Electric school buses more than doubled in USA from March 2022 to June 2023
14 by elorant | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Friday, December 29, 2023
Thursday, December 28, 2023
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Monday, December 25, 2023
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Friday, December 22, 2023
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Who needs holiday help? (Follow up thread)
Ask HN: Who needs holiday help? (Follow up thread)
39 by atdrummond | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hi all, I wanted to make sure that, ahead of Christmas and New Years, that everyone on HN who needs help (whether that’s affording a Christmas Day dinner or with longer term needs) is able to communicate such. I will be inaccessible from the 27th of December onwards for ten days, so I want to make sure I’m able to fulfill all/the majority of requests prior to then. Thanks to our previous thread ( https://ift.tt/WHSFTR2 ) I was able to distribute nearly $30,000 in support to those who needed it. Unfortunately, this year the requests were not only far more numerous than in year’s past but also much more significant in the amounts asked. Given this, I kindly request that if you’re asking for support, that you do two things: 1. Make sure that the request is necessary. We had some asks for things like children’s college funds for kids who are 1-2 years old. While this is a worthy investment, it is somewhat outside the scope of this particular support programme. 2. Keep your request to $1,000 or less. Last year, the vast majority of funding requests were under $100. This year, a good 25%+ of all requests were over $1000 and we had a decent number (2-3%) over $10,000. While I did my best to finance the larger requests, please remember that I can have a greater impact the larger the number of people I can support. This cap might be overridden in truly extenuating circumstances but I want to encourage people to ask for what they truly need. Finally, please post in this thread once your support request has been filled. I want to avoid the otherwise-inevitable double funding that seems to happen when fulfillments are not noted. Once again, thank you to this wonderful community for all you’ve done for me and others. I truly hope that this is a small way in which I can begin to repay my karmic debt. - alexander EDIT: if you DID not receive a response from me (I got well over 300 emails) please send me a NEW email with your request. please include: 1. total needed 2. name + address 3. how to pay (preferred methods are, in order of preference, cashapp, bank transfer (wise, wire, ACH, etc), PayPal, crypto)
39 by atdrummond | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hi all, I wanted to make sure that, ahead of Christmas and New Years, that everyone on HN who needs help (whether that’s affording a Christmas Day dinner or with longer term needs) is able to communicate such. I will be inaccessible from the 27th of December onwards for ten days, so I want to make sure I’m able to fulfill all/the majority of requests prior to then. Thanks to our previous thread ( https://ift.tt/WHSFTR2 ) I was able to distribute nearly $30,000 in support to those who needed it. Unfortunately, this year the requests were not only far more numerous than in year’s past but also much more significant in the amounts asked. Given this, I kindly request that if you’re asking for support, that you do two things: 1. Make sure that the request is necessary. We had some asks for things like children’s college funds for kids who are 1-2 years old. While this is a worthy investment, it is somewhat outside the scope of this particular support programme. 2. Keep your request to $1,000 or less. Last year, the vast majority of funding requests were under $100. This year, a good 25%+ of all requests were over $1000 and we had a decent number (2-3%) over $10,000. While I did my best to finance the larger requests, please remember that I can have a greater impact the larger the number of people I can support. This cap might be overridden in truly extenuating circumstances but I want to encourage people to ask for what they truly need. Finally, please post in this thread once your support request has been filled. I want to avoid the otherwise-inevitable double funding that seems to happen when fulfillments are not noted. Once again, thank you to this wonderful community for all you’ve done for me and others. I truly hope that this is a small way in which I can begin to repay my karmic debt. - alexander EDIT: if you DID not receive a response from me (I got well over 300 emails) please send me a NEW email with your request. please include: 1. total needed 2. name + address 3. how to pay (preferred methods are, in order of preference, cashapp, bank transfer (wise, wire, ACH, etc), PayPal, crypto)
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Monday, December 18, 2023
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Friday, December 15, 2023
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Maeve Unveils Plans for 80-Seat Hybrid Regional Airliner
Maeve Unveils Plans for 80-Seat Hybrid Regional Airliner
10 by hindsightbias | 0 comments on Hacker News.
10 by hindsightbias | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Monday, December 11, 2023
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Saturday, December 9, 2023
Friday, December 8, 2023
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Tuesday, December 5, 2023
Monday, December 4, 2023
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Saturday, December 2, 2023
Friday, December 1, 2023
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Monday, November 27, 2023
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Friday, November 24, 2023
Thursday, November 23, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: UI Library Creator
Show HN: UI Library Creator
6 by kemyd | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! The "Generative" trend is booming, and UI Library Creator is our original approach to it. In the last three years, we have added 60+ professional UI libraries to Shuffle's catalog (Shuffle = visual editor for web developers). Still, we know we need more than this to satisfy our growing user base! That's why we created the UI Library Creator. In this tool, you can combine elements and styles to create unique UI libraries that work seamlessly with the Shuffle Editor and all its capabilities (drag-and-drop, customizations, live preview, and more). We provide you with UX solutions (components) written in Tailwind CSS and presets so you can quickly combine them to create what you need. You don't need to talk to a "black box" AI with a chat interface. Possible combinations are in gazillions. We aim for original creations, but you have complete control over the final effect. How to use the UI Library Creator: * Visit: https://ift.tt/YQ29apE * We recommend starting by selecting Assets and Copywriting for your target audience. * When these two options are locked, use the "Shuffle Styles" button to bootstrap your project with the first style. * If you like something, lock the category and then repeat shuffling. You can also change options manually, but with "Shuffle Styles," you can quickly see many creations. If you enjoy the final result, click "Publish now" and send your UI Library to Shuffle. Once processed, it will be available for use in your Dashboard. Let us know what you think! Video (2min) with product tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZFlWEDr7XM
6 by kemyd | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! The "Generative" trend is booming, and UI Library Creator is our original approach to it. In the last three years, we have added 60+ professional UI libraries to Shuffle's catalog (Shuffle = visual editor for web developers). Still, we know we need more than this to satisfy our growing user base! That's why we created the UI Library Creator. In this tool, you can combine elements and styles to create unique UI libraries that work seamlessly with the Shuffle Editor and all its capabilities (drag-and-drop, customizations, live preview, and more). We provide you with UX solutions (components) written in Tailwind CSS and presets so you can quickly combine them to create what you need. You don't need to talk to a "black box" AI with a chat interface. Possible combinations are in gazillions. We aim for original creations, but you have complete control over the final effect. How to use the UI Library Creator: * Visit: https://ift.tt/YQ29apE * We recommend starting by selecting Assets and Copywriting for your target audience. * When these two options are locked, use the "Shuffle Styles" button to bootstrap your project with the first style. * If you like something, lock the category and then repeat shuffling. You can also change options manually, but with "Shuffle Styles," you can quickly see many creations. If you enjoy the final result, click "Publish now" and send your UI Library to Shuffle. Once processed, it will be available for use in your Dashboard. Let us know what you think! Video (2min) with product tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZFlWEDr7XM
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Monday, November 20, 2023
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Friday, November 17, 2023
Thursday, November 16, 2023
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Monday, November 13, 2023
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Saturday, November 11, 2023
Friday, November 10, 2023
Thursday, November 9, 2023
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Monday, November 6, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How do you start a research based company?
