skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoy coming back to re-read this article every few years, because it's one of the rare things that I continue to agree with every time.

Joel mentions the "build one to throw away" mantra, and notes that it can be dangerous, but I'd go further with that: assume the "prototype" you build is going to be the product, and it will never get thrown away and rewritten. Because that's often what ends up happening, and you (and your colleagues) will be much happier working over the next many months or years inside a project where there was at least some thought given to architecture and abstractions when it was started.

The only time where I think a rewrite might be warranted is if you, no matter how hard you profile and work on it, have realized that the framework (or even language runtime/interpreter) you have built on is just not going to give you the performance you need. Even then, you should really be sure that you can't optimize it better, even if that means digging into the framework you're using to make changes. (Digging into the language runtime or interpreter might be a step too far, though, depending on the circumstances.)

Ok, I guess there's one more time: if the architecture of the code is just so completely wrong that you can't add new features or fix issues anymore, and your velocity completely drops to zero. And you are pretty sure that starting from scratch would get you to feature parity faster than embarking upon a series of gigantic refactors. But even then, I think most people underestimate how long that rewrite will take.

But otherwise... nah, it's probably not worth it, unless you're doing it on your own time, as a toy project, for learning or just fun. I might take an old personal project written in C and decide to rewrite it in Rust because I'm sick of C, and just don't care to work on it anymore, even though there are more things I want to do with that project. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily a good reason to do it, but if I have no professional obligations around that code, it's my prerogative to spend my time however I want.
I am sorry I couldn't aptly understand you.

did people migrate from twitter / reddit to discord / slack? That's an interesting phenomena if it has happened that I wasn't aware of, do you have sources I can read up on it more?

anyways, my point was that "usability in general" is not the key (reddit has famously terrible interfaces, for example). it is being really usable on the core functionality it should provide (like having tons of content to discover, and getting your content to tons of other people, in case of social media) is what matters.
Not that simple. Maybe they struck a deal with a few of the companies or they made a different risk calculation. And of course they have a pretty fierce patent portfolio themselves so there's the notion of them being able to retaliate in kind to some of these companies.
I still miss DVI.
It does seem inevitable the corner shop gets replaced by the supermarket, especially as travel time is not an issue - how many corner shops survive with a supermarket next door?

Maybe what we need is a range of small hipster specialty shops and cafés etc.
Probably this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/

I think it would be much better for everyone involved and humanity if Mr. Duda himself got the patent in the first place instead of praying no one else will.
"jxl without a flag" can't be re-added because that was never a thing.
I'm just inferring from the fact that MS got a patent and then this whole thing ground to a halt.
Happy with my up to 31 days amoled watch.
I guess I'm a great believer in the original intention of the author being important, and thus am apt to be overly annoyed at these kinds of things, so I guess you might make that assumption from just the text, however the common tropes in genre do not do this kind of thing, in Science Fiction many people can have non English names and those are generally provided, and in fact in the book there are numerous names that are not English or any recognizable language, so all that together makes it seem like we are doing way too much work to explain away a messy narrative decision - if there is an Occam's razor for fiction, which I shall suppose there is having conceived of it, it seems much more reasonable to suppose Paul is named Paul Atreides, and Duncan Idaho is named Duncan Idaho.
Eh? Being unable to afford a house does not imply living in a dense urban region with usable public transit.
If I understand it correctly, you can do that, but you cannot call it "HDMI compliant" or otherwise use the HDMI trademark.
> Switching from globalized giants like Amazon to small specialized shops might be hard

5 years ago I would have considered it near impossible, nowadays I look everywhere else first. Specialized shops put more thought into their product selection than "anything I can dropship" and compared to modern Amazon it's far easier to find something resembling quality. They may be more expensive but in my experience paying 70 bucks once to a trustworthy vendor ends far better than paying $20-30 three times on Amazon because in reality it's always the same $5 Aliexpress stuff. The downside is that small shops sometimes have a bit more friction in the ordering process or higher delivery costs.

About a year ago I didn't even have a choice: dozens of USB-C adapters I looked at on Amazon were obviously lying about the specs in their product description, I couldn't find a single one that was even worth trying. They all just go for the lowest common denominator and hope 99% of the customers don't actually check (and are probably right, sadly). A local shop meanwhile had exactly one adapter of that kind with datasheets on the manufacturer's website and it worked.
Their 32 bit time_t ran out sooner than expected!
Yep! Learned this one the easy way! I don’t get to say that often, so I’m taking full advantage.
Interesting counterpoint, thanks.
European AI Office
I’m working with a Derek right now. Highly motivated and highly incompetent. Usually it’s one or the other. How do you deal with people like this?
I don't think real requirements are known and understood in general.

