skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has been programming professionally since the 80s, I have seen the idea of 'no code' system development being hyped every few years.

Visual drag and drop tools are not going to make coding obselete in the forseeable future. But they can be very useful in well defined domains.

I am currently working on a 'no-code' drag and drop tool for data transformation. I have been able to create transforms that cover ~95% of cases. But there always going to be edge cases I can't cover. So I have included the ability the write some Javascript. ;0)
> but the real reason is the massive savings they will get on logistics

When positing causes, I suggest you learn how to do back-of-the-envelope calculations in your head. A container can hold a lot of iPhones. The cost of transport is trivial in comparison to the value, so the profitability delta is very small. I.e. I think you are making up stuff.
> Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way.

I would pass this buck way, way earlier. Many diverse future candidates (non-white) are educated at awful public schools. When you begin your education at a miserable daycare-school then you are far less likely to make it all the way through the life-pipeline and get in front of a high tech recruiter. I have hired diverse candidates and they are great just like all candidates I hire. There simply aren't that many that apply, and the pool of diverse candidates is sucked up by way better-funded FAANGs and similar.

I would argue we need to completely reinvent our primary education system from the ground up to offer more choice and make them way less depressing for lower-income students. You can't expect a tech recruiter to fix 2 decades of mistakes through their hiring system.
My eldest became a proficient reader because she was playing Minecraft. Don’t remember exact age when this happened, maybe 6 or 7 (she’s 10 now). Before Minecraft, she would go a word at a time and not really comprehend but once she started playing her reading became fluent within weeks. Had an immediate impact on her performance at school too.

Now she’s into Roblox and I sometimes see her in Roblox studio hacking some Lua (or their version of Lua).
Over 80% of Covid-19 patients in a hospital study have Vitamin D deficiency
Snapdragon 875 is 5nm, but on Samsung's process not TSMC's[1].

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/272139/samsung-foundry-to-become...
I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. This reeks of fake inflated / manipulated Chinese currency / gov't backed debt.
Unless you have better evidence than Keith Olbermann to back your statement, I think we're done here. I'm not going to go back and forth about Twitter followers as a valid metric for gauging public opinion on genocide...
> "I’m sorry, it may be possible that climate change is real, it is just that we have no proof of it, except by people who also claim the feminist science is true."

This is one of the most absurd strawman critiques of climate science ever.
https://comb.io/yHqJ2w

"Oh, well, no. Neddy doesn't believe in insurance.
He considers it a form of gambling."
Literally every one of the existing options still works.

Ok with charging at 5w? Plug your lightning-to-A cable into the little tiny cube charger they've been selling since forever.

Already have a faster USB charger? It works.

Ok with Qi at 7W? Works

Oh, you want the new shiny MagSafe puck system?

Great. Buy it.

This analysis completely ignores that the new shiny system is supposed to be a better experience. It's completely additive to what we have now, nothing has been taken away: except the included charger and earphones, neither of which I would want to have.

I expect MagSafe will be quite popular. But that's because it's cool, not because anything about the new generation of phones compels users to buy it.
There's also Samsung 5 nm.
I think the core of the issue is that real problems contain a lot of complexity, and code is still by far the most efficient way to encode complex logic.

For instance, I've done some work with node-based editors like Node Red and Max MXP, and while they are nice for simple cases, invariably they reach a tipping point where you end up with a giant graph which is far less navigable and comprehensible than a set of source files.

There's no escaping complexity.
If you are looking for strict limitations check out the arduboy: https://arduboy.com/

It's a credit card sized game system which you can program with the Arduino IDE.
Language is probably a prereq.

You can't be in great battles with yourself without language arising. So where ever language arises, Consciousness of some sort follows.

Ants I doubt have great self control problems cause language hardware is primitive.
Ask HN: How did you overcome your speech stutter?
Hoping to hear from data-driven folks here who have managed to successfully overcome speech disfluency/stutter in their lives. I have a four year old whose blocking/disfluency/stutter is getting worse by the day. He already has virtual speech therapy sessions 2x a week.
I'm really worried about what will become of him in the American high school system with its rampant bullying, and then about the pain and suffering the world will inflict on him. What can I do to help him overcome this?
I think a lot of people who've commented clearly feel threatened by the concept of no-code and have default knee-jerk reaction anytime it's mentioned (how many comments are about the article vs the concept). Maybe there's also a theme of being troubled by the notion that the masses might cause a mess with these tools and shouldn't be trusted.

I think this kind of reaction is inevitable when people with power and privilege feel threatened by another group who are claiming some power for themselves.

Here's what the article was really about:

> The key here is that no-code tools aren’t successful just because they are easier to use — they are successful because they are connecting with a new generation that understands precisely the sort of logic required by these platforms to function.