Ask HN: How do you start a research based company?
19 by mnky9800n | 10 comments on Hacker News.
Looking around hacker news it seems like everyone everywhere has their new AI company whose main goal is to develop some kind of new algorithm and then find customers later. Where do people get funding for such initiatives? I believe I'm a bit naive but it also seems like this could be a better way of doing research for the time being than continuing on in academia. But how do you get money to start a company whose goal is "make AI and worry about customers later"?
19 by mnky9800n | 10 comments on Hacker News.
Looking around hacker news it seems like everyone everywhere has their new AI company whose main goal is to develop some kind of new algorithm and then find customers later. Where do people get funding for such initiatives? I believe I'm a bit naive but it also seems like this could be a better way of doing research for the time being than continuing on in academia. But how do you get money to start a company whose goal is "make AI and worry about customers later"?
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Friday, November 3, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: GitHub Is Down
GitHub Is Down
42 by bombcar | 11 comments on Hacker News.
The status page shows stuff about slack https://ift.tt/bAoR2ae but it seems authentication is down hard, can't pull, comment, or even view public repositories when logged in.
42 by bombcar | 11 comments on Hacker News.
The status page shows stuff about slack https://ift.tt/bAoR2ae but it seems authentication is down hard, can't pull, comment, or even view public repositories when logged in.
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Streamdal – an open-source tail -f for your data
Show HN: Streamdal – an open-source tail -f for your data
62 by dsies | 10 comments on Hacker News.
Hey there! This is Dan and Ustin (@uzarubin), and we want to share something cool we've been working on for the past year - an open-source `tail -f` for your data, with a UI. We call it "Streamdal" which is a word salad for streaming systems (because we love them) and DAL or data access layer (because we’re nerds). Here's the repo: https://ift.tt/fAQdZG4 Here's the site: https://streamdal.com And here's a live demo: https://ift.tt/N4YWSey (github repo has an explanation of the demo) — — — THE PROBLEM We built this because the current observability tooling is not able to provide real-time insight into the actual data that your software is reading or writing. Meaning that it takes longer to identify issues and longer to resolve them. That’s time, money, and customer satisfaction at stake. Want to build something in-house? Prepare to deploy a team, spend months of development time, and tons of money bringing it to production. Then be ready to have engineers around to babysit your new monitoring tool instead of working on your product. — — — THE BASIC FLOW So, wtf is a “tail -f for your data”. What we mean is this: 1. We give you an SDK for your language, a server, and a UI. 2. You instrument your code with `StreamdalSDK.Process(yourData)` anytime you read or write data in your app. 3. You deploy your app/service. 4. Go to the provided UI (or run the CLI app) and be able to peek into what your app is reading or writing, like with `tail -f` . And that's basically it. There's a bunch more functionality in the project but we find this to be the most immediately useful part. Every developer we've shown this to has said "I wish I had this at my gig at $company" - and we feel exactly the same. We are devs and this is what we’ve always wanted, hundreds of times - a way to just quickly look at the data our software is producing in real-time, without having to jump through any hoops. If you want to learn more about the "why" and the origin of this project - you can read about it here: https://ift.tt/dJhq7Rc — — — HOW DOES IT WORK? The SDK establishes a long-running session with the server (using gRPC) and "listens" for commands that are forwarded to it all the way from the UI -> server -> SDK . The commands are things like: "show me the data that you are currently consuming" , "apply these rules to all data that you produce" , "inspect the schema for all data" , and so on. The SDK interprets the command and either executes Wasm-based rules against the data it's processing or if it's a `tail` request - it'll send the data to the server, which will forward it to the UI for display. The SDK IS part of the critical path but it does not have a dependency on the server. If the server is gone, you won't be able to use the UI or send commands to the SDKs, but that's about it - the SDKs will continue to work and attempt to reconnect to the server behind the scenes. — — — TECHNICAL BITS The project consists of a lot of "buzzwordy" tech: we use gRPC, grpc-Web, protobuf, redis, Wasm, Deno, ReactFlow, and probably a few other things. The server is written in Go, all of the Wasm is Rust and the UI is Typescript. There are SDKs for Go, Python, and Node. We chose these languages for the SDKs because we've been working in them daily for the past 10+ years. The reasons for the tech choices are explained in detail here: https://ift.tt/YRLfny4 — — — LAST PART OK, that's it. What do you think? Is it useful? Can we answer anything? - If you like what you're seeing, give our repo a star: https://ift.tt/fAQdZG4 - And If you really like what you're seeing, come talk to us on our discord: https://ift.tt/TVGjHIv Talk soon! - Daniel & Ustin
62 by dsies | 10 comments on Hacker News.
Hey there! This is Dan and Ustin (@uzarubin), and we want to share something cool we've been working on for the past year - an open-source `tail -f` for your data, with a UI. We call it "Streamdal" which is a word salad for streaming systems (because we love them) and DAL or data access layer (because we’re nerds). Here's the repo: https://ift.tt/fAQdZG4 Here's the site: https://streamdal.com And here's a live demo: https://ift.tt/N4YWSey (github repo has an explanation of the demo) — — — THE PROBLEM We built this because the current observability tooling is not able to provide real-time insight into the actual data that your software is reading or writing. Meaning that it takes longer to identify issues and longer to resolve them. That’s time, money, and customer satisfaction at stake. Want to build something in-house? Prepare to deploy a team, spend months of development time, and tons of money bringing it to production. Then be ready to have engineers around to babysit your new monitoring tool instead of working on your product. — — — THE BASIC FLOW So, wtf is a “tail -f for your data”. What we mean is this: 1. We give you an SDK for your language, a server, and a UI. 2. You instrument your code with `StreamdalSDK.Process(yourData)` anytime you read or write data in your app. 3. You deploy your app/service. 4. Go to the provided UI (or run the CLI app) and be able to peek into what your app is reading or writing, like with `tail -f` . And that's basically it. There's a bunch more functionality in the project but we find this to be the most immediately useful part. Every developer we've shown this to has said "I wish I had this at my gig at $company" - and we feel exactly the same. We are devs and this is what we’ve always wanted, hundreds of times - a way to just quickly look at the data our software is producing in real-time, without having to jump through any hoops. If you want to learn more about the "why" and the origin of this project - you can read about it here: https://ift.tt/dJhq7Rc — — — HOW DOES IT WORK? The SDK establishes a long-running session with the server (using gRPC) and "listens" for commands that are forwarded to it all the way from the UI -> server -> SDK . The commands are things like: "show me the data that you are currently consuming" , "apply these rules to all data that you produce" , "inspect the schema for all data" , and so on. The SDK interprets the command and either executes Wasm-based rules against the data it's processing or if it's a `tail` request - it'll send the data to the server, which will forward it to the UI for display. The SDK IS part of the critical path but it does not have a dependency on the server. If the server is gone, you won't be able to use the UI or send commands to the SDKs, but that's about it - the SDKs will continue to work and attempt to reconnect to the server behind the scenes. — — — TECHNICAL BITS The project consists of a lot of "buzzwordy" tech: we use gRPC, grpc-Web, protobuf, redis, Wasm, Deno, ReactFlow, and probably a few other things. The server is written in Go, all of the Wasm is Rust and the UI is Typescript. There are SDKs for Go, Python, and Node. We chose these languages for the SDKs because we've been working in them daily for the past 10+ years. The reasons for the tech choices are explained in detail here: https://ift.tt/YRLfny4 — — — LAST PART OK, that's it. What do you think? Is it useful? Can we answer anything? - If you like what you're seeing, give our repo a star: https://ift.tt/fAQdZG4 - And If you really like what you're seeing, come talk to us on our discord: https://ift.tt/TVGjHIv Talk soon! - Daniel & Ustin
Monday, October 30, 2023
Sunday, October 29, 2023
Saturday, October 28, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: WireHole combines WireGuard, Pi-hole, and Unbound with an easy UI
Show HN: WireHole combines WireGuard, Pi-hole, and Unbound with an easy UI
15 by byteknight | 49 comments on Hacker News.
