skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “The merchants of complexity will try to convince you that you can’t do anything yourself these days,” wrote David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails. “You can’t do auth, you can’t do scale, you can’t run a database, you can’t connect a computer to the internet. You’re a helpless peon who should just buy their wares. No. Reject.”

Such a beautiful quote, and really describe well my experience. For the past few months I've been in a team that keeps trying to pull dependencies and library of components for the simplest of things, and trying to argue my point kinda in vain, to the point that I'm starting to get cranky and rant-y about the subject[1].

Need a header on top of our application? Let's use a Angular Material component, why would you code it yourself? Need to display stuff in a grid, oh we better should center our project around Ionic so we can use ion-grid.

More than 'merchant of complexity', I thing that a huge culprit is the need for content marketing, and so any new thing in a framework become the theme of multiple conference, and the obligatory Medium posts explaining the new stuff (in itself, not necessarily a bad thing), but which often tend to snowball into "Method X is obsolete, why you should all port your code using newfangled method Y".

And now, I have a colleague working in an Angular app that keeps on rewriting stuff and wrap everything with signals. Signals can be good sometime, I'm not against angular signals in itself, but he's just taking dead-simple code and making it more complicated because apparently now everything Angular should be about signal. At least I'm away from the part of the React ecosystem that keeps trying to re-invent the cascading part of CSS but with Typescript in the mix. shudders.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40476275
Not even that is true in my knowledge. For example a particular benchmark [1] demonstrates that many popular libraries benefit much from minification even after gzip compression, with the saving ranging from 35% to 75%. Sure, a small library would be fine without any minification or even compression, but otherwise minification is clearly beneficial.

[1] https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks
I have been looking into mini pcs. The niche I want is a USB c powered hand sized pc. I have only found two on Amazon so far, one has a small screen and another close to the size of a small dock. But they are both underpowered with Celeron processors.

I just need something that i can take from one desk to another that carry docking stations.
Unless the Linux developer community at large requested Rust in the kernel, this is good news.
It is very cool, but I think some version of this feature has been around for years? This commit is from 7 years ago, and it looks like the code originates back to 2010.

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/v2.9.0/docs/replay.txt

That said, I was not aware of it until I saw this post, and I definitely want to play around with it.
Yes, it's very convenient to be able to use SQL with your massively parallel commercial database (Oracle, Snowflake, etc.) and then again with the results sets (Pandas, etc.). Interestingly, it's a concept that was implemented 35 years ago in SAS (link below) but is just now gaining traction in today's "modern" software (e.g., via DuckDB).

USING THE NEW SQL PROCEDURE IN SAS PROGRAMS (1989)
https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings-archive...
The Sql procedure uses SQL to create, modify, and retrieve data from SAS data sets and views derived from those data sets. You can also use the SOL procedure to join data sets and views with those from other database management systems through the SAS/ACCESS software interfaces.
Am not the OP, however, I have similar observations too. I noted that people who read fiction often handle various life's situations better. My hypothesis is that this would be because they get broader exposure to life's situations than what non-fiction books deliver in practice.

I wish there were a lot more non-fiction books dealing with common and uncommon life's situations, which step out of the theory towards what actually happens in practice.
There are still sites out there that require third party cookies to function and it was only in the last few years you could consider getting away with this and not breaking a ton of sites.
> They literally said "spreading your religion" at the very start of their critique.

And that critique is near the end of all the people who asked questions or made comments. So no, the presenter wasn't "immediately stacked" when making that presentation.
YES!!!! Usable ebay interface - very nice!

would be great to have a filter for country of origin/shipping
I'm using this just for transactional emails. I have another solution for marketing emails.

I was using SendGrid's WYSIWYG templates for many emails, but I'm re-doing them in my own code so that I can more easily change providers in the future. I'll just need the ability to send HTML emails.

I'm trying out MailTrap.
Yup.

Still wondering where AI is gonna get its raw information from in a few years when 90% of websites have given up updating.
GNUStep still looks pretty much stuck in the pack.

Okish if only pretending it is Next step clone, macOS is probably still around Panther or Snow Leopard.

Window Maker was my favourite window manager, until I went back to Windows 7 as main OS.
JSON Schema with Speed
Sure, and what would happen if the gov ran the system? It's a 300bn fix. The only difference would be that you wouldnt know about it.

Thankfully MPs are incentivised to publish this stuff against private companies.
> The keyboard feels awful

So sad. I had a Toughbook CF-30 and its keyboard was one of the best I ever used on a laptop. Not mechanical, but it had a bounce to it that made it easy to type for a long time without getting tired.

In the next iteration (CF-31), they changed it to a chicklet style keyboard like those common on laptops nowadays, and there was no magic anymore.

Another think I loved about my CF-30 was how bright the screen could get.

Agree on the trackpad, that thing was small and never worked right.
Introducing Appointment By Thunderbird
Look into PantherX linux. https://www.pantherx.org/

It is based on gnu guix. It comes with non-free softwares by default.

It also has GUI package installer and some form of GUI config.

If you want support, you can pay for that, too.

I think pantherx can be easier than ubuntu or fedora due to GUI-centric approach and reproducibility.
Well, that’s a risk you take as an investor.

In your example, a stock went up 10x overnight. Mature stocks don’t do that, so you must be investing in something very risky.

What a tax would do is incentivize you to realize some of your gains to pay the tax. If you don’t want to do that and would rather keep gambling, then you’re free to do that. If the stock then crashes and you lose all your money that’s on you.

Obviously you have to think about implementation to make sure you’re not charging a tax that people can’t pay, but that can be figured out.
It baffles me why people would be so unnecessarily critical on someone's project they are showing off in a show-and-tell fashion. It's a neat project with value.
It struck me as a weird article. For one thing it's not a healthy or rational "market" at this time in that investment is flowing into it far beyond the actual revenue or realized benefits. It continues to defy all the principles of microeconomics, thus I'd avoid using that word in that situation.

It's also a little weird to me that he goes to lesswrong for answers (I'd trust copilot more) and also that lesswrong caught up with my opinions from a year and a half ago.

That is, OpenAI has no sustainable advantage or "moat" for ChatGPT-4. Adding more coefficients won't improve performance dramatically because LLMs are structurally inadequate to solve many problems. (Read an introductory algorithms book) On the other hand we didn't understand how these things work at all a year and a half ago (we understand a lot more now but less than we will in another year and a half) and there is a huge amount to do in terms of space/time performance optimization. So it was clear to me that models from the low end were going to catch up.

The "structurally inadequate" problem can be attacked by adding elements to the architecture such as tools (let it write a Python program if it needs to sort a list) and RAG but the book Godel, Escher, Bach points out that sticking together multiple problem solving strategies won't fundamentally solve certain problems that are intrinsic to problems such as the intractability of logic + first-order arithmetic.
Sonnet 3.5 has a max output of 8192 tokens[0].

I break most tasks down into parts. Aider[1] is essential to my workflow and helps with this as well, and it's a fantastic tool to learn from. In fact, as of v0.52 I'm able to remove some of my custom code to run and test.

Started playing around with adding Nous[2] as well (aider is its code editing agent), but not enough that I'm using it practically yet.

[0] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/about-claude/models

[1] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider/

[2] https://github.com/TrafficGuard/nous
Jenny did a really good video of her experience there...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4&t=2969s&pp=ygUPa...
You're able to rectify the "injustice" for at least one dishwasher by writing a check... if you truly believe this
I wonder if the next step for AI companies (those in control of search, at least) will be to start refusing to index content from companies that have opted out, in an effort to sway their decisions.
I prefer that too. Now to get data for all the listed CPUs!
... and the Juicero type failure is worse from the perspective of most investors.
Video Game Secrets That Went Undiscovered for Years
Here's a version that keeps closer to the original text while fixing the main typos:

Very happy with https://supermaven.com. Switched to it from Copilot, and it's faster and has a much better understanding of what I'm trying to do. I think it uses a git diff + some other stuff that it feeds into the context window that makes it so that when I'm working on a new feature, when i’m creating say the 3rd it understands what I'm going to write even if the file is empty.
Well, personally I think that Meta is taking the threat of regulator action very seriously. You only have to look at how Google and Apple are in trouble.

Owning WhatsApp, Threads and Instagram makes them a big target for breakup.
And an open system defuses that significantly.
Only thing I'd like to suggest is an option to search for Windows 11 compatible machines. With MS cutting off support for Windows 10 next year, making sure a machine has the system requirements needed.

However, I have seen a lot of sellers install W11 on non-compatible devices using a few tricks. I'm not sure how you check that in a search tool, but great job otherwise! I'll definitely be using this in the future (and I think you should pass everything through affiliate links! Pay for the upkeep at least)
True, but the JVM is so cumbersome that I will use something else instead.
Would have loved to see this site a few months back. I ended up buying Dell optiplex refurbs thinking they were minis, but they were big lol.

Edit: Nevermind - mine are the same size as many of the listings here with DVD drives. I was thinking of micros.
Why do C devs even have to be 'collaborative' about Rust modules? The latter would typically ingest C APIs, most likely via bindgen, making C code the "source of truth" about what the API is - because Rust modules are self-contained and C is the only stable ABI that Rust supports. All the type-checking smarts that the video talks about are purely on the Rust side. If a new 'raw' low-level C API is needed to build better smarts on the Rust side (which seems to be what's involved in some of the fs proposals) that can just be a self-contained proposal, with very lightweight changes on the C side of the code. This whole thing looks like a tempest in a teapot to me - and to be clear, this absolutely includes the Linux dev's complaints, which are extremely poor form.
On the other hand you could argument that a dishwasher ain't worth all that much. You can basically toss them back out on the street and grab the next yokol and the operation contiues just fine. Chef and waiter? Not so much.
ILearningEngines: An AI SPAC with Artificial Partners and Artificial Revenue
What's your plan for independence? I am thinking of doing the same but I am slightly worried that it may get worse than regular employment at some point.
Take out the internet? Does Putin want a war with the rest of the world? :D

No, I don’t think so.
> Does your C++ have a garbage collector? No?

You can have GC in C++, completely pauseless GC (https://github.com/pebal/sgcl). The only one in the world, even Java doesn't have anything like it. The GC support in the C++ standard was useless, so it was removed.
Ibis allows this with custom datatypes.
Yes, there are several industrial applications that use a solar concentrator to drive a turbine engine or a Stirling engine.

I'm not sure it's a viable way to produce electricity on a small scale because:

- high thermodynamic efficiency requires high temperature difference

- photovoltaic panels are mass-produced and increasingly efficient

Personally, I think small scale concentrated solar power is most useful for applications that require direct heat (cooking, desalination, foundries).

In these cases, photovoltaics have a lower efficiency and a shorter lifetime.
Websites like this talk to my heart. Strong early 2000s vibes of nerds just putting it out there.

Love this, thank you!
It’s the latter. Why give away something that the most valuable public company in the world wants?
https://www.pantherx.org/ might be what you want.

It adds non-free softwares, GUI package installer, and GUI config to gnu guix.

pantherx also allows you to pay for support for however many people you want.
More tools should be built on ASTs, great work!

I'm still waiting for the AST level version control tbh
This is really nice, and I just did this analysis myself.

It seems like the tool is missing some of the better deals, like Optiplex 3070 with 9th gen i5s for ~$100, entire working system included (this is what I ended up buying).
Datastructures for External Memory
People Wanted
> the legal situation that you need a license to distribute binaries that belong to them

Legally speaking, they don't own the binaries but just have a temporary monopoly.
Good news for whom? The mental safe space of old time kernel developers? Or good new for users who will continue to have to deal with kernel panics and other memory issues.
For monthly donations, the minimum is actually 3 EUR. And it's super easy to do from the US - just enter a CC number and billing address. What would be a lower bar?

For smaller amounts, I can imagine it would be better to save them some overhead and donate annually. They have a button for doing 10 EUR per year if you still wanted to help out. You can choose any amount that's at least 3 EUR. I imagine even 3 EUR per year would help! Here's the site if you can't find it: https://donorbox.org/kde-community
I love that his exists without even being in the need of it!
You changed the important part to ...: "The U.S. government has introduced restrictions prohibiting access to certain software products and services to any person in Russia."
That makes it literally not free - it was paid for with the opportunity cost of the ad.
Good call, I'll encode the state in the URL.

Did not come across a lot of Intel VPros in my searches. What's the use case for them?
Firewall rules: not as secure as you think
I'm not gonna lie. Opening a massive Toughbook in a classroom full of puny Macbook Air and other ultrabooks felt GREAT, and worth lugging the 8-pound behemoth in my book bag. Plus, free rucking workout.
The mid to late xscale era got very weird. Between the 90s and early 2000s handheld processors were growing in leaps and bounds. At the height in 2004 devices like the Dell x50v were shipping with 624mhz xscale chips with a dedicated GPU with 16MB of VRAM. Then they just stumbled. Later devices dropped the maximum clock speed, dropped the dGPU, even dropped the screen resolution from 640x480 to 320x240.
I went down this rabbit hole earlier this year. Best I came up with was to calculate the TDP at max for the whole year. Full TDP is unrealistic, but it gets us a worst-case "max running cost" . Energy for me is roughly $0.12/kWh, so the yearly max running cost for a 35W TDP is $36.79, 65W is $68.33, and the 95W would be $99.86.

I ended up going with a HP EliteDesk 800 G5 Mini I5-9500T (35W) off of Ebay for $100 and it does the stuff I need it to do just fine. According to my current monthly power usage graph, it's averaged 7W which accounts for $0.61 of this month's power bill.
> And an open system defuses that significantly.

I'm not sure that it has as much of an impact as you think it does. Threads would not be a significant target for regulator action regardless of openness—it doesn't have enough share of the market to be interesting. Meanwhile, the openness of Threads does nothing to alleviate the concerns of their dominance in every non-microblogging social media category.
I'm not sure that there are any "secret codes" in metroid. There's an interesting analysis of the password system here https://youtu.be/wiOalxCQ1Mw and I think there's just a lot of coincidence and a permissive password system that result in "secret codes"
This is really cool! Definitely going to check it out
> The coolant temperature limit is a design issue. There are known designs that avoid it, e.g. situate the plant on a larger river or body of water that would provide enough cooling water even on the hottest of days, or use cooling towers instead of river water.

