skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I can tell, the market for these low-code tools is as much non-tech managers as it is the actual users. Slick demos go a long way to convincing people who own budgets and are tired of expensive engineering salaries.

Which I can understand, because engineers are expensive and behave in ways that are unintuitive for non-tech people.

But I fear “generative AI coding tools” appeals to the same people for the same reasons, leading to the same results.
Yep - even with 2FA off they still like to check.

I have a client who tries to share one Google / Gmail Inbox account between users internationally and Google does not like that at all!

Google constantly requires verification for logins!
I’ve seen these before, a decade or so ago there was a push around these tools. I think tools that declare business users can build/change things tend to not work out because this puts more work on them. Business users are used to doing their jobs, not IT’s or software. I would imagine Sales management/leadership wants their people out selling and not attending training on how to build some business logic thing. The industry has also shifted a lot where these types of systems aren’t needed as there are SaaS options out there that fit most needs.
That's great - thank-you. Assuming I work through this quickly, what resources would you recommend as a follow-on?
You're acting like people just have blind faith, ignoring they undergo routine audits
Having escape hatches is critical, but they should also be well built, or it can cause just as much headache.

Example from us using Azure Data Factory: You can add a step to call out to an API, which we did for a data flow that had a lot of calls. Performance was atrocious. Dug into it, and the API getting called was replying in 100ms or so, but ADF's "escape hatch" was adding 5-10 seconds of overhead to send the POST and parse the HTTP status code.

Microsoft Support said that's normal, expected behavior for the service.

In the end, we had to write an additional batching layer ourselves.
Still not a partnership. Tether spin.
Ask HN: Coping with Career Dread
How do you all cope with various forms of career dread?

Specifically, work taking the joy out of a craft I love, interpersonal conflict making work less enjoyable, and the feeling that I will never achieve anything meaningful.

Rationally, I know life is long, that work should be work, and that not everyone achieves anything at all, to reframe my achievements and that perhaps I should just tough it out and earn a wage + support my family. Or perhaps I should do hobby projects to fill this void - but that feels like it misses the point.

Emotionally, I always feel this pang that I won’t do anything worthwhile at all and that all my hard work will be for naught.

More specifically -

I am a dilettante of sorts, and have a deep passion for software engineering and technology in general. I attended a good CS uni, worked a big FAANG style job and also startups that have gone on to be widely used. However I have this nagging feeling that none of it is really meaningful, that my dilettante nature means I will never have authority at work, and that 15 years from now, I’ll have no energy to do anything because corporate America will have drained me and the burdens of family will shackle me to an unfulfilling wage. Sure, these thoughts come with tremendous privilege but don't I have a moral obligation to find a better path, given my privilege?

I understand the normal, rational arguments against some of the things I am voicing, yet have not been able to design a life that satisfies me. I want the central focus of my day to be intensely meaningful and intellectually satisfying - does anyone have any tips for a perhaps misguided, potentially naive, soul?
What converges is the resulting value of the calculation. As you add more lines the approximate result (of the circumference) gets closer and closer to the true answer. It's not necessarily referring to the geometric shape of the polygon. (Though you can also see it as, if you take any given point on the circumference of the polygon, as you add more segments, that point will get closer and closer to the true edge of a circle.)
After a career in a science, engineering and IT, I am now teaching computer science and maths in high school and loving it. In Australia, any previous degrees would have a big impact on what additional training you would need before teaching. But to answer your direct question, any and all of your industry experience will be valuable in a high-school context, whatever its ‘pedigree’ or quality.

To teach, however, you are likely to need an education qualification. In Oz, this could be a 2 year Masters of Teaching provided you already have a degree of some sort to act as a content base (3 yr Bachelors is fine). There are accelerated 18 month courses available, mostly online but with significant periods of in-school practical experience (2-3 slots of 4-8 weeks).

Both the education and the pracs are very valuable to your teaching roles. The reduced contact over working days, and weeks of holiday are great, but you will still need plenty of energy for the kids, and there is plenty of outside-hours of work too, but you choose when and how you do it.
I feel like the developers that need to do that have already been using frameworks like React Native.

Plus, if you target Android, you've got nowhere to go if you want to put your app on the web, while React Native gives you a path.
I think Twitter provides a case study here. The site is still working fine despite being staffed by only 20% of the employees it had just over a year ago.
It's funny that you think the way transformer models are "intended" to be used is the result of intentional engineering and not an accident that ML academics are no closer to giving some causal explanation for why it works today than they were when Attention is All You Need was published.
Doesn’t matter, as long as users are getting value. How you solve the problem is less important than solving the problem. I expect LLM output to improve over time, along with mechanisms to coax deterministic behavior.
It's not that terrifying in my opinion, it's mostly just impressive.

From a business standpoint it's probably the single most useful software platform ever invented.
“Ideally” is quite a word, highly subjective.

But really you are missing a key piece of the puzzle, it matters less what is happening and more why. Sure a low code tool could churn out a textual description to say if the value of some variable is < some threshold branch to X else branch to Y, but thats generally easy to figure out, why is that threshold important, that’s a question that requires understanding the intention of the user of engineer who set it up, that’s not something you can just puke out of an auto-doc tool.

I would go so far as to say the inability to capture intention is one of the sharpest edges for low-code tools, it makes the solutions built on then extremely brittle and creates silos of knowledge.

Expanding on that further this is why most auto generated documentation is worth the effort put into it.
Unless when it doesn’t, see the problem of “squaring the circle”. Somewhat related to the coastline paradox as well.
Hmm..at least you reasoned that it is a "problem" (and I would say it's more analogous to VLOM switchover than turbo lag ROFL).

For now, if you infrequently do full builds (and instead do incremental builds) and are mainly dragging things around, adding small features, etc. you're better off with less cores, even if those cores do run slower.

I don't really want Apple to "care deeply" us [slowing our phones], so I'mma not help illustrate further because a proper solution could involve a massive Engineering task (maybe Nuvia knows) and even with $3T market cap, they pretty much cheap bastards unless it comes to food courts and office chairs.
Power line networking will be crap until we start delivering all our power via network cables.
Can you share that anecdote? That seems absolutely wild to me and I've never even heard it suggested before your post
Slick, this is news to me. I like the flexibility. It seems like Hugo's docs are quite complete, but not super optimized for either discoverability or for thinking in terms of the process that actually happens in the rendering process. I thought I've gone all over them, but I never noticed this.
I was trying to ask generically because Microsoft deals with a universe-sized quantity of email traffic in comparison to my self-hosted barely used domains.

By tiers (which may be the wrong word, maybe just 'layers'), only relating to my setup, I mean things like:

- Tier 1: Spamhaus DROP and eDROP lists are outright blocked

- Tier 2: IP addresses that have illegitimately connected to my mail server ports are outright blocked (port scans, invalid login attempts, etc. - I manually check some of these against abuseipdb.com to determine their validity)

- Tier 3: IP addresses that have scanned non-open ports on my systems are outright blocked from connecting to my mail server ports

Just running these rules for a couple of months has dropped unwanted connections to my mail server ports a heavy percentage. One theory being that if you can block known-bad and highly-likely-bad connections, then actual spam detection (through email content review) is minimised to a certain degree.

I actually want to implement additional anti-spam IP address block lists and just haven't gotten around to it yet, but the above does a good enough job for my essentially unknown domains (as I said, a universe of difference to what Microsoft has to deal with)

- Tier 4: Black-box spam detection built-in to the all-in-one mail server solution I use (I don't know how it works, I don't know how to edit the 'rules' or even if I can).

'Tiers' I would expect Microsoft to have would be:

- Their own lists of known-bad IP addresses / ranges / ASNs

- Reverse DNS lookup validation

- DKIM checks

- SPF checks

- More protocol level 'things' beyond the understanding of a simple network admin such as myself.

- Weighting the results of all of the above to determine some kind of 'spam likelihood' score.

All of this is before reviewing the content of the actual message.
I don't need to read any vaccine-denying, COVID-deny9ng crap.
Every generation wants to reinvent the wheel, because otherwise they'd feel helpless and it's way more fun. Further than that I think that every generation wants to make their own mistakes, regardless of how well documented they were.

Overall this is healthy, a new set of eyes to an old problem can yield new solutions. In some cases though, it's a facepalm situation. Like the whole Javascript world of today.
Exactly. I'm a huge fan of CLI tools for text/data management as well, so I figured I was future-proofing myself a little by keeping things in Markdown files.
Show HN: Mailbrane – an email masking service for organizations
Hello HN,

I wanted to show you mailbrane - an email masking service. I use firefox relay a lot, and thought that email masking was a service needed by enterprises as well, but there was no one catering to them.

I used honojs + typescript + htmx + drizzle ORM and I really liked working with this tech stack. Chrome, firefox and safari extensions are next after I finish work on integrating stripe.
I'm fairly certain that pixelpoet is referring to direct raycasting, not raytracing (light transport simulations). These aren't noisy.
There's also no connection, just tin foil hat
If someone has been "viable" for years and is suddenly not "viable" any longer, what happened?

And why is some manager not being publicly flogged for letting that happen?
Great Britain is an Island.

England is one country and geographical region within that island. Wales and Scotland are the other countries within that island. Some of the surrounding islands are respectively part of the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.

The UK is the state, the British state. It operates within Great Britain (and its surrounding islands), and part of the island of Ireland - i.e Northern Ireland.