WireHole offers a unified docker-compose project that integrates WireGuard, PiHole, and Unbound, complete with a user interface. This solution is designed to empower users to swiftly set up and manage either a full or split-tunnel WireGuard VPN. It features ad-blocking capabilities through PiHole and enhanced DNS caching and privacy options via Unbound. The intuitive UI makes deployment and ongoing management straightforward, providing a comprehensive VPN solution with added privacy features.
15 by byteknight | 49 comments on Hacker News.
WireHole offers a unified docker-compose project that integrates WireGuard, PiHole, and Unbound, complete with a user interface. This solution is designed to empower users to swiftly set up and manage either a full or split-tunnel WireGuard VPN. It features ad-blocking capabilities through PiHole and enhanced DNS caching and privacy options via Unbound. The intuitive UI makes deployment and ongoing management straightforward, providing a comprehensive VPN solution with added privacy features.
Friday, October 27, 2023
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Monday, October 23, 2023
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Friday, October 20, 2023
Thursday, October 19, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Did any of you first encounter programming through Scratch?
Ask HN: Did any of you first encounter programming through Scratch?
22 by MarcScott | 27 comments on Hacker News.
I'm old enough that my first encounter with programming was though BBC BASIC and LOGO. I'd be interested how many of today's younger programmers had their first experience in coding while using a block based language, and what they're experience was like.
22 by MarcScott | 27 comments on Hacker News.
I'm old enough that my first encounter with programming was though BBC BASIC and LOGO. I'd be interested how many of today's younger programmers had their first experience in coding while using a block based language, and what they're experience was like.
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Why is there no modern successor to the 3D Pinball games of yesteryear?
Ask HN: Why is there no modern successor to the 3D Pinball games of yesteryear?
11 by eigenvalue | 9 comments on Hacker News.
I recall games like Full Tilt! Pinball and the 3D pinball game included in Windows were pretty popular and good showcases for the speed and quality of computer graphics back in the 90s. Then it occured to me that modern GPUs like the nVidia 4090 would be incredible for simulating a pinball machine with insane fidelity using RTX ray tracing and the optimized physics simulator (PhysX) they have. You could probably end up with something that truly looks and feels like the real thing. I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but after doing a quick search on Steam, I don't see anything like that on the market. Why do you think that is? Would it really be so hard to do? Wouldn't that be popular? I know I'd love to see it just because it would be such a great showcase for the power of modern machines, especially the integration of super realistic physics. Imagine bumping the machine hard to cheat? Or being able to smash the glass with a hammer and then put objects in the case and see what happens to them while you play? Could also be an amazing physics education thing if you could see real-time free-body diagrams overlaid on the ball that you could freeze in time and study showing all the forces acting on it. You could turn a dial and see what it would be like to play pinball on the moon! I hope someone sees this and makes it!
11 by eigenvalue | 9 comments on Hacker News.
I recall games like Full Tilt! Pinball and the 3D pinball game included in Windows were pretty popular and good showcases for the speed and quality of computer graphics back in the 90s. Then it occured to me that modern GPUs like the nVidia 4090 would be incredible for simulating a pinball machine with insane fidelity using RTX ray tracing and the optimized physics simulator (PhysX) they have. You could probably end up with something that truly looks and feels like the real thing. I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but after doing a quick search on Steam, I don't see anything like that on the market. Why do you think that is? Would it really be so hard to do? Wouldn't that be popular? I know I'd love to see it just because it would be such a great showcase for the power of modern machines, especially the integration of super realistic physics. Imagine bumping the machine hard to cheat? Or being able to smash the glass with a hammer and then put objects in the case and see what happens to them while you play? Could also be an amazing physics education thing if you could see real-time free-body diagrams overlaid on the ball that you could freeze in time and study showing all the forces acting on it. You could turn a dial and see what it would be like to play pinball on the moon! I hope someone sees this and makes it!
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Monday, October 16, 2023
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Saturday, October 14, 2023
Friday, October 13, 2023
Thursday, October 12, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Kali – Scheduling Assistant for iOS
Show HN: Kali – Scheduling Assistant for iOS
8 by evansjp | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Launching Kali today and I'm super excited to iterate on this. I hate scheduling and my gf got sick of managing my calendar for me, so I made an AI do it instead. :) Please let me know what you think!
8 by evansjp | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Launching Kali today and I'm super excited to iterate on this. I hate scheduling and my gf got sick of managing my calendar for me, so I made an AI do it instead. :) Please let me know what you think!
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Monday, October 9, 2023
Sunday, October 8, 2023
Saturday, October 7, 2023
Friday, October 6, 2023
Thursday, October 5, 2023
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Leporello.js – interactive functional programming IDE for JavaScript
Show HN: Leporello.js – interactive functional programming IDE for JavaScript
16 by dmitry-vsl | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hi! Leporello.js is an interactive functional programming environment designed for pure functional subset of JavaScript. It executes code instantly as you type and displays results next to it. Leporello.js also features an omnipresent debugger. Just position your cursor on any line or select any expression, and immediately see its value. Leporello.js visualizes a dynamic call tree of your program. Thanks to the data immutability in functional programming, it allows you to navigate the call tree both forward and backward, offering a time-travel-like experience. Leporello.js offers the ability to develop HTML5 applications interactively, enabling you to update your code without losing the application's state. It records an IO trace of your program, which is then transparently replayed during subsequent program executions. This allows you to instantly reexecute your code after making small tweaks, thereby tightening your feedback loop. Furthermore, Leporello.js can serve as an interactive notebook. You have the flexibility to utilize any JavaScript libraries to visualize your data directly within your code. For a more detailed walkthrough, please watch the product video. Currently, Leporello.js is available as a free online application that you can try right in your browser. My goal is to build the Leporello.js standalone Electron app and a VSCode plugin, both with TypeScript support. Additionally, I plan to add Node.js support (currently, Leporello.js is only for HTML5 apps). In the VSCode plugin, Leporello.js will sit on top of the built-in TypeScript/JavaScript mode, utilizing its code analysis information to enhance the default VSCode experience with unique Leporello.js features. I am building Leporello.js as a single independent developer. Leporello.js is funded solely by donations. Support me on Github Sponsors [0] and be the first to gain access to the Leporello.js Visual Studio Code plugin with TypeScript support. I'll be delighted to answer any questions you may have. [0] https://ift.tt/QfYzxvl
16 by dmitry-vsl | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hi! Leporello.js is an interactive functional programming environment designed for pure functional subset of JavaScript. It executes code instantly as you type and displays results next to it. Leporello.js also features an omnipresent debugger. Just position your cursor on any line or select any expression, and immediately see its value. Leporello.js visualizes a dynamic call tree of your program. Thanks to the data immutability in functional programming, it allows you to navigate the call tree both forward and backward, offering a time-travel-like experience. Leporello.js offers the ability to develop HTML5 applications interactively, enabling you to update your code without losing the application's state. It records an IO trace of your program, which is then transparently replayed during subsequent program executions. This allows you to instantly reexecute your code after making small tweaks, thereby tightening your feedback loop. Furthermore, Leporello.js can serve as an interactive notebook. You have the flexibility to utilize any JavaScript libraries to visualize your data directly within your code. For a more detailed walkthrough, please watch the product video. Currently, Leporello.js is available as a free online application that you can try right in your browser. My goal is to build the Leporello.js standalone Electron app and a VSCode plugin, both with TypeScript support. Additionally, I plan to add Node.js support (currently, Leporello.js is only for HTML5 apps). In the VSCode plugin, Leporello.js will sit on top of the built-in TypeScript/JavaScript mode, utilizing its code analysis information to enhance the default VSCode experience with unique Leporello.js features. I am building Leporello.js as a single independent developer. Leporello.js is funded solely by donations. Support me on Github Sponsors [0] and be the first to gain access to the Leporello.js Visual Studio Code plugin with TypeScript support. I'll be delighted to answer any questions you may have. [0] https://ift.tt/QfYzxvl
Monday, October 2, 2023
Sunday, October 1, 2023
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Friday, September 29, 2023
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Using LLMs and Embeddings to classify application errors
Show HN: Using LLMs and Embeddings to classify application errors
19 by vadman97 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi Hacker News! We’re Vadim and Chris from Highlight.io [1]. We do web app monitoring and are working on using LLMs/embeddings to add new functionality to our error monitoring product. Given that there’s a lot of founders/engineers using LLMs in their products, we figured we’d share how we built the new functionality, their impact on our workflows, and how you can try it out. Our goal was to build two features: (1) tagging errors (e.g. deeming an error as “authentication error” or a “database error”); and (2) grouping similar errors together (e.g. two errors that have a different stacktrace and body, but are semantically not very different). Each of these rely heavily on comparing text across our application. After some experimentation with the OpenAI embeddings API [3], we went ahead and hosted a private model instance of thenlper/gte-large (an open-source MIT licensed model), which is a 1024-dimension model running on an Intel Ice Lake 2 vCPU machine on Hugging face [4]. Our general approach for classifying/comparing text is as follows. As each set of tokens (i.e a string) comes in, our backend makes a request to an inference endpoint and receives a 1024-dimension float vector as a response (see the code here [5]). We then store that vector using pgvector [6]. To compare any two sets for similarity, we simply look at the Euclidian distance between their respective embeddings using the ivfflat index implemented by pgvector (example code here [7]). To tag errors, we assign an error its most relevant tag from a predetermined set decided by us. For example, if we tag an error as an "authentication error" or a "database error", we can allow developers to have a starting point before inspecting an issue.(see the logic here [8]). Anecdotally, this approach seems to work very well. For example, here are two authentication errors that got tagged as “Authentication Error”: * Firebase: A network AuthError has occurred * Error retrieving user from firebase api for email verification: cannot find user from uid. We also use these error embeddings to group similar errors. To decide whether an error joins a group or starts a new one, we decide on a distance threshold (using the euclidean distance) ahead of time. An interesting thing about this approach, compared to using a text-based heuristic, is that two errors with different stack traces can still be grouped together. Here’s an example: * github.com/highlight-run/highlight/backend/worker.(*Worker).ReportStripeUsage * github.com/highlight-run/highlight/backend/private-graph/graph.(*Resolver).GetSlackChannelsFromSlack.func1 Both reported as `integration api error` as they involve the Stripe and Slack integrations respectively. The neat thing is that the LLM can use the full context of an error and match based on the most relevant details about the error. We have rolled out a first version of the error grouping logic to our cloud product [9], and there’s a demo of all the functionality at [2]. Long-term, if the HN community has other ideas of what we could build with LLM tooling in observability, we’re all ears. Let us know what you think! Links [1] https://ift.tt/UiZVr1T [2] https://ift.tt/X7Ty2nH [3] https://ift.tt/gETKHUo [4] https://ift.tt/IZQHRbK [5] https://ift.tt/9FgBQrc... [6] https://ift.tt/sdTRMVe... [7] https://ift.tt/NMLS537... [8] https://ift.tt/nWhJDF7... [9] https://ift.tt/xzqk2sW
19 by vadman97 | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi Hacker News! We’re Vadim and Chris from Highlight.io [1]. We do web app monitoring and are working on using LLMs/embeddings to add new functionality to our error monitoring product. Given that there’s a lot of founders/engineers using LLMs in their products, we figured we’d share how we built the new functionality, their impact on our workflows, and how you can try it out. Our goal was to build two features: (1) tagging errors (e.g. deeming an error as “authentication error” or a “database error”); and (2) grouping similar errors together (e.g. two errors that have a different stacktrace and body, but are semantically not very different). Each of these rely heavily on comparing text across our application. After some experimentation with the OpenAI embeddings API [3], we went ahead and hosted a private model instance of thenlper/gte-large (an open-source MIT licensed model), which is a 1024-dimension model running on an Intel Ice Lake 2 vCPU machine on Hugging face [4]. Our general approach for classifying/comparing text is as follows. As each set of tokens (i.e a string) comes in, our backend makes a request to an inference endpoint and receives a 1024-dimension float vector as a response (see the code here [5]). We then store that vector using pgvector [6]. To compare any two sets for similarity, we simply look at the Euclidian distance between their respective embeddings using the ivfflat index implemented by pgvector (example code here [7]). To tag errors, we assign an error its most relevant tag from a predetermined set decided by us. For example, if we tag an error as an "authentication error" or a "database error", we can allow developers to have a starting point before inspecting an issue.(see the logic here [8]). Anecdotally, this approach seems to work very well. For example, here are two authentication errors that got tagged as “Authentication Error”: * Firebase: A network AuthError has occurred * Error retrieving user from firebase api for email verification: cannot find user from uid. We also use these error embeddings to group similar errors. To decide whether an error joins a group or starts a new one, we decide on a distance threshold (using the euclidean distance) ahead of time. An interesting thing about this approach, compared to using a text-based heuristic, is that two errors with different stack traces can still be grouped together. Here’s an example: * github.com/highlight-run/highlight/backend/worker.(*Worker).ReportStripeUsage * github.com/highlight-run/highlight/backend/private-graph/graph.(*Resolver).GetSlackChannelsFromSlack.func1 Both reported as `integration api error` as they involve the Stripe and Slack integrations respectively. The neat thing is that the LLM can use the full context of an error and match based on the most relevant details about the error. We have rolled out a first version of the error grouping logic to our cloud product [9], and there’s a demo of all the functionality at [2]. Long-term, if the HN community has other ideas of what we could build with LLM tooling in observability, we’re all ears. Let us know what you think! Links [1] https://ift.tt/UiZVr1T [2] https://ift.tt/X7Ty2nH [3] https://ift.tt/gETKHUo [4] https://ift.tt/IZQHRbK [5] https://ift.tt/9FgBQrc... [6] https://ift.tt/sdTRMVe... [7] https://ift.tt/NMLS537... [8] https://ift.tt/nWhJDF7... [9] https://ift.tt/xzqk2sW
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
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New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Hydra - Open-Source Columnar Postgres
Show HN: Hydra - Open-Source Columnar Postgres
38 by coatue | 3 comments on Hacker News.