> Conversely, it's not obvious how you design a wind turbine that can provide power when there's no wind.

Sure it is, and you've pretty much said the solution yourself on a previous comment with a different context:

> You're talking about an individual nuclear plant rather than the whole grid.

Just as all the reactors can have a correlated failure for whatever reason, so too can all the wind. But wind and nuclear aren't the only systems.

I'm not going to investigate if the wind really does go to zero on both sides of the Rockies — though that does seem unlikely, I'm willing to just agree it does for the argument.

Dunkelflaute — lack of both wind and solar — normally only last 24 hours even in the much smaller Germany. Of course you have to size your systems to cope with the once-every-generation events: how long this is is a matter of observation, and I can't be bothered to download and process the satellite data to find that out for the USA for this comment (but it's not hard, that was part of my first proper job about 20 years ago for unrelated research about squid). Also, while high-altitude winds are not normally affected in the same way as surface winds, and flying turbines have been demonstrated to take advantage of this, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiteGen I'm just going to ignore them here.

The USA's current average (annual) electrical draw is 455.3 gigawatts, while the installed hydro capacity has a nameplate capacity of 102.8 GW with another 12 GW known. How long could they provide this, I do not know, but these things do already exist, and that's already a quarter of your instantaneous needs all by themselves.

Batteries exist, and are getting very cheap: while production is currently limited, the supply needed for the electrification of cars is by itself enough to get over any Dunkelflaute — the total need per year only requires an average household to cycle a car-sized battery 1-3 times. And that's without any support from hydro.

And the maximum size for a grid isn't a country: the USA, despite Texas being awkward, already has some interconnects to Canada and Mexico. While I'm not suggesting it's likely or coming any time soon, China has been massively expanding in many areas including the production of aluminium, and they now produce enough by themselves to build every three years a complete global power grid with one ohm resistance. They've already suggested connecting themselves to South America — if they do or don't is more a political decision about soft power projection rather than anything else, same as the Belt and Road initiative.

And that would work without any support from hydro or batteries, and would still work just fine even if you only went one of wind and PV rather than diversifying.
Tried to donate using Paypal and got this error:

Donations to this recipient aren't supported in this country
Return to K Desktop Environment e.V.

Funny that in this monetization-est period of tech, easily giving money away is still not a solved problem :)
I’ve recently switched over to nixos and hyprland and couldn’t be happier. Linux UIs are stagnating all all seem to be coalescing around GNOMEs styling which I don’t particularly for. Hyprland with nix breaths new life into linux for me.
Optimize your workflow with Git stash
Closed-loop transfer enables artificial intelligence to yield chemical knowledge
Show HN: Voggle, a unique word game with handcrafted puzzles and hidden themes
>>ChatGPT is trained well enough on all things AWS

It was scary to me how to chatting with GPT or Claude would give me information which was a lot more clear than what I could deduce after hours of reading AWS documentation.

Perhaps, the true successor to Google search has arrived. One big drawback of Google was asking questions that can't be converted to a full long conversation.

To that end. LLM chat is the ultimate socratic learning method tool till date.
Ibis still supports over a dozen backends, including DuckDB and DataFusion and Polars (all great single-node OLAP query engine options that are often faster than trying something distributed) and PySpark, Snowflake, BigQuery, Trino, ClickHouse, Druid, and more

plenty of options for fast and scalable computation. in the fullness of time, it would be great to have a Dask backend but it'd need to be rewritten to use dask-expr, which isn't something the core Ibis team has the capacity for
Maybe: Open Source OS for Your Personal Finances
the data needs a bit of a cleanup. I see N100 showing up with "Intel 100", Intel Alder Lake N100" and just "3.4 GHz" in various places.
Worked for me right now (from the US).
nice to see some retro vibes on HN!
Cat observes itself.
Not being snarky, but when would "new physics" just became a "theory"? These ideas aren't all that new.
Hey did this and I thought it was a good idea. Glad this is getting picked up on by other email services.
eBay uses a 'best match' sort on the results, perhaps that's why it was missed. What did you search for when you found this one?
I'm grateful to Web Design Museum for keeping the history of web design alive. I love waking up and seeing something new from days gone by that rekindles that spark.
More like not invented here syndrome and lack of experience. Puts it pressure off on your resume to create yet another project which gets stars
Because they shouldn't be "C devs" but "kernel devs" with a common goal?
Great feature! Would love to see this in Outlook (only option at work), gmail and others. Is this proprietary or some kind of extension of the email spec? Cheers
Probably less than he paid in retainer for the best lawyers France has to offer.