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I used it recently to write a useful utility related to OpenTelemetry file processing. .NET AOT produced a single-file static binary which is similar in size to what Go would produce, and can be dropped into any target system and run without dependencies, just like Go does.
It was nice. Feel free to take a look
Yuck. I like both Go and C# a lot, and use them both professionally.
In my experience the strengths of Go are mostly - Deployability via single-file static binaries - Simple syntax that anyone can learn (no exceptions, no classes or inheritance) - Wicked fast compile times
And the strengths of C# are - Powerful language with null-safety and lots of syntax sugar - Runtime-level coroutines so you don't need `async/await` everywhere
G# seems like it has the _worst_ of both worlds, not the best. It's fun to write compilers, and good on them for doing it, but no thank you for real use
I thought the title was clickbait, but no, he really did fix it! Nice
It's a solved problem. The physics is simply such that it's really inefficient.
... we'd need a system 12.5 times bigger, i.e., roughly 531 square metres, or about 2.6 times the size of the relevant solar array. This is now going to be a very large satellite, dwarfing the ISS in area, all for the equivalent of three standard server racks on Earth.
https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...
The gist of it is that about 99% of cooling on earth works by cold air molecules (or water) bumping into hot ones, and transferring heat. There's no air in space, so you need a radiator 99x larger than you would down here. That adds up real fast.
Yes, slack is intermittently down for me and the rest of my company. It's intermittently losing messages, failing to load new ones, and showing error pages :-(
Now you understand why this app costs more than 2x the price of alternatives such as diskDedupe.
Any halfway-competent developer can write some code that does a SHA256 hash of all your files and uses the Apple filesystem API's to replace duplicates with shared-clones. I know swift, I could probably do it in an hour or two. Should you trust my bodgy quick script? Heck no.
The author - John Siracusa - has been a professional programmer for decades and is an exceedingly meticulous kind of person. I've been listening to the ATP podcast where they've talked about it, and the app has undergone an absolute ton of testing. Look at the guardrails on the FAQ page https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/ for an example of some of the extra steps the app takes to keep things safe. Plus you can review all the proposed file changes before you touch anything.
You're not paying for the functionality, but rather the care and safety that goes around it. Personally, I would trust this app over just about any other on the mac.
I can't find a specific EULA or disclaimer for the Hyperspace app, but given that the EULA's for major things like Microsoft Office basically say "we offer you no warranty or recourse no matter what this software does" I would hardly expect an indie app to offer anything like that
Yep. At a previous job we had a file server that we published Windows build output to.
There were about 1000 copies of the same pre-requisite .NET and VC++ runtimes (each build had one) and we only paid for the cost of storing it once. It was great.
It is worth pointing out though, that on Windows Server this deduplication is a background process; When new duplicate files are created, they genuinely are duplicates and take up extra space, but once in a while the background process comes along and "reclaims" them, much like the Hyperspace app here does.
Because of this (the background sweep process is expensive), it doesn't run all the time and you have to tell it which directories to scan.
If you want "real" de-duplication, where a duplicate file will never get written in the first place, then you need something like ZFS
This is basically only a win on macOS, and only because Apple charges through the nose for disk space
You do realize that this software is only available on macOS, and only works because of Apple's APFS filesystem? You're essentially complaining that medicine is only a win for people who are sick.
He "only" saved 30%? That's amazing. I really doubt most people are going to get anywhere near that.
When I run it on my home folder (Roughly 500GB of data) I find 124 MB of duplicated files.
At this stage I'd like it to tell me what those files are - The dupes are probably dumb ones that I can simply go delete by hand, but I can understand why he'd want people to pay up first, as by simply telling me what the dupes are he's proved the app's value :-)
In order to check if a file is a duplicate of another, you need to check it against _every other possible file_. You need some kind of "lookup key".
If we took the first 1024 bytes of each file as the lookup key, then our key size would be 1024 bytes. If you have 1 million files on your disk, then that's 128MB of ram just to store all the keys. That's not a big deal these days, but it's also annoying if you have a bunch of files that all start with the same 1024 bytes -- e.g. perhaps all the photoshop documents start with the same header. You'd need a 2-stage comparison, where you first match the key (1024 bytes) and then do a full comparison to see if it really matches.
Far more efficient - and less work - If you just use a SHA256 of the file's contents. That gets you a much smaller 32 byte key, and you don't need to bother with 2-stage comparisons.