It may be a poorly written click-baity article or you may think the conclusions are wrong but you can't dismiss the reality that a generation of people are being exposed to programming concepts in an entirely different way to our experiences. This is fascinating whatever you think about the tools themselves. Isn't the interesting discussion to be had here more about what this will mean for end-user software going forwards?

- Does this trend maybe mean that it's vitally important that we build some forms of open standards around this kind of technology?

- Should we rethink programming education for young people knowing that many are likely to have exposure to concepts no-code introduces?

- What does FOSS look like with no-code - do we need some serious FOSS tools in this space?

I think there are a lot more interesting avenues to explore beyond "I don't like this trend" and "we've seen abstractions get higher-level before and we haven't been put out of a job yet so what's all the fuss about".
One more thing:
I am also toying with the idea of using Jupyter notebooks as a starting point. One could relatively easy derive relationships between code cells and display them in graph based view instead of linear sequence. Then go further and add projections for AST.
This is a good point, but it mostly matters when you are in middle of developign the strategy so that you can protect it and wanna have a robust plan. Maybe they are!
At least in the US there are plenty of USB-A wall sockets out in the wild. The apartment I just moved into has a few of them. Most planes, trains and buses with charging ports also have USB-A ports.
You know what, if you are willing to spend this much time proving that you are "not technically wrong", I will give it to you. Sure, everything can be turned into anything, given enough effort. And Syncthing does show similarities if you squint really hard.

It doesn't change the fact that the "have access to my music/movie collection on anything with a browser" mentioned by the grand-parent is not what Syncthing does, and is not even close to what it does now or what the team is interested in implementing [1]. While it is a great piece of software (that I personally use), this recommendation was misguiding.

Have a good rest of your week.

[1]: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/6753#issuecomm...
Intel's prior CEO, Brian Krzanich, mentioned that 7-nanometer will have "2.4x the compaction ratio" of 10 nm. This puts the 7-nanometer node at around 202-250 million transistors per square millimeter.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process#P1276
For a desktop CPU that wouldn't be far off, but the A14 has a lot of other stuff so I very much doubt that. However, until we see an actual floor plan this is all speculation.
> In what context would this be advantageous?

Plenty of corner cases which collectively add up to a majority of cases.

Pandemic: you don't want to get too close to the checkout, so you can do it from a six foot distance.

Retail locations with limited space: all you need is a flat wall to put a QR code on, and you can put it up in multiple areas. You could even put it on the floor or hang it from the ceiling.

Forced serialization: multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously, while the NFC nearness requirement means that only one person can tap at once.

Restaurant table: put a QR code on the menu, scan.

Websites on your desktop or laptop: can't tap, but can scan as usual

That's all just talking about payer UX, not even considering seller UX. QR codes are cheaper and more flexible than NFC.

And, most of all, the fact that QR codes work in such a wide range of scenarios enables the biggest advantage: ubiquity. When they're ubiquitous, they become a single payment interface that you can assume will be available no matter where you go, which is game changing.
"Apple Books TSMC's Entire 5nm Production Capability"

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-tsm...

so it seems apple paid to get to the front of the line
FCC puts final nails into net neutrality coffin, one week before US election
13 in 1981 (The first day of grade eight had me in the computer lab). I remember writing a top down scrolling vertical scrolling racing/avoid the obstacles game. load "*", 8 will forever be etched in my mind (We had PETs in school). I've been a paid developer since about '90. These days I mostly do Rails apps (with a bit of Go).
This is honestly what I'm most fearful of when it comes to covid. Even if you end up being non-symptomatic the potential for permanent brain damage or chronic blood clots is very concerning.

Some may take issue with this stance, but personally if I knew I was going to be in a permanently compromised mental or physical state the rest of my life. Albeit, unable to care for myself or continue to make an income that upholds my current quality of life I'd likely kill myself. I'm just being realistic - if you can't enjoy life and you are a burden to those who care for you, why exist at all?
Even if you use the iPhone Upgrade Program, you get to keep your old accessories.
I'm always surprised how much petty bitching people do about Apple.
This will spawn cottage industry of one guy per village sharing his internet connection for a fixed monthly cost with other houses in the hood.

Possibly against TOS but I'm sure no one will police this too hard.
Speedscope – A fast, interactive web-based viewer for performance profiles
Agreed. No-code is only long-term viable once no-code tooling is self-hosted.
This is honestly really neat to see! Can it run in reverse, ie: take JS code and turn it into S-expressions? If it can then this would be an interesting way to write JS using an S-expression aware editor like emacs!
Just get a usbc to usba adaptor. Of course if you want top of the line stuff, pay more. If they include it, the price goes up but of course you don’t complaint because you don’t notice it every year you brought an iPhone.
Too bad sociopaths and narcissists are more common in positions of power. All it would do is uselessly kill a volunteer.

