register Machines

— ⁂ —

You said:

> Nothing in my comment is about modelling anything to do with electronics in software.

You are mistaken about that. The part of your comment that is about modelling something to do with electronics in software is the part where you replied to a comment saying:

> ... four "deep dives" into the four "languages of engineering." There were four 15-unit courses, each about one of these "languages":

> - 6.001: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the "procedural" language, led by Abelson and Sussman)

> - 6.002: Circuits and Electronics ("structural" language)

> - 6.003: Signals and Systems ("functional" language)

> - 6.004: Computation Structures ("architectural" language)

Your comment in reply said:

> Lisp (...) can hardly be called "procedural". The core material of SICP revolves around (...) concepts that (...) have far more to do with "structure", "architecture" and "functionality" [sic] than with "procedure".

That is, you were explicitly asserting that the core material of SICP was concerned with "structure", "architecture", and "functions" in the sense of the core material of those courses, rather than only or even primarily procedural abstraction. However, two of those four courses—specifically, 6.002 and 6.004—were concerned almost exclusively with modeling electronics. (An awful lot of the "systems" in 6.003 are also electronic, but that's beside the point.) However, as you know, 6.001, SICP, and Lisp are concerned exclusively with modeling things in software.

Modeling electronics in software is a reasonable thing to do, and Lisp is a reasonable medium to do it in, but you need to understand the structural, architectural, and (at least for analog electronics) functional angles on the electronics in order to do that. None of that is part of SICP or 6.001, and Lisp is not a reasonable medium for describing electronic systems from at least the structural and functional angles. You need schematics, pole-zero diagrams, and Bode plots. If you remembered what you studied in that course 20+ years ago this would be obvious to you.
by leakycap | 2025-07-26 00:34:45+00:00
> "In the test, the satellite tilted forward to scan 500km ahead of its orbit and snapped a preview image. Ubotica’s AI quickly analysed the scene to check for cloud cover. If the skies were clear, the satellite tilted back to take a detailed photo of the surface. If clouds obscured the view, it skipped the shot — saving time, storage, and bandwidth."

The title implies more than that, I'd think. I'm surprised satellites haven't been checking for cloud cover for years?
by roncesvalles | 2025-07-26 00:36:39+00:00
I know this is HN but imo it's rarely ever a good deal to work at startups as an employee instead of a cofounder (with actual cofounder equity not just the title i.e. within the same order of magnitude as the largest-shareholding cofounder), over a bigger established company.

The only good reasons to do so are if you want to learn or make contacts so that you can found your own startup later.

In my pensive moments, one of the things about humans that makes me go "god damn" is how little money it takes for insanely talented people to just come and work for you.
by leakycap | 2025-07-26 00:36:42+00:00
This is a great resource, I see some classics and some I have never heard of.

From the "how we chose" link:

> "I included some shows that have ended their runs. I tried to pick podcasts that, if not entirely evergreen, have a hefty archive that can be revisited—series that cracked jokes that haven’t gotten old or covered books and movies you can still read and watch before tuning into a specific episode that will help you appreciate them more fully."

Exactly the kind of curation that makes a big difference on this kind of list.

https://time.com/7303677/how-we-chose-100-best-podcasts/
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-26 00:37:19+00:00
› extremely robust existing system (payments)

It is not, indeed.

The first part is its goal: identity is secondary, the main purpose is money. It means a customer can put a fake name and address as long as the money part is considered OK. Most PSPs won't check the cardholder name (it can be used for fuzzy scoring, but exact match is a fool's errand). Address is usually only required for physical goods and won't be checked otherwise. And 3DSecure will shift the blame enough that the PSP won't need to care that much about the details.

The second part is the whole mess that comes with payments. You'll become a card testing pot in no time, and you'll be dealing with all the fuss just to check identities, you'll soon be rising the token payment to a significant amount to cover the costs, and before you realize it half your business has shifted into payment handling.
by wyuenho | 2025-07-26 00:37:24+00:00
I swear if I see another "SEO" guy or some rando web dev who joined the workforce after Covid complaining about SPAs by misrepresenting it, I'm gonna explode.

As someone who's been developing web apps since the 2000s, let me tell you the origin of SPA has few things to do with the "false promise of SPAs" he listed, but largely due to companies in the late 2000/early 2010s wanting to go "mobile first". This usually meant they still had a desktop second somewhere, which implied they were architecting the entire system to completely separate the frontends and the backend.

Before, what web devs meant by frontend was essentially server-side rendered HTML templates with perhaps a little bit of jQuery running on the client-side. Now, since mobile and desktop web apps are to share some business logic and the database somehow, people had to rediscover REST by reading Roy Fielding's Phd dissertation that inspired the original HTTP. This meant now every company was moving to service-oriented architecture and started exposing their backend APIs onto the open internet so their mobile apps and SPAs running in the browser can share the same APIs. This was a cost saving measure.

This period also coincided with the steady decline of full-stack webapp frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django because for a couple of years, these frameworks had no good ways to support an API only applications. Django hadn't even reached 1.0 back then. This was a time when NodeJS was really starting to pick up momentum. Once people had started being more comfortable with JS on the server-side, lots of people suddenly realized they could push a lot of business logic to increasing powerful desktop browsers and phones, application hosts people now call "edge devices".

This is the true impetus of SPA. How is CSS going to kill this need?
by gerdesj | 2025-07-26 00:37:36+00:00
Thank you for giving me a starting point to work with.

FFS, I have a degree in Civ Eng but if I start wittering on about bridges and roads I will define abbreviations. Its common courtesy.

With regards your analogy involving Spotify: I ripped all my CDs to FLAAC some years ago. The tapes and records took a little longer. No idea what a Spotify is. Well I do, I'm an IT consultant, but I don't actually care, I'm a 50 something IT consultant! I bought my music years ago and listen to it on my gear and from my gear alone.

This SPA thing sounds like it is getting out of hand and it also sounds like there are tribal divisions being drawn up. IT does love a tribe! We even have multiple internal tribes: devops, webdev and so on.

I'm nominally a PHB ...
by zeroq | 2025-07-26 00:38:07+00:00
It's funny you've mentioned that.

It reminded me of the time when I joined Wikia (now Fandom) back in, I think it was 2006. One of the first things that landed on my desk was (I can't recall the context) deeplinking.

And I remember being completely flabergasted, as I came Flash/games background, and for us that problem was completely solved for at least 4 years at the time (asual swfaddress package). I felt kind of stupid having to introduce that concept to much more senior engineers that I was at the time.
by jkingsman | 2025-07-26 00:38:39+00:00
With some elegance, too; iirc they pivot languages on the word "Golgotha" as he reads from the bible, the Latin word for a location near Jerusalem, but having a non-English/non-Russian word be when they switch made it a lot less jarring. Plus, having it be during a read-out-loud-from-book portion allowed for more measured cadence that smoothed the switch but probably would have felt jarring if the audience were parsing multi-character dialogue when it happened.
by ramesh31 | 2025-07-26 00:39:00+00:00
>Why haven’t game stores just spin off separate store front for porn content? It is basically free, since they already have the infrasructure.

Because the payment processing is unreliable and prohibitively expensive. For all the whining about "moral pearl clutching", the reality is that adult oriented businesses deal with massively higher rates of fraud and charge-backs. Visa and Mastercard couldn't care less about the ethical issues, it's simply a risk calculation for their business.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-26 00:39:09+00:00
Given their definition of procedural, the term makes sense. The book is about processes and procedures that describe how they're executed or things are computed, versus describing what is computed (mathematical sense, declarative or more declarative, closer to some popular meanings of functional programming today).

They define functional programming as "[p]rogramming without any use of assignments". Which would be a subset of procedural programming in the sense that they mean it.

They also contrast imperative and functional programming (the first being with assignments and mutations, the latter without). Both imperative and functional programming can reasonably fall under procedural programming using their definitions.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-26 00:39:14+00:00
With exception to Reddit, I generally prefer apps to sites because mobile process management is considerably nicer than browser tab management.

App processes are sorted in order of most recent use, keeping the most relevant ones at hand, and those that aren’t used for a while just silently go away without much fuss.

In comparison browser tabs aren’t organized unless the user does that themselves, and so with each web app tab management overhead increases. Some browsers have an idle tab auto-close feature, but that closes the wrong tab (usually a page with info pertinent to something I’m working on) quite often. “Installing” PWAs can be an ok-ish workaround, but the problem there is that a lot of sites don’t have the little bit of manifest magic that makes saving to home screen “install” a PWA instead of just opening a browser tab.
by borroka | 2025-07-26 00:39:58+00:00
Unfortunately, most proverbs, sayings, etc. have no quantifiable value, which makes all the difference when evaluating opportunities. I like to say that I probably worked harder than many of the best soccer players in the world today when I was young, but I'm nowhere near their level. However, perhaps if I had talked to the right person, if I had made the right choice when choosing one team over another, I would have had a decent professional career instead of the mediocre one I had.

Maybe I should have worked 10% less and spent 70% more on “networking,” and my chances of making it would have increased by 30% or 20%. But no one knows. And even if you had a way to estimate these probabilities at the population level, the individual realization of random draws from the probability distribution would still be random. Most of the time, it doesn't take more than 1 or 2 favorable random draws to get where others would die to be.

According to heritability estimates, I had a 5% chance of becoming much taller than my parents, which, we can all agree, is a pretty low probability, but it happened.