MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ichik | 2025-08-03 09:33:42+00:00
> design tools market stays competitive

Adobe killed their Figma competitor (XD), so the reality of the UI design tools niche in the design tools market is that Figma actually has a near monopoly. Sketch still chugs along, but its market share is negligible. Penpot is a neat idealistic community effort that is lightyears behind.

This is one of the reasons why Figma continues to tighten the screws on their userbase, who doesn't like it one bit, but continues to pay.

Now, this is all not to say, that it would've been any better with Adobe's involvement, more like lamenting the fact that Figma lived long enough to become a villain.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-03 09:35:41+00:00
> If they could hire 10 people equally as good for 1/10 the price then they would do so.

I think this is where the misunderstanding is. In this context it is not 10 times as much in salary - where it is already highly improbable that a single person provides 10 times as much value as 10 other highly motivated candidates.

You have to increase by orders of magnitude.

Remember that these threads exists in the context of the posted article.
by latexr | 2025-08-03 09:35:56+00:00
> the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format.

That’s not true at all. QuickTime is far from the best video player, but it’s also not entirely worthless. It can play “modern” popular formats like H264 MP4, which is exactly what YouTube recommends.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en
by achenet | 2025-08-03 09:36:41+00:00
> Plan A: Miraculously get rich

To be fair - this first plan is actually very doable if you're a reasonably skilled programmer in the 21st century.

Like you know that Tim Bray article about Bitcoin where he's like "and that's the thing about late stage capitalism, there's so much money floating around that people can't find a use for that we get stuff like cryptocurrency speculation"?

Find one reasonably convincing business idea, bonus points if it uses current hot tech trends, ask rich boomers for money via "seeking venture capital funding/investment", pay yourself an exorbitant salary for 5 years and then close shop because "we ran out of funding but the market didn't materialize".

Go read Adam Neumann's wikipedia page if you need inspiration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann

If you're posting on Hacker News, and you want to be rich, I reckon you can reasonably expect to have a seven figure net worth in a decade or so if you consistently make good decisions.
by William_BB | 2025-08-03 09:37:18+00:00
You sound like you subscribe to "Orthodox C++".

Speaking seriously, I agree there's definitely a lot of bloat in the new C++ standards. E.g. I'm not a fan of the C++26 linalg stuff. But most performance-focused trading firms still use the latest standard with the latest compiler. Just a small example of new C++ features that are used every day in those firms:

Smart pointers (C++11), Constexpr and consteval (all improvements since C++11), Concepts (C++20), Spans (C++20), Optional (C++17), String views (C++17)
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-03 09:37:29+00:00
> of all the goods that can happen to the web, 90% of them can't happen due to not having access to font rendering & metrics in JS

I’d be interested to see a representative excerpt of this person’s “goods that can happen to the web”, because it sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Not much needs that stuff, and a lot of that stuff is exposed in JS these days, and a lot of the rest you can work around it without it being ruinous to performance.

It’s also pretty irrelevant here (that is, about HTML-in-Canvas): allowing drawing HTML to canvas doesn’t shift the needle in these areas at all.
by esperent | 2025-08-03 09:37:36+00:00
Here's a simple example that's currently very hard to do and requires all kinds of hacky and unsatisfying workarounds:

1. A 3d model, say of a statue in a museum

2. Add annotations to the model drawing attention to specific features (especially if the annotations are not just a single word or number)

If you want the annotations to be properly occluded by the model as you move the camera around, it's hard - you can't use HTML. If you do use HTML, you'll have to do complex calculations to make it match the correct place in the 3d scene, and it will always be a frame delayed, and occlusion is bad - usually just show or hide the entire HTML annotation based on the bounding box of the 3d model (I have seen better solutions but they took a ton of work).

So you could use 3d text, maybe SDF, but now you've created a entire text rendering system without accessibility or anything like that. Also, if you want anything more than very simple annotations (for example, videos, lists, select menus, whatever) you either have to reinvent them or fall back HTML.
by curiousObject | 2025-08-03 09:38:41+00:00
The image sensor samples different light wavelengths with a time offset of about 250ms, as the satellite moves over the Earth.

I think that means it could be possible to enhance the resolution by using luminance data from one wavelength to make an ‘educated guess’ at the luminance of other wavelengths. It would be a more advanced version of the kind of interpolation that standard image sensor cameras do with a bayer color filter

So it seems possible to get some extra information out of the system, with a good likelihood of success, but some risk of point hallucinations.

The image sensor and filters are quite complex. Much more complicated than a simple bayer filter CCD/CMOS sensor. It is not AFAIK a moving filter, but a fixed one, however the satellite is obviously moving.