hi hn, hydra ceo here hydra is an open-source extension that adds columnar tables to Postgres for efficient analytical reporting. With Hydra, you can analyze billions of rows instantly without changing code. demo video (5 min): https://youtu.be/1yzxgb0Oyrw github repo: https://ift.tt/Fni1dxh For 1.0 GA release, aggregate queries are over *60% faster* than Hydra beta due to aggregate vectorization. Spatial indexes (gin, gist, spgist, and rum indexes) and pg_hint_plan are now enabled for performance optimization. postgres is great, but aggregates can take minutes to hours to return results on large data sets. long-running analytical queries hog database resources and degrade performance. use hydra to run much faster analytics on postgres without changing code. for testing, try the hydra free tier to create a column postgres instance on the cloud. https://ift.tt/MP10D8B
38 by coatue | 3 comments on Hacker News.
hi hn, hydra ceo here hydra is an open-source extension that adds columnar tables to Postgres for efficient analytical reporting. With Hydra, you can analyze billions of rows instantly without changing code. demo video (5 min): https://youtu.be/1yzxgb0Oyrw github repo: https://ift.tt/Fni1dxh For 1.0 GA release, aggregate queries are over *60% faster* than Hydra beta due to aggregate vectorization. Spatial indexes (gin, gist, spgist, and rum indexes) and pg_hint_plan are now enabled for performance optimization. postgres is great, but aggregates can take minutes to hours to return results on large data sets. long-running analytical queries hog database resources and degrade performance. use hydra to run much faster analytics on postgres without changing code. for testing, try the hydra free tier to create a column postgres instance on the cloud. https://ift.tt/MP10D8B
Monday, September 18, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Goodbye HTML Gmail
Tell HN: Goodbye HTML Gmail
37 by howmayiannoyyou | 11 comments on Hacker News.
To be (dis)continued: "We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024. The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality."
37 by howmayiannoyyou | 11 comments on Hacker News.
To be (dis)continued: "We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024. The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality."
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New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Erlmacs – a script to update your .emacs file for Erlang development
Show HN: Erlmacs – a script to update your .emacs file for Erlang development
9 by dlachausse | 0 comments on Hacker News.
erlmacs automatically configures and updates your .emacs file with support for the emacs mode that is included with Erlang/OTP. It frees you from having to locate the installation directory of Erlang/OTP and its bundled emacs mode. It is an escript that only depends upon Erlang/OTP and Emacs. Note: There is not much in the way of error checking at this moment, but it does make a backup of your .emacs files before any destructive operations.
9 by dlachausse | 0 comments on Hacker News.
erlmacs automatically configures and updates your .emacs file with support for the emacs mode that is included with Erlang/OTP. It frees you from having to locate the installation directory of Erlang/OTP and its bundled emacs mode. It is an escript that only depends upon Erlang/OTP and Emacs. Note: There is not much in the way of error checking at this moment, but it does make a backup of your .emacs files before any destructive operations.
Saturday, September 9, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations
Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations
26 by advaith08 | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! I've been thinking about the idea of a LLM thats a clone of me - instead of generating replies to be a helpful assistant, it generates replies that are exactly like mine. The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige), and I think with LLMs, there might actually be a possibility of us doing something like this! I've just released a fork of the facebookresearch/llama-recipes which allows you to fine-tune a Llama model on your personal WhatsApp conversations. This adaptation can train the model (using QLoRA) to respond in a way that's eerily similar to your own texting style. What I've figured out so far: Quick Learning: The model quickly adapts to personal nuances, emoji usage, and phrases that you use. I've trained just 1 epoch on a P100 GPU using QLoRA and 4 bit quantization, and its already captured my mannerisms Turing Tests: As an experiment, I asked my friends to ask me 3 questions, and responded with 2 candidate responses (one from me and one from llama). My friends then had to guess which candidate response was mine and which one was Llama's. Llama managed to fool 10% of my friends, but with more compute, I think it can do way better. Here's the GitHub repository: https://ift.tt/75og901 Would love to hear feedback, suggestions, and any cool experiences if you decide to give it a try! I'd love to see how far we can push this by training bigger models for more epochs (I ran out of compute credits)
26 by advaith08 | 4 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN! I've been thinking about the idea of a LLM thats a clone of me - instead of generating replies to be a helpful assistant, it generates replies that are exactly like mine. The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige), and I think with LLMs, there might actually be a possibility of us doing something like this! I've just released a fork of the facebookresearch/llama-recipes which allows you to fine-tune a Llama model on your personal WhatsApp conversations. This adaptation can train the model (using QLoRA) to respond in a way that's eerily similar to your own texting style. What I've figured out so far: Quick Learning: The model quickly adapts to personal nuances, emoji usage, and phrases that you use. I've trained just 1 epoch on a P100 GPU using QLoRA and 4 bit quantization, and its already captured my mannerisms Turing Tests: As an experiment, I asked my friends to ask me 3 questions, and responded with 2 candidate responses (one from me and one from llama). My friends then had to guess which candidate response was mine and which one was Llama's. Llama managed to fool 10% of my friends, but with more compute, I think it can do way better. Here's the GitHub repository: https://ift.tt/75og901 Would love to hear feedback, suggestions, and any cool experiences if you decide to give it a try! I'd love to see how far we can push this by training bigger models for more epochs (I ran out of compute credits)
Friday, September 8, 2023
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New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Modular Diffusion – A modular Python library for diffusion models
Show HN: Modular Diffusion – A modular Python library for diffusion models
4 by secularchapel | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello everyone! I've been working on this project for a few months as part of my thesis in Machine Learning. It's meant to be a library that provides an easy-to-use but flexible API to design and train Diffusion Models. I decided to make it because I wanted to quickly prototype a Diffusion Model but there were no good tools to do it with. I think it really can help people prototype their own Diffusion Models a lot faster and only in a few lines of code. The base idea is to have a Model class that takes different modules corresponding to the different aspects of the Diffusion Model process (noise schedule, noise type, denoising network, loss function, guidance, etc.) and allow the user to mix and match different modules to achieve different results. The library ships with a bunch of prebuilt modules and the plan is to add many more. I also made it super easy to implement your own modules, you just need to extend from one of the base classes available. Contrary to HuggingFace Diffusers, this library is focused on designing and training your own Diffusion Models rather than finetuning pretrained ones (although this is possible). I would really appreciate your feedback.
