skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I want to create and launch an Android app. Where do I start?
Some background: I'm a web hosting professional, not a developer. I've also got a fair bit of creativity that's usually expressed in my writing, but also in building electronics and other hobbies. The largest programs I've written were 250-300 line bash scripts.

This is going to sound very cliché unfortunately, but I am serious and don't expect that anything will come easy. I have a concept for a mobile app that will interface with fitness trackers (or the phones built in gyro) in order to see if the user is active or inactive, and then it'll send them various messages about their activity.

My goal is to start by supporting Android and Fitbit and see how it goes from there. I am working toward creating my first Android app via Android Studio, but beyond that: Where do I go? What knowledge will I need to finish this and launch an app?

I appreciate any input. I know this isn't a typical HN question but I can't think of a better place to pose this question, since there are so many seasoned developers and founders here.
Thanks for the suggestion! I have added the link to the Readme.
I really like Observable a lot, and have made a couple of brief, messy visualisations with it (messy in terms of code at least).

I hope at some point they can offer some sort of offline support. The focus on ease of sharing is great, and the volume and breadth of content has really helped me to get more proficient with d3. The inability to open and edit notebooks offline/locally is a real inconvenience, however.

I have a small personal site on Netlify (with Next.js) and going forward I'm looking at hosting the sort of stuff I have on Observable there, simply as it's easier to work to when offline. The quality of the community and resources is a really valuable thing, but the need to be online is a real drawback at times.
Lazarus meaning the Delphi / Pascal IDE? I haven't touched any Pascal code since the first year of highschool over a dousen years ago :). Forgot it even existed.

Yes I hate bloat but I'm starting to hate it less and less each day due to understanding more and more the effort required to build things (in general, not just desktop apps).

I think, unless you have the resources to dedicate yourself to just one OS/toolkit, for which your app performance is an absolute must, it's better to prioritize delivery speed and adoption, using generic tools, with plenty of resources and skills that can be transfered from other areas, like web frontend is in this case. One thing is for sure, I don't have time and resources but I have a pretty fast laptop, so the choice is easy in my case.
Well I guess good for you. Moreover in my case electron used 0MB of memory because I did not use it. So it is pretty good.
I used PulseAudio and removed "bluealsa". So far it's worked fine with everything. Unfortunately the standard LXDE volume/device selector icon doesn't play nice with PulseAudio so I have to use pavucontrol for that. The standard audio icon does pairing very well; by comparison "blueman" isn't as good.
Awesome job you are a hero
We were never taught that we were invaded by those nations - history lessons talk about “Romans”, “Saxons”, and “Normans”. None of those nations are around any more, so the obvious conclusion is that we must’ve “won”, probably by virtue of England being the strongest most pure-blooded nation, or something like that...
Iosevka is highly active and highly customizable set that I've been sticking with after a dozen terminal fonts switching. Every time I try a new font now, I go back to Iosevka. The narrow width makes it stand out significantly from the others and it's much easier to use when having multiple columns open on the screen. I highly recommend it.
Thanks. My eldest daughter is 11 and that's exactly the stuff I worry about.
Is it just me or did the website designer go WAY overboard on the banner size and it’s practically unreadable on mobile in horizontal?... Why do people do this? Do they not care?

Edit: lolokhn https://i.ibb.co/9VcJtCn/00-ACECC5-A03-F-4988-8286-99-E7650-...
isn't in insane how over the last few months people just assume their fellow man is a murderer for BREATHING?

this virus is causing more insanity than health effects.
Coincidentally, I tinkered with my first Observable notebook last night (https://observablehq.com/@rzg/prosthaphaeresis -- don't judge too harshly).

One of the improvements on the computational notebook concept is that it seems to compute a data flow graph so it knows what cells to update when the data changes, without you needing to re-run cells in a particular sequence. The cells can also be out of order.

The editor interface is pretty slick, and I wish it were open source so I could use it in other projects.

