skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps.

The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing.

Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits.

Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native.

But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same)

We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while.

That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow.

But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.
alternative opinion: if the board had done what it was should have done in the first place it wouldn't have been left up to social media to do the work for them.
I would suggest switching to Meson instead of CMake.
Nor will it be a good argument in case of a fatal crash to say "well, it did contribute to this terrible accident, but in the long run it'll be better for everybody!".

Nobody in aviation is conservative about automation due to a lack of a desire for safety; quite the opposite. But it's just a fact that e.g. an automation system that can prevent a type of human error entirely in 99% of all cases can lead to more accidents in total, if it means that humans aren't regularly exposed to these 99% of cases which in the end train them for the 1% that the computers can't handle.

And this is, as are so many things in aviation safety, learned through blood.
How is this done? I couldn't find an explanation on a quick web search, nor could I find controls on my phone.
Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservice Applications
PWA are not as good as apps - and not because of OS vendors restricting APIs.

Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.
I'm thinking that if Python becomes "easy to pick up" to do WASM development, it could go a long way towards helping PWAs thrive. I'm not very familiar with WASM but most tutorials seem to be around C/C++, Rust, or C#, so I wonder if there's something holding back Python + WASM. I only mention Python because of its current popularity and accessibility to the masses.
Will have to give this a shot on m68k Atari, it's been a long time!
About the only time I can tell some app is a web app is when my password keystore tells me it can fill in my credentials.
I had some issues with Virtual II and the author quickly helped.
I cancelled Netflix, but I'll go back when the new Stranger Things is out at some point. Then catch up on maybe some other stuff I missed, and cancel again.
Mobroute is a minimal FOSS public-transportation router
> To spoil the story a bit, the Ivory Coast descended into an ethnic/religious civil war that killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in less than a decade after FHB’s death. An incredible amount of the contemporary accounts attribute the prior ethnic/religious peace of the Ivory Coast to FHB personally

Sounds like Yugoslavia to me. Minus the balkanization and the tidal forces of EU.

> he was massively corrupt and likely looted billions of dollars from the Ivory Coast.

Funnily enough, we never seem to see any track of these money over and over again (and such stories are aplenty), and especially not in the hands of that dictator's children, clan or followers. Leading to suspicion that it is not "looting" but maybe the old colonial power using the local quasi-independent government to siphon money out of their former properties. This way, these dictators have to send money back to the mother ship, "or else"; themselves getting peanuts - but at least after hedonistically partying in Paris.

You know that specific game mechanic if you ever played the original Dune from 1992.

An counterexample to this rule (that confirms its existence) is Dos Santos' daughter who exists, owns significant capital, and is a target of boring stuff such as lawsuits. This is opposed to when these billions simply disappear for good.
I don't know that it's a serious tech recession; my understanding is that the major players are still posting serious revenue growth. As far as I can tell, a lot of the VC/startup world was mostly a low interest rate bubble.

I suppose I'm "lucky" that I got laid off in 2021 after the company I was working for was acquired by private equity. It wasn't a bad time to find a job, and I went looking for something different which ended up being a small, local company that does fairly boring software development.
I didn't know the name either. Yeah, I'm spoiled by them in Spain (at least in my region, pretty much every residential house or building has them) and I typically sleep too little when I'm elsewhere due to lack of them. No other alternative I have seen comes even close when it comes to making a room really dark at night.

I just call someone to fix them, though. It's quite a dark art for those of us who suck at DIY.
> If brain activations are insensitive to subtle adversarial attacks, we would expect people to choose each picture 50% of the time on average. However, we found that the choice rate—which we refer to as the perceptual bias—was reliably above chance for a wide variety of perturbed picture pairs

Ok, but the article doesn’t say what was the actual rate?
Thought it was a joke at first, then I realized it’s viable
The key issue in US politics is that the Democrats have achieved a monopoly on reasonable governance. The right has completely abandoned moderation in favor of active malice. That means it doesn't matter who the Democrats put up for election. A fucking golden retriever would get my vote, because the GOP is committed to overt evil.

That's not to say the Democrats are saints, or even not also evil. Most of them are in it to line their own pockets. But at least they're doing that without actively trying to make things worse. So they're approximately adequate.

