MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keyringlight | 2025-04-29 16:56:23+00:00
The ongoing saga with the migration from control panel to the settings app is as good an example as any. They've been working on that since win8 which released in 2012. Given the time it took to make a new release, it's been 15 years and is still ongoing, it very much seems like MS don't care about that area of the OS.

I can understand that there's a lot of old/legacy third party stuff that would rely on the .cpl capabilities so you can't rip it out in one go, but "it's a lot of work" seems like a poor excuse for a company with resources like MS to not at least get all their own moved across with equivalents. They could even leave the old deprecated ones available in the background for anything legacy that needs to interact with them.
by jbrisson | 2025-04-29 16:56:27+00:00
Exploring MCP (model context protocol) using Claude as a base LLM. I understand that this is quite new and may change a lot in the next few months but I feel something interesting could be done by plugging transactional APIs to a LLM. Remind me of the old CGI (common interface gateway) stuff in the 1990s.

This kind of hack can lead LLMs to be the 21st century browsers.

Oh yes... also working on preparing my retirement end of this year...
by xnx | 2025-04-29 16:56:45+00:00
> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Reading queue. Unfortunately, every app becomes its own sort of todo list: email, browser tabs, social feeds, RSS feed.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to make an AI agent that collects, cleans (ad removal, de-sensationalizing, summarization), and prioritizes information from disparate sources.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-04-29 16:56:51+00:00
I built a tool[0] that gives you constant input at your level as you browse the web, so you don't need to take time out of your day. You can just learn a little as you browse, and let it compound over time.

It works by estimating the difficulty of English sentences, then translating ones at your level into your target language.

[0] https://nuenki.app
by kccqzy | 2025-04-29 16:56:57+00:00
I think theoretical calculations could mean a detailed calculation of the number of times a certain function or operation is called. We all know from tech interviews that there are big O time complexity, but this is usually very hand-wavy and not precise enough. You can usually come up with a more precise formula though it can get messy with recurrences if your algorithm involves recursion. You probably need a computer algebra system. Spending an afternoon doing these symbolic calculations might give you better intuition of why the profiling produced such a measurement.
by Arelius | 2025-04-29 16:57:00+00:00
I'm actually really curious what the experience is like having not more than 10 tabs at a time, like what thing causes you to close a tab? 10 seems sort of wild to me, it's enough that you are clearly not just monotasking, somehow bounded. Probably in contrast, if you could imagine just forgetting to do that whole closing tabs thing, eventually you have hundreds or thousands of tabs.

Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned, discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work mail, spotify, my task list.

Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on, and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working through.

There are the various layers of those things for the things I was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked back to yet.

And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or haven't gotten around to closing yet.
by shayway | 2025-04-29 16:57:03+00:00
I agree with your overall point - I'd also like to see more novel FOSS projects rather than knockoffs of proprietary software - but at the same time, there's a lot of value in FOSS clones for a few reasons.

The main one being: proprietary things tend to get worse over time, while FOSS (with enough momentum) tends to get better. Windows vs Linux desktop is a great example of this; while Linux and its DEs have steadily been improving over the past couple decades, Windows has been in a slow downward spiral since 7, and nowadays I would say KDE/GNOME/Mint are actually less janky overall than Win11.

Mastodon, despite its jank, largely has the traction it does because of the X/Twitter enxittification. Godot and Unity are another good example of my point, the former being largely superior to the latter nowadays despite a lot of similarity, and as with Mastodon it gained a lot of popularity through the blunders of the proprietary version, which is significantly less of a risk with FOSS.

Also - while there are some Windows/MacOS knockoff DEs, there are also plenty of unique ideas in things like GNOME or Budgie, not to mention tiling window managers.

I think clones just tend to get the most popularity. Case in point, there are easily hundreds of FOSS language learning apps out there that do their own thing, but "LibreLingo - FOSS Alternative to Duolingo" is the one that ends up on the front page.
by rpastuszak | 2025-04-29 16:57:04+00:00
> But also mission wise

I have bad news for you my friend.

For years, most of (+90%) Mozilla's revenue was ad partnership based*. Recently this has gotten worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096

* https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...
by zelphirkalt | 2025-04-29 16:57:14+00:00
The app could use some spinners, when actions lead to a delay. I clicked on the landing page on the only available purple action button and nothing seemed to happen. I already checked my uBlock Origin, whether it is blocking something, but it does not. Already wanted to reload the page, when finally something visually changed, and the course was loaded. Simply a little spinner/animation would make this way less confusing.

