skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(I hope this thread doesn't go anywhere. I just feel like complaining.)

There's been some inflection point where the desktop version is now often worse than the web app. And you can't blame web tech because the web app in the browser is usually quite good.

WhatsApp on macOS has catastrophic bugs for years. I regularly can't focus the input field and have to relaunch it. Until recently, its image modal would regularly bug out and leave behind a global dimmed window that eats all input so you can't even close it.

Poe's desktop app is less polished than poe.com. Off the top of my head, its desktop app scrollbar becomes so tiny that you can't even click and drag it.

ChatGPT's desktop app is simply worse than its web app or was when I stopped using it months ago for that reason.

Youtube Music is another pointless desktop app since it's just the web app inside a web view, though at least it embraces that.

It's like the only thing going for these desktop apps is that you can alt-tab to them individually. It's time to come up with a trivial one-click first-class OS-level way to turn websites into apps and put all these sad desktop apps out of their misery.

Oh well, it's come at a good time because I've mostly soured to the idea of having to install software at all. 90% can be run in a sandboxed browser away from my file system.
But it’s TCP that’s holding us back. You can get around it up with multiple range requests, but even then TCP is a bit chatty to be as efficient as theoretically possible.

What we need is an open-source Aspera. I gave it a shot a long time ago, but hammering the bugs out of something like that is really hard.
Video compression for mere mortals (2023)
Ask HN: How do I find UI/UX design systems for my app?
Been out of the web dev game for a bit. What are the latest popular design systems? Ideally for React and B2C? Is there a directory out there?
Your question is great. It’s easy to forget that people are the point, not the tech.

When I was in college, automation was envisioned to reduce injuries to people, increase access to goods, and to create more discretionary time. Somehow we’ve lost the focus on human outcomes.
Having a home designed (previous owner) world sailing vessel with a mast that is bigger then the original designer's spec. It made it around cape horn and has seen a lot of high latitude low atmospheric pressure no problem.
I've heard it argued that a longer mast makes the boat more stable like a tightrope walker with a pole.

I'm curious about how it went for you?
Passkeys. The answer is passkeys.
This fan broke the concert habit about 10 years ago when it really started getting out of hand; I’ve only been to local, relatively small venues since. $80-100 is my cutoff.
And where does it link to?
This sounds a lot like Ticketmaster’s goals as well.
In the US. 2024 AD.

E.g. at Trader Joe's, look at the huge quantity of fruit juices, sugary snacks, and low-fat dairy products they sell. "Low-fat" should not even exist as a category!

Trader Joe's customer base is much more educated than average, and it's not all "old people." If they are buying (in to) this crap, the rest of America is doing even worse.
Tiny suggestion, possibly without merit (no comments or email in the article):

Use ULEB64 encoding instead of RAW unsigned 64-bit fields for STRING lengths.

ULEB64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEB128) is a simple encoding where the 7th bit is used to show if there are more bytes following. So, lengths less than 128 can be encoded in one byte and so forth.

I doubt the protocol will routinely send lengths that are more than, say, four gigabytes. The longest ULEB64 number is eleven bytes, as far as I recall.

Other than that, I know nothing about the ancestors of the proposed protocol and thus cannot comment.
It depends what real world is for you. In embedded or with low bandwith it might.
Deployments still suck, but maybe they don't have to
I imagine the Mac mini is really small now if it could be powered via USB PD then I think it’s no problem to put it in a backpack with a kb and touchpad then bring it home then to the office. This is because I notice there are many people just bring their MBP to the office then plug it to a big screen. The downside is just you can’t work anywhere like with a MBP, but the usability is mostly the same (to me)
It could be solved as simply as an app that requires verified ID and limited amount of tickets transferred, but that’s probably too simple for the Megabrains at Ticketmaster.
This is almost completely undocumented outside of this HN post (check Google). Can you tell us more about what this does and how it is intended to be used? Thanks!
Microsoft Sucks at Everything [video]
What's happening here? The picture I have in my mind after skimming through this is we will have LLMs running in routers and firewalls. There will be an incoming request, we will create some prompt "Imagine you are a router sitting on the edge of our corporate network, you received an HTTP request from 203.44.211.17, it has no TLS but you know we terminated TLS before you so it is all good, here are the headers ..., and the path seems to be .... What do you want to do? You have these tools "forward", "accept", "drop". Can things get more silly?
It doesn't because server operators don't want a unpaid full time job moderating a server. If anything, community servers have more anti-cheat not less. ESEA and FaceIt servers for CS2 have additional anti-cheat. FiveV community servers for GTAV rolled their own anti-cheat before Rockstar added one recently.