I don’t know if the ‘Super-Resolution’ technique in the OP is taking advantage of that possibility though. I agree it would be disappointing if it’s just guessing —- although perhaps a carefully well-trained ML system would still figure out how to use the available data as I’ve suggested.

the optical Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) samples 13 spectral bands: four bands at 10 m, six bands at 20 m and three bands at 60 m spatial resolution

Due to the particular geometrical layout of the focal plane, each spectral band of the MSI observes the ground surface at different times.

https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/web/s2-mission

I’m making some guesses, because I don’t understand most of the optics and camera design which that ESA page describes. For instance if anyone can explain why there’s a big ~250ms offset between measuring different light wavelengths, despite the optics and filters being fixed in place immobile relative to each other? Thank you.

The time per orbit is about 100 minutes. Sun-synchronous orbit.

Actually there are 3 satellites. The constellation is supposed to be 2, there’s currently a spare one as well. But the orbits are very widely separated, supposed to be on opposite sides of the planet, so I don’t know how much enhancement there could be from combining the images from all the satellites. And don’t know if the OP’s method even tries that.

Anyway, the folks at ESA working with Sentinel-2/Copernicus must have already thought very hard about anything they can do to enhance these images, surely?

Edit: The L1BSR project which is linked to from the OP git page does include ‘exploiting sensor overlap’! So I assume it really is doing a process similar to what I’ve suggested
by SleepyMyroslav | 2025-08-03 09:38:51+00:00
You are sounding like rose tinted glasses are on. I think your glass is half full if you recheck actual versions and features. And mine is half empty in gamedev.

Anecdata: A year or so ago I have been in discussion if beta features of C++20 on platforms are good to be used on large scale. It makes it not a sum but an intersection of partial implementations. Anyway it looked positive until we needed a pilot project to try. One of the projects came back with 'just flipping C++20 switch with no changes causes significant regression on build times'. After confirming it that it is indeed not an error on our side it was kinda obvious. Proportional increase of remote compilation cloud costs for few minor features is a 'no'. After a year the beta support is no longer beta but still partial on platforms and no improvements on build times in community. YMMV of course because gamedev mostly supports closed source platforms with closed set of build tools.
Show HN: High-Quality E2E Tests at Recorder Speed – You Own the Code [video]
by enekesabel | 2025-08-03 09:39:03+00:00
Hey folks!

I’m a frontend dev who’s been obsessed with e2e testing for over half a decade. It feels to me that with the current selection of tools you're forced to choose between speed and quality: You can either create brittle tests fast, or spend too much time writing solid ones from scratch - the kind that actually last.

I spent the past 8 months working on my side project, a tool that helps you create a rich, domain-focused Page Object Model as you record tests. It then generates clean, professional Playwright code that you actually want to keep and can control.

It’s not a huge thing, but yesterday I finally managed to “close the circle” and connect the main workflows, ending up with something that is still not 100% correct - or ready for public use - but at least presentable :D

Here’s a short, straightforward demo showing the core workflow in action. I'm curious if it's only me feeling the vibes, or if some of you are also getting the hang of it :)

I’d love to hear any feedback, harsh critiques, or ideas you have.

Thanks for reading & watching!
by a_t48 | 2025-08-03 09:39:35+00:00
Prediction: it will be used heavily for things like command line arg parsing, configuration files, deserialization, reflection into other languages. It will probably be somewhat a pain to use, but better than the current alternative mashup of macros/codegen/template metaprogramming that we have now for some of these solutions. It will likely mostly be used for library code, where someone defines some nice utilities for you, that do something useful, so that you don't have to worry about it. I don't think for the most part it has to hurt compile times - it might even be faster than the current mess, as well - less use of templates.

I don't think the "legos" vs "shipping" debate here is really valid. One can write any type of code in any language. I'm a freak about C++, but if someone wants to ship in Python or JS, the more power to them - one can write code that's fast enough to not matter, but takes advantage of those languages' special features.
by kristo | 2025-08-03 09:41:32+00:00
Nobody wants to tell you you can’t buy a truck, but the rest of us shouldn’t bear the negative externalities of every person who wants to buy a truck - especially when the facts show most of those people would be served (practically if not emotionally) just as well by a smaller vehicle.

Why should we subsidize truck (and SUV) ownership? They ruin roads, are vastly more dangerous, require wider lanes, have worse visibility of pedestrians, pollute more, are louder, and take up more space than other options. Yet we don’t make SUV owners pay for any of that. We subsidize their gas, their road repairs and expansions, their car insurance, their storage space, their car payments, not to mention ignore the injuries, deaths and discomforts they cause.

My 2011 VW Golf gets 40mpg… so I’m not very impressed by an F150 that 99.9% of the time performs the same job (carrying one person and no cargo) getting 25. (Even if this isn’t your experience, the facts show that for most people it is)

You should be free to make your own decisions! I support you in that. I can believe that your lifestyle justifies owning a truck, even though that doesn’t generalize to most SUV owners. I just don’t want to pay for other people’s lifestyle decisions. It’s like we have socialism for truck owners, but market capitalism for people who need healthcare
by xorcist | 2025-08-03 09:41:55+00:00
But that's the thing. These are hired people. Their job is to bring glory to the great leader. Exactly the same way Altman get the OpenAI fame.