Time is also of the essence for MAD; known delay only makes MAD less effective if e.g. sub-launched cruise missiles are faster than dissection. And do all the fallback commanders need their own willing victim to mount a response?
Dicipline of the company is more important than the talent. Oracle has a lot of talent, but they lack the discipline of generating anything novel. They buy the idea. Anyhow semi-conductor industry is different. Apple or Amazon played it in my opinion better although in vastly different markets.
I think the fact that we no longer use barbaric practices such as lobotomies certainly counts.

Still, we have only the faintest idea of how the mind truly works.
Another issue is that evaluating memory disorders like AD is really hard if your subjects don't have language and can't discuss their subjective experience. A mouse that can still find its way around a maze that it learned is hard to compare to a person that can still find their way to their office but can't remember colleagues' names or whether they are married. Apes wouldn't help with the problem that AD symptoms are tied up with relationships and experiences unique to the only species that has language. (Side note: as someone approaching retirement from a family with a strong history of AD, I'm not entirely sure that the unique faculty of language is worth its associated cost: that we're the only species whose members know they will senesce and die,) Edit: shit, that's maudlin. Need a drink. Ignore me.
Ask HN: Has your company’s office reopened?
It looks like SF is now allowing 25% capacity of non-essential offices (https://sfmayor.org/article/san-francisco-continues-reopening-expanded-business-operations-and-activities). Has your company decided to allow some people to come back?
I checked it out and am kind of on the fence about one file = one repo - especially SQLite.

It's mostly because I remember filesystems from my university time and trying to implement one in a file myself. Continuously adding data is fine, but when you remove data either you leave a "hole" in the file and have to keep track of the "empty" blocks, or you shift everything to fill the hole. Off-by-one errors corrupt files.

Those are all resolved problems for filesystems, but additionally, I learned the hard way (performance) that SQLite wasn't good as a production db. The situation here is different of course (db access isn't very frequent), but I can't quite shake it.

Maybe I'll dig into the internals to understand what kind of optimisations they made. The wiki and bug-tracking are definitely a plus though.
Good catch, I should clarify - one could rightfully argue that free speech is not available to all if the legal system is not affordable to everyone. It’s a serious shortcoming of the justice system.
On the other hand, I still don't own a single USB-C device or cable and I just bought the 2020 iPhone SE.
Of note, meson is mentioned to optionally use ninja as a build system, but the same is true of CMake.

On thing to note is that the simplicity of ninja means that a lot of things need to be repeated. For a project I'm working on, the input build.ninja file is 142MB. Just generating that files takes a few minutes.

I think an improvement would be to be able to split it in sub-trees and have ninja produce a "mark" file that has a date that represent when the last time the sub-tree was touched and to not even read any sub-tree files, even the sub-ninja file if an entire sub-tree date is older than the mark file.
Yeah sure, the price of logistics is probably tiny compared to the BOM of an individual phone, but at the scale Apple is operating on, make no mistake this is saving them a huge amount of money.

And it's not just logistics - it's storage space in warehouses, and probably a number of other things which are made substantially more efficient by fitting the same amount of units in a lot less space.
This should probably be a book.
Show HN: A tool to understand and compare tech company compensation
With rare exceptions the things both political parties have been willing to work together on have been implementations of various forms of corporatist and imperialist policies. Fracking was cemented into place, and popular resistance to the DAPL was crushed, under an administration which was supposed to have all the right positions on the question of climate change. There was not some halcyon age in the 60s/70s/80s when the Republicans and the Democrats were ready to work together to dismantle the fossil fuel industry until it was all undone by a PR campaign.
Roxy turns Moon dust into oxygen
No code generation is a bit like building a living room with ikea parts. You can only do so much with that. As opposed to hiring a pro carpenter and crafting pieces or in building it to walls etc.
I'm planning to build something like this with Next.js / Vercel. All of the changes will be managed via GitHub Pull Requests (so no need for any other authentication) with automatic deployment on Vercel.
> It can be noted that the cell size reduction rate from 2017 to 2018 to 2019 is much slower than the rate for preceding years 2011 to 2017, showing that SRAM cells have not been scaling at the same rate as logic in general. At IEDM 2019, the 5nm process was quoted to have 1.84x logic density improvement compared to 1.35x SRAM density improvement[1]

0.021um per cell [1] for TSMC N5 vs 0.027um per cell [0] for TSMC N7.

Even if Apple did everything right, they'd still be behind due to the limits of the process.

[0]https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2408/tsmc-7nm-hd-and-hp-cells...

[1]https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/tsmc/283487...
Buy an iPad pro because time and time again we have seen that optimizing is not a priority for the majority of business.