I even remember ICCUP for Starcraft 1 had 'anti-hack'.

Being able to host your own playgroups is generally possible in modern games still. Private lobbies on their public servers exist, but that's still more effort than people are willing to do versus hitting the 'play game' button. We used to call those PUGs.
I think the pointless argument here is the one you make.

Mostly free is not the same thing as free, and the scale of ‘carefulness’ is already completely arbitrary. How much more careful is 6 than 5?

You don’t have to argue about it, because the scale doesn’t represent anything. The only thing to say is, sure, we’ll set the carefulness to 6.
I saw these guys present at Actuate a few months ago. Really cool stuff.
Advertising and mixed motives (2022) [for search engines]
Can we trust official statistics? The data gaps shaping our view of the economy
> Treating the question literally, that would not be in the USA (federal elections).

I strongly disagree. Going by your interpretation, the question "How many people in the USA vote in local elections?" would have the answer "not a single person."
Not really. There are specific criteria and preferences applied to models about what companies do and don't want them to say. They are intentionally censored. I would like all production models to NOT have this applied. Moreover, I'd like them specifically altered to avoid denying user requests, something like the abliterated llama models.

There won't be a perfectly unbiased model, but the least we can demand is that corpos stop applying their personal bias intentionally and overtly. Models must make judgements about better and worse information, but not about good and bad. They should not decide certain things are impermissible according to the e-nannies.
It's true, though: accomplishing anything at all is relatively a feat. You have two ways to contrast a retrospective: what if we had been perfect, and what if we had done nothing. Sometimes a comparison against the latter is more informative.
> What stops “the poor” from continuing to have a thriving economy on their own

There can be a large class of poor, but it still be cheaper for a poor person to get their goods & services (as they can) from the corporations with the automation to provide them for a fraction of the cost, and of higher quality, than someone without capital can.

When poor people get money, they want whatever technology and services the middle class or above have. They want to move up.

They don’t want to buy handmade arts & crafts from each other.

The Industrial Revolution took resources. You can’t recreate that while poor.

They are not going to recreate farming either. They won’t have the land, water rights, etc

And hunting & gathering isn’t a fallback.
Fair, but how will robots change that?
I was under the impression that labelling something as "recycled" was a value add, and it would be done where possible. I suppose that is not actually the case.
What do you think about this tool changing the landscape of software testing?

I think you could change the roles of SDETs and other quality assurance jobs dominated by Selenium and Playwright. I mean think about it. It would half the number of testers needed to do the same work.
I’ve seen maybe one out of ten managers actually take responsibility when things go to shit.
The "Hallway Track" is my favourite thing about conferences. By far the best one of those I've had, so far, is at Functional Conf 2022 online edition (because of you know what), where I ended up hanging out for almost six hours with a bunch of APL nerds discussing APL, Life, The Universe and Everything in one of the "breakout rooms" of their conference software.

Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city/country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff.

I do love in-person gatherings and online ones, when done right, both cases.

Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can't (and vice-versa).

Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.
Maybe Slack should stop making an LLM for data mining and chatbots, and instead, deploy an LLM to read a message and determine whether or not you should be notified, because notifications from Slack truly suck.
Random access DNA memory using Boolean search in an archival file storage system
One thing I will always admire Apple for is being willing to essentially kill the iPod with the iPhone in 2007. No other company I've seen has been willing to kill their cash cow so thoroughly and so profitably.
'twould be very apple
By contrast, etymology for "lichen" has nothing to do with corpses, apparently:

Borrowed from Latin līchēn, from Ancient Greek λειχήν (leikhḗn), from λείχω (leíkhō, “to lick”).

Which, I must presume, is derived from the behaviours of animals which eat the stuff, licking it off rocks.
I'm basing my opinion off the demonstration Tesla did where they were remotely operated, and footage of that event. I'll admit I'm not up to date on the development details. Do you have a recommended and trustworthy source for more info? (I don't consider Elon to be one, as he makes bald-faced fantastical lies on the regular.)
I can accept some level of this, but if a user specifically requests it, a model should generally act as expected. I think certain things are fine to require a specific ask before surfacing or doing, but the model shouldn't tell you "I can't assist with that" because it was intentionally trained to refuse a biased subset of possible instructions.
Let’s say I have 10M in stocks. What is the optimal strategy to not end up as “have nothing poor” in an automated economy?
Query parameters are so tired. All my homies embed their queries into the password portion of a basic auth header. Keeps your queries super secure from spies and competing browsers.
Show HN: Open-in-SearchGPT – Access SearchGPT in your Chrome context menus
North Carolina. Locally it's not so much exhaust type stuff, but all the damn pollen, which I'm somewhat allergic too. Pine trees for miles. I'm about 50 miles inland from the coast so lots of wetlands so in the summer (Which means basically... late March through mid October - it's going to hit 82 here toomorrow) it's oppressively hot and humid.
Every company can scale properly
> Human life is about finding meaning

All of the things you list are, in the hypothetical scenario, better done by robots. Therefore, they don’t serve any purpose by truly serving anyone or adding any value to society etc. Most people don’t ascribe any deeply satisfying meaning to mere personal enjoyment, so in this scenario what is the basis for extracting meaning from any human labor?
I thought of this too! But I thought the Vasa was sunk by leaving the gunports open?
Nothing more permanent than a temporary process.