Voting third party introduces massive risk that the mustache-twirling, overtly fascist sympathizing party takes power, which isn't acceptable to most reasonable people. Which is why we need to get rid of first-past-the-post voting, but unfortunately those same parties that are currently entrenched in power are the only ones with the power to make that reform.
Why are ATC instructions given verbally over sometimes staticy channels using the always error-prone communication tech, human speech? Why not digital?

The ATC operator chooses a command from a UI: 'JAL 123' > 'Runway 34R' > 'Clear for landing'.

Everything cascades automatically from there: ATC's on-screen maps and info, airport lights, commands to all relevant planes (including 'Runway 34R' > 'Hold short').

Transmission to planes could be digital. Given the relatively few possible commands, we're talking very little bandwidth, plenty of room to ensure error correction, redundancy, etc. - and perfectly accurate reception.

All planes would show the exact command on a screen, their maps etc would update, and they could play locally generated audio of the command.

I know nothing about aviation. (I do know that entirely rebuilding matured, critical systems for the new technology is rarely a good idea - the trick is to start with one small subsystem, work out the bugs, mature it, and grow from there.)
Because this is a non story, at most an analysis or opinion piece, based on assumptions that are not founded on report-worthy facts or specific sources.
That’s all for “just another guy with a blog on the internet who thinks he knows how journalism works”.
beautiful read and a beautiful sendoff to Tom Scott's streak. very inspiring.
>because the objective argument doesn't take into account the patient's personal perspective.

Suppose a friend is afraid of crossing the street. Would it be more helpful from a personal perspective POV to tell your friend the odds of being hit by a car, or to make up the fact that you are just as likely to die today crossing that street as not dying? Because the latter strikes me as unhelpful from either an objective perspective or a personal perspective.
I think something like https://dioxuslabs.com could deliver native, cross platform apps and win back mobile.

YC made a good bet here.
That assume the company has the requirement to have 2x the work.

If not, the argument becomes:

a) Get rid of 1000 people

b) Get rid of 500 people, by making 500 people 2x efficient.

Option (a) is clearly better.
Vote with your wallet or conscience, and don't buy or use it. This null choice is always conveniently missing when people say there is no "better choice." The fact that people continue to do so means there is at least some value in the product as it is. Therefore, it is acceptable to most people, or otherwise they wouldn't continue to use it.
Web apps on Chrome suck compared to native desktop apps on both Windows and macoS, so I don’t see how this is Apple‘s fault really.
Well, they clearly can’t, because one is being bolstered by politicians and the other attacked by the same set of those politicians.

I have not heard of a single Democrat politician advocate defunding religious organizations. I have often heard the GOP advocate for punishing college faculty/students/administrators and withholding accreditation/nonprofit-status.

Regardless, I actually think it’s a bad idea to go after either: both of those institutions, ultimately, are checks on the State — and historically, when a state turns to fascism, universities and religious organizations (save the “favored/officially sanctioned religion”) are the first thing to go.
Having trouble finding blueprint's repo. The paper says it's open source. Would love to poke around, if you know where to find it!
The code of this relatively recent project wasn't promoted (yet ?) as the internal official closed-source calculator.
The vast majority of apps are just text, images, and buttons. Maybe a video player if you're getting wild. Not really anything that requires processing speed except to just render stuff on a screen and wait for touches. They don't need feats of engineering to run well.
Maps are guided by power, not truth
- AI startups crash and burn. OpenAI raises prices dramatically. ChatGPT and Bard start subtly adding product ads into their responses.

- Quality of life in the US continues to decline. Shantytowns start springing up in California. Rule of law shows cracks and gang-controlled zones expand.

- Entrepreneurs stop immigrating from China/India and prefer to stay there and build.

- Israel declares victory in Gaza and most people forget about the whole thing.

- Russia stops advancing, digs in. Ukraine continues sending drones in, but human casualties essentially stop. Turkey, Poland, and Scandinavian countries become more friendly with Russia.

- TSMC continues moving its operations from Taiwan to mainland China.

- Oil and gas production boom in the US, many tech workers end up working on the pipelines.
Ask HN: What's the SOTA for open source search embeddings?
Hi *

I'm working on a project that involves hybrid search (neural + keyword search) and I'm wondering which is the current state of the art regarding open source search embeddings.

Afaik Mixtral is the current sota for generative models, but the embeddings it gives aren't well suited for search. As far as I understand, using the last layer activations of a generative model as embeddings isn't a good idea since two different sentences may have similar embeddings because the next word to be predicted is the same, while the semantics of the sentences are very different, eg (1) No Luke, I am your [father] and (2) My name is Íñigo Montoya, you killed my [father]. The embeddings given by the last layer of a generative model for (1) and (2) are very similar since the next word to be predicted is the same, but the semantics are very different.

