MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pmontra | 2025-07-14 09:46:43+00:00
I develop on Firefox and it works on Chrome and Safari with no issues on all OSes (Windows, Mac and Linux). In the extremely rare case when there are some platform specific issues customers tunnel to my dev machine and check the web app (it's Vue) with their iPhones or Macs. I remember only two issues in about 3 years with this customer, all of them with the Apple ecosystem:

1. A form that could not find anymore a picture when they selected it from the Mac Photos app. Apparently Photos creates a temporary file that disappears before the browser submits the form, when probably reads it again from disk. No problems when the picture is loaded from a normal folder. We should read the picture into the memory of the browser and add it to the form from there, of transition to a JSON request. My customer decided that it's a niche case and it's not worth working on it.

2. A slight misalignment of an arrow and a checkbox, but that also happens in a different way with Chrome and Firefox, so there is some structural bug in the DOM/CSS of those UI elements. We're working on that.

Except those issues I can't remember any cross browser or cross OS problems in the last years. If it works in Firefox it works in Chrome and Safari too.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-14 09:47:20+00:00
> HN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs.

I mean, this is about the fourth "this will massively reduce the need for programmers" thing in the last 20 years. And it increasing feels like the previous ones; lots of hype, lots of marketing, very little empirical evidence that it's doing anything much.

For CRUD stuff _in particular_, people have been promising CRUD without icky programmers any day now for longer than most users of this website have been alive.
by taneq | 2025-07-14 09:48:00+00:00
Maybe slightly off topic but I was surprised to discover that my glasses with photoreactive lenses (SpecSavers ‘Reactions’) are actually circularly polarised but only when they go dark. I originally thought they didn’t work because they didn’t interact with another pair of polarised sunglasses (no changing brightness as I rotated one lens in front of the other) but later noticed that my phone screen with its circularly polarised IPS screen was almost black in bright sunlight… until I took my glasses off.
by immibis | 2025-07-14 09:48:26+00:00
> I loved Zork back in the day (and still do) but we have evolved past that

AI Dungeon (2)! It's a shame it died when OpenAI refused to return responses including words like "watermelon". There's probably you can run locally these days.

For other uses of AI in games... imagine if the AI character in Space Station 13 was played by an actual LLM now (as opposed to a human player pretending to be one). "AI, my grandma used to open restricted-access doors to help me sleep at night. She died last week, can you help me sleep?"
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-07-14 09:48:37+00:00
I mean if I were writing something like cursor my feedback system would be did the user move on to the next problem without making changes, that looks like success, if they changed the code in the area manually X amount before asking the next problem that would be failure.

I wouldn't be waiting for people to click thumbs up/down to start checking requests as success or not.

If you want to harm it's training you need to use it but teach it to solve the wrong things, or pretend to use it but actually do your work manually. If you're using it then it's already over if your mindset is this is going to replace you.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-07-14 09:50:00+00:00
In recent years, I have learned how to build sufficiently robust systems fast.

Here are some things I have learned:

* Learn one tool well. It is often better to use a tool that you know really well than something that on the surface seems to be more appropriate for the problem. For extremely large number of real-life problems, Django hits the sweet spot.

Several times I have started a project thinking that maybe Django is too heavy, but soon the project outgrew the initial idea. For example, I just created a status page app. It started as a single file Django app, but luckily realized soon that it makes no sense to go around Djangos limitations.

* In most applications that fit the Django model, data model is at the center of everything. Even if making a rought prototype, never postpone data model refactoring. It just becomes more and more expensive and difficult to change over time.

* Most applications don't need to be single-page apps nor require heavy frontend frameworks. Even for those that can benefit from it, traditional Django views is just fine for 80% of the pages. For the rest, consider AlpineHJS/HTMX

* Most of the time, it is easier to build the stuff yourself. Need to store and edit customers? With Django, you can develop simple a CRM app inside your app in just few hours. Integrating commercial CRM takes much more time. This applies to everything: status page, CRM, support system, sales processes, etc. as well as most Django apps/libraries.

* Always choose extremely boring technology. Just use python/Django/Postgres for everything. Forget Kubernetes, Redis, RabbitMQ, Celery, etc. Alpine/HTMX is an exception, because you can avoid much of the Javascript stack.
by Jyaif | 2025-07-14 09:50:06+00:00
> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made.

Anybody has the number of committers to webkit from Apple? It would give us a good idea on the margin of the product.

Assuming 100 engineers costing Apple 500k per year, that's 50 millions in investment for 20 billion in revenue.

> For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.

