skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Uhhhhhh... yes, this is exactly what I would expect it to do.

So you expect MidJourney to not draw Mario when asked "Mario from Mario Bros" while you expect it to draw Mario when asked "Famous plumber from a video game"?
It's not, and it's faster to take my phone out of my pocket and open it there (where it's native)...

...which is exactly what I do.

The desktop app is only really useful for reading images with small text or shunting around attachments. As a messaging app it's a mess, and not even remotely a first-class way to use WhatsApp.

P.S. it takes even longer if you haven't used it in a while while it catches up while re-rendering for some reason so it looks like the whole app is in super speed... rather than just do that behind the startup loading bar and save the useless visual updates that look half-broken?
I couldnt disagree more. Many/most of the apps the author lists as "let's write more of these!" are EXCLUSIVE to Macs. Of course it's much easier to develop a native app if that's the only platform you target.

Hell, the author even self promotes his own app as a model to follow. Surprise surprise the only supported platform is Mac.

I don't think it's realistic to expect every company, regarless of size, to redevelop their application in native toolkits for every platform. It's much better overall to develop a one-size-fits-all solution, and Electron is obviously one of the more popular tools for doing this.

Now, I definitely support a leaner cross-platform framework, but advocating that companies "use Apple’s own tools and toolkits, and stick closely to them" is fanboyism at it's most extreme.
You can do all that minus the offline Xcode project part, which you need to sign in to download I believe.
> "I" simply means "the person who is currently speaking"

But on this definition you can raise the question of why the person who is currently speaking is the person who is currently speaking (which by alternating de re and de dicto interpretations can be understood in the same non-tautologous ways as e.g. "Why is the person who is currently the President the person who is currently the President?") So this linguistic analysis doesn't succeed in dissolving facts about personal identity into nothing. You still have the fact that you are who you are and not someone else. And the intuitive notion of personhood (on which your definition depends and which you haven't in any way reduced to physics) is intimately connected with the idea of a more-or-less uninterrupted stream of first-person conscious experience.

> I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel about your own conscious self.

If we set 'intuitive feelings' aside, then of course the whole problem of conscious experience disappears immediately.
On my M1 Pro using the latest Whatsapp version, it launches in 0.5 - 1.5 seconds.
I'd wager yes since Mars has less extreme thermal cycles than the moon
Weird question, what's the right number?
Apps outside the app store are still subject to Apple's review. So don't hold your breath hoping for most apps you value from F-Droid making it on IOS.
There is no reason why a chat client should take more than a second to launch on any desktop or laptop produced in the past two decades.
The only problem is that the other side already ignores robots.txt. What is the difference in processing and indexing something to be returned as a full original result vs being returned in a permutation? The point of robots.txt is to control indexing, something the LLM/ML businesses are completely ignoring already because they’re “different” and don’t have to play by the rules because AGI.
Seen https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/discovery-dish ?
The article got me in touch with one of the hyper devs, and we had a very friendly conversation that taught me a lot.

If questioning some design decisions and calling a marketing blurb a little disingenuous is mocking and condescending, they didn't seem to think so.
How exactly are companies supposed to intuit what the law actually means? Surely the written law has some sort of bearing on how companies can comply with the law. So many people have the attitude, “C’mon, we all know what the law actually means…” That is not a good foundation for running a business or for administering law.

How in the world can a business read the mind of a bureaucratic organization to divine what the “intention” of a law is? Apple thinks they are complying with the law. Either they missed something basic or the law needs to be amended/changed if they want Apple to do something differently.
> If the author wanted an explanation for a technical decision, they could open an issue and have a conversation like an adult.

Opening an issue comes across as a whole lot more aggressive to me. That implies that they owe you an explanation or you want them to change their code.

> They cry about the existence of some unsafe code, but don’t actually put in the effort to figure out if it can lead to a real problem like unsoundness.

unsafe might as well be unsound. The key benefit of Rust is supposed to be better memory safety than C; if everything is using unsafe, why bother?

> Here’s a post by the maintainer of hyper about what they accomplished in 2023 and what they hope to accomplish in 2024 - https://seanmonstar.com/blog/2023-in-review/

Ok, and that doesn't mention "unsafe" once - no justification for why it's used, much less a plan to reduce or eliminate it.
I didn't build a dedicated Firefox version, but I suspect there's a way to install it without significant code changes. I actually just tried and I ran into an error: `background.service_worker is currently disabled`