I don't know exactly what Siracusa is doing here, but I can take an educated guess:
For each candidate file, you need some "key" that you can use to check if another candidate file is the same. There can be millions of files so the key needs to be small and quick to generate, but at the same time we don't want any false positives.
The obvious answer today is a SHA256 hash of the file's contents; It's very fast, not too large (32 bytes) and the odds of a false positive/collision are low enough that the world will end before you ever encounter one. SHA256 is the de-facto standard for this kind of thing and I'd be very surprised if he'd done anything else.
+1. He's not taking anything away because you never had it.
The author is now discovering Ruby and Objective-C :-)
In iOS 17.4 Apple allows you to apply to create an alternative store. Apple can still deny your request and kill your alternative store, and this is exactly what happened.
Epic opened a developer account under their european subsidiary company, which applied for this, and Apple just banned that account, so Epic can't create a store. Perhaps if someone else (Google, Microsoft, Meta) made a store, Epic might be able to upload apps to that store, but because in the Apple world everything traces back to the developer accounts, I'm pretty sure that would be blocked by Apple as well.
As much as it might seem like Tim Sweeney was exaggerating about Apple's DMA "compliance" changes being hot garbage, a horror show, and malicious compliance -- he really wasn't. Apple are in full on villain mode here.
The part that doesn't make sense, is why Apple are choosing to be such dicks about everything, when the EU is already breathing down their necks. They're inviting more and harsher regulation upon themselves and making the rest of the world hate them in the process.
It looks like to use this product, I have to learn an entirely new programming language (which appears to be a weird mashup of Python and Haskell), a whole set of entirely new API's, I can only host my stuff on their for-pay cloud infrastructure, and I can't use source control?
That's a lot of very high hurdles to clear. Even if this magically solved all my scaling and distributed system problems forever, I'm not sure it'd be worth it. Good luck to them though for being ambitious.
Has this guy ever been on any actual planes? His "Status Quo" model is completely unlike any of the planes I've ever been on.
It's easy to improve over a fake strawman
That answer is only there because it's really old, from the early days of S.O. where people were allowed to ask questions that weren't super serious binary yes/no style. It'd get moderated and deleted in a heartbeat today. A forlorn monument to the cool place that S.O. once was
+1
I've owned personally, and used macs for work since around 2009. I've never installed any third party window-snapping or management systems, and I don't consider it a big deal.
I do use window snapping on Win10/11 periodically, but TBH I find that the beefed up snapping in Win11 is more annoying than it is useful, often snapping things to quarters of the screen when I just wanted to move a window.
Likewise, I've seen non-programmer users on win10 hit the window snapping by accident and be confused and put off by it.
Would I like it if Apple were to build a power-user window snapping feature into macOS? Yes, I would. Am I upset at them for not including it? Certainly not. Were I a product manager for macOS I would find it hard to justify the investment, given all the other things they can and do work on.
There's a ton of apps now which require iOS15, and some are starting to move to 16. If you're stuck on 14 for jailbreak reasons I suspect you're going to struggle with more things than Wavelength.
There's more to an app than just the UI layer; Catalyst helps with not only the UIKit parts, but other surrounding stuff like app launching, integration with system features (sharing etc) which differ between mac/iPhone, and other things like that.
It holds value even if you wrote all your UI in SwiftUI. Whether it's a dead-end technology or not, only apple knows (and they won't tell us), but SwiftUI alone doesn't remove the need for it.
> How are you going to build your service network? Compensate the contractors fairly and act as lead gen.
I used to work at a company which makes security and access control systems (swipe cards, electronic locks, etc).
They created a consumer-level system (as opposed to the big Enterprise ones they were known for) and tried to create a distribution model which appears to be how you're thinking about it. The idea was they'd build a network of contractors ("Installers"). Customers would buy direct from the company, who would then forward a request to your local installer (lead gen). The company would cut the installers in for some percentage of the ongoing subscription revenue cost, plus whatever margin they added at install time.
This failed miserably. The company learned within the space of a couple of years, that all the good installers want to build a relationship with (and critically, to bill) the customer, they don't want to be a behind-the-scenes referral on someone else's website. Few signed up, and the ones that did, weren't incentivized to prioritize it highly. They put it lower down on their job lists, which led to customers having to wait a long time and experiencing poor service in some cases. Not great. The company also struggled tremendously to drum up interest. Because security systems (like HVAC) come with maintenance/repairs/etc, the market had evolved into one centered around companies/individuals looking around at their local providers first, picking the "best" one, and then choosing a product based on what the provider was offering or what they recommended, much like you would with a Plumber or Electrician.