When you have zero incidents using the temporary process people will automatically start to assume it’s due to the temporary process, and nobody will want to take responsibility for taking it out.
A separate gripe: Still no support for "batching up" a trickle of notifications from a particular DM/channel, which is especially frustrating on the phone-app.

*bzzzt* You probably met him, that one guy

*bzzzt* who sends messages like this

*bzzzt* and each time your phone vibrates for attention

*bzzzt* but you never needed to know that soon anyway.
Keep track of all TODOs in one's life. You can create TODO items and schedule them. You tag them (similar to hashtags) too. Now, if I want to see the list to things to be done today (or any day for that matter), Org Mode will generate the agenda for you. You can filter your agenda/TODOs - for example, if you are getting into a call with Team X, you can filter with "teamx" to get the list of items marked against the team. You can of course add checklists under tasks (sub items), and notes too. Recurring schedule is supported.

Keeping notes. Org Mode doubles up as an Outliner. You can keep hierarchical notes in a single large file. You can mix-in tables (with support for LISP formulae) for tabular data. You can embed images and LaTeX too. You can convert your notes to HTML or Markdown in a jiffy. There are shortcuts for instant note taking. You can archive sections that are no longer required.

I have stopped using mindmaps and now rather rely on Org. It can handle tree-structured information very well.

As a calendar. You can also add diary-remind reminders. Remember one's wedding anniversary (and Spouse's birthday) to save one's marriage.

As with everything in Emacs, configurable and extensible (with ELisp). Almost every method and every variable is Global. This is of course crazy, but the power that this proffers is enormous.

I learn something new about Org Mode every now and then. I do not consider myself as a power user, as I am sure there is still much left to be explored.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/orgcard.pdf
Does anyone seriously use googles commercial products?
Showa American Story – Exclusive Trailer [video]
> (also, as per another comment, if you know that this happened then surely they didn't get away with it?)

Is it possible to steal money from a bank and get away with it? Is it possible to obtain citizenship fraudulently and get away with it? etc.

But if they got away with it then how do you know?

> How did they vote and get away with it previously?

Look it up on Wikipedia? They literally have linked cases from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...

Or look at the most recent case in the news yesterday, which someone already replied with in the other comment: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/20...

> At the risk of derailing the conversation down a completely different rabbit hole...

This will definitely derail the conversation so I'll just leave my reply at this.
You might want to highlight chunking and how embeddings can/should represent subsections of your document as well. It seems relevant to me for cases like similarity or semantics search, getting the reader to the relevant portion of the document or page.

Theres probably some interesting ideas around tokenization and metadata as well. For example, if you’re processing the raw file I expect you want to strip out a lot of markup before tokenization of the content. Conversely, some markup like code blocks or examples would be meaningful for tokenization and embedding anyways.

I wonder if both of those ideas can be combined for something like automated footnotes and annotations. Linking or mouseover relevant content from elsewhere in the documentation.
> If you can explain to me how you convince a nontechnical person why 6 is not free, I’ll concede the point.

"I said the minimum is at 5, but if you want me to trace the line more accurately then let's take a 2 minute break and I'll do that".
Make it local and slow.
For anyone in the northeast, i can recommend Three Days At The Fair [1], the longest duration of which is actually 6 days and the course is a 1 mile loop around a state fair ground in New Jersey. I did a mere 12 hour option on the final weekend, and the suffering of those competitors on their 5th/6th day is something i will never forget. Sideways leans, some quite pronounced, others moving backwards to alleviate pains developed moving forwards etc.

Why do they do it? Well, the camaraderie is incredible. Much of the course is lined where runners have pitched their tents/campers/chairs and the support, sharing of food, stories and beer make it a unique event. The shortest duration is 6 hours and you’re not obliged to run more than a single loop/mile if you don’t want to.