For example, consider a team that has been maintaining the system for a long time. Most or all of the people that has initially created the system have moved on to other positions or companies. Many of the people who stuck with the team did so for reasons of being experts but are also unable or unwilling to communicate well (for example, because they see the value in preserving their position of being one of the few people with expertise).

In a team like that, they might have good memory of things they have worked on recently, but not necessarily things that are working and the users take for granted. Users do not typically spend much time reaffirming the features that are working well.

One of the challenges of working with stakeholders is that close to 100% of the communication tends to be on things that are not working or are missing or they want to get done. As a developer or manager of the team, you need to find some way of answering the question "am I doing well?". Because users are of course unhappy with how the application works, but to understand levels of unhappiness you need to find some other reference (working for some other projects).

I was yesterday in a meeting with developers where they complained about how manual our deployment system is.

Our deployment system requires them to press a button to deploy a version of the application to the environment. Yes, log in and press a button.

I explained, that I worked in the past for teams that had hundred page manuals on how to compile and deploy the software and that manual would be compiled again and again for each release and the process would take from couple of days to a whole quarter.

So you need to have some perspective to be able to judge that kind of feedback.
>But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI.

Windows 8 and later were all designed by professional UI designers.

Also, every single company website or app that has absolutely atrocious UI was designed by a professional UI designer.
Ah of course, that makes sense, thanks. In their comparison, perhaps they should still mention that just to clear up any confusion.
On most countries in Europe either Good Friday and/or Easter Monday are Holidays…

Then you have Ash wednesday and some other holidays around Lent (6 weeks before Easter)…
I, for one, never expected to see something so wholesome from 4chan. It made me really contemplate the state of our society in which putting clothes on people is counterculture.
For German there is an international body. Regional language differences are officially acknowledged. For example, Swiss High German has no Esszet and in Austria January is spelled "Jenner" instead of "Januar".
Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
Before the web, the typical "client/server" application was a Windows program with a GUI that invokes queries and stored procedures directly on the database and shows the results.

If someone is tasked to port a similar application to the web, writing a PHP application that does the same is not a bad idea.
I agree, AI should not be the central focus, but when appropriately integrated, it can be highly beneficial.
Pretty cool, a js implementation of n-grams!

What is amazing to me is this: imagine that English only had 10,000 words. For each of those 10,000 words there’s 100 valid subsequent words. So there’s 1 million valid bigrams. Now if you want trigrams that takes you to 100 million, and for 4-grams it’ll be 10 billion. Just for that, you’d need 14 bytes per word and gigabytes of storage.

LLMs typically have context windows in the hundreds if not thousands. (Back in my day GPT2 had a context window of 1024 and we called that an LLM. And we liked it.) So it’s kind of amazing that a model that can fit on a flash drive can make reasonable next token prediction on the whole internet and with a context size that can fit a whole book.
fair. but I'm assuming you need such expensive (and as a result, centralised) services regardless. a small part of content discovery is "who has reacted to my content", take the case of tiktok, in which a strong content discovery mechanism helped it soar through the ranks. I suspect without such a mechanism the system won't succeed either way (as the fediverse is suffering rn), so its a problem that we will have nevertheless (same as the problem we have with search engines).
I once worked at a place that had many different specialised applications serving different needs and serving different data.

The incoming CEO who wanted to make his mark (let's call him Derek) had an impressive background in marketing decided that the right thing to do was to rationalise everything into one huge database.

They employed a small army of consultants who covered the entire office (it was a big office) in huge database schema diagrams. This took several months.
Eventually they "discovered" that the only data that the schemas had in common was a reference, a description, and a created date field.

So they immediately cancelled the project and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Haha, only kidding. Of course they didn't. The right solution was to go schemaless. Enter mongodb. They would achieve full flexibility going forward, and wouldn't have to subside a small diagramatic wallpapering industry as a bonus.

At this point I was no longer involved and just watched the slow train wreck from afar. Years later all the applications had finally been migrated to use the new OneDatabaseToRuleThemAll™ system. I don't think any new functionality was delivered over that period. There were persistent performance issues for the larger data sets. Changing anything required the code to support all previous possible schemas because they never migrated any data (it's schemaless, it's all super flexible!).

I think Derek left to go ruin somewhere else, with a huge success story on his CV.
Show HN: [OS] Animation Components that can make the dev process 80% faster
Hi Hackers, I'm Suby

The main goal behind building this library is to make websites livelier and more interactive with minimal effort, ultimately enhancing the user experience.

So, I created an open-source library featuring a collection of animated UI components. These components are mostly inspired by the innovative designs found on Awwwards websites.