I think the cynicism here is that if only these frontend developers would just learn to optimize we would all finally be better off. I think there are two factors that push against this though. First, if you learn to optimize then you can charge more for your labor, and you will likely get a job somewhere else. Second, companies exist for profit, and optimizing is not often the most profitable next step.
> For me it's an optimal experience

You are a one off use case. The standard deviation for your experience is pretty large. Especially for first time iPhone buyers.
Interactive Fiction Competition 2020 is Underway
The games are out! Vote on something fun for a change.
I’m fairly in the fan camp. It seems like both an eco play and a profit play. I don’t care about the latter. In fact, I should probably support it because for DECADES businesses have been refusing to do the necessary eco work because it was too costly. Apple have found a way to tick both the boxes. I should buy shares.
Keith Raniere, Leader of Nxivm Sex Cult, Is Sentenced to 120 Years in Prison
To be short, it was the batteries. They were just too damn big, heavy, and expensive per amp hour for anything more than a commuter car. Tesla struggled with batteries early on and ended up building their own factory in the end.

That said, there were definitely people excited about electric commuter cars and the big automakers were disdainful of them. GM's famous EV1 that they refused to sell (only lease) because they wanted the power to destroy them the instant the government got off their back about electric cars.

There was a missed market opportunity for a startup that did electric commuter cars in the 90s and 2000s. Maybe not a huge userbase, but very loyal. Of course a small company would face the same dealership franchise headwinds that Tesla had to fight and might not succeed, especially in a world with relatively little Internet connectivity and less comfort with shopping and buying online.
Joeisdone.github
> If the generator sped up beyond it's tolerances, it could cut-off. Why should it generate shocky torque that can damage the rubber grommets?

This was not the generator speeding up beyond its tolerances. From what I understood from this article, it sped up slightly (still safely within its tolerances), but the difference in frequency made it out-of-phase with the power grid. Once it was connected, the misaligned electromagnetic field instantly tried to align the shaft (and match its rotation speed); that's where the sudden torque came from.

(This Wikipedia article has a description of the procedure using an older instrument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchroscope#Process_of_Synchr...)
I mean, GM was producing the first "modern" EV 24 years ago (1996) - and are one of the biggest traditional auto manufacturers with both a history of producing EVs/hybrids as well as a plan to introduce a large number of EVs across their brands. It's definitely not as fast as we'd all like, but I think the indication that they know ICE is limited lifespan (for a lot of reasons) is definitely built into GM's history and future. It's no Tesla as far as EV volume, capability, and product line - but they're definitely working on it (like the slow multi-million-vehicle-production-per-year company they are). I think it's hard to argue that GM has known about this and ignored the problem, though.

Anyway, disclaimer: I work for Cruise and so I'm clearly a shill for GM, so you can just ignore a lot of what I say because I'm 100% biased.
"Why do you want a USB-A charging cable in 2020?"

Lots of wall socket USB charging ports are USB-A - even nice new ones with qualcomm quick charge (or whatever it is).

Personally, I would much prefer utility ports (on the wall, in the rack, on the backs of computers) to remain USB-A and leave the mini connectors on the devices themselves...
Thank you! Glad you were able to find this item despite the flagging.
Realistic and Interactive Robot Gaze
I recently played around with Next 9.5 prerendering. It had about 400 simple pages with artificially slow API responses to get an idea.

- you can prerender a decent amount of pages no probs

- you can prerender only a subset and then have Next render the necessary pages on the server upon request

- as the page is being prerendered, you can send placeholder content, so ttfb is low

- linking to a non-prerendered page within Next will prefetch (and thus prerender) said page as soon as the link is in the viewport (can be disabled)

- in Vercel you can set the branch name as an env variable. I set it to prerender almost nothing during build time if the branch name contained “hotfix”

So far I think it is worth serious consideration. Will it work for you? I dunno. But it’s a breeze to set up, quick to learn, and run some experiments of your own.
Thanks for the explanation, but it is really unnecessary. Developers are the users for developer tools. UX fits perfectly nice.
The big spreadsheets that everybody in a department use always evolve into a mess full of VBA.

I am yet to meet the mythical CRUD app that could be created without code.

Now, if you go into "low code" as in a very high-level opinionated framework+language, that can work. But if you start from CRUD generation, you won't reach anywhere useful.
I'm not a fan of service workers myself. Another team at a previous job added a service worker to a site that served many separate backend apps. It caused endless loading, caching, and crashing problems for my team, for no clear benefit.

If you want a cache, use HTTP caching, not custom JS code.
While that does explain part of the issue for racial discrimination, gender discrimination is much less well explained by gaps in public school systems.

The medium- and higher-income districts are all still close to a 1:1 gender ratio but tech companies are really, really far from that.