I like, that for keyboard input the special letters are given as buttons, so that I don't need to hunt for those on any US/English keyboard layout.

One thing missing is a way to report mistakes in the learning material. For example I found "Buenos dias" to be translated to "Good morning".
by monkeyelite | 2025-04-29 16:58:11+00:00
> would be satirised in a New Yorker/Far Side single-panel comic:

Thanks for taking my experience and comment seriously and challenging your preconceptions.

> Code should be correct and efficient.

When it ships to customers. The goal is to find the bugs before then. Having a stable branch can be accomplished in many ways besides gating each merge with a review.

Do you have any studies to show how effective synchronous code review is in preventing mistakes? If they are such a good idea why not do 2 or 3?
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-29 16:58:27+00:00
Totally, and I hope we care to make this happen. If we cared to, I think we could solve it much faster than 200 years. My doubt is more so about our perceived incentives and will to focus on it. We've solved some insane problems, and while I know virtually nothing about this stuff, my intuition here is that solving plastics problems is likely simpler (chemically and logistically) than, say, sending rockets to space and creating nuclear reactors. I know it's more complicated than it appears on the surface (we have heaps of plastic and its byproducts in a dozen types of forms, in all different biomes, in all stages of decay, and countless byproducts under the same conditions... On a global scale), but other problems we've solved have been multifaceted too.

Maybe what we need is a strong will to solve the problem, no lobbying to prevent the funding of the necessary research or restrictions on creation of plastics, and so on. Similar to how the space race and nuclear programs more or less got all of the money, resources, and agency required to get the job done.

It seems like the reality with plastic is we've become insanely good at making it, but nowhere near as good at dealing with its externalities. We can get better at it.
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-29 16:58:37+00:00
The headline is about wages and jobs. It’s very possible that AI could result in time savings of 50% of work hours in a week and still have no impact on wages or jobs.

This is because the economy is not a static thing. If one variable changes (productivity), it’s not a given that GDP will remain constant and jobs/wages will consequently be reduced. More likely is that all of the variables are always in flux, reacting and responding to changes in the market.
by goku12 | 2025-04-29 16:58:54+00:00
I replied using my phone and couldn't see your original comment for reference. Yes, your list contains more compiled languages.

Of those, I'm not very comfortable with using C and C++ for backend development. Their lack of automated memory safety measures is an issue for services that are exposed to the internet. (To be clear, memory safety isn't the only type of safety required). Swift may be a fine choice. (I'm unfamiliar with it.)

JVM languages like Java, Kotlin and Scala are all compiled languages, but I'm unsure how well they satisfy what I said before. To repeat, what matters is energy efficiency and resource utilization (not speed). I hope that somebody can provide an insight into how much overhead they incur on account of running in a VM.
by godelski | 2025-04-29 16:58:57+00:00
I've been using this and it even blocks YouTube ads. But do note that it often reduces video quality and in shorts there seems to be an off-by-one error where if it's "hide toolbar" then if you click the like it'll click the dislike and if you click dislike it'll click comments.

Worth it IMO but I really wish there was a better way to submit bug reports than creating an account on their site. Fuck that dark pattern
OneUptime: Open-Source Incident.io Alternative
by ndhandala | 2025-04-29 16:59:06+00:00
OneUptime (https://github.com/oneuptime/oneuptime) is the open-source alternative to Incident.io + StausPage.io + UptimeRobot + Loggly + PagerDuty. It's 100% free and you can self-host it on your VM / server. OneUptime has Uptime Monitoring, Logs Management, Status Pages, Tracing, On Call Software, Incident Management and more all under one platform.

Updates:

Native integration with Slack: Now you can intergrate OneUptime with Slack natively (even if you're self-hosted!). OneUptime can create new channels when incidents happen, notify slack users who are on-call and even write up a draft postmortem for you based on slack channel conversation and more!

Dashboards (just like Datadog): Collect any metrics you like and build dashboard and share them with your team!

Roadmap:

Microsoft Teams integration, terraform / infra as code support, fix your ops issues automatically in code with LLM of your choice and more.

OPEN SOURCE COMMITMENT: Unlike other companies, we will always be FOSS under Apache License. We're 100% open-source and no part of OneUptime is behind the walled garden.
by zahlman | 2025-04-29 16:59:11+00:00
Canada. But yes, I've heard the stories about Germany, and Australia too.