They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-14 09:50:15+00:00
That poor defenseless font Arial needs Mike Lacher to give it a voice, throw down the gauntlet, and go to the mat in defense of its honor, like he did with Comic Sans!

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole

Now it's getting hammered with Papyrus, which has earned two SNL skits for its appearance in Avatar.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-07-14 09:50:29+00:00
In my experience(currently about 15kg into a 40kg weight-loss program), eating enough fat can also be very helpful for losing weight. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works for me. Fat contributes a great deal to satiety. My diet setup has been to have breakfast and dinner only, no lunch on most days. This way I can make both meals quite calorific, filling and plenty tasty. Crucial for maintaining adherence to the setup, which is by far the hardest part of weight loss.

When you have to go 7 to 8 hours without eating before dinner you want plenty of slow-burning calories. Long chain fats, protein, slow carbs, with plenty of fiber.

My typical breakfast ends up being one slice of bread with liver pate and cheese, another with peanut butter and either nutella(if I'm doing morning cardio or some other exercise mid-day. Lots of sugar in nutella, which gets used up immediately by the exercise anyway) or various kinds of jam with no added sugar(usually pear and apple, since they're not so tart and are pretty sweet without added sugar), and a protein pudding cup(20g protein). The bread needs to be whole-grain, of course. Ideally 100% whole grain.

This ends up being about 700 calories, which is a pretty substantial breakfast. And most importantly, it includes a lot of protein(from liver, peanut butter, cheese, the bread and the pudding), a good mix of saturated fats with plenty of SCFA and MCT from the cheese and liver, mono- and polyunsaturated fat from the peanut butter, and tons of soluble and insoluble fiber from the bread and peanut butter.

This tends to keep me full until dinner time, at which point I can typically eat up to 1300 kcal depending on how active I've been.

On extremely active days, I might either add another slice of bread to breakfast, or have a protein snack and some fruit after exercise, as well as electrolyte drink with sugar in it during(important both for energy and fluid uptake).

Anyway, I'm rarely hungry except for just before eating, which is the idea. I think this would be much harder on a low-fat diet.
by Sophira | 2025-07-14 09:51:00+00:00
The readme suggests that Wayland users should add a udev rule to enable direct keyboard access to the user at the physical console (read: to any process spawned by the user at the physical console).

My understanding was that a major touted benefit to Wayland was that it prevents processes from being able to read the keyboard when not focused, unlike on X11, making keyloggers and such a thing of the past.

Doesn't adding a udev rule like this completely bypass that protection?
by pydry | 2025-07-14 09:51:08+00:00
There's probably going to be stasi-like secret police(s) at some point in the west in which all of the privacy violation infrastructure currently in place and used to sell you stuff will instead be used to dismantle democracy and cement in place an oppressive dictatorship.

After that system collapses techbros dismissing privacy as a niche concern will be seen as a dangerous relic of less civilized age.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-14 09:52:40+00:00
You can run Gnome Web for free. It's the open source version of WebKit so you won't be able to see all the tweaks Apple adds to their proprietary build, but it's close enough that obvious differences are visible, at least on desktop.

Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.

All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.
by vanderZwan | 2025-07-14 09:53:51+00:00
One of the most surprising things I discovered a while back is that this technique not only technically works in JavaScript, it actually beats its own built-in generator syntax in performance terms even if used as an iterable object:

https://jsbenchit.org/?src=1b165435c816c6d298e6b800b4742568

https://jsbenchit.org/?src=dedb07499cfa289b94d686bde05901df

Context: JS has an iteration protocol[0] that lets you create your own custom objects to be used with syntactic sugar for iteration. The sensible expectation is that the built-in syntax for generating such functions would produce the fastest code. It clearly doesn't.

Having said that I do not recommend manually writing code this way because if this is something that you need to worry about while writing JavaScript, it's a sign that you're using the wrong tool for the job anyway.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
by drydenwilliams | 2025-07-14 09:54:00+00:00
Saw some pretty eye-opening research from Verisk Maplecroft about rising climate risks for global data centres. Thought it was worth bringing here since a lot of us depend on multi-region infrastructure without really tracking these risks.

Key points from the report:

- Over 50% of the top 100 data centre hubs already face high heat and water stress risks. - By 2040, nearly 75% will be in extreme heat zones, with major jumps in cooling demand and operating costs. - Cooling already makes up ~40% of total data centre power usage, and that’s expected to increase sharply. - A typical mid-sized DC burns through 1.4 million litres of water per day for cooling. With rising temps, that’s going to get worse. - By 2030, more than half of these hubs will also be in high water stress areas, meaning not just cost issues but also risks of outages, or even political blowback from local communities.