I'll figure out a workaround and document the steps to install: https://github.com/andrewnguonly/Lumos/issues/36
Apple already charges for the SDK, the $99/year developer fee. This is a second, unrelated, app install fee. There's certainly nothing similar on PC, Mac, or Android
These days, stripping fixed-length prefixes and suffixes off of slices is pretty easy with slice patterns. But that code was originally written around the time of Rust 1.0.0, when the language and standard library had far fewer features to help with this. For instance, it uses slice::from_raw_parts() rather than slice.get_unchecked(pos..), since the latter wasn't stable until Rust 1.15.0. Similarly, split_first() wasn't stable until Rust 1.5.0, and slice patterns weren't stable until Rust 1.26.0.
I don’t think you are aware of all the damage that has been done. Being unaware does not make it disappear. For you, maybe, but not for Apple.
I've been to the Salton Sea, it has to be seen (and smelled) in person to really capture the overwhelming apocalyptic feeling it has. The air when you're dozens of miles away becomes acrid and starts stinging your eyes and nose. It's just a total wasteland, I feel terrible for the people trapped there.
I could give the standard “ah shucks brother keep your head up!” advice that most people do.

Or I can give tactical suggestions, which may be a bit hard to stomach, so he can improve his odds at landing a job.

It’s fairly easy to infer his job domain from comments. He mentions web technologies and SQL often. He refers to himself as a dev, not as an engineer, and he mentions running numerous websites. He probably got his start working in “IT” (nobody says IT anymore, but he still does) in the 90s in support or technician roles and moved into full-stack web developer roles around dotcom.

He also comes across as low self-confidence due to “I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews” instead of telling us why he’s an excellent dev. That likely comes out in interviews and further hurts his chances.
I think you are missing the point that they want to impose this reviewing process on the off-brand App Store too
For accessibility, consider representing closeness without colour or shade of colour, maybe through a little number or something?

I think there might be too much information given away by disclosing how far away the letter is though. A more difficult mode could be just having three states:

1. Amber: Closest guess(es) so far
2. Red: Wrong guess that is not the closest
3. Green: Correct guess

So you only get new information after the second guess, assuming you don’t hit a green on the first go, and you don’t immediately eliminate most of the keyboard as soon as you are within 2-3 (haven’t quite worked out when the shading starts) characters away.
> Architects, we have to admit, are under-performing in the metric of "creating new architectural styles and schools of thought" and over-performing in "number of uninspiring designs."

I don't see a problem, except in the unimaginative repetition of obsolete styles. There have always been lots of uninspired buildings, just like there have been uninspired songs - the pop music of 50 years ago wasn't better, it's just survivor bias.

They are obsolete now because they were designed for a certain situation: The affordable building materials, skills, engineering, etc. If you want to follow tradition, and innovate new designs now for the new situation - that's what they did, and back then people all complained about anything new, just like now.

We were a culture that embraced innovation, now we're actively killing it, IME, as people seem to have embraced thoughtless, irrational conservatism. (General thoughtlessness - an acceptance of the abandonment of reason - is killing it more.) It's socially acceptable to make these statements, people will even cheer you on, so people make them. You can see the almost standardized rhetoric, including the definitive language as if there is no other possibility they can imagine. If even HN doesn't embrace innovation, who will?
Because the sides of the partnership are disproportionately unequal and this imbalance creates incentives that are in the opposite direction of more openness.
To be clear, I'm referring more to the middle tier: apps that are big enough to support an individual or small business.
Sure... but you can't just "join" the Linux Foundation on a whim.

I'd almost argue it's easier to form a non-profit entity that become sponsored by a non-profit organization such as TLF.

This almost reinforces the parent's point.
WSL has nothing to do with all this - we're talking about gcc building directly for Win32. That aside, you make several claims that are outright wrong.

First of all, MinGW does come with all Win32 headers of their own included, and no, they're not protected IP (or at least Microsoft never made the claim to the contrary).

With respect to C runtime, Windows itself ships with a bunch of them, packaged as system DLLs. MinGW used msvcrt.dll historically, which is the one that originally shipped with VC++ 6.0 before getting included into Windows. Since Win10, Windows ships an ABI stable C runtime called uCRT, precisely so that different toolchains have a single shared library for better interop. Modern versions of MinGW link against uCRT. Visual Studio still ships the C++ runtime, which MinGW doesn't need because it has its own.

On top of that, unlike Unix, in Windows, CRT is not the basic OS API, but mostly a relatively thin wrapper around rich native Win32 APIs, so there are far more around than just different versions of VC++ runtime and glibc. For example, C++ Builder has its own.

If you're a standalone Windows app, you don't have to redistribute DirectX. You can just target the minimum version supported for your matrix. If you're targeting supported versions of Windows (i.e. 10+), that'd be DirectX 12. And then of course you don't have to ship SQL Server Embedded because you don't need to use it; there are plenty of alternatives such as SQLite and Firebird.

Just about the only situation I can think of where you have to pay Microsoft for the privilege of developing for Windows is when writing drivers.
LTSE Equity appears to be kind of a side project of the main LTSE Exchange which is not shutting down.
Long-ish
>I totally agree with the author's points, however, I can't understand why people run "apps" for things like WhatsApp (and Slack) when they run just fine in a browser tab.