The meaning of Britain varies with context, sometimes it refers to the state (the UK), sometimes the island of Great Britain.

The City is the square mile of London, a quasi city state which in some respects is not even part of the state (see the Norman Conquest of England), but that is usually ignored. The Commonwealth currently refers to parts of what were previously the British Empire.

Officially, the UK exited, as the UK was the member. However, arrangements were made for Northern Ireland such that it sort of stayed within the Single Market (for Goods) and observes EU customs rules.

Hence GB fully exited, NI exited, but has special arrangements such that many aspects of EU law still apply.

The headline is trying to indicate that Brexit had detrimental effects, but only because the UK did succeed in leaving the EU. If it had not managed to leave, there would have been none of the complained of detrimental effects - i.e. the 'failure'.
IMO it is because SQL isn't a well liked/popular language (eg. the nosql movement) and it is a lot easier to avoid these days with all the various DBs. Personally I wish Prolog had gained more traction back in the day, it would have made a great alternative.
If you genuinely want to know, shouldn't you be asking 'foldr' of why it's relevant to raise the comparison?

I can't speak on their behalf since I am a different person.

See their parent comment:

> In a Western democracy, government ministers don't just go missing without any official explanation for their disappearance. (I am not suggesting that such official explanations are always true, but they at least exist.)
Do you mean SpaceX, or Boeing?
The deviations from a stock Hugo install, other than content pages in `content/pages/*.md` is really entirely summarized in the post. It's just the shortcode HTML file, an addition to the theme CSS (should be independent of theme), and the config file edits.
Not sure if brew's grep is as NERF'ed, but POSIX standard often is just a subset of minimal features for the GNU version.

Cheers, =)
I think I followed the whole thing, and quite enjoyed it. But not very HN.
> Why not? Doing so prevents this exact scenario.

And creates other scenarios.
OpenEmu 2.4 released after 3 years of work, rewritten in Swift
I've tried to play with Smalltalk on my vacation and I've had some troubles with Squeak and Pharo.

Surprisingly, everything worked out of the box with Cuis and its vector graphics rendering makes the experience much more pleasant. I'm impressed!

For the record, on my Linux box, Squeak would have troubles with my keyboard input (I can't type a caret!) and Pharo had DPI scaling issues where everything becomes blurry, as well as some crashes here and there.
How are they crap? Some places have interference but in situations where they work, they seem to be fairly well liked.

Most people are not streaming 8k VR.
Introduced 12 years ago, is there is a technology limit or an interest limit?
Popfile is a per folder bayesian auto classification system, procmail's more of full fat server mail filter system. You could get procmail to do the same thing but it would require a bit of work and certainly isn't an out of the box sort of thing.
How does it achieve better deallocation performance?
Edward V. Berard said, "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." I would seem business rules engines are ideal, because those rules are never "frozen", by nature.

It's true that specifications change faster than software can be completed. That is at the core of the agile manifesto (not to be confused with Agile the industry). There's more than constant change. Part of why specifications are never frozen is how hard it is to specify things at the level of exactness and detail computers require. Vagueness and contradictions are rife, and as programmers one of the reasons we get paid a lot of money is to turn rules into running code. That's another part of the ideas behind the agile manifesto: Get something working in front of the users, adjust what isn't right, and iterate.

Business rules engines aren't magically able to determine what users mean. Someone still has to specify things precisely enough to be executable. The task is difficult enough to require specialized skills: in other words, to require someone who can think like a programmer.

The business user able to specify things in ways computers can execute is so rare as to be near-mythical. What happens when rules engines get deployed, where they make sense, is that there is a team of programmers who are also involved in managing the rules. You might remember the scene in RoboCop 2, where Murphy is so burdened with rules developed by committee he is unable to function meaningfully.

At least one of you who has read this far is about to reply with something about "AI, if not now, at least soon...". I advise pondering carefully before replying.
It's not really a fractal in the sense that a fractal is a mathematical object, and a coastline lives in the real world. As your ruler gets smaller, it also becomes impossible to define what even is the coastline anymore - is it the wetted sandline? On a sufficiently small scale, where is the interface between land and sea?

Thus at sufficiently small scale it does break down, but the fractal nature over a very broad range of scales is clear; I feel like the Wikipedia article is tripped into pedantry at that point :)
Smart glasses will never go anywhere. They depend on the user wanting to wear glasses, and wanting the style of those glasses to never change.

What do you do when you want to put sunglasses on?
I don't necessarily mind these "reverse engineering" type problems, I think you can consider your input part of the problem statement. In earlier years it was common, particularly in early days, for your input to be on the page itself IIRC, like "Your input is 103053439" rather than a link.