The Idea:

1. Browse through the animations and choose the ones you like.
2. Take a look at the example codes provided
3. Follow the documentation instructions to set up the components in your project.
4. Voila! You're all set.

Day 1:
I shared my project on Indiehacker did well and 39 visitors.
Day 2:
I used my existing network and messaged them over twitter about the Animation Library. One of them shared the post and got almost 300 visitors.
Day 3:
I did a post on reddit on the developer community, and it got me almost 5.7k impressions and I ended up with 153 users.

I don't have a large network or following, so it's tough to market the product even if it's open-source and useful.

Right now, I'm dedicating all my efforts to expanding the library by creating as many components as possible. If you like the idea and find the library useful, please consider supporting it. I'm also eager to receive feedback for further improvements.

Opensource Library Link: ui.gloz.tech
Particularly odd since the Swedish calendar has had a lot of leap-day shenanigans, including a one-time Feb 30th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Feb...
Many many dataframes and dialects. Is this dataframe dialect similar to polars or pandas? Porting and testing is a key factor for adoption

Regex for strings and more detail on how partitioning works would be interesting
An update on the BBC's plans for Generative AI
Netscape could have been as big as Google. Instead, Microsoft ate their lunch. Now, even Firefox too has become niche.

Off-topic: anyone else remember the Mozilla browser before Firefox? Remember XUL? That was with KDE and Gnome 1.x, when the Linux desktop was just round the corner. Who needs Word when you could use StarOffice....
Daft: The Distributed Python Dataframe
I don't think that's true (see my other comment for what the patent is really about), but even when it is, Adobe's adoption means that JPEG XL is worth the supposed "risk". And Google does ship a lot of technologies that are clearly patent-encumbered. If the patent is the main concern, they could have answered so because there are enough people wondering about the patent status, but the Chrome team's main reason against JPEG XL was quite different.
Why not make a better product than slam some metaphorical hammer?
Yes, I misspelt.
LLM Red-Teaming Resistance Leaderboard
Recent discusson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39543291
OmniFocus 4 is now available
Not sure about that, there is a lot of overlap with bedouins. The harsh desert planet in which they have learned to thrive is now highly desired by outsiders because of the spice (oil).
Reinforcement learning is a completely different strategy compared to how most LLMs work.
Well, that's a problem with your lease agreement. (I assume you are talking about the lease of your apartment?)

Even the most competitive market for ISPs couldn't fix your lease agreement.

In any case, the fix for not having a competitive market is not to pile on even more red tape that makes it harder for scrappy upstarts [0], but by removing barriers to entry.

I don't know too much about the US market for ISPs. But I do know that eg satellite internet doesn't get automatically approved: there's lot of red tape star link and others have to jump through. Cut that red tape, and also make it easier for foreign companies to become ISPs.

A read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_wireless_sp... also suggest significant extra red tape. Btw, a simple idea (inspired by that Wikipedia article) would be to make both TV stations and ISPs compete on equal footing in the auction: whoever bids most gets to use the spectrum as they please. Instead of deciding by administrative fiat which parts of the spectrum to use for broadcast TV and which for mobile broadband.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction#Goals says:

> "In designing auctions for spectrum licenses, the FCC is required by law to meet multiple goals and not focus simply on maximizing receipts. Those goals include ensuring efficient use of the spectrum, promoting economic opportunity and competition, avoiding excessive concentration of licenses, preventing the unjust enrichment of any party, and fostering the rapid deployment of new services, as well as recovering for the public a portion of the value of the spectrum."

In other words, politicians and bureaucrats reserved the rights to hold beauty contests (which incumbents can win more easily, because of their existing connections), instead of running a simple auction.

I'm sure there's lots of other barriers to entry you could dismantle.

[0] To have any real teeth, that new labeling requirement needs to be contestable in court. But that means that you better have a real good lawyer to look over your label. Incumbents are much more likely to be able to afford good lawyers.
That should be a top comment here as it is most annoying and prevalent bug of all presented in this thread.
The inclusion of QOI in the lossless benchmarks made me smile. It's a basically irrelevant format, that isn't supported by default by any general-public software, that aims to be just OK, not even good, yet it has a spot on one of these charts (non-photographic encoding). Neat.
Endatabas team here. Thanks for clarifying why this post was marked as a dupe.

We recently released our Beta, including a live in-browser demo built on Wasm. It seems the OP noticed our release somewhere, but didn't mention the Beta or the Wasm build in their new post.