4 by secularchapel | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hello everyone! I've been working on this project for a few months as part of my thesis in Machine Learning. It's meant to be a library that provides an easy-to-use but flexible API to design and train Diffusion Models. I decided to make it because I wanted to quickly prototype a Diffusion Model but there were no good tools to do it with. I think it really can help people prototype their own Diffusion Models a lot faster and only in a few lines of code. The base idea is to have a Model class that takes different modules corresponding to the different aspects of the Diffusion Model process (noise schedule, noise type, denoising network, loss function, guidance, etc.) and allow the user to mix and match different modules to achieve different results. The library ships with a bunch of prebuilt modules and the plan is to add many more. I also made it super easy to implement your own modules, you just need to extend from one of the base classes available. Contrary to HuggingFace Diffusers, this library is focused on designing and training your own Diffusion Models rather than finetuning pretrained ones (although this is possible). I would really appreciate your feedback.
Friday, September 1, 2023
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: An Immersive Game of Thrones Multiverse Experience
Show HN: An Immersive Game of Thrones Multiverse Experience
1 by thronesMultiV | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Alpha Version Demo: https://ift.tt/81VHCTN Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThronesMultiV/status/1697440568874348953 We're here to present an experimental product empowered by the blend of Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT! Dive into Westeros like never before. Our experimental product offers an immersive storytelling experience where you play a pivotal role in shaping the narrative. Ever wondered if the ending of the final seasons of Game of Thrones could've been different? Now's your chance to twist the tale. Current Features : - AI-driven alternative endings starting from the end of S7. - Real-time story interventions, allowing you to change the plotline as you read. What's Next : - Continuous enhancements to refine and polish the storytelling experience. - And yes, we're contemplating open-sourcing the project – giving back to this amazing community and encouraging further innovation. We truly believe in the power of collaboration. If you have feedback, suggestions, or just want to geek out about Westeros, shoot us an email at ready2play.contact@gmail.com ! Additionally, if you're as passionate about AI and storytelling as we are, we'd love for you to collaborate with us on this exciting project. Remember, winter is coming, but with AI, the possibilities are endless. Stay excited and stay kind! Valar Morghulis!
1 by thronesMultiV | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Alpha Version Demo: https://ift.tt/81VHCTN Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThronesMultiV/status/1697440568874348953 We're here to present an experimental product empowered by the blend of Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT! Dive into Westeros like never before. Our experimental product offers an immersive storytelling experience where you play a pivotal role in shaping the narrative. Ever wondered if the ending of the final seasons of Game of Thrones could've been different? Now's your chance to twist the tale. Current Features : - AI-driven alternative endings starting from the end of S7. - Real-time story interventions, allowing you to change the plotline as you read. What's Next : - Continuous enhancements to refine and polish the storytelling experience. - And yes, we're contemplating open-sourcing the project – giving back to this amazing community and encouraging further innovation. We truly believe in the power of collaboration. If you have feedback, suggestions, or just want to geek out about Westeros, shoot us an email at ready2play.contact@gmail.com ! Additionally, if you're as passionate about AI and storytelling as we are, we'd love for you to collaborate with us on this exciting project. Remember, winter is coming, but with AI, the possibilities are endless. Stay excited and stay kind! Valar Morghulis!
Thursday, August 31, 2023
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New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Run globally distributed full-stack apps on high-performance MicroVMs
Show HN: Run globally distributed full-stack apps on high-performance MicroVMs
6 by edouardb | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re Yann, Edouard, and Bastien from Koyeb ( https://www.koyeb.com/ ). We’re building a platform to let you deploy full-stack apps on high-performance hardware around the world, with zero configuration. We provide a “global serverless feeling”, without the hassle of re-writing all your apps or managing k8s complexity [1]. We built Scaleway, a cloud service provider where we designed ARM servers and provided them as cloud servers. During our time there, we saw customers struggle with the same issues while trying to deploy full-stack applications and APIs resiliently. As it turns out, deploying applications and managing networking across a multi-data center fleet of machines (virtual or physical) requires an overwhelming amount of orchestration and configuration. At the time, that complexity meant that multi-region deployments were simply out-of-reach for most businesses. When thinking about how we wanted to solve those problems, we tried several solutions. We briefly explored offering a FaaS experience [2], but from our first steps, user feedback made us reconsider whether it was the correct abstraction. In most cases, it seemed that functions simply added complexity and required learning how to engineer using provider-specific primitives. In many ways, developing with functions felt like abandoning all of the benefits of frameworks. Another popular option these days is to go with Kubernetes. From an engineering perspective, Kubernetes is extremely powerful, but it also involves massive amounts of overhead. Building software, managing networking, and deploying across regions involves integrating many different components and maintaining them over time. It can be tough to justify the level of effort and investment it takes to keep it all running rather than work on building out your product. We believe you should be able to write your apps and run them without modification with simple scaling, global distribution transparently managed by the provider, and no infrastructure or orchestration management. Koyeb is a cloud platform where you come with a git repository or a Docker image, we build the code into a container (when needed), run the container inside of Firecracker microVMs, and deploy it to multiple regions on top of bare metal servers. There is an edge network in front to accelerate delivery and a global networking layer for inter-service communication (service mesh/discovery) [3]. We took a few steps to get the Koyeb platform to where it is today: we built our own serverless engine [4]. We use Nomad and Firecracker for orchestration, and Kuma for the networking layer. In the last year, we spawned six regions in Washington, DC, San Francisco, Singapore, Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo, added support for native workers, gRPC, HTTP/2 [5], WebSockets, and custom health checks. We are working next on autoscaling, databases, and preview environments. We’re super excited to show you Koyeb today and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the platform and what we are building in the comments. To make getting started easy, we provide $5.50 in free credits every month so you can run up to two services for free. P.S. A payment method is required to access the platform to prevent abuse (we had hard months last year dealing with that). If you’d like to try the platform without adding a card, reach out at support@koyeb.com or @gokoyeb on Twitter. [1] https://ift.tt/pkT6dBn... [2] https://ift.tt/TtSX5Lq... [3] https://ift.tt/nm8vRXG... [4] https://ift.tt/1janbTd... [5] https://ift.tt/v9uSRbD...
