HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alex_duf

3,323 karma · joined November 28, 2013

Staff Software Engineer

https://alex.dfnt.fr/

submissionscomments
alex_duf··on You can make up HTML tags
Really? Flash had been such an absolute pain for me for years, I was so happy when my bank stopped using it so I could uninstall the heck out of it.
alex_duf··on The battle to stop clever people betting
Since when is betting supposed to be fair? The whole point is the middle man extracts money.
alex_duf··on Backing up Spotify
But then you need to rent a server without leaving any hint on your real identity. Which means going to some dodgy corners of the internet.

I certainly wouldn't attempt

alex_duf··on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
The majority of drivers believe they’re better than average [1]

1: https://www.lbec-law.com/blog/2025/04/the-majority-of-driver...

alex_duf··on Jolla Phone Pre-Order
wow, I never expected to see them come back
alex_duf··on Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond
That's not at all how I read it.

They mentioned they delivered a software decoder on android first, then they also targeted web browsers (presumably through wasm). So out of these 30%, a good chunk of it is software not hardware.

That being said, it's a pretty compelling argument for phone and tv manufacturers to get their act together, as Apple has already done.

alex_duf··on WhatsApp will become interoperable with other messaging apps in Europe
I wonder if that would allow Signal to become interoperable with Whatsapp?
alex_duf··on Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data
I guess the only way to do this today is with a raid array?
alex_duf··on Structured outputs on the Claude Developer Platform
It's not 100% success, I've had responses that didn't match my schema.

I think the new feature goes on to limit which token can be output, which brings a guarantee, where the tools are a suggestion.

alex_duf··on Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k
but do you want it to be dependent on trillion dollar companies?
alex_duf··on Laptops with Stickers
I used to put stickers on my work laptop. Then one day I upgraded my laptop, which meant handing over my old one with stickers.

Which meant scrubbing it (there's no reason I'll let whoever receives it to scrub it for me)

Which was an absolute pain.

I don't put stickers on my laptops anymore.

alex_duf··on VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
well deserved

I've heard he was working on an extremely low latency gaming system: Kyber

Anyone has any recent news on that subject?

alex_duf··on Video games can alter reality
Interesting reading the comments in this thread.

I've been part of the crowd that said loud and proud that "no, video games aren't making you more violent, and aren't destroying your soul". But here we are with a whole list of people who report that it has had a negative influence on their driving etc.

alex_duf··on A startup’s quest to store electricity in the ocean
It's anchored to the seafloor. Also surely we have the technology to hold a pipe in high sea, as this is what petrol platforms are doing.
alex_duf··on A startup’s quest to store electricity in the ocean
What I don't understand is how the top reservoir is floating when filled with brine. Are the small floaters enough to hold it up?

Otherwise I love the fact that's simple. Simplicity scales. It's also salt water, so assuming they're not putting anything else than NaCl, it can break and it's no big deal

alex_duf··on A startup’s quest to store electricity in the ocean
kWh of capacity, as compared to a kWh of capacity on a battery, over the lifetime of the product.

On each of these kWh you'll have (hopefully) multiple orders of magnitude of charge cycles

alex_duf··on Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower
There was a video on this motor recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4OdH0ibOBk made by a phd in the field
alex_duf··on URLs are state containers
Any blob of byte is a state container
alex_duf··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
I understand the argument but the language used for uv (rust) and python don't have the same goal.

Python aims to be simple, not particularly fast (though it is getting faster)

I don't see a problem with that. Pick the language adapted to your problem. Python isn't aiming at solving every problem and that's okay.

alex_duf··on Twake Drive – An open-source alternative to Google Drive
Immich can do that
alex_duf··on Twake Drive – An open-source alternative to Google Drive
It's potentially not off-site though, a house fire and it's gone
alex_duf··on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous
yeah same, I'm in the process of migrating so I have both google photo and immich, and honestly immich is just as good.

I actually find the semantic search of immich slightly better.

alex_duf··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
I think unfortunately both can be true at the same time, politically deadlock AND punching above its weight.

There's a lot to fix in France, and a lot of things going well.

alex_duf··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
The former, a tribunal has proven there was an illegal collusion between him and Muammar Gaddafi, in order to finance his presidential campaign.

There's been bags of cash that transited by private airplanes, terrorist acts in reprisal, and ultimately a probable demise of Gaddafi's regime in response.

Some real dirty actions with lots of lives lost.

alex_duf··on Servo v0.0.1
I hope they don't, Servo is a technology

If someone wants to put marketing veneer on top of a new project that uses servo, great! But servo is servo: a rendering engine

alex_duf··on Igalia, Servo, and the Sovereign Tech Fund
Made in rust, started 10 years ago by the folks at Mozilla
alex_duf··on One-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill
Also the responsibility is put on one person. That's bonkers, the emails aren't sending themselves.
alex_duf··on A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
regarding how long the ingestion should take to implement, I'm going to say: it depends!

It depends on how complex the models are, because now you need to parse your model before inserting them. Which means you need tables to be in the right format. And then you need your loops, for each file you might have to insert anywhere between 5 to nested 20 entities. And then you either have to use an ORM or write each SQL queries.

All of which I could do obviously, and isn't rocket science, just time consuming.

alex_duf··on Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally
Thank you so much for this! I've also had the idea but, contrary to you, never had the courage nor energy to actually do it. I have some of my old devices backed up with the very first text my (now) wife and I exchanged, and this feels like the perfect use case.

So thank you so much, I now have another project to host on my home server, and a meaningful one.

>(PS. I'm open to changing the name. Never really liked this one...)

Timelinize is great, it explains what the product does

alex_duf··on A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
yeah recently I needed a script to ingest individual json files into an sqlite db. I could have spent half the day writing, or asked an AI to write it and spend 10 minutes checking the data in the DB is correct.

There are plenty of non critical aspects that can be drastically accelerated, but also plenty of places where I know I don't want to use today's models to do the work.

← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →