skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built an app to use a QR code as my doorbell
I didn’t have a doorbell before (multiple reasons) and my house feels unwelcoming without one. So I built a doorbell app that uses a QR code - visitors scan the QR code to ring the doorbell and I get notified on my phone.

Here is an example of the QR code I have on my door. You can scan it and say hello: https://www.thebacklog.net/img/2024/10/show-hn.png

This was also a great excuse to build my first app for Android and iPhone.

I’d love to get some feedback before I spend more time polishing the app. Please try it out and feel free to ask me any questions! No logins or accounts needed.
Our industry has few innovative ideas in past decades ranging from small to large. Rust, React, Tailwind, Typescript, Nix come to mind. All these did things differently enough to seem weird at first.

Flutter is hands down the best DX product with a beautiful language. It is modern Qt and destined for great success given it doesn't get sent to Google's graveyard.

As for the fork, I don't see anyway it not significantly diverging from upstream because bug fixes might involve refactoring which would make difficult to pull in upstream changes.
I think what you're saying is right but the explanation is backwards. I think of "science fiction" as being fiction in which the science is held constant--the universe works more or less the same way, but with humanity and their technology exploring a different landscape of the possibility space. So the science is real, not fictional. The plot is fiction.

Of course this assumes we're talking about hard sci-fi, which doesn't include stuff like Star Wars.
Industrial revolution: roughly 1760 onwards if you count agricultural revolution as part of it.

Middle ages: 500-1500

Henry George, 1839-1897, is indeed part of the industrial revolution. @trashtester and I were both comparing what happened before the industrial revolution to what happened in it.

The valuation of land before still wasn't Georgism: the land was assumed to have productive output, and if someone didn't pay taxes based on the assumption, perhaps you couldn't because the land wasn't that productive, that's their problem.

And you know what else happened in the industrial revolution? Karl Marx and Adam Smith, the former placing workers rather than land at the root, and the latter placing capital rather than land at the root. As with HG, neither liked rent-seekers, and they were both more influential in the "solutions" than Henry George. (Not that he wasn't, they were just more).

Not that Henry George could possibly have foreseen even mere Earth orbitals as "land", let alone disassembling the moon into a swarm of robots that outnumber humans by more than humanity outnumbers a single human and which don't need to land on Earth which is good because if they did we'd all die just from them landing. Can't blame him for that, the difficulty seeing clearly this far ahead is why some call it "the singularity" (though I prefer "event horizon").
You can start a new theme with marmite and remove the little JS it has to switch white/dark modes.
The normal price when buying locally or from china seems to be 200$/kwh.
It does, however, have bearing. Despite how common the practice may be in the corporate world, developing a framework without any regard to the user experience thereof is pretty suboptimal
For me the Heisig method was a great help for learning the first few hundred kanji. Knowing those made it way easier to learn to read words containing said kanji, because the meaning of the kanji more often than not helped remembering what the word meant, and, importantly, recognizing the word.

But after a few hundred kanji the system starts to get so complicated, with more and more elaborate and contrived mnemonics, that IMO it isn't worth continuing that approach. But that's fine, at that point you're already on board and can learn the rest from reading real texts.

(The negative of abandoning Heisig after the first few hundred kanji is that you also stop writing kanji at that point.. which adds to my difficulty of hand-writing Japanese)
Ahh good to know, thanks. PBT/PBAT is actually one of the "alloying" additives used to create PLA "Plus/Tough/Meta", as it increases hydrophilicity, deflection temperature, flow and ductility. Hopefully it's used at a low enough ratio that it doesn't get smelly!
Very early on I took pains to figure out what toolchains gave me traction and which tools produced waste complexity.

I think a lot of the excitement about using LLMs to code is because a lot of teams are stuck in local optima where they need to use noisy tools, and there's a lot of de-noised output available to train LLMs.

This is progress in searching and mitigating bad trade-offs, not in advancing the state of the art.
Can it read the scribble of my doctor? If so this is groundbreaking in the medical data entry space.
Yes, like Saturn's rings.
I’m actively data-mining OpenAI, they get a bunch of code that they have anyways because they have GitHub, I get arbitrary scope to plot their quantization or whatever with examples.

Flip it on em. You’re the one being logged asshole.

https://youtu.be/un3NkWnHl9Q?si=VOnH2krJkJLRA2BQ
Case study: optimization of weirdly picked bad plan
It’s a bit unsettling to see Ubuntu demo stuff on Windows (I know that Flutter looks and behaves the same on Linux, but still).
I'd like it the other way around and want to see Flutter APIs for other languages (lets say Kotlin). Personally I feel no desire to learn Dart to use it only for Flutter.
Enhance your development workflow with DevOps testing services designed for testers. Our TestOps solutions bridge the gap between DevOps and testing, ensuring proactive testing rather than reactive responses. Discover how TestOps can identify what DevOps might overlook, providing critical insights for your projects. Learn about essential features like real options testing and seamless integration that elevate your testing strategy. Experience the transformative power of TestOps and its unique benefits for your team.

Find more information on DevOps testing: https://zapple.tech/blog/types-of-automation-testing/testops....

Key Points:

- The transition from DevOps to TestOps emphasizes proactive testing methods.
- TestOps offers features that help identify gaps in traditional DevOps approaches.
- Effective integration of TestOps can enhance overall development efficiency.
This is also a good example of why we teach things that might seem "useless". You just don't know what someone will find useful in their life. The teachers probably didn't even think of video games having physics and needing to understand it for that. In my uni class I think I was the only one to use forces and masses (and therefore acceleration) instead of just speed. I initially used speed but then my school learnings came flooding back and I did a full physics model (it's really easy if all your objects are rigid bodies on perfect planes). I'm actually pretty sure I've used everything I've ever learnt in school at one time or another. But the the meme amongst normies is you don't use any of it...
I'm going to the US in a couple of weeks and I'm already abhorring the prospect of spending some time looking at the specific tipping requirements of the state I'm going to, to then spend a week awkwardly guessing if I'm tipping enough, too much, or offending someone in the process; while having uncomfortable feelings about the people serving me food, drink, tour guidance, etc. (on the one hand because they all seem to be hunting for my money and being a foreigner, they might be hoping that I will tip too much, on the other hand because they might be underpaid and I might be an asshole to them if I tip too little).

I suppose people who have lived there all their life just don't notice it, but for me as an outsider the amount of stress and awkwardness that the tipping culture produces in daily life is ludicrous.
So far as I can tell, the A+B strategy described therein is exactly the principle that Stockfish -- and more or less every other chess engine -- was built on prior to AlphaZero, after which the top engines moved to NN derived evaluation criteria for what is still a pruning tree search.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix#/media/File%... is a good visual of (many of, not all) the various versions of UNIX and when they were released. BSD was first released in 1978. United States v. AT&T was implemented in 1984 (judgment 1982) GNU was first created in 1983.
Profiles available on my Oneplus 7 Pro and my Pixel 8 (that is running GrapheneOS though).
I think you are still thinking just on another level. E.g. you go on a walk, you fantasize about everything you are going to do, and it builds up in your head, then you come back, it is all in your head and AI will help you get it out quickly, but you have already solved the problem for yourself and so you are also able to validate quickly what the AI does.
As others have stated I don’t believe this is a good faith definition of passive income. What do you do with your time now that you don’t have to work? If you decided to sleep all day and spend money on consumption, I would call you ill. At some point you’ll probably want to do something productive, not because you want to get paid but because that’s just what people tend to do at some point.

I do think a society where this is the only type of work being done is possible. It’s not free money or perpetual motion, just efficient at matching people’s natural inclinations to demand (and automation could fill in the gaps).
Sounds like your issue wasn't with factory resetting, but with the anti-theft features.

The factory reset process is simple. Proving ownership (and transfer of ownership) for getting around anti-theft lockouts is not.
If you have a recent machine, the actual developer experience isn't too bad. It's just not a language for language purists (was it ever?).

I'm enough of a purist to be annoyed whenever I see the "expression took too long to type check" error. (I think bidirectional type inference isn't worth it with Swift)

The gaggle of verbose pointer types makes me want to switch to C++ whenever I have to deal with memory directly.

As the article mentions, a bunch of features were added for the sake of SwiftUI. Function builders allow SwiftUI's syntax to be minimal. They allow you to write:

VStack {
SomeView()
AnotherView()
}

instead of something like

VStack(
SomeView(),
AnotherView()
)

Given the rather bad (still!) error messages you get with SwiftUI that seem to be a result of function builders, I'd say it wasn't worth it. At least I get fewer of the "couldn't produce a diagnostic, please file a bug" errors than I used to.

Then there are property wrappers, which wrap struct/class fields with get/set code (IIRC Lattner didn't like the property wrappers). They've been partially replaced in SwiftUI by macros. The @Observable macro (probably the most widely used one) decorates your class with code that notifies listeners (almost always SwiftUI) of changes. I'd be curious to see what SwiftUI would look like without property wrappers (or macros).

I think they had a missed opportunity to really add robust updating of views in response state changes. Currently it's still relatively easy to not have your SwiftUI views update because your data model uses some object that isn't @Observable.

I wrote a UI library inspired by SwiftUI, but in Rust [1], and of course I couldn't add anything to the language, and more experienced Rust programmers discouraged me from using macros. So it can be done without all the extra stuff Swift added.

[1] https://github.com/audulus/rui
They've been selling something which doesn't exist for years, as a fixed fee, or subscription. Most large companies end up walking a tightrope of getting away with as much as possible. But FSD can only be described as a lie, a euphemism if you're feeling generous [1].

It's a company worth unthinkable amounts of money. Most people would have less patience with a guy running a Patreon in his spare time who had claimed for years his supporters would have a product soon, let alone an organisation swimming in funding (Twitter debacle aside).

[1] https://www.pocket-lint.com/is-tesla-fsd-worth-it/
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion too fast. We don't know yet what consequences years of vaping unregulated vape can do.
One of the most revolutionary AI releases, what's are you using "computer use" for?
Nah, im good
Why should he give money to someone over literally any other person in the same establishment or outside of it? What does that have to do with "the man"?
I do really think ACOUP is a great comparisson.

It's not a newsletter, but it still hits the spaced repetition point. It doesn't have the advantage of following news, but it makes up for this by having a huge 'backlog' of things to write about. And it still has the 'known outcomes' point, because largely the outcome of history is known. And on the open questions, there isn't much progress, but there are themes to hearken back to. So even there you still have spaced repetition.
X11 != the lowest common denominator implementation of X11. Nor was everyone using it with big heavy compositors (honestly, the only reason I used a compositor for years was intel removing sync circuitry from their iGPUs).

And Wayland did not stop requiring multiple IPCs, in fact it mandates them as several features require passing data by secondary channels, not just for Portals et al - some don't even have any described way to reliably pass the information that I have seen (like how to pass around cookie to let one application activate window of another? Or maybe the spec is such a mess that I'm looking at completely wrong place when I tried to fix ability to reliably switch between applications without extending compositor).

And yes, the architecture is more complicated in practice, otherwise it might have reached parity with what X11 did after as many years - like input method support. Unfortunately it's so broken that you have multiple versions of it in practice, it requires extra IPC in practice, and at least in my experience just does not work.
I've tested it for:
1. portfolio analysis 1. scrape portfolio 2. analyse it with ffn
2. make a meal plan, add all items to shopping basket from local supermarket within budget
I think it is not the boilerplate of the programming language necessarily, but it is more to do with boilerplate of common business logic. E.g. even say form validation, I have done it countless of times and I can't be bothered to write out rules for each field again, but AI can easily generate me Zod schema with reasonable validation based on the database model or schema. It probably does better validation rules than I would do quickly on my first try.

Then I use these validations both in the backend and frontend.
Yeah... that's my experience with Scala all around - it's abysmally slow, especially if you use any sort of "metaprograming"... (one of the reasons I stay clear of the language)
For me, it’s the bombs. Real life bombs don’t beep or blink a red LED.
Documents are 1:sqrt(2) so side by side would be 2:sqrt(2). For code I find closer to 9:16 to be optimal. Two side by side would be 18:16, also squareish.

You can slice 16:9 into multiple appropriate ratio windows and the limitation becomes pixel density. The ultrawide wastes the extra pixels where you don't see them. Assuming you need at least retina pixel density you won't find it in any reasonably priced ultrawide. It's also just not feasible with current copper cables.
Either way the inbuilt update system had zero way of updating itself or the OS to something that worked and it resulted in a painful few hours of stepping the system up through various OS versions downloaded on other devices until it got to the end of the downloadable versions, and from there on it was inbuilt app for updates only. No downloadable OS. Which would indicate since you can no longer download the latest OS iso's eventually they will block the last available Iso's one from working on their app store and the devices will be bricks.

This is shite design. Let's not kid ourselves here. This is one of the wealthiest companies on earth and thy control their entire hardware and software stack from the ground up. If they can't keep stuff sorted so when an old system plugs in it atleast limp mode upgrades it to the latest offering that system was supported with, this isn't because it's something that's impossible, it's because they don't want to.

If community non profit managed linux distros can get installed on 15 year old machines and just you know, sort out the drivers for the ancient ass tech in them without the user doing any more than running the update manager to hell apple couldn't have worked out the same.

It's a load of crap sold under the guise of security. Some nefarious actor wants to dl updates from their servers for ancient tech? Why in the world should they not be able to? Their update servers shouldn't have any services attached other than being a glorified dl directory.it shouldn't even be something they care about because there is zero risk attached.
Explicit Sync, yes. The reason why I consider previous implicit sync a bug is that it was essentially unfounded expectation - nothing guaranteed you'd get a magic mutex in the sky that synchronized renders for you, and in fact, you do not want one for maximum performance. Lack of explicit sync also essentially meant common multi-gpu setups would be broken.
In general, e.g. to place the files and their metadata like checksum, access rights, image previews, foreign keys right next to each other.

In the authors use case, it might also be easier to drop the executable and one big database file on a random shared file store in the company network instead of many small files and a database file for metadata.

And it might be faster to read files from db than from fs https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html
Flutter has much bigger scope than PHP Foundation. It's more fair to compare PHP Foundation scope to Dart Lang and Dart SDK. Flutter scope on top of that is Flutter Engine, Flutter Widgets, Flutter Framework, Flutter Packages, Dev Tools (IntelliJ + VSCode). PHP also support desktops/server environments instead of Flutter 6 platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS, Web). Making crossplatform UI toolkit is the most labor intensive - PHP Foundation is not developing that. PHP had also 2 decades ahead of development.
Ruby is exactly as versatile as all those other languages you list. It was made before Rails was, and it can do everything eg Python can. It's not very popular anymore outside Rails but eg lots of people did APIs in Ruby using stuff like Sinatra. I personally did lots of CLI utilities in Ruby. It's really nice for stuff like that.
You mean the best mobile phone OS that we ever had? Unfortunately disastrously managed and then squandered, but still.

Also, Vista was a mess, but it was ambitious and it laid the foundation for 7 and it was only around for a few years before being replaced. Unlike 10, where Nadella has doubled down on the worst choices and even worse ones were made going into 11 (HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SET DEFAULT APPLICATIONS NOW, THIS IS FUCKING NONSENSE).
We should look at statistics, not your anecdotal case. I’m sure there are plenty of people like you who are pretty smart, but perhaps not a genius. Statistically that is an outlier and most people are doing worse than their parents.

Having the qualities you’ve listed does not automatically entitle you or earn you rewards. Frequently there is extra buffer with having generational wealth to help give leg up and extra chances to do better.
The Dart community tries to extend itself outside Flutter, there’s Serverpod for backend development for example.

It’s the Dart Team that is focused on Flutter.
Yes. The article quotes two US companies that don't actually ship batteries in quantity. The big players working on this are CATL, BYD, Samsung, and Toyota, all of which already make batteries in large quantities.

The current situation seems to be that solid state batteries have been made as prototypes and work, but volume production is hard to do. Various approaches are being tried. One of the big players says the technology maturity is currently at 4 (technology validated in lab) on a scale of 1-9.

Huge amounts of money are being spent on this. It's probably going to work, but it's not clear if it will be cheap.
I know your comment is in earnest and I don't mean to make fun of you, but there is something so funny in our Americanised world where everything is reduced to "it's not you, you just need to buy the correct gizmo that will solve all your problems."

Fountain pens enthusiasts are like music gear or mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, that justify their hobby and believe spending on the next shiny thing is the key to fulfil their whatever, until the next shiny thing arrives.

The thing is... if one dislikes or doesn't care about writing that they have basically forgotten how to, it is not spending money on a fancy writing implement that is gonna turn them into a medieval monk scribe.
I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
I guess it's some sort of longevity paradox.

It lasted so long, even after the warning, that I never got any urgency.
> Steven Levitt's whole schtick IMO. He finds contrarian results, strips out any nuance, and presents them as if they cover a much broader domain than they really do

Isn't that pretty similar to what you just did? Reduced his entire ouvre to a snappy criticism without nuance and then used it to dismiss him.
> Back to the topic at hand: Tipping is a ridiculous notion that the wealthy can see through, while the rest of us are too brainwashed to objectively analyze

Oh yes, the wealthy are superior to us unwashed masses in every way. How I wish I could see through and objectively analyse, but my bank account won't allow that.
Someone needs to come up with a interactive shell first, one that is comparable in usability. Then we can think about replacing the unix shell.

I tried both python and lua interactively, but they are a pain when it comes to handling files. You have to type much more to get the same things done.
Well people don't go out looking for a Meth dealer because they suddenly got the idea of using Meth. It doesn't go like that. You go to parties with friends and they use Meth and they introduce you to it and eventually connect you to a dealer.
> An anecdote I've heard is a lot of R&D is focused on these at the moment as they have a higher energy to weight ratio compared to lithium chemistries so are idea for "disposable" use cases such as suicide bomb drones.

You could use normal fuel-burning engines for that, I'd suppose. Or rockets, depending.

> , 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version

The 50k case is not that recent (FLIR Lepton). Not sure about the 0.33MP. The 24x32 is very cheap and as you say, has enough res for some ok applications. I've been intrigued by it and wondered why FLIR seems to still have a monopoly over higher res detectors.