In point of fact, I can fairly reliably download at that rate (for example I can usually watch streaming 1080p video with only occasional interruptions). The best case has been over 20Mbit/s. (This might also be partly due to my wifi; even with a "high gain" dongle I suspect the building construction, physical location of computer vs router etc. causes issues.)
by fabian2k | 2025-04-29 16:59:37+00:00
While profiling and measuring is very important if you want to optimize performance, there are a lot of things you can do without any profiling. In many situations the consequences of each approach are well known or easily reasoned about. Most of the time it's simply "do less work" = "more performance", or avoiding obvious and well-known patterns like N+1 database queries.

But it's also very easily to mislead yourself that way, many "optimizations" might do much less than you think. So you should avoid implementing more complex or harder to understand code just because you think it is faster, but otherwise I'd certainly try to write faster code by default in areas I know well enough to judge that.
by rafram | 2025-04-29 17:00:02+00:00
It's not just me getting Reddit discussion results - Google has an exclusive deal with Reddit to list it in search results [1], and it tends to be ranked highly now for more subjective/recommendation-based queries. (And I did this test after clicking the "Try without personalization" link in the Google footer.)

I didn't list the ads in the Google results because I didn't see them. There's no reason not to be using an ad blocker, and unlike Kagi, it's free.

[1]: https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...
by noisy_boy | 2025-04-29 17:00:17+00:00
I open a new window for each "topic" to keep the tabs grouped while keeping unrelated things separate.

I also use an extension (on my phone so can't lookup the name) to give names to each of these groups of tabs. Only the "main" window with it's tabs automatically starts up upon browser launch. For the rest of the named groups, the extension provides a button on the toolbar to "resume" any named group which launches its tabs in a new window. This workflow reduces startup time and only keeps those things open that I'm actively looking at.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-29 17:00:25+00:00
Personally, I frankly do not need the borrow checker. I have been writing manual memory management code for so long I have simply internalized how to avoid having problems with it. I've been called arrogant for saying this, but it's true.

But I still like the borrow checker style of programming because it makes the code easier to understand.

I find it convenient in the D compiler implementation to use the GC for the AST memory management, as the algorithms that manipulate it are easier if they needn't concern themselves with memory management. A borrow checker approach doesn't fit it comfortably, either.

Many of the data structures persist to the end of the program, as a compiler is a batch program. No memory management strategy is even necessary for those.
by alex-mohr | 2025-04-29 17:00:33+00:00
It was in the early days of Kubernetes and long since fixed. I don't recall the precise details, but it was likely the first official CVE we published: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/issues-security/officia...

Link to the patch fixing it: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/7fef0a4f6a44...

Of course, we'd already fixed other issues like Kubelet listening on a secondary debug port with no authentication. Those problems stemmed from its origins as a make-it-possible hacker project and it took a while to pivot it to something usable in an enterprise.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-29 17:00:55+00:00
I can see your point about it being better to switch candidates early, but this is mostly on Biden himself IMO; I can see publicly visible infighting against the current president doing even more damage to the party (long term and immediate results!), than being slow at picking the candidate.

> They think that a candidate that people are excited to vote for is not a necessity and have been proven wrong over and over and over again. They got beat with this strategy in 2000, 2004, 2016 (and now 2024). It barely worked in 2020.

Who, specifically, is "they"? I think either party just picks the candidate that can muster the most internal support and money, and those are both pretty good proxies for probability of success.

I strongly disagree with your examples. I think Al Gore was an excellent candidate (and he was very close to winning, too). 2004 was basically unwinnable for democrats against an incumbent after going through a crisis that fused the country together.

Trumps success I believe is mainly owed to a media landscape that is extremely helpful for populism in general, a bit of an overton "backlash" after achieving a lot of progressive goals (LGBT, black president, environmentalism) and his success in building a cult of personality out of voters with conflicting beliefs (=> the whole anti-woke movement) as well as diametrically opposed interests (working-class voters that don't stand to profit from neither isolationism-light nor gilded-age-v2 policies).

I personally don't see the republicans holding on to the presidency either way, because in my view, Trump was basically heaping a lot of blame as central part of his rethoric, but after actually getting all the power, people are gonna expect results at some point. Blaming "deep state obstructionism" and "the media" is just not gonna cut it to justify mediocrity, and looking at present policies and past results, mediocrity is about the best I'd expect from him as administrator (thats simply not what he is good at).
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-29 17:01:00+00:00
What if there are negative byproducts of this process though? It's a leap to conclude that we're fine. Consider that we'd be placing a lot of food for fungi into the environment, in places they shouldn't be, which would likely disrupt those environments... And also, the fungi likely can't live in every place the plastic is. Deep sea, deserts, alpine, etc.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-04-29 17:01:10+00:00
I use the simple tab groups plugin and I normally have quite a few tabs open (but only a few visible at a time).