One thing that bothers me more though is when the example input is nonsense for Part II or can be solved but in a radically different way because it has very different properties than the inputs people are given for real. Contrast day 19, where the example input has a rational answer, which you are told about for the Part II, against day 20 where the example input is completely irrelevant for Part II and good luck.
If you have quick enough failover to wifi-- who cares. I'll happily take 75% availability of dedicated 2gbps and less-congested wifi the other 25% of the time.
A well known very large successful trillion dollar company emphasizes this heavily and it’s called identifying Cause By, regressions are categorized before a build is submitted, in the current build, or in previous builds. It’s extremely important to identify cause by (commit) in order to either revert or fix.
Yes, that's the problem. You need to maintain a close attention level to know which things are POSIX. And in the case of GNU grep, you actually need to set POSIXLY_CORRECT=1. Otherwise its behavior is not a subset.

POSIX also forbids greps from searching UTF-16 because it mandates that certain characters always use a single byte. ripgrep, for example, doesn't have this constraint and thus can transparently search UTF-16 correctly via BOM sniffing.
Scale in representation, AI, and why we're scrolling our way to our doom
I'd think you'd be positively appalled by the state of code in academia then.

It's kludge after hot patch after voodoo incantation. I once worked on a computer that under no circumstances could it be put on the web. It was running Windows 98 in ~2017 and was only used for a single program to control an instrument. I know for a fact that it's still online and running. It was slow as all get out, but no one had any kind of time, let alone gumption, let alone skill, to try to bring it up a millennium.
did you have to compile it for your box or you used a ready image?
My experience with squeak was similar:(see below)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38820927
Maybe Tuesday because Monday is a holiday in the US?
I have never been very physically active (sat in front of a computer terminal my whole life), but I engaged a personal trainer in 2020, and it was one of the best things I've ever done. I only wish I had done it in my early 20's!

I started with 3 half-hour sessions a week, bumped it to 4, bumped it to 45 minutes, then to an hour as I gained strength and stamina. For the 1st year I gained muscle steadily (after losing 35 pounds with an illness, I was in bad shape). After that first year, my gains slowed way down; from what I've read that's pretty typical. After 18 months I bought some dumbbells and other equipment for my home gym and have slowly transitioned to doing more workouts at home. For 2024 I'm doing all workouts at home, every other day. If I regress I'll go back to the trainer's gym, but at my age, I'll be happy with just maintaining my strength.

IMO, trying to start a workout program on your own is not likely to be successful: there's just too much to figure out on your own without a professional explaining things. Another key aspect is getting a feel for when your body is becoming overloaded and when you can continue to push it. A good trainer will be able to ensure you don't overdue it and get injured, and with time, you will develop a knack for doing this yourself.

I'd encourage everyone who can afford it to hire a trainer. Best investment I ever made in myself!
I was also wondering why they form six arms, for want of a better description?
Low code is what IBM, SAP, Salesforce have sold as "the solution" for the past few decades, but packaged in a different way. This is no farther along than we were 20 years ago IMO.
Looks good. Though it would be massive PITA to fit that with my device :(

I'll look around a bit but I'll probably get a standalone indoor one.
In 8 States, Tesla Model Y For $32k and Model 3 For $30k, this weekend only.
> here is like no source control, or if there is the source controlled thing is an unreadable artifact which generally doesn't belong in source control

I think this is an artifact of "source code is text" that our current tools assume (and is invalid IMO).

Otherwise I agree
Given the intensive surveillance state set up by the CCP, it would be very hard to hide such benefits.
A lot of the commenters are missing it: it's not that you have _nothing to do_: it's that you're being told to find a job ASAP, in the next 8-12 weeks. It's very easy to say "the first thing I'd do is take a 2 week vacation", but, the expectation is you're finding a position ASAP -- and there are none. So you need to start practicing your Leetcode for our absurd interview process as an industry. The last thing you're thinking is "I should pump out some graphics shaders and get permission to open source them!"
Tether has not completed a single audit yet
Tesla tweet: https://twitter.com/tesla_na/status/1740446648776417285
Not necessarily, you could have specialist skills in a market that is unfashionable, and consequently doesn't pay well. Telco for example, or IoT, or (soon) VMware. Particularly dangerous for mid career people who need to decide how to pivot.
Is Amazon equity still backloaded as much as it was before (10% after year 1, 20% after year two, 30%, 40%, vs the 4/1 standard at most other companies)?
I find bat pretty useful on my local machine
Please, do tell more!

Where I see no/low code fall apart is when complex input data validation is required. However, I can also see that this might be our old practices getting in the way of innovative forward thinking.

Maybe you've found a way, since you are starting from scratch :)
Same hiring dynamic in Mexico.

They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.

Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
I went to college with that dude, neat to see his work getting recognized.