On macOS, you get native notifications, a bright red dot on the app icon for notifications, and a separate window from your browser. Lastly, the app might optimize for native macOS APIs strategically.
The rust standard library support was not that complicated to add because
a) esp-idf ( with the FreeRTOS kernel) is used underneath
b) esp-idf has unix like features and exposes a posix layer for stuff like networking and filesytem.
If you want to look at the full initial PR on rust-lang github look for PR number 87666.
How is that different than most startups?
Maybe this is a naive question, but if the information is for sale, why would the government need a warrant?
Apple made deals around app permissions.

However the economics have changed now. It’s no longer practically free to support iOS. So some companies could make a reasonable argument that supporting iOS is too expensive when only a fraction of their customers do in app purchases from Apple hardware. So from Apple’s perspective, they now have more to lose in not making deals. While app developers have more to lose in supporting Apple.

This might just tip the scales into forcing Apple to negotiate on more than just app permissions.
Elon rubs me t he wrong way often, but I appreciate the long term view and not getting lost in the quarter to quarter weeds. Just needs to make sure he is actually focussed on delivering and not getting distracted.
From what I can tell 'shrine' is being used metaphorically to describe a player 'Place', and the drag-drop part might be a Place Program? There's not a lot of documentation without jumping in.

I haven't played but I've read way too much about it since following Dan on Masto/Fediverse. Someday if I ever have time and bandwidth again I've really got to get on there.
I agree with this take. Most of the 'good' app listed (and also the ones I love) like Transmit, iTerm etc are mac _exclusive_. They only target Mac.

It doesn't make any sense to do that to Discord because it's cross platform by necessity and design.
> We all know how browser-based web apps tend to feel. Things lag, they’re inconsistent, you’re never sure whether stuff like copy & paste or drag & drop is going to work, you’re not sure where (or if) your work is getting saved, the list goes on.

This has not been my experience with Electron apps at all.

> An app that’s under 20MB is very lean. Apps over 100MB better have a good reason for being so big, and apps above 500MB are probably bloated, unless they’re games or legitimate mega-apps like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro.

Smaller is better, surely. But outside of gaming computers and embedded software, how often are most people really scraping together megabytes of disk space to store their 200MB applications? Not very often, is my anecdotal experience.

> While they’re running they also take up RAM (memory,) and use CPU processing power.

Sure, I won't argue at all here. This one hurts a bit sometimes. I suppose it more so hurts people running low end hardware.

This might get filed under my list of "hot takes," but rarely, if ever, is my computer slogging and I open up htop or Task Manager and discover it's some Electron app swallowing my system resources. So I find a lot of the anti-Electron arguments to be a bit exaggerative.
I think my dentist offered it for $3600 without insurance? I haven't done it yet, but I want to. They did need proof of a sleep study, but I think that is more of an insurance thing.
That's very much a picture that you learn on the usual mathematics route of learning about these things, yes. More generally, there's a fair amount to be said about how you can derive shapes of unit balls from distance functions and vice versa (in functional analysis in particular).
No, predates broadband at least. Certainly was around on Usenet in the nineties.
More like Epic. Valve had 15 years to consider a steam store on Android games (and honestly that was my biggest hope with all this disruption. Proper premium games to come back to IOS/Android), but they only really have a front end for the PC store in that time.

Epic has had an Android store in the roadmap since the beginning of the EGS. They still seem years out but I imagine this news will accellerate development for that.
This looks great!

I wanted to bundle a chain of certs, check that the leaf was <some domain> and its key signed <some data>, and that the bundle provided a path to a locally-trusted root. This allows third-party serving of signed data, rather than having to trade your IP address for validation.

Doing so with existing tools was so terrible that I was pretty sure my result was grossly insecure :(

I look forward to the promised lower-level APIs!
AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support for Ryzen AI on Linux
I guess I'm just biased because I like to run an OS on my desktop (freebsd) that doesn't support Electron. I've carried that over to my macbook... I've just gotten into the habit of "gmail is leftmost, slack is next, etc", and never have a problem finding slack..
I thought that Alexander's "A City is not a Tree" had a statement about how grids are not necessarily a problem, and organically-shaped streets/towns are not necessarily a solution, but skimming it again I can't find it. Maybe it was in an essay responding to Alexander.

But grids themselves aren't necessarily bad. One can imagine a street grid as a trellis, on top of which life is able to grow in abundance. Alexander and Jacobs both didn't seem to have a problem with grids and right angles, only with poor uses of such.