If you really had thoughts in your head worth a quarter of a billion, the rational thing to do is not to spill those beans.

Approximately no one is motivated by money they already have.
by nosianu | 2025-08-03 09:42:23+00:00
Brains are not computers and we don't learn by being given abstract rules. We also don't learn nearly as well from class room teaching as we do from doing things IRL for a real purpose - the brain always knows the difference and that the (real, non-artificially created) stakes are low in a teaching environment.

That's also the huge difference between AI and brains: AI does not work on the real world but on our communication (and even that is limited to text, missing all the nuance or face to face communication includes). The brain works based on sensor data from the real world. The communication method, language, is a very limited add-on on top of how the brain really works. We don't think in language, to do even some abstract language based thinking, e.g. when doing formal math, requires a lot of concentration and effort and still uses a lot of "under the hood" intuition.

That is why even with years of learning the same curriculum we still need to make a significant effort for every single concrete example to "get everyone on the same page", creating compatible internal models under the hood. Everybody's own internal model of even simple things are slightly different, depending on what brain they brought to learning and what exactly they learned, where even things like social classroom interactions went into how the connections were formed. Only based on a huge amount of effort can we then use language to communicate in the abstract, and even then, when we leave the central corridor of ideas people will start arguing forever about definitions. No matter how the written text is the same, the internal model is different for every person.

As someone who took neuroscience, I found this surprisingly well written:

"The brain doesn't like to abstract unless you make it"

http://howthebrainworks.science/how_the_brain_works_/the_bra...

> This resource, prepared by members of the University of London Centre for Educational Neuroscience (CEN), gives a brief overview of how the brain works for a general audience. It is based on the most recent research. It aims to give a gist of the brain’s principles of function, covering the brain’s evolutionary origin, how it develops, and how it copes in the modern world.

The best way to learn is to do things IRL that matter. School is a compromise and not really all that great. People motivated by actual need often can learn things that take years in school with middling results significantly faster and with better and deeper results.
by noelwelsh | 2025-08-03 09:42:39+00:00
I need to get a NAS, and this just gave me a whole new rabbit-hole to go down. The other builds on their site e.g. (archive.org link because the WP site is struggling) https://web.archive.org/web/20250505085226/https://jackharve... are also very interesting.

I should probably just hook something up with, say, the old Mac Mini I have lying around, but it's fun to consider the options.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-08-03 09:43:35+00:00
It would appear that someone forget to add something before putting the page up... part way down the page is 'XXX-add-show-URL-here-XXX' referring to a youtube livestream vod for the announcement of the winners

Edit: Before posting this, I looked to see if there was a repository I could contribute to to fix it, but I can't find one
by zahirbmirza | 2025-08-03 09:43:41+00:00
Do you think Notes is as good as it could be, in terms of the marriage of aesthetics and function?

My app presents just an alternative, its free, and there are screenshots on the app store. It is my response to my own criticisms of Apple. You can decide for yourself if you think I have achieved any goals. There is a website for the app if you are android.

But, my bigger frustration with Apple remains, that it no longer seems to prioritise the miraculous simplicity that obsessive and meticulous design can bring. It has become, as I said in a previous reply, the WhatsApp of the computer world. Play it safe. Don't upset ANYONE apart from shareholders who "know" what works.
by isaacremuant | 2025-08-03 09:44:43+00:00
This is as ridiculous as "Netflix shouldn't give me all episodes at once because that way it forces us not to binge watch them".

People don't need to be forced by the environment. They can strike healthy balances on their own.

You can have a social life without having roommates and you'll likely end up living with your romantic partner after spending some time dating them or multiple people until you find the one you move with.

Living alone will definitely help with the privacy and ease of bringing people you're dating to your place for private time.
by a_t48 | 2025-08-03 09:47:46+00:00
I've been down this road. I ended up with a config YAML (basically - an IDL) that goes into a pile of jinja files and C++ templates - and it always ended up better and easier to read to minimize the amount of jinja (broken syntax highlighting, the fact that you are writing meta meta code, it's a hot mess). I'd much prefer to generate some bare structs with some minimal additional inline metadata than to generate both those structs and an entire separate set of structs describing the first ones. std::meta lets me do the former, the latter is what's possible right now.
Show HN: ReplyFast – Instantly reply to emails in your own tone (1-click)
by skyzouw | 2025-08-03 09:47:46+00:00
Hey HN,

I built ReplyFast, a minimal AI tool that helps you reply to emails instantly – in your own style – with just 1 click.