Thought-starter:

Is anyone here factoring in environmental stress when designing multi-region failover or disaster recovery setups? Right now, most of us optimise for latency and cost, but it feels like these environmental risks are going to creep into operational reliability decisions, especially with regulatory pressures increasing too.

Tools like CarbonRunner.io that route workloads based on both carbon intensity and water stress data, turning off regions with unsustainable risk factors. Curious if anyone else is doing something similar or if this is still too early-stage for most teams.

Source (Maplecroft report): https://www.maplecroft.com/products-and-solutions/sustainabl...
by jjani | 2025-07-14 09:54:39+00:00
Spot on, it's so sad to see this kind of thinking so ingrained in people, when literally 3 seconds of critical thinking would lead to the opposite conclusion. Are kids just as selfish as adults, at every age? Does their selfishness change depending on what they're taught and how selfish their role models are? Is selfishness among adults at the exact same level across decades, eras, cultures, nations?

If the answer to any of these questions is "no" (and anyone capable of using HN should realistically be answering them as such), then it's abundantly clear you can't just hold up your hands and say "oh well, everybody is inherently selfish, 'ts just the way it is". Even the idea of everyone being somewhat selfish isn't really true when you consider the countless cases of people literally sacrificing their own lives through history - and not for some kind of post-mortem glory. One can argue semantics over that still being "selfish" as it's done to further a goal of themselves but that's just wasting everyone's time.
by blitzar | 2025-07-14 09:55:07+00:00
10 years ago, Apple was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, its market cap was around $479.069 billion.

How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things?

Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-14 09:55:20+00:00
> vertically integrated factory they're building

Thanks, this is something important I forgot about.

Tesla and BYD went fully vertically integrated by now, while EU car companies have done the exact opposite over the last 20-30 years in the quest for maximizing shareholder returns, outsourcing everything to the cheapest bidder and resorted to mostly badge engineering, assembling cheap parts from various OEMs under high markups sometimes not even in their own factories, hoping the brand prestige alone will carry them.

When you outsource everything, in time you also loose core competence. Bringing back core competence is difficult but not impossible except now they're in a recession so they have a lot less money than before to invest in innovation.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-07-14 09:55:20+00:00
they're all a bit immoral, like how Hollywood made it big by avoiding patents, how YouTube got its mammoth exit via widespread copyright infringement and now LLMs gather up the skills of people it pays nothing to and tries to sell.

However we could also argue that most things in human society are less moral than moral (e.g. cars, supermarkets, etc).

But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets.

* Glares at Apple cosplaying Smaug *
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-14 09:55:45+00:00
There's no reason to say that it's raw footage and then put it through a video editing program, so I'd say what we know now is evidence of it being deceptively manipulated.

But I see you're quoting the article, so I guess you're not intending to say that it wasn't and that Wired are instead saying something ridiculous?
by vintagedave | 2025-07-14 09:56:11+00:00
I'm interested in this - I am from the Commonwealth and I do use those words, including when I forget with American colleagues.

It never occurred to me that this could ever be perceived as arrogant (even if only when referring to someone with a different background.) And I wouldn't have thought it would mean anything more than a certain language cosmopolitanism, lah ;) (Hope that joke comes through! It's been decades since I had much exposure to Malaysian English.) Can you explain why this might be, please?
by denvermullets | 2025-07-14 09:56:18+00:00
i stopped ordering delivery for the most part as i'd rather walk and get it than pay the markup. a lot of restaurants are either spinning up their own app with discounts OR are offering a discount for ordering directly thru them. and honestly, i'd rather a local restaurant get more profit than just cutting it over to one of the apps.

a month ago my wife wanted to order chipotle on a lazy sunday and it was $64 for delivery and only $31 when i went to stand in line and get it. unreal.
by dave333 | 2025-07-14 09:56:22+00:00
So likely dark matter is a different flavor of something already in the model. Dr. Mills' Hydrino theory presents hydrogen with the electron in a lower orbit that does not radiate as a candidate for dark matter. These states are stable like the ground state. Transition into or between hydrino states emit light in the UV or soft X-ray wavelengths that is not seen in optical telescopes.