6 by edouardb | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We’re Yann, Edouard, and Bastien from Koyeb ( https://www.koyeb.com/ ). We’re building a platform to let you deploy full-stack apps on high-performance hardware around the world, with zero configuration. We provide a “global serverless feeling”, without the hassle of re-writing all your apps or managing k8s complexity [1]. We built Scaleway, a cloud service provider where we designed ARM servers and provided them as cloud servers. During our time there, we saw customers struggle with the same issues while trying to deploy full-stack applications and APIs resiliently. As it turns out, deploying applications and managing networking across a multi-data center fleet of machines (virtual or physical) requires an overwhelming amount of orchestration and configuration. At the time, that complexity meant that multi-region deployments were simply out-of-reach for most businesses. When thinking about how we wanted to solve those problems, we tried several solutions. We briefly explored offering a FaaS experience [2], but from our first steps, user feedback made us reconsider whether it was the correct abstraction. In most cases, it seemed that functions simply added complexity and required learning how to engineer using provider-specific primitives. In many ways, developing with functions felt like abandoning all of the benefits of frameworks. Another popular option these days is to go with Kubernetes. From an engineering perspective, Kubernetes is extremely powerful, but it also involves massive amounts of overhead. Building software, managing networking, and deploying across regions involves integrating many different components and maintaining them over time. It can be tough to justify the level of effort and investment it takes to keep it all running rather than work on building out your product. We believe you should be able to write your apps and run them without modification with simple scaling, global distribution transparently managed by the provider, and no infrastructure or orchestration management. Koyeb is a cloud platform where you come with a git repository or a Docker image, we build the code into a container (when needed), run the container inside of Firecracker microVMs, and deploy it to multiple regions on top of bare metal servers. There is an edge network in front to accelerate delivery and a global networking layer for inter-service communication (service mesh/discovery) [3]. We took a few steps to get the Koyeb platform to where it is today: we built our own serverless engine [4]. We use Nomad and Firecracker for orchestration, and Kuma for the networking layer. In the last year, we spawned six regions in Washington, DC, San Francisco, Singapore, Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo, added support for native workers, gRPC, HTTP/2 [5], WebSockets, and custom health checks. We are working next on autoscaling, databases, and preview environments. We’re super excited to show you Koyeb today and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the platform and what we are building in the comments. To make getting started easy, we provide $5.50 in free credits every month so you can run up to two services for free. P.S. A payment method is required to access the platform to prevent abuse (we had hard months last year dealing with that). If you’d like to try the platform without adding a card, reach out at support@koyeb.com or @gokoyeb on Twitter. [1] https://ift.tt/pkT6dBn... [2] https://ift.tt/TtSX5Lq... [3] https://ift.tt/nm8vRXG... [4] https://ift.tt/1janbTd... [5] https://ift.tt/v9uSRbD...
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
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New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Learn a language quickly by practising speaking with AI
Show HN: Learn a language quickly by practising speaking with AI
14 by cwbuilds | 12 comments on Hacker News.
Hi guys, Hope everyone is well. This app was borne out of my own frustration. I thought that I was terrible at learning languages at school, since I didn't become conversational in French after 5 years of study. However, I later traveled with some French friends and, in just under 3 weeks, I was able to hold a reasonable conversation. I realized that there's no substitute for speaking to native speakers. I tried to adopt this approach for other languages, but it's much harder to find people to practise with when you aren't travelling. I started using iTalki to meet people from different countries and chat to them. It quickly became very expensive and time-consuming to schedule the calls, so I gave up. I made PrettyPolly so that anyone can easily practice speaking 26 languages orally. The app uses ChatGPT (amongst other tools) to allow you to practice speaking whenever you want. It also generates a fluency score for each conversation so that you have an objective way of tracking progress. It's free to use (up to 15 conversations per month). I've found that using it once or twice per day is plenty, and you'll be amazed at how much you will pick up in a week. I've added some FAQs here in case useful - https://ift.tt/UHnF2Vf Would really appreciate any feedback. Let me know if you have any questions, issues or suggestions. Thanks, Chris
14 by cwbuilds | 12 comments on Hacker News.
Hi guys, Hope everyone is well. This app was borne out of my own frustration. I thought that I was terrible at learning languages at school, since I didn't become conversational in French after 5 years of study. However, I later traveled with some French friends and, in just under 3 weeks, I was able to hold a reasonable conversation. I realized that there's no substitute for speaking to native speakers. I tried to adopt this approach for other languages, but it's much harder to find people to practise with when you aren't travelling. I started using iTalki to meet people from different countries and chat to them. It quickly became very expensive and time-consuming to schedule the calls, so I gave up. I made PrettyPolly so that anyone can easily practice speaking 26 languages orally. The app uses ChatGPT (amongst other tools) to allow you to practice speaking whenever you want. It also generates a fluency score for each conversation so that you have an objective way of tracking progress. It's free to use (up to 15 conversations per month). I've found that using it once or twice per day is plenty, and you'll be amazed at how much you will pick up in a week. I've added some FAQs here in case useful - https://ift.tt/UHnF2Vf Would really appreciate any feedback. Let me know if you have any questions, issues or suggestions. Thanks, Chris
New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: We built swup+fragment-plugin to visually enhance classic websites
Show HN: We built swup+fragment-plugin to visually enhance classic websites
9 by rasso | 0 comments on Hacker News.
## TL;DR - Progressively enhance your classic website / MPA to a single page app. - Support for fragment visits, comparable to nested routes in React or Vue. - Keep your site crawlable and indexable without any of the overhead of SSR. - No tight coupling of back- and frontend. Use the CMS / Framework / SSG of your choice. - Strong focus on interoperability with DOM-altering JS tools (think Alpine.js, jQuery, ...). - Strong focus on accessibility, even for fragment visits. ## Long Version: Best of three worlds Hi, I'm Rasso Hilber. I have been a web designer and developer since around 2004. From the beginning of my career, I always had to make tradeoffs between 3 goals when building websites: 1. The websites I build should be visually impressive, original, and snappy. 2. The websites I build should be crawlable, accessible and standards compliant. 3. The websites I build should have low technical complexity and be easy to maintain in the long run. In the beginning, I was able to achieve goals 1 (impressive!) and 3 (easy to maintain!) by using Macromedia/Adobe Flash, but due to the nature of the technology horribly failed to deliver crawlable and accessible websites. Later, I found a way to run two sites in parallel for each website I built, one using CMS-generated XHTML for crawlability, one in Flash for the visitors, fetching the data from its XHTML twin. Now I had solved goals 1 and 2, but my setup was awfully complex and brittle. Around 2010, I was relieved to see Flash finally coming to its end. I switched to building websites using PHP, HTML, and jQuery. I could now tick goals 2 (accessibility) and 3 (low complexity), but the websites I was able to build using these technologies weren't as impressive anymore. Hard page loads between every link click being one of the biggest regressions in UX from the days of Flash IMO. Around 2014/15, I first heard about the new frameworks: Angular, React, Vue. These frameworks were not intended to be used for classic websites. They were made for single-page-apps! But it felt to me like no one cared. Even when building classic websites, many developers sacrificed SEO and accessibility for a snappy experience, serving an empty ` ` to the browser. I couldn't blame them; I had done the same in my