You paste the incoming message, pick a tone (friendly, direct, confident, etc.), and ReplyFast writes a clean, human-sounding reply you can send immediately. It’s like having a muscle memory for email responses, powered by GPT-4.

⸻

Why I built it: I was wasting way too much time replying to emails and DMs that didn’t need 100% of my brainpower. Most tools either feel clunky, overkill, or too robotic. I just wanted something that: • Sounds like me • Works in 3 seconds • Doesn’t turn into another inbox or SaaS dashboard

⸻

Tech: • Next.js (App Router) • GPT-4 • Hosted on Vercel • Fully client-side preview, no login needed to try it

⸻

What I’m looking for: • Is the output natural enough? • What would make you use this every day? • Would you want Gmail/Twitter/LinkedIn integrations? • Would you pay to save hours per week on emails?

Try it → https://www.replyfast.net/ Happy to answer anything or take roast-level feedback!

– Viggo
by MartinMond | 2025-08-03 09:47:59+00:00
> One that I've repeatedly gone back to over the years is paginated rich text editing. It's simply impossible to do with contenteditable in a product level way - one of the reasons Google docs has a custom layout engine.

As do we at Nutrient, we use Harfbuzz in WASM plus our own layouting - see the demo here: https://document-authoring-demo.nutrient.io/

Getting APIs for that into the Platform would make life significantly easier, but thanks to WASM it’s not a total showstopper.

Btw, I saw you’re working on sync at ElectricSQL - say hi to Oleksii :)
by teekert | 2025-08-03 09:48:31+00:00
Perhaps it is worth noting that all super computers I know (like the Dutch Snellius and the Finnish Lumi) are Slurm clusters with login nodes.

Bioinformaticians (among others) in (for example) University Medical Centers won’t get much more bang for the buck than on a well managed Slurm cluster (ie with GPU and Fat nodes etc to distinguish between compute loads). You buy the machines, they are utilized close to 100% over their life time.
by mike-the-mikado | 2025-08-03 09:50:30+00:00
An interesting game, if you can come up with enough good questions. (At least it isn't telling me which digits are right, but in the wrong place).

With a target of 20% accuracy, it won't make much difference, but I think that symmetrical error bounds are appropriate in this case - the factor by which the answer is wrong. so 2 times too big, is as good as 2 times too small.
by grumbel | 2025-08-03 09:50:45+00:00
Guix is a reimagining of the concepts of Nix with Guile/Scheme instead of the Nix language, so they are very similar in overall feel, but differ in the details (e.g. GNU Shepherd vs systemd).

As for learning curve, I find Nix substantially easier, since the language is much simpler (JSON-like with lazy-functions) and doesn't need all that weirdness that result from using Scheme as configuration language (lots of quoting, module system, etc.)
by arrrg | 2025-08-03 09:51:35+00:00
This is a nonsensical generalization.

This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.

If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.

That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.

Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.
by eschneider | 2025-08-03 09:51:39+00:00
Debugging/modifying code generated from someone's undocumented c++ code generator is pretty close to the top of my list of unpleasant things to do. Yes, you can eventually figure out what to do by looking at the generated code and taking apart the code generator and figuring out how it all works but I'll take built-in language features any day.
by isaacremuant | 2025-08-03 09:52:45+00:00
> I remember hearing years ago that the ingredients for a strong friendship are (1) serendipitous, unplanned encounters, (2) vulnerability, (3) sustained time spent together. Housemates seem like the only modern avenue to this for adults

The ingredients for a strong friendship are doing things together without forcing it and contact surviving when things change (e.g. geographical move, shared activity ending, family change).

The fact that you needed such a constant school like, unavoidable presence speaks to your own lack of sustained activities and communication in other areas. You haven't made friends through sports, hobbies, shared courses or even work? Only by 24/7 living with them?

You may want to change that. It may seem like it requires more effort at first but it's not that different and lasts beyond the see each other every day phase.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-03 09:52:54+00:00
People not used to it. On my school run some will do 20-60 depending on where along the road and how narrow and what the sight lines are. Others will just do 20-30 for the whole 10 miles.

At a couple of locations there’s morning room but lots of room to overtake (as long as nothing comes the other way), the road is nearly wide enough to have a line down the middle. Most drivers are fine but some of the 20-30 lot will swerve all over the road to try to block overtaking.

These aren’t super narrow, you can get a tractor or hgv down the whole road, and even at some passing places get one past another.
by graemep | 2025-08-03 09:53:38+00:00
Really? People walk everywhere in the UK I have lived in - London, Manchester, and small towns. Edge of town currently, there are regularly crowds of kids walking to school going past, people going to the convenience store or cafe nearby, people walking dogs, people walking to get the bus......

If buses were more frequent people would take them more, and use their cars less.

People can be very reliant on cars really rural areas but that is a small proportion of the population.