My question is then, which is the current sota for search embeddings? This is, embeddings that have been trained specifically for search.

Thank you!
Given the circumstances, I am happy to read this. I own two ~2009 netbooks with Intel Atom N270 CPUs and 1GB of RAM each - running Firefox on those is ridiculous, whereas dillo will run very well on these.

I used to use dillo on my main desktop too, for browsing documentation that wasn't too heavy on CSS - having 20 to 40 tabs open would gobble up a lot of RAM in Firefox, whereas dillo happily stayed around 100MB no matter what I threw at it. My current desktop has enough RAM this not a concern any more, but I have fond memories of using dillo on memory-deficient machines and am a current user still.

Also, the lack of a Javascript engine makes it a very secure browser. Whenever I try to open a link that I am suspicious of, I do so in dillo.

So thanks to everyone who continues to work on this, I really appreciate the work you do! Dillo is a fine piece of software that I have enjoyed using for at least 15 years now, and I hope it will be around for many years to come! <3
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait

I think this probably qualifies, a better title would be something like “Experts confirmed the culprit: coastal coyotes”
In a heavily automated world, you won't be able to get a job building widgets for Ford or IBM - but you will always be able to make hand-made furniture. There may not be jobs for security guards, but there will always be jobs for nursing-home attendants, and school teachers. If you WANT to work, there will always be meaningful things you can do.

"All meaningful work" going away is pretty unimaginable to me. And if that's what you're imagining, then IMO you've gone way past the realm of reasonable speculation and into fantasy.
https://support.google.com/android/answer/9079661?hl=en#zipp...
Now who is appealing to dead guys?
They should test a signaling system that allows for them to not cancel so many trains, so often.

It's shockingly bad in terms of reliability for such an expensive form of transport.

It's become "apology line". It should apologize with full day discounts, see how that incentivizes them to improve their service.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-66754481.amp
On mobile, it works really well because all u have to do is tap to change the direction. They should just remove the arrow keys on web, as you said.
> Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly but you'd never know it reading Wired or The Verge.

I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, EU forcing browser choice for iOS, and now Epic v Google and the recent win. There has also been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc in the comments.

How exactly are they ignoring this story? It feels like it's been at the forefront of their coverage for months now.
I know people that just turn the TV on when they get up or get home. They aren't even paying attention in particular, it's just a habit and source of background noise. It's a bit like the way some people always have music playing.
Her proven plagiarism is quite egregious. Can’t understand how other academics can keep defending her.
yes, that’s what collective health care means, regardless of if it’s state-mandated, or fully private.

you, or i, don’t get to decide what’s fair to treat, or who’s deserving of treatment.
Someone with an iPhone told me the webm video embedded in the article still doesn't work on iPhones in 2024 so here's another link to the video: https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1742101904250060842
> increasingly interested in learning graphic and UI/UX design

You will need some kind of niche because you will be competing with the likes of Fiver and Upwork and other gig economy places for the lower end of the market work.

So you need a USP around a certain specific task or a specific industry/domain area that you have ability/network in.
> ... Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey

A key issue in women's rights is reproductive freedom. To varying degrees, abortion is legal in every country you just mentioned. Abortion is generally allowed under Islam. Afghanistan and Pakistan have stricter laws than, say, Turkey but they have usable exceptions (life of th emother, life of the fetus) where the states in the US that have enacted abortion bans generally have the patina of exceptions. These are exceptions so vague and so strict that they're intended never to be used (eg [1]).

Russia has started limiting abortion access. India allows abortion.

So yes, by some measures, the countries you mentioned do, to varying degrees, have more freedom for women.

The issue I think is that many in the US have very skewed views of both how draconian and restrictive some US laws are and a warped view of life in Islamic and other non-Western countries.

Back to prisons, the US has roughly 2 million inmates [2], roughly 1% of the adult population and by every metric this makes the US the most carceral state on Earth. So why aren't we the safest?

[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/11/texas-abortion-lawsu...

[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
I don't think that's fair, the concept of a "store" with user reviews, changelogs, detailed app information (e.g. permissions) is great. It only becomes a problem when a platform decides to act as a gatekeeper for the entire platform with insane rules & fees.