early days as a Flash developer. They ticked goal 1 (impressive) and goal 3 (low complexity). But the lack of accessibility kept me from joining the movement. I was still building classic websites, after all. After some time, many started realizing that serving an empty div had downsides – SSR, hydration, and whatnot were born, now ticking goal 1 (impressive) and goal 2 (accessibility), with the trade-off of awful complexity. It reminded me a lot of my little Frankenstein's monster "Flash+XHTML," and I still didn't want to join the hype. Still, because the noise was so loud, I felt like I might be becoming obsolete, an "old man yelling at the clouds". New very interesting tools like HTMX or Unpoly popped up that looked promising at first, but at closer inspection weren't optimized for my use case either. These were primarily built for real interfaces/single-page-apps (html snippets instead of full pages, UI state independent of URLs, altered DOM saved in history snapshots, ...). I wanted to find a tiny tool, optimized for building presentational , content-driven websites with a strong focus on accessibility . Instead, after a few years of rolling my own home-grown solutions, I started using swup[0], a "Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites". Swup consists of a tiny core and a rich ecosystem of official plugins[1] for additional functionality. It was hitting the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, and felt like it was perfect for my use cases. Shortly after I had started using it, I became a core contributor and maintainer of swup. The only thing I was still missing to be a happy developer was the ability to create really complex navigation paths where selected fragments are updated as you navigate a site, much like nested routes allow in React or Vue. The last two months I teamed up with @daun [2] to finally solve this hard problem. The result is two things: 1. A new major release of swup (v4) that allows customizing the complete page transition process by providing a powerful hook system and a mutable visit object 2. The newly released fragment-plugin [3] that provides a declarative API for dynamically replacing containers based on rules Use cases for the fragment-plugin are: - a filter UI that live-updates its list of results on every interaction - a detail overlay that shows on top of the currently open content - a tab group that updates only itself when selecting one of the tabs - a form that updates only itself upon submission I can now finally build websites that tick all three boxes: 1. Visually impressive, fun, and snappy by using swup's first-class support for animations[4], cache[5], and preload capacities[6], enhanced with fragment visits as seen on the demo site. 2. Accessible by being able to serve server-rendered semantic markup that will fully work even with JavaScript disabled (try it out on the demo site!). On top of that, swup's a11y plugin[7] will automatically announce page visits to assistive technologies and will focus the new `` element after each visit. 3. Because now all I need for my fancy frontend is a bit of progressive JavaScript, I can choose whatever tool I like on the server, keeping complexity low and maintainability high. I can use SSGs like eleventy or Astro (the demo site is built using Astro!), I can use any CMS like WordPress or ProcessWire, or a framework like Laravel. And I don't have to maintain an additional node server for SSG! The plugin is still in it's early stages, but I have a good feeling that this finally is the right path for me as a web developer. All it took was 20 years! ;) [0] https://ift.tt/Jp9dIk0 [1] https://ift.tt/ac7dkpS [2] https://github.com/daun [3] https://ift.tt/hCu3adD [4] https://ift.tt/QHawGej [5] https://ift.tt/EQUq495 [6] https://ift.tt/ZXr7dRy [7] https://ift.tt/i1f4OPs
9 by rasso | 0 comments on Hacker News.
## TL;DR - Progressively enhance your classic website / MPA to a single page app. - Support for fragment visits, comparable to nested routes in React or Vue. - Keep your site crawlable and indexable without any of the overhead of SSR. - No tight coupling of back- and frontend. Use the CMS / Framework / SSG of your choice. - Strong focus on interoperability with DOM-altering JS tools (think Alpine.js, jQuery, ...). - Strong focus on accessibility, even for fragment visits. ## Long Version: Best of three worlds Hi, I'm Rasso Hilber. I have been a web designer and developer since around 2004. From the beginning of my career, I always had to make tradeoffs between 3 goals when building websites: 1. The websites I build should be visually impressive, original, and snappy. 2. The websites I build should be crawlable, accessible and standards compliant. 3. The websites I build should have low technical complexity and be easy to maintain in the long run. In the beginning, I was able to achieve goals 1 (impressive!) and 3 (easy to maintain!) by using Macromedia/Adobe Flash, but due to the nature of the technology horribly failed to deliver crawlable and accessible websites. Later, I found a way to run two sites in parallel for each website I built, one using CMS-generated XHTML for crawlability, one in Flash for the visitors, fetching the data from its XHTML twin. Now I had solved goals 1 and 2, but my setup was awfully complex and brittle. Around 2010, I was relieved to see Flash finally coming to its end. I switched to building websites using PHP, HTML, and jQuery. I could now tick goals 2 (accessibility) and 3 (low complexity), but the websites I was able to build using these technologies weren't as impressive anymore. Hard page loads between every link click being one of the biggest regressions in UX from the days of Flash IMO. Around 2014/15, I first heard about the new frameworks: Angular, React, Vue. These frameworks were not intended to be used for classic websites. They were made for single-page-apps! But it felt to me like no one cared. Even when building classic websites, many developers sacrificed SEO and accessibility for a snappy experience, serving an empty ` ` to the browser. I couldn't blame them; I had done the same in my early days as a Flash developer. They ticked goal 1 (impressive) and goal 3 (low complexity). But the lack of accessibility kept me from joining the movement. I was still building classic websites, after all. After some time, many started realizing that serving an empty div had downsides – SSR, hydration, and whatnot were born, now ticking goal 1 (impressive) and goal 2 (accessibility), with the trade-off of awful complexity. It reminded me a lot of my little Frankenstein's monster "Flash+XHTML," and I still didn't want to join the hype. Still, because the noise was so loud, I felt like I might be becoming obsolete, an "old man yelling at the clouds". New very interesting tools like HTMX or Unpoly popped up that looked promising at first, but at closer inspection weren't optimized for my use case either. These were primarily built for real interfaces/single-page-apps (html snippets instead of full pages, UI state independent of URLs, altered DOM saved in history snapshots, ...). I wanted to find a tiny tool, optimized for building presentational , content-driven websites with a strong focus on accessibility . Instead, after a few years of rolling my own home-grown solutions, I started using swup[0], a "Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites". Swup consists of a tiny core and a rich ecosystem of official plugins[1] for additional functionality. It was hitting the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, and felt like it was perfect for my use cases. Shortly after I had started using it, I became a core contributor and maintainer of swup. The only thing I was still missing to be a happy developer was the ability to create really complex navigation paths where selected fragments are updated as you navigate a site, much like nested routes allow in React or Vue. The last two months I teamed up with @daun [2] to finally solve this hard problem. The result is two things: 1. A new major release of swup (v4) that allows customizing the complete page transition process by providing a powerful hook system and a mutable visit object 2. The newly released fragment-plugin [3] that provides a declarative API for dynamically replacing containers based on rules Use cases for the fragment-plugin are: - a filter UI that live-updates its list of results on every interaction - a detail overlay that shows on top of the currently open content - a tab group that updates only itself when selecting one of the tabs - a form that updates only itself upon submission I can now finally build websites that tick all three boxes: 1. Visually impressive, fun, and snappy by using swup's first-class support for animations[4], cache[5], and preload capacities[6], enhanced with fragment visits as seen on the demo site. 2. Accessible by being able to serve server-rendered semantic markup that will fully work even with JavaScript disabled (try it out on the demo site!). On top of that, swup's a11y plugin[7] will automatically announce page visits to assistive technologies and will focus the new `
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