For example, Jacobs talks about long blocks which prevent cross-mingling between parallel streets. She also describes how staggering streets with dog-legs and other obstructions can improve neighbourhoods by slowing traffic.
Was gatekeeping outlawed by the DMA?
Depends if they consider Mozilla Corp (a for-profit corporation) or Mozilla Foundation (the no-profit owner of the Corp) the developer of the browser. All the engineers are employed by the corp.
Did you have any issues with the device when you first got it? I've been using a cpap machine for a while, but it took me literally years before I could sleep through an entire night with it on. I've been thinking of either having surgery or going the oral appliance route this year.
I didn't know "we" were lawyers here.

I don't have any IOS devices, but I'm expecting maybe $50 (and I'm being generous) to come as a result of a similar lawsuit on Google over over-charging for IAPs.
I agree with the author.

I think this is the consequence of git's model - there is continuous interaction happening locally.

It is important to save your work. I've even wondered if there should be "autosaves" just like in video games.

In other (centralized/shared) version control systems, the commit messages are important and well thought out, because a commit is when you merge your work with other people's work.

I think that point is when you should be prompted to enter a comment - it might even be required.

somewhat related, I also hate that when looking at files in gitlab, it shows the commit message beside each file, where more intuitively it should describe the file
unfortunately, your fingerprint is more than likely unique either way: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
People experiment far more on a computer, where you can try lots of different things, render them, see them in different light and weather, test structural integrity, etc.

I wonder when buildings were built as you describe; maybe the 19th century? Isn't the 'golden age' romantic fantasy obvious?
That sounds promising but probably another quarters wait for good measure given my decidedly modest rust skill
In defense of the companies that do this - making native apps is extremely expensive compared to just using Electron. If you want to have a native app for Mac and Windows and a website, that's 3 separate frontends that you have to propagate changes across. This triples all the work that you typically have to do (UX changes, platform-specific bugfixes, etc), and getting some fullstack developers are cheaper than hiring Mac/Windows specialists.

I think HN users are in the minority of users who seriously care about speed/performance. Electron is good enough for pretty much everyone else, and it's clearly working well for for Discord and Slack. It makes more sense IMO to invest time in improving Electron efficiency rather than telling companies to just avoid it.
The color scheme was really confusing for me too. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple as farthest away to closest maybe?
If you work with more than 1 person on a project, commit messages can be very useful during reviews. Sometimes a change sets up a later change, and you need context on why the change is being done. It also forces you to split up your code into bite sized chuncks so changes are easier to understand for other contributors.

That being said, this is the only reason I think of for writing a commit message. After adding the commits into master (via rebase preferably), I've rarely read a commit message.
So you're using your browser tabs as an app manager. Most people prefer to use the actual OS app manager.
Apple said it would not charge a commission to developers of apps who avoided
the App Store ...

But then they say they are charging money per install.

So it's rent seeking regardless of whether they call it a "commission" or any other name. :(
By squashing, you lose ability to effectively bisect.

Instead of finding an offending commit that has only a few lines to analyze, you only get a massive feature-landing commit that doesn't narrow it down.

Interactive rebase or amend can be used to squash "oops forgot a semicolon" junk commits.
Native apps are genuinely better and I don't think it's fanboyism to point that out. But yeah, we're never getting native apps so it's mostly pointless to rehash it.
> Early death from what? When?

I literally said "early death from disease". Do you need me to enumerate specifically which diseases penicillin was able to treat?

Your comments reek of survivorship bias. Just because we're alive today doesn't mean things weren't terrible before. Imagine how different the 14th century could have been if we had antibiotics to treat the bubonic plague.
What do you mean "killed off", there seems to have been an update last week ?

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24056177...

(Now I will be the first to point out that online-only games have no future, but this one at least still has a present.)
(1) popularization of pytorch

(2) network effect due to the number of users

(3) uploading weights, distributing weights, running demo on GPUs is mandatory part of ML engineering

=== interlude ===

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being argumentative; discussion is especially interesting to me because it often weighs on me how hard it is to explain HuggingFace. So I enjoy trying and improving at it.

=== longer analogy ===

Imagine if all mobile developers in 2008* needed to host demos on iPhones captive in a server farm somewhere.* Some company offered that for free. On top of it apps were 30 GB, but the company hosted downloads for free. So everyone is putting their stuff on there. Then that feedback loop continues while the field takes a historic spike in interest and it's 4 years later.

* AI developers in 2020.

** GPUs captive in a server farm somewhere.

== Musings ==

This sort of highlights a thread of discussion for startups, the unreasonable effectiveness of specialization. Data scientists in 2020 use Python because they can, they're not really familiar with GitHub as in VCS so their mental model of it is more a dropbox. All of a sudden there's an $X billion (so far) opportunity to clone GitHub, but make it marginally easier to use via hiding stuff that's necessary for all other software, and then light money on fire hosting GPUs and S3.