Maybe the HVAC industry is sufficiently different from Security and this model might work for you? From what I saw though, there's a lot of overlap there and I'm not optimistic.
After a year or two, the company pivoted to a model where they formed partnerships with contractors/installers and moved away from the direct-to-consumer model. At the time I left, this was proving much more successful of a model. The partnership model involved more revenue share, training, and a bunch of other stuff I wasn't involved in, but critically, it meant that when an end-customer went to their local security system provider and asked them what was good, they'd be highly likely to recommend my ex-company's product. That was the clincher.
I hope that's of some use @cmui
Oh BTW, a small bit more feedback
Better air quality is achieved through a thermostat with PM2.5 and CO2 sensors, as well as an air quality module on the air handler that controls HEPA filtration, fresh air intake and modification of the home’s humidity
This is very nice, but in the grand scheme of things nobody cares about these. They just want a warm house in winter and a cool one in summer. If air quality/filtering were a free/cheap addon that'd be great, but not if it means the unit costs significantly more.
OTOH, that gives you a very nice market segmentation mechanic. Provide a lower-cost unit without things like CO2 sensors and HEPA filters, and charge a fat margin to upgrade to the fancy one for those richer people who have the luxury of such things.
Speaking here from New Zealand, where central heating/thermostats are basically unheard of, outside of offices and schools. Heatpumps are very common in homes, usually high-wall mounted ones like this:
https://www.mitsubishi-electric.co.nz/heatpump/i/69337B/stan...
We have the approx 12 year old variant of the above heatpump in our current house, and in our previous house paid to install a similar thing.
The hardware cost for one of those is $2900 NZD, plus another few for install, leading to a total cost of around $5000-6000 NZD ($3000 - $3700) USD approx. While that is still a fair chunk of change, it's less than a quarter of the cost of the $14,000 USD that Electric Air is launching with.
It's not ideal, you end up with a single climate controlled part of your house, and the rest relies on leaving the doors open. The fully ducted electric air system (which I assume lets you heat/cool individual rooms) would certainly be a lot nicer, but the massive price differential means that only the really super rich elite level houses would ever install one. The other 99% of the market is happy with the "good enough" solution of a wall-mounted heatpump.
One other thing - Water drainage from a heatpump in cooling mode is a common problem. Installers need to run pipes out through walls to drain away condensed water, and while they ideally can use gravity, sometimes install location means a water pump is required. We have one of those; some years ago the pump failed leading to a lot of soaked carpet in our living room. Hopefully electric air has a good reliable solution there!
Finally: When installing heatpumps, this requires the indoor unit (source of cold/hot air) to be connected via heatpipe to the outdoor unit. This almost always involves drilling holes through interior and exterior walls (often brick). Because of the potential for things to go wrong, I'd never recommend a DIY / home contractor to install such a thing. You want a reputable company that warranties their work, has something at stake, and that you can have recourse against, if they screw it up.
Good luck!
Isn't this just "Now you can pay to purchase and operate hardware to compensate for our crappy coverage, so we don't have to improve it ourselves?"
Diagram 1 has the comment "What I think it should be".
It's easy to interpret that as "stackoverflow should change to be like this", but I think it was meant to be more like "If I had to guess how stackoverflow works, this is what I think it would look like".
It's amazing how much performance and scalability you can get out of computers, if you don't burden them with 100x overhead caused by shoveling data between microservices all the time :-)
Tech Pundits: ZOMG ChatGPT is going to make Google Obsolete tomorrow even though it makes up false answers constantly.
Google Investors who know nothing about tech: Hey Google. Why U No AI?
Stock Market: Google ⬇
Google: Look we have some bullshit AI too! Don't forget about how smart we are!
Stock Market: Google ⬆
That's the entire point of this article, particularly why it's written by the CEO.
Will they actually have any decent AI? Who cares!
This seems silly. Any company that is in the business of storing tons and tons of DNA data will probably be recompressing it for archive purposes using better algorithms already. If they're not, their loss.
For smaller players where maximum tool interoperability is important, gzip seems good enough.
Why are there ads on HN now?
Leap seconds are a "problem" in that they represent work and effort. That doesn't mean we need to discard them; they serve an important purpose.
I agree with gmiller here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229049 that the whole thing smells like Facebook's engineers wanting to save themselves some work, at the cost of generating more problems for the future.
This kind of garbage attitude is why we have climate change, covid-19 and so many other things wrong with the world. Befitting that this one came from facebook.