I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the background when I'm not working on that project and bring them back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to looking into job opportunities, and then also some entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics, some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".

Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).

It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend plugin I have).

To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-29 17:01:30+00:00
This is false. Or at least it's almost totally false.

I can try to judge things by whether they are true or false, accurate or misleading, good or bad ideas, regardless of who said them.

Yeah, I fail sometimes - partly because I do have biases, and partly because I don't have infinite amounts of time and energy to dig in to find out the truth. Still, I don't judge what the administration says by which brand of administration it is. I prefer my news sources to be straight rather than slanted.

And I can say that without being a supporter of the current status quo. I find Trump's bullying to be reprehensible.
by rchaud | 2025-04-29 17:01:41+00:00
Netbooks were so underrated.

Small screen, full-OS laptops for $300 at a time before the iPad/iOS era of dumbing down computers. I wrote most of my undergrad thesis on a Dell Mini, with STATA installed for regression analysis. 9-inch screen, 1 GB RAM, 1GHz Intel Atom was plenty powerful for handling office work and watching Youtube. Its battery life was actually better than most high TDP Intel laptops, and games up to 2003-04 worked very well on it.
by immibis | 2025-04-29 17:01:41+00:00
Tor still exists. Once ordinary porn can only be found on Tor, Tor will become a lot more popular and everyone will be able to access all kinds of censored things (from deepfake nudes, to pirated movies, to drug marketplaces, to AI that can tell you how to make a bomb). Of course, they'll just make Tor illegal then.
by vladms | 2025-04-29 17:02:05+00:00
I think in some countries people understand all these issues and some do change their behavior, but it takes much longer than you would assume (reference: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti... - note the peak consumption is in the past).

On the other hand you might downplay how bad can be for some people to totally eliminating meat/dairy. I know a couple of examples that had big issues with iron deficiency due to that. Pills didn't work for years, while restarting eating for a couple of months meat fixed all their health issues.

I do agree though that people eat way more than they need, but probably it is not only meat related (also sugar, carbs and others).
by vel0city | 2025-04-29 17:02:26+00:00
To me, a Yoto is a toy-as-a-service. And for what it does, I don't mind. The tradeoffs for what I'm buying are OK to me in this situation.

I'm fully aware the content on these cards will one day go dark. For content I really care about, I'll make sure I purchase that content another way. Often by buying the actual physical book.

But my family doesn't need every children's story book to last forever, we don't need every kids toy to become generational artifacts.

The device has a lot of online "radio" content as well. Those change on a regular basis and once they're gone, they're gone. That's OK to us in the end. We use the app to mess with these boxes as well and listen to the content we bought on cards through the app in the car as well.

If Yoto disappears tomorrow and the boxes fall silent, sure I'll be disappointed. And yes, potentially they could have made them another way. But nobody on the market today makes something as durable, easy to use for a child, and have such a good content library while also making that content 100% offline. The kids are too young to realistically be handling CDs or vinyls. Eventually the kids will age up into handling CDs for listening to content they own, and they already do have some CDs and vinyls but that's currently a "mom and dad handle loading it" situation.

I totally get things like Tonies and Yotos are the embodiment of DRM hellscape. But assuming you go into it eyes open, its an ok trade in my book. Its not like that's the only way to consume media. And in the end, with the license for the media attached to physical cards, its easy to trade/sell/buy the content second hand from friends and other families around. And since its so durable, even though a toddler handled it for a year or two it's still in perfectly fine shape. Have a two year old handle a CD on their own for a year and see how well it holds up.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-04-29 17:02:44+00:00
I'm in this boat as well. From my perspective, I'd only bother keeping a tab open for a long period of time if it meets the following criteria:

1) It's something I'd actually want to go and view later (most stuff fails this criteria)

2) It's not something I can easily find again

3) It's something that I only anticipate going back to a couple of times, and thus isn't worth making into a bookmark

And over all my years browsing the web, almost nothing satisfies all that criteria. I'm pretty aggressive with closing tabs, and I almost never regret closing a tab.
by ryao | 2025-04-29 17:02:50+00:00
C, unlike C++, does not really force new versions onto you, even if dependencies begin using them. That said, Linux switched to C11. Newer versions of C will gradually be adopted, despite the incompatibilities this causes for C++.

As for WG 14, they incorporated numerous C++isms into C. While you claim that they did not go far enough, I am sure you will find many who would say that they went too far.