MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where can I give my app away for free?
by isntThatSth | 2025-07-16 15:55:09+00:00
I’ve made a mobile app that taught me a lot about the process of app development, but hasn’t seen a lot of downloads. For various reasons I’m moving on, and after having closed my Apple Developer and removed the app from the App Store, I tried to remove the app from the Play Store and close my Android developer account, only to find that Google doesn’t let you remove your apps or close your account ever if your app has had even just one download.

Android developer accounts contain a lot of personal info, and if I’d like that info to be deleted or at least not publicized, the only way I can close my Android developer account is to transfer the app to a different Android developer account. So at this point I’d be willing to give the app away for free (since it probably isn’t commercially viable enough to be sold for profit).

Giving the app away for free in this case means giving the source code (Ionic + Vue) to the new owner, and transferring the Android app to the new owner’s own Android developer account. With regards to iOS and the App Store, since the app has already been removed from the App Store, the new owner would just have to upload the app to App Store Connect (as opposed to getting it directly transferred from my account).

Is there a website that allows you to give your app away for free? Flippa isn’t an option; charging $29 even just for listing the app. I don’t think I can make any significant money from selling the app source code; that’s why I’m searching for a way to give it away for free. As an alternative, would anyone here on HN like the app (someone who already has an active Android developer account that I can transfer the app to)? If so, feel free to contact me at the email address in my bio, and I’ll send you more info about the app.
by jraph | 2025-07-16 15:55:13+00:00
Desktop Linux is difficult to define exactly, but the idea has merits. Something that's not proprietary, and that's not incredibly closed / locked / controlled by a monopolist like Android or Chrome OS.

> maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.

I'd be excited by numbers showing an increase free software use, including the OS, first and foremost.

For what I personally care, I'd be happy to drop the Linux kernel requirement and extend the scope to Desktop BSDs and other open source desktop OS as well. People being trapped in closed OSes that happen to be based on a Linux kernel is of limited comfort anyway, actually.
by dmbche | 2025-07-16 15:55:18+00:00
I mentionned this in an other comment, but I wholeheartedly agree - tools are great.

I've used a sandblasting machine to do in 3 minutes what would've taken me easily two days of hand scraping. With maybe 4 mins of training. It's absolutely undeniable how efficient the tool is.

Can you show me something concrete that's comparable with AI/LLMs?

In the order of 900-1000x efficiency - like comparing your legs to your car, you know?
by saberience | 2025-07-16 15:55:22+00:00
This title really doesn't fit what the submission did actually.

The submitter made a basic MCP function that returns the current time, so... Claude knows the current time. There is nothing about sundials and Claude didn't somehow build a calendar in any shape or form.

I thought this was something original or otherwise novel but it's not... it's not complex code or even moderately challenging code, nor is it novel, nor did it result in anything surprising... it's just a clickbaity title.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-16 15:55:29+00:00
I was very supportive of the infrastructure IT team when they moved their datacenter. I also had popcorn when watching the switch being figuratively flipped on.

It went surprisingly well despite having stayed 15 years in the old DC without rebooting. They were super scared of exactly the case you described but except for some minor issues (and a lot of cussing) it was OK.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-16 15:55:49+00:00
Good then that even WebGL mostly doesn't run on Khronos APIs ;) (only on Linux, although I don't know whether ANGLE is now actually using a Vulkan backend on Linux - which of course is also a Khronos API though).

Both WebGL2 and WebGPU are probably the most 'watertight' specced and tested 3D API ever built, and especially WebGPU has gone to great lengths to eliminate UB present in native APIs (even at the cost of usability).
by transfer92 | 2025-07-16 15:55:59+00:00
BBC is not perfect either: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0k7n6kd8yxo

"In February the BBC apologised over "serious flaws" in the making of the programme about children's lives in Gaza, after it was revealed its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas minister."
by Twirrim | 2025-07-16 15:56:16+00:00
> The 3 Ps made history. According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters. The new generation of devs is more pragmatic. These days it's less about language wars and more about picking the right tool for the job.

I feel like the religious wars aspects of this is completely overblown. The conversations around languages really hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years. Look at the way you see things happening in HN, heck even in the comment thread right here. It's the exact same kinds of discussions as happened back 20 years ago, with exactly the same kind of pragmatism.