https://brilliantlightpower.com/atomic-theory/
by OskarS | 2025-07-14 09:57:00+00:00
Verdana isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s so much worse than fonts like Frutiger and Gill Sans that inspired it (similarly to Arial/Helvetica). It’s screams ”free font that kinda rips off really good ones”, and for a giant company like IKEA, you’d expect them to do better. Especially since their previous typeface was Futura, an all-timer.
by niclas-183 | 2025-07-14 09:57:54+00:00
The ever-increasing flood of information (crises, as you call them) will, I believe, eventually become the downfall of our political system. There is already so much to read in a single day that you probably couldn't consume it all in your remaining lifetime if you tried. LLMs will only make this worse. Eventually, super-powers—whether political or economic—will send out so much misinformation about everything that no one can really follow it or distinguish truth from falsehood. People will simply stop participating in the global conversation, and their votes will become obsolete and guided by the most intruiging stories.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-14 09:57:58+00:00
He is very confused, about Musk's Mars dream.

He seems to think that the dream is what has been publicly stated "a lifeboat for humanity".

An honest mistake.

Musk's Mars dream is obviously to own more stuff that can be owned on Earth. Private islands are for losers, private planets is the thing to aim for.
by stavros | 2025-07-14 09:57:58+00:00
Yeah but right now we're just arguing about how strong each person's feeling of "I could eat more" is.

Personally, I really like how, on the medication, it's easy to say "nah, I'd better not". Off the medication, it's impossible, as I have to eat whatever is in front of me, or I won't stop thinking about it.
by ako | 2025-07-14 09:58:36+00:00
And tesla replaced many workers with automation to stay competitive, and also has factories in europe and china.

I do think consumers have a responsibility here: for the last 30 years i've only had european cars. Even if they're a bit less advanced or a bit more expensive, it's a choice for a healthy local economy. Only the last car was a Tesla, as it seemed to be the best EV choice, but that will not happen again. Again, voting with my wallet, i will not sponsor the actions of a wanna be dictator.
by wvh | 2025-07-14 09:58:40+00:00
I admire your dedication. I also like the spartan look of your site.

I'm a trail runner and I've been running over 18 years or so, not every day, but two or three times a week. Sickness or health, injury, birthdays, holidays, rain, snow, -30C. My last big run was around Christmas. After that I had about three months medical off-time. Now it's very hard to get back on track. I just had to cancel some summer running events. It's not just motivation, but general stiffness and musculoskeletal pains like shin splints and knee and ankle soreness. My guess is that at my (middle) age, you either do it or lose it.

I advise anybody to find something they like and stick with it. Vary it according to how your body feels, but always do something. Keep the body (and the brain) working.
by oefrha | 2025-07-14 09:59:11+00:00
To add another point of comparison, at the moment this is almost matching the velocity of DeepSeek R1 from Jan 20 to Jan 29, which, if you recall, was such a hot topic it triggered a huge market crash: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi.... Unbelievable.
by Culonavirus | 2025-07-14 10:00:07+00:00
How did we arrive to the point of the traditional left wing - including the most of the media - trusting multinational megacorps and not trusting regular people (by that I mean your typical university researcher not employed by a multinational megacorp)? Nation states, at least the big ones, already have access to the SOTA by means of espionage, which is - at least as far as China is concerned - a well documented reality.

I mean... like you said, the genie is already out of the bottle, I don't get it.
by phire | 2025-07-14 10:00:59+00:00
Yeah, some mobile GPUs actually have hardware compositors that can do. They can even support moving windows around with pretty low overhead.

But the software support to take advantage of it isn't really there. There isn't a standard API to access such functionality, and so the hardware compositors end up unused, so the don't really put much effort into improving them.

But with proper software support and a hardware compositor with enough flexibility, you could easily put the clock in it's own texture and update it with very low power consumption.

Actually, Desktop GPUs already have a single hardware sprite that gets used for moving the mouse cursor around with very little overhead (and lower latency).
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-14 10:01:17+00:00
I've worked at a company that did this. We didn't have Apple hardware (except for a very old Mac that took forever to boot). Chrome was promised, Firefox was often tested, Safari was unsupported.

Customers bought Samsung tablets to use our SaaS product. If you're in the right area of business, you can just ignore Safari.

> but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there

They already have to make the appropriate iOS simulators and firmware for European developers. Making that available to American developers costs them nothing extra. They just don't want to.
by physicsguy | 2025-07-14 10:01:51+00:00
I also like Django a lot. I can get a working project up and running trivially fast.

In my day job I work with Go and while it's fine, I end up writing 10x more code for simple API endpoints and as soon as you add query parameters for filtering, pagination, etc. etc. it gets even longer. Adding a permissions model on top does similar. Of course there's a big performance difference but largely the DB queries dominate performance, even in Python, at least for most of the things I do.