Take care,
-steven
Of course its personal but KDE is to me what a general purpose WM should be.
Amazing work KDE team congratulations on this achievement.
True this. In the 1990s I visited California and I had to walk out of a sandwich shop because I could not make out a single word the kid behind the counter was saying (Brit with a BBC English accent). There's not one American accent, there are dozens of them, and some of them are very challenging for me. To be fair though, part of that could be influence and merging with other languages brought in my immigrant communities from Europe over the last few hundred years.
Let me tell you about this human trait called procrastination.... actually I just have to do something first
I think as always in software, "it depends". The author appears to be assuming there are no tests on all of these paths that we will apparently miss when we migrate the code over. If so that is a problem with testing rather than migration.

Also how messy are we talking? I've seen code at a bank where a junior contractor implemented, in reams of code, his own database locking primitives, apparently unaware that the db could handle concurrent accesses on its own.

Rewrites aren't such a big issue these days, this seems a little dated. The real issue where we get painted into a corner now is architectural, say if you went really hard down the microservices route and tried to back up out of it.
Alibaba Presents EMO: Emote Portrait Alive
Don't we just need to induce new stem cells from the patient's own cells, and transplant those in?
But why did forums die?
Was it bad UX?
Were feeds of kittens more interesting and addictive than sequential debate?
In particular, Reddit etc. are many-to-one (one post, many comments), where a forum thread are sequential pages of comments.
And in that sense, perhaps there is no obligation to understand the entire conversation to participate, you just react to the OP.

If single-topic Facebook Groups / sub-reddits exist, then why is the internet "crowded"? Is the problem not solved?
Again, is the UX broken, and what's the alternative?

I'm very interested in this problem.

Any recommended literature? In particular on the topic of social dynamics, herd behavior, and what we've learned not to do from the last 20 years of forums and social networks.
Spite Houses: Built only to annoy neighbors
And yet didn't reach the Pareto frontier! It's quite obvious in hindsight though---QOI decoding is inherently sequential and can't be easily parallelized.
Acoustofluidic separation of prolate and spherical micro-objects
I was posting it because there was -20 during winter. But now I checked [0] and it seems that anomalies are even further north.

[0] https://pulse.climate.copernicus.eu
300,000 lines of code doesn't seem unattainable for a single developer in a year. If I'm in the zone, I can easily bang out 5-10k lines of code over a weekend if I know what I want to write.

But that's the thing: a lot of development involves not writing any code, as you re-think your abstractions, plan the architecture of the next bits you'll write, debug what you've written, etc.

So I don't think we're necessarily talking about speed when we say that it's harder to read code than to write it. I think reading -- and truly understanding -- code (especially when it's someone else's, or even yours, that you haven't seen in a long time) can require quite a bit more mental effort than writing code.
> I see the point of having a dynamic summary of a thread...

That was a really cool feature in Discord, for a while: The AI always completely missed the point of the discussion and made hilariously awful summaries that provided entertainment for hours.
A few notes and corrections.

I don't believe I've ever seen a "news article" anywhere that wasn't a thinly veiled advertisement.
Vimeo rolls out generative AI tools for internal training
can someone explain me, maybe with an example, what this part means:

> 6) A very important and at the same time difficult class of solutions is model result validation

Thanks.
Struct is quite inspired by Discourse. It's a unique blend of forum and chat application.

So, you know, every forum, including email, has threads and feed. But, forums are asynchronous, not designed around real-time chat. The challenge when applying concept of threads and feeds to a chat platform is that you need to make it real-time. And that's the hard thing that Struct is tackling -- with the real-time feed design that we have.

I disagree a bit about, "if it's chat, it doesn't need summary". I've been part of enough conversations which go on and on, to know that's not true. Even with the small team we run, we have threads which have like 100s of chat messages, going back and forth. Having summaries really help.

Or, at the very least, you'd appreciate the titles, so your feed would make more sense.

You can structure your threads using tags, and create feed around those tags. That'd be the equivalent of "folders". (Reminds me of when Gmail came out and people had to learn to map their labels on SMTP folders)

The difference in a Struct thread, v/s say a Discourse thread would be this. Struct emphasizes short form, real-time, back and forth communication. Discourse emphasizes long form, well-thought through, one-off posts. Former is chat, latter is forum.

This is long topic, but something I think about a lot. Designing Struct is hard exactly because of this balance between structure, knowledge and being real-time.
This is simply untrue. The mafia started outside the US long before prohibition came along. It may have given the mafia an opportunity to accelerate and expand but it certainly did not “literally create” the mafia.
I really wouldn’t go with aws for this. You can get a more powerful box for 1/3rd the price at hetzner
It works but is painfully slow. Unless you don’t need results real time I wouldn’t
I think it can be understood as an expected Pareto frontier if enough options are added to make it continuous, which is often implied in this kind of discussions.
Sure, why not. Since BMI is used at the population level some outliers don't make it wrong.
I think studies show the effect with cake and edibles too