MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by emchammer | 2025-04-23 10:51:05+00:00
Oh, man, I had forgotten about having the menu keyboard shortcuts underlined all the time. Sometimes you could even tell that whoever had a sense of humor in choosing the mnemonics. I don't even know how to open the macOS menu bar without my keyboard now.

After doing an Internet search for it, I have learned that it is Fn-Control-F2, after enabling Full Keyboard Access in Accessibility. How could it get this bad? (Apple's other accessibility features are amazing.)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-23 10:51:25+00:00
It's important to remember that a large proportion of the community just wants to see tech stories here, and not anything perceived as political.

And I totally get where they're coming from (this stuff is super exhausting and depressing).

That being said, this story in particular seems squarely in the HN wheelhouse, but I can understand that others disagree.

tl;dr probably not a conspiracy, just people who think differently than you do.
by Tmpod | 2025-04-23 10:51:40+00:00
I'm not sure I agree with Adobe design suite being needed. I am a close to someone who's been through multiple different public sector institutions in my country and the only true constants is the cord Microsoft Office suite (Word+Excel+PowerPoint), Outlook and more recently Adobe Acrobat (mostly because of digital signing) and Microsoft Teams.

The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.

LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.

Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features. Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).

Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.
by close04 | 2025-04-23 10:51:55+00:00
> I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising.

This is not really their choice at this point. They were already found to have abused their position so it's up to a judge to decide what Google has to to next. Google doesn't need "a browser", they need a tool that allows them to exercise more control and this whole court case is about preventing that.

OpenAI is just looking for new ways to funnel data into the training of their models. And I'm afraid so many people would eat it up as long as OpenAI gives them some AI candy in return.
by ryao | 2025-04-23 10:53:28+00:00
Has the U.S. ever claimed to be the leader