Furthermore, social media is a really poor way to discover anything unless it happens to go viral. A general-purpose search engine such as Google is entirely suboptimal, as it can only match on keywords on the page. It doesn't address reviews or provide convenient (but optional) payment processing either.

You shouldn't be forced to use one specific store, but their role is nonetheless valuable. Whether it's for apps, books, appliances, or food.
> Looking in from a European perspective
> Bullying!? Are you kidding me?

American public school perspective, here, but death threats were a normal part of the bullying equation growing up. Sure, it was mostly "we're going to kick your ass after school", but there was the occasional "we're going to put you in the hospital or the morgue" and just enough follow-through to make the threats credible.

Calling this bullying isn't inaccurate, the severity of bullying has been downplayed. It isn't just stealing your lunch money and calling you ugly.

Bullying is exactly the correct term for this. You just don't appreciate how evil bullies actually are.
Why do they assume that 50% choose cat and 50% choose truck? Or did I miss the part where they show the participants an untampered version of the image to create a baseline.

I mean, cats are small and cute, trucks are big and stinky.

And wouldn't the subject of the image also make the participants possibly lean to one of the answers? Flowers in a vase go well with a cat (both can be found in an apartment, for example). If the image would show the ISS, would more people tend to pick "truck", for example?
Good catch! Here's the link to the framework: https://gitlab.mpi-sws.org/cld/blueprint/blueprint-compiler.

Also added it to the blog post :)
The survey does not ask "Would you be opposed...?" It asks:

> Student groups often invite speakers to campus to express their views on a range of topics. Regardless of your own views on the topic, should your school ALLOW or NOT ALLOW a speaker on campus who promotes the following idea?

Someone who truly supports free speech would say "ALLOW" even if they themselves personally disagree with the speech. Students at Harvard apparently do not.

Additionally, the survey asks students whether they support suppressing speech via deplatforming or violence, and whether they believe that the administration would defend the rights of speakers when controversy arises.

The questions can be found on page 76 of this PDF: https://www.thefire.org/sites/default/files/2023/09/CFSR%202...

> Additionally, disinvitations are measured as well despite not being examples of student speech being censored.

A second ago you said that free speech covers the Westboro Baptist Church coming on campus. Now it only applies to students? If someone is being disinvited, presumably someone invited them to begin with, whether students or faculty.
Hypothetically, could JavaScript support be added by using a lightweight engine, such as QuickJS?
But we also aren’t a megacorp or a nation state, and while as a percentage of the world we aren’t a huge number, as an absolute number there are a lot of people capable of doing this.
75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.
No it's not. M is a very old programming language created by "Bercy", for the "Impôt sur le Revenu".

Mon-entreprise is coded in publi.codes, a more recent language.

Mon-entreprise is focused on the social contributions (payroll), subject of OP.
While we're at it, we can get rid of yum and maven and just manually search forums for stuff to download.
> There's no technical reason this needs to be true though.

yes, yes there is. HTML/JS is a bastard to parse. it takes a fucktonne of resources to actually figure out how to render a box. Go and fire up a windows 95 box, with 133mhx of pentium III goodness. THen make a VB6 app that animates boxes/shows images.

Look how fucking fast it can do it (and vb6 wasn't a fast language)

Or, more easily, render a web page on the original raspberry pi-b, try and play video in a browser, do some sort of animation.

It lags like a fucker. Use py-game (you know python with its 50% "what fucking type is this?" tax) and you can run animations at 60fps.

The web is slow, its just moore's law has shielded us from it.
A respectable person offering nuance can be shattering if you identify as pro- or anti something.

I wish we had an easier time talking about ideas with a little more detachment.
Don’t forget http://binary.ninja :)
Them's citin' words! Are you sure you're as well-versed as you portray yourself to be?

The article which you linked to is from 2012; it pertains to the performance of Facebook's web client in 2010, when run on mobile devices in 2010.

Most apps today can be implemented as progressive web apps, without any user experience penalty. Instead, they are built with tools that lock developers into a platform of one type or another. That's because some handset manufacturers prioritize the platforms that have lock-in, such as the App Store and iMessage, over the platforms that do not, such as the web and RCS. It is not because the web is somehow a bad platform for apps.

If you want FaceTime to call your mom on her headset when your watch detects a spike in your heart rate, then yes, you may want to write a native app to do that. But Sudoku, Pandora and the McDonald's app can live on the web, and so can most of the rest.