I think the gulf comes about from the fact that the primary sources are conversations occurring between people that are largely anonymous behind an online handle, interacting with people that aren't face to face. There's always been an element of exaggeration in the interactions. What might be a "Umm, no" with a maybe a shake of the head, becomes "Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries". Almost every party involved comes to recognise the particular cultural quirks (which varied from forum to forum) and how to translate what was said, to what was actually meant.
by pitpatagain | 2025-07-16 15:56:37+00:00
The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context.

Is it the easiest thing to read? No.

Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
by Gormo | 2025-07-16 15:56:40+00:00
There's no 'proposal' here -- this is a review of an active ecosystem that has already had its ideas implemented and iterated on for the past six years.

Having a different ecosystem is the exact intention of this project. If that's not for you, you're certainly not required to participate, but the world is a vast continuum of variation, and is full of niches and clines that are intentionally distant from the global mean. Complaining that non-mainstream stuff exists seems pretty nuts to me -- the world is full of 'distinct populations'.
by habosa | 2025-07-16 15:57:04+00:00
I created CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) because of my own frustrations with GitHub's code review UI and my experience with far superior tooling inside Google.

In the last ~5 years there has been a huge increase in the number of alternative code review tools for GitHub.

Some of my favorites (besides CodeApprove, of course):

- Graphite (https://graphite.dev)

- Reviewable (https://reviewable.io)

- CodePeer (https://codepeer.com/)

- Codelantis (https://www.codelantis.com/)

All of them have many of the things you are looking for!
by Anon1096 | 2025-07-16 15:57:05+00:00
I work on something at a similar scale to 1.1.1.1, if we had this kind of setup our oncall would never be asleep (well, that is almost already the case, but alas). It's easy to say "just implement X monitor and you'd have caught this" but there's a real human cost and you have to work extremely vigilently at deleting monitors or you'll be absolutely swamped with endless false positive pages. I don't think a 5 minute delay is unreasonable for a service this scale.
by unshavedyak | 2025-07-16 15:57:12+00:00
It's even a blocker for some design patterns. Ie it's difficult to discuss options and choose the best one when the AI agrees with you no matter what. If you ask "But what about X" it is more likely to reverse course and agree with your new position entirely.

It's really frustrating. I've come to loathe the agreeable tone because every time i see it i remember the times where i've hit this pain point in design.
by threetonesun | 2025-07-16 15:57:42+00:00
Windows has at least three screens in the install that are upsells on other Microsoft products, plus a screen where you have to disable multiple analytics trackers. The GPU driver issue might have been a VM issue but to get even basic support I needed to install the AMD drivers, and ended up in some endless loop of the installer telling me it could install drivers for my GPU, installing them, then saying it wasn't supported. I figured the issue out eventually, after watching the AMD installer (with ads!) run for the Nth time, but like I said I'm not trying anything cutting edge, so drivers baked into the OS that I don't have to think about are much nicer.
by CJefferson | 2025-07-16 15:58:52+00:00
While you definately need rollback I wonder if it would have been easier, if a player got into a conflict position, to just dump their state and grab it a fresh copy from the server?

As long as you'd sent all their moves off to the server, they should see all the moves they've done which were valid (hmm.. there could be a race condition there). I wonder how often it's worth doing the more complex unwinding described? I may well be missing some complex case (which I imagine is often the case with rollback!)
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-16 15:58:54+00:00
From Steve Wittens, a well respected graphics hacker, and maker of the excellent Use.GPU. https://acko.net/tv/usegpu/ . I'm mostly posting to expand context, and sprinkle in a couple light options.

> Bindless resources are an absolute necessity for the modern style of rendering with nanite and raytracing.

Yeah, for real. Looking at the November 2024 post "What's next for WebGPU" and HN comments, bindless is pretty high up there! There's a high level field survey & very basic proposal (in the hackmd link), and wgpu seems to be filling in the many gaps and seemingly quite far along in implementation. Not seeing any signs yet that the broader WebGPU implementors/spec folks are involved or following along, but at least wgpu is very cross platform & well regarded.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/next-for-webgpu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42209272 https://hackmd.io/PCwnjLyVSqmLfTRSqH0viA https://hackmd.io/@cwfitzgerald/wgpu-bindless https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/3637 https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/380

> Would you like to render high quality lines or points? Sorry, it's not been a priority to make that simple. Better go study up on SDFs and beziers.