(Mike Bostock, one of the founders, is also the creator of D3.js and the information visualization gallery bl.ocks.org. Here's my favorite: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/31bd072e50eaf550d79e)
I think it's more "borrows many ML concepts but uses C/C++ style syntax to look more mainstream, also no GC".
Further still, nobody really talks about Hovertank 3D. It's also a 3D shooter which was made by Carmack, Romero, and Hall, but came out in 1991

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertank_3D
Sounds like a neat bit of kit. For anyone unfamiliar, it's essentially an ARM-powered PC, in the form factor of a keyboard. [0]

> I was able to unbrick it

I know it's a nitpick, but if it can be repaired, it's not bricked.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400-unit/
I don't have that process while running WSL2 in my machine. I have vm-agent and vm-agent-daemon, but I'm using a virtual desktop, so this might or not be related to WSL2. Both of these processes consume less than 10 Mb combined. In my other comment [0] I referenced a link from Microsoft that says RAM is dynamically allocated and reclaimed when freed.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25161769
Yes, it depends on taste. Those are just boxes...
not just the dentry cache:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
The Personal and the Political
With AMD64? I thought that was completely backwards compatible with x86. Or do you mean IA-64?
Jailbreaking by definition introduces avenues for exploitation against what device security requires. Apple pays millions of dollars for security staff, auditing and security research.
Cultural groups are capitalized most of the time. It's like Native American or Latino. White is an exception because most white people think of themselves as Norwegian or whatever. Gay isn't capitalized most of the time because most gay people don't think of themselves as Gay.
Media authoring-wise, the Wick Editor [1] is attempting to fill the gap. It's still pretty young, but looks promising.

[1]: https://www.wickeditor.com
I understood it was basically Terraform under the hood...

I have little experience with either, do you find another tool more reliable?

I guess all of these tools are dependent on the consistency of the cloud provider APIs they're working with
Awesome! I'm digging this. I also like how the features are tiered. You might want to make a chart showing what features are under what tier, but it's not overly confusing.
GitHub Issues as Comments
As someone with a solid HTML/CSS background but weak JS, I gave up on trying to figure out GSAP and other animation frameworks, and just bought Tumult Hype.

It's a GUI-based web animation tool that exports to HTML and MP4, with the ability to write custom JS if you need it. Being able to visually look at timelines and set tweening by dragging a slider is much more my speed, and reminiscent of Flash, which I haven't done anything on in more than 10 years.

Best of all, it's a one-time payment. I considered Adobe Animate, but monthly subscriptions are a total no-no for me.
Ideally EN-IE, but I'd settle for EN-GB or EN-US. Although to be honest, there's no real differences between those three locales for most people other than keyboard layouts and the arse-backwards way the US uses to write dates, neither of which apply to a HomePod.
ahhh I'm eagerly awaiting this to come out!

Adafruit and PiShop don't have it yet :/
> I plugged in a Kingston brand 120GB SSD on a USB3 adapter.

> Then I accidentally yanked a cable. And the SSD was bricked.

People who are going to use this as as their setup ought to buy a real, fast USB SSD, instead of relying on SSD drives plugged into adapters. They're engineered to deal with stuff like this and they're fast. (the Samsung T5 and T7 both benchmark even faster than what you saw, well above 300MB/s)
I have a very simple rule when it comes to doing work, be it on open source software or otherwise. If you want me to do something for you, (and you are not a close friend or relative) you will pay me appropriately for it. Want me to fix a bug for you? Pay me. Want me to merge your drive by pull request? Pay me. Want "to arrange a zoom call between me and your team to discuss how we can better use your project to add value to our business". Pay me. This idea that we should all be giving away our labour in the name of the great God's FLOSS and freedom is bollocks and one of the great con jobs of late stage capitalism.
I’m working on some Windows apps currently in the native-ish WPF and UWP frameworks. Being somewhat detail-oriented, I’ve noticed a few major areas where Electron apps tend to deviate from native:

* button/link handling: win desktop uses the pointer with hover effects; electron uses a hand cursor with hover effects

* minimize/maximize/close buttons, and title bars in general; electron apps tend to have them being bigger than native. Native tends to vary by framework, with UWP explicitly not allowing some of the desired customization.

* Electron and web apps in general tend to allow more text selection than native does, and with different patterns; there are pros and cons to this.

* Electron apps tend to handle high and mixed DPI better than the native frameworks (I can’t believe I’m typing this). UWP dialogs are super buggy on high and mixed DPI. WPF needs lots of manual configuration otherwise it will look blurry at least some of the time (the very latest changes _may_ have fixed this)

I tend to support native development in general, but in the case of win desktop, the native frameworks are so bad and inconsistent, I’d rather just follow the web patterns. E.g. I think the hand cursor on buttons and things is actually quite nice and worth emulating, same with non-shit titlebars.

Because so many daily use apps (VS Code, Teams, Slack, all of the web) are electron, electron often feels more native than native, at least on Windows.

Edit, since I was suddenly triggered: SVG support on Windows is shit. WPF can sort of do it if you convert to Path geometries, but that isn’t a perfect match or convenient in any way. UWP does that, but with the added bonus of an extremely buggy rendering engine that falls down on even the simplest icons.
Hi Hvis!

Inferentially undecidable sentences of Russell's Principia

Mathematica are not nonsensical. However, they are obscure

because no particular example is known because no one knows

how to present them constructively.
Amazon Lightsail Containers
That depends if you use the OpenCL SYCL backend or the Level Zero SYCL backend. The latter has only existed for a few months.

but yeah, I think the default backend switched to level zero recently, so strikethrough the last sentence of my comment - apparently nobody will focus on opencl as a oneAPI backend.
Only 94% of California is subject to this. Some counties like San Francisco, San Mateo and Sacramento not included in the ‘limited curfew’ map.

Curious minds want to know why.
The Sonos Move has "Auto Trueplay", which is the same, and allows Bluetooth playback in a "dumb speaker" mode.
Weirdly, not at the same time - Auto Trueplay is only supported in WiFi mode.
> Rust, you have to name an interface, but you can’t actually create new instances of the concrete type returned by the function.

I think that's the distinction that really matters. The thing that's neat about Voldemort types, and gives them their interesting properties that are distinct from anonymous types, is that they have no name at all. Not even an interface or trait name.
There's also the benefits of things like this - You want an app that supports the new Apple silicon? tadaaa most of the work's done for you already - https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron-11-0
The library only includes vkFFT.h file (in C) and a set of shaders (C-like language compiled to SPIR-V). Vulkan_FFT.cpp is only an example that shows how VkFFT can be used. It also contains the benchmark in it, but it is not a part of the library.
I think sect implies a factionalism or mutual exclusivity that doesn’t generally fit for ancient polytheistic religions.
The data flow is really well implemented with Observable. The fact you don't need to go through and repeat the execution of a number of downstream cells when you make a change is really useful.

Another great advantage they have is the data map on the right-hand margin. It's a good way of seeing how complex a notebook is getting as well as being a really efficient way of navigating through the data flow.
How to Build a Bilingual Newsletter
“The lipid nanoparticles have some adjuvant activity, providing a little inflammation with the vaccination that helps the immune system to make antibodies and T-cells that target the Sars-Cov-2 virus,”
An issue of visualization on the web I don’t know how to solve is how to load large data.
Please make a whole new post about non breaking spaces and dashes.
Vaccine Allocation Planner for Covid-19
> imagine writing running a Linux command, piping its output in a Windows command to pipe it again in a Linux command.

Actually for that special case WSL2 works. I'm currently experimenting with `sshd -i` on WSL2; not sure why it doesn't work on Ubuntu 20.04 but does on OpenSUSE 15.2…
I don't think a search engine is the tool you seek; you're looking for an expert-opinionated resource for sifting data, not an automated system to retrieve some data on arbitrary topics.
I’m fairly certain we’ve had lambdas (lisp) for something like 40 years. Type inference (ML/lisp compilers) for 30-40 years. And generics, at least in the sense of parametric polymorphism, (Ada/C++/Java/ML) for about the same amount of time. As far as I can tell, the borrow checker and some features around dependent types are newish, but actually modern features are few and far between.
This resumes the desktop app development drama.

I hope Flutter will solve that
And most of time these declarations are true initially, but with staff rotation that erodes away eventually.

Also yeah - major red flag.

EDIT: Good culture doesn't require this kind of posturing.
Do Software Architectures Meet Extra-Functional or Non-Functional Requirements?
modern usually seems to mean means algol syntax and not having macros :)

aka the status quo of 60 years ago
Your filmstrip view looks pretty cool. Nice work!
Google Home Max also does the auto calibration thing and also has an Aux jack and bluetooth support.
Yeah, I am a bit lost on that line. Third Estate refers either to commoners (in the Middle Ages) or the judiciary (in modern times).
Cool! I hoped that line would get people to show me a few more, and it has.
Why is dependent type theory more suitable than set theory for proof assistants?
Inflammatory response is high in Vitamin D deficient Covid-19 patients
Sure, I can help. That powerpoint is horribly out of date and I'd argue full of FUD (intentional or not).

>• Raid 0, 1, 5, and 6 are also built in the filesystem

BTRFS RAID has been a nightmare from day 1 including complete data loss. Parity-based RAID has been "just around the corner" for almost a DECADE. Sure you can do RAID-1 but in 2020 I'm just not interested in losing half of my capacity.

Yes you can layer it on top of MDRAID but that eliminates half the elegance of what ZFS brought to the table.

>ZFS is fairly memory hungry, it's recommended to have
16GB of RAM and give 8GB or more to ZFS (it wasn't
designed to use the linux memory filesystem, so it uses its
own memory that can't be shared with the rest of linux).

This is just flat wrong. You need 2GB of memory for a happy filesystem, 8GB+ is if you're doing deduplication which is unnecessary overhead in most environments. I'm also not sure where the "memory that can't be shared with the rest of linux" is coming from - ARC will use and free memory as needed by the system.

>Due to the CDDL being incompatible with GPLv2, a linux vendor or
hardware vendor will never be able to ship a linux distribution or hardware
device using ZFS

Except Ubuntu already is. I believe SLES does as well.

>As a result, you shouldn't plan on using ZFS for any product that you
might ever want to ship one day.

Delphix ships a product today based on ZFS. 0 issues.

>Oracle may have stopped further work on ZFS as a result.
Or it could be another reason entirely...

Oracle absolutely didn't stop work on ZFS, I'm not even sure where he came up with that nonsense. Oracle continued to update and release new versions of ZFS long after the lawsuit was settled.

You know what's far more telling? 13 YEARS after starting BTRFS: Oracle uses ext4 as their default filesystem, not BTRFS. Redhat has dropped support for BTRFS entirely.

https://fossbytes.com/red-hat-deprecate-btrfs-filesystem-str...
Is there any official statement from the ZFS maintainers on when we can expect the Pull Request (RAID-Z expansion) to be merged?
Great domain. We like hq domains too :)
I don't see how it is grotesque. No one is forced to buy these products, they can just as easily buy a competitor's or go the distance and build their own.

I prefer to have my devices work with minimal effort on my part, and with "good enough" security I can trust.
Does it support encryption that has no known backdoors?
>but spending hours a day on this can’t be healthy long term.

If you think this is some new phenomenon that kids spend a whole 2.5 hours/day on a game... well, I'm not sure how to break this to you.

Kids used to watch an insane amount of TV each day forever. Then they moved to console games in the early 90s.. and also computer games. It's been what 50/60 years of TV and 30+ years of consoles/computer games.

If anything, things in the last ~10 years are better because kids have a good option to not just sit in front of the TV and watch whatever is on and all these ads.. they can be into games that are mentally challenging. And they have all these options to have voice chats with friends, so it's way more social than ever.

So just in general the argument is "this can't be healthy in the long term" seems to imply that it's some new phenomenon..
>However, unit tests are usually written to assert assumptions.

As you say, types are a more declarative (rather than procedural) way of asserting assumptions.

>In practice, this means that you sometimes get "surprised" by some unit tests that are failing after a refactor. That's good because it sheds light where you've made mistakes when changing your code.

>To some degree, of course, this is true for types. E.g. they will always help you to point out when two APIs mismatch. However, a test usually is contained within a unit with a clear description motivating its existence. It's so much harder to accidenitally changing a test for the worse than it is to change a typed function signature for the worse.

I'd argue it's just as true for types as it is for unit tests, if not more so. You can get "surprised" by the compiler when refactoring methods in just the same way. I'd argue you get more information with types, because it hooks into the LSP and identifies everywhere in your code that now fails. In contrast, a unit test only tells you that unit test failed. It is still up to you to find the actual locations in the code. In this way, unit tests can be thought of as a parallel program. This isn't true of types, which are directly embedded into the program. Put concretely, if you removed a property on a type then the LSP and tsc would tell you every single place that property is missing.

That's the crux of my argument. Types have better tooling, which helps with both the "delclarative unit test" part and equally importantly with refactoring. You can check for more things with types, like whether your `switch` statement exhaustively goes over every option or is missing any. Your tools also understand the types (like the LSP), which helps with refactoring.

I'd also argue that types are usually easier to understand than tests. While good unit tests can provide good examples on how to use an API, types exhaustively tell you what a thing is and what it is capable of.

>Lastly, very often functions are crucially dependent on input values and not their types. So even if, in a dynamic language, you get b=0 input into div(a, b) return a/b and it's a valid type, you should test for values as in this case as you can't divide by 0.

That's a great point. There's absolutely still a place for tests. Types are not a like-for-like replacement, and each have their strengths, but there is significant overlap. If one wanted to exhaustively enumerate in options in a `switch` statement, and ensure division by 0 issues, then they would need both.
Can confirm. I used to love tiny fonts for coding, for everything — more text, less scrolling! 10, maybe 11pt. But as I approached 50, I started bumping font sizes up. When one of my eyes actually started twitching, I gave in and got glasses. My 20 year-old self would shake his head at my 50 year-old self in his glasses, peering at his 15pt code.
It's always seemed strange to me that the normal SaaS flow forces users to blindly commit... I want you to fall in love without any coercion. It's more romantic that way
To be fair, GMOs can just as easily be unsafe; the difference in that regard is that with GMOs there are fewer ways things might go wrong, and they're much more easily enumerated and examined.
Bush may have lied, but don't forget that Saddam Hussein used WMDs and wanted his neighbors to think he might have them to project regional power. So the lie was believable and not manufactured from whole cloth. Did they believe it? Some probably did, but other used it to forward a proactive foreign policy to remake the middle east. It's one area where conservatives underestimate the cost of change.
This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of cross-platform toolkits that are far leaner than electron.
Show HN: SystemFlow – Like Tailwind, but for Webflow
Games often use arena-based allocation systems, slotmaps etc to manage myriads of instances. I don't see how any of that is a problem in Rust?
> There were a couple of absolute gems in the Flash era but there was an absolute boatload of crap as well.

Don't 90% of Youtube videos get less than a thousand views [0]? There are millions of videos on TikTok, I'd imagine the algorithm results in the same 80-20 ish sort of balance.

Yes, there were bad Flash projects. But just like everything else, we remember the good ones.

[0]: https://9to5google.com/2020/08/10/almost-90-of-all-uploaded-...
It distract me reading the text, on PC.
There is truth to your comment, but don't expect people to validate your idea.

It's in our best collective interest for everyone to take this vaccine even if there's a 0.01% chance it has negative side effects.

Even on an individual level, the cost-benefit of taking the vaccine is a no-brainer. Even if there's a 0.01% chance of negative side effects, the individual benefit of re-opening society far outweighs that risk.

It's true you can freeload and reap the benefits without the small risk, but if everyone thinks this way, there are no benefits to go around. Can't you just be a team player?

To put things in perspective, a 0.01% risk is like going skydiving once, or getting out of bed and doing your usual routine for a week.

It goes without saying that if the general public doesn't get vaccinated, you should definitely get vaccinated because the risk of catching COVID is worse than the risk of this vaccine.