[1] - https://sites.google.com/site/njtrailseries/fair
You don't need a GPT-4-sized model to count brackets. You just need to make sure that your training data includes enough cases like that for NN to learn it. My point is that GPT-4 can do much more complicated things than that, so there's nothing specific about LMs that preclude them from doing this kind of stuff right.
They are working on quantum computing, so they do have cutting edge tech in some sectors, but as mentioned, they make their money on their rather outdated infrastructure.
I think you vastly underestimate the power of induction burners. They quickly concentrate a lot of energy in a small space. Mine came with a warning to always start at 60% power at most, so that's why I am so adamant about it.

I fully understand that this may just be the manufacturer covering his, um, behind. But I am not going to risk it.
Lag compensation makes the absolute minimum relatively high. For example you need the client to know about an enemy player behind them that doesn't get rendered, because the client can turn around faster than the server can tell them about that player. Otherwise it can lead to a super frustrating experience where the enemy player pops into existence on the client in the middle of the screen, and you couldn't have reacted because there was nothing there.

So if you're sending that data to the client, well now cheats can look for that and detect if there's a player behind you and warn you, giving an advantage.

The same thing applies to corners and other occlusions, just less extreme, but still just as frustrating.
https://xkcd.com/927/

but in all seriousness this looks pretty interesting, definitely gonna check in again later :3
Why not use roadmap.sh to add more paths?
It's a U shape, you don't need either one for a U shape.
> RT GI is currently usually around ~4ms, which is at the upper edge of usable. However the temporal stability is usually the bigger issue - at current ray counts, with current algorithms, either noise or slow response times is an inevitable tradeoff. Hence, 70% usable. But with another few years of improvements, we'll probably get to the point where we can get it down to ~2.5ms with the current stability, or 4ms and much more stable. Which would be perfectly usable.

Maybe you should be saying 70% feasible rather than 70% usable. And you seem to be very optimistic about what kind of improvements we can expect for affordable, low-power GPU hardware over a mere 3-5 years. I don't think algorithmic improvements to denoisers and upscalers can get us much further unless we're using very wrong image quality metrics to give their blurriness a passing grade. Two rays per pixel is simply never going to suffice.

Right now, an RTX 4090 ($1700+) runs at less than 50 fps at 2560x1440, unless you lie to yourself about resolution using an upscaler. So the best consumer GPU at the moment is about 70-80% of what's necessary to use path tracing and hit resolution and refresh rate targets typical of high-end gaming in 2012.

Having better-than-4090 performance trickle down to a more mainstream price point of $300-400 is going to take at least two more generations of GPU hardware improvements even with the most optimistic expectations for Moore's Law, and that's the minimum necessary to do path tracing well at a modest resolution on a game that will be approaching a decade old by then. It'll take another hardware generation for that level of performance to fit in the price and power budgets of consoles and laptops.
Instance #9843298 of people not understanding Baumol's Cost Disease.

It is economically ridiculous to imply that, as technology advances, un-teched sectors should continue paying people similar real wages. The only thing that will accomplish that when some sectors are being improved with technology and some aren't is working to apply that benefit as broadly as possible.
> Articles like this leave me in a position of — ok, but who is this point of view helping.

To me, this point of view is helping a younger me and a younger you: future generations. It is prescribing a sociological solution to this problem. One where my mother wouldn't have had nearly as much anguish from the neuroticism of managing her own deficits while also trying to manage mine. One where in my twenties, I wouldn't have struggled trying to form foundational habits (like brushing my teeth longer than 10 seconds and twice daily).

They describe providing support systems that go beyond just medicating. But for those of us who didn't have all the structural support needed to thrive, medication is absolutely necessary, there is no question about it. For future generations, maybe we can lessen the need for these medications, because they do have side effects for some people independent of the benefits.

Probably the most frustrating part of these types of discussions are when someone who is so insular, so lacking in the ability to understand what it's like to be someone else, that they can't understand that the forming and ingraining of basic functional habits does not come natural to everyone.

How did I actually go about getting the medication? A private psychiatrist, like you say; paid out of pocket (the total cost of the psych and meds being $160/month total). Someone who was OK with not being overly critical of how I described the problems I was having because they were going to be paid for it without insurance bullshit. Then GoodRX to get a lower price on the amphetamines. In other words... an existing support system already had to be in place for me to be able to get the medication. I don't really need it anymore, or rather, I don't need it all the time.

I'm wishing the best for you, please don't give up hope. Even with some semblance of a support system, my situation was shitty, so I can't imagine what it's like for you, but--well, there is no but. I hope you get where you want to be.
We've seen there's some demand for it with gig economy jobs. My guess is it'd be a net improvement, and the fact that our minimum wage is being inflated into irrelevance and wages are still rising suggests that's true.
I particularly like line 1322 and 1344