I realize lines and font rendering are an insanely complex fields, and that OpenGL offering at least lines and Vulkan not sure feels like a slap in the face. The work being done by groups like https://linebender.org/ is intense. Overall though that intensity makes me question the logic of trying to include it, wonders whether fighting to specify something that clearly we don't have full mastery over makes sense: even the very best folks are still improving the craft. We could specify an API without specifying an exact implementation, without conformance tests, perhaps, but that feels like a different risk. Maybe having to reach for a library that does the work reflects where we are, causes the iteration & development we sort of need?

> actually producing a lit, shaded and occlusioned image with PBR, indirect lighting, antialiasing and postfx

I admit to envying the ambition to make this simple, to have such a great deep knowledge as Steve and to think such hard things possible.

I really really am so thankful and hope funding can continue for the incredibly hard work of developing webgpu specs & implementations, and wgpu. As @animats chimes in in the HN submission, bindless in particular is quite a crisis, which either will enable the web to go forward, or remain a lasting real barrier to the web's growth. Really seems to be the tension of Steve's opening position:

> WebGPU is both years too late, and just a bit early. Wheras WebGL was OpenGL circa 2005, WebGPU is native graphics circa 2015.
by jlarocco | 2025-07-16 15:59:34+00:00
When did Python go out of fashion? This is the second article I've seen talking about it as if it's some kind abomination.

I get that it's not the shiny new thing, but I don't understand people hating on it. Is this just junior devs who never learned it, or is there some new language out that I missed? (And please don't tell me Javascript....)
by androng | 2025-07-16 15:59:38+00:00
Freuqntly after reading books like "Ray Dalio Principles" and "The hard thing about Hard things" and "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck", they are so long that I forget the point of the book and just never put it into my own words so I forget everything unless its been repeated throughout the book 6 times. there's no knowledge check at the end of most books. So like the article says I just subscribe to blinkist now and save the effort.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-16 16:01:05+00:00
It's a terrible solution if it is the only solution. Up until this situation, the alerts I received on my phone have been pretty spot on, which has been impressive. Yes, local sirens are a good idea, but they come with caveats. I have local sirens in my area, but they are for tornado or other severe weather. If I hear those sirens, my action to take is totally different than for a flood. Naturally, if I were to come to an area where the sirens are meant for flooding, my reaction to them would be the wrong move. I would hope that a siren for flooding would just sound different than how the established tornado siren warning system sounds.

This trained response to a siren/warning system is the reason they chose not to use the tsunami warning system in Hawaii during the fire. When that siren goes off, people seek higher ground which would have driven them to the fire.
by ghc | 2025-07-16 16:01:21+00:00
Here's a good article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/technology/crypto-debanki...

Treating crypto as a risky and destabilizing security (like subprime mortgages) is a valid reaction to what happened during the SVB and FTX implosions. Accusing Elizabeth Warren and the Biden administration of being actual fascists over it is absolutely wild.

Similarly, saying "everyone knows" Biden was not the actual president, USAID was a terrorist funding organization, and that we can't keep track of money without blockchain....these all originate in QAnon circles or Russian state media.

To quote CS Lewis' novel, "That Hideous Strength", on why this is so dangerous:

> “Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
by alias_neo | 2025-07-16 16:01:38+00:00
I've never really used old hardware, and generally I've not had too many issues using the latest hardware with Linux. I don't tend to buy PC hardware on release day either, so within a few weeks/months of release when I'm buying, drivers are usually available. I've been through a half dozen generations of Intel laptop for work usually with Nvidia GPUs but my current one is the first with an Intel Arc GPU, for which there are no Ubuntu 24.04 drivers as far as I'm aware, and I'm not entirely sure whether it is/can run the dedicated GPU right now or if I'm using the iGPU; but my work doesn't require GPU accel beyond my desktop and my IDE and terminal (Alacritty).

The biggest issue I find is external devices that need firmware flashing require some crap piece of Windows software from the manufacturer in order to flash, so I'll spin up a Windows VM and USB passthrough to do the update then blow it away again.
by libertine | 2025-07-16 16:01:41+00:00
What does it mean in the current Russian political environment?

> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]

Just to make sure, according to you, this is completely false and detached?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage

But this is a small detail from my reply, why are people so focused on this? Even if I was wrong, which I don't see that I am, everything else still stands.
Show HN: Explainer/docs for GGUF quantization (unofficial)
by irt24 | 2025-07-16 16:02:07+00:00
"GGUF quantization" is the most popular tech stack for quantizing Llama-like models for CPU. But the documentation is very sparse, and the maintainers made it clear that writing a paper is not their priority. So I spent like a week reading through the code and understanding the various concepts (K-quants, I-quants, importance matrix, etc) and put together this (unofficial) repo with explainers.

It was mostly written by hand, without standard AI slop. I used AI mostly just to interrogate Claude Code on the llama.cpp codebase to help me understand it.

It's possible that I made mistakes or missed things here and there. If you have in-depth knowledge, I'd love your contributions!
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-16 16:02:18+00:00
There are several alternative API's. @dataclass is one, Pydantic offers another, there's also attrs, plus less general things like namedtuple.

Admittedly it's obnoxious when you've got habits for one and you're on a team that uses another--totally flies in the face of the zen re: "there should be only one obvious way to do things".

...but that was always a rather ambitious goal anyway. I'm ok navigating the forest of alternative API's if it means not being locked into something that I can only change by choosing an entirely different language. I'm happy that it's very easy to tell when somebody is mucking about with python internals vs when they're mucking about with some library or other.
by mschild | 2025-07-16 16:02:41+00:00
Anecdata: I found most people don't have an issue with the vocabulary itself but rather their attention spans. From what I've experienced from family members and friends, the younger ones seem to get exasperated by any longer amount of text that isn't in very simple English language.

A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that could actually sit through a whole reading session in her 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-07-16 16:02:48+00:00
Again and again, your code lacks the basics of engineering. Where is your package manager and requirements? Your code would never pass any test in a professional context. It's like you haven't went past a Python tutorial and feel the AI output is acceptable.

The docs are pictures, and what is a Pipfile in any context? It looks like a requirement file but you never bothered to follow the news about pip or uv.

Every AI project is like that and I'm really scared for the future of programming.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-16 16:02:48+00:00
The GL programming only feels 'natural' if you've been following GL development closely since the late 1990s and learned to accept all the design compromises for sake of backward compatibility. If you come from other 3D APIs and never touched GL before it's one "WTF were they thinking" after another (just look at VAOs as an example of a really poorly designed GL feature).

While I would have designed a few things differently in WebGPU (especially around the binding model), it's still a much better API than WebGL2 from every angle.

The limited feature set of WebGPU is mostly to blame on Vulkan 1.0 drivers on Android devices I guess, but there's no realistic way to design a web 3D API and ignore shitty Android phones unfortunately.
by duxup | 2025-07-16 16:03:04+00:00
I grew up in a smaller town that while it is not declining like the article, has changed and on a recent visit I thought "I don't think I'd mind living here".

But then politics ... I'm not interested in living in a place where the politicians are banning books, trying to pass laws that make librarians criminally liable if they lend out a book deemed objectionable and other strange culture war efforts.

It's a non starter, I don't want to be a part of that.

Let alone the bizarre support of GOP candidates who pass laws that strip folks of insurance coverage, cut regulation, and effectively push rural hospitals to consolidate or outright close. Then they inexplicably complain about it. I don't want to live someplace where the locals are determined to poke themselves in the eye, complain, and then keep at it. Same goes for support for state laws that prevent local government from collecting taxes, and then they complain about roads, services ...
by Spivak | 2025-07-16 16:03:19+00:00
It really is, students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English that they don't read, write, or speak; that makes reference and uses turns of phrase that would be well-understood by readers at the time but are archaic to a modern reader.

If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the results would be perfectly acceptable. Why would you test literacy, a very practical skill, using anything other than contemporary language, the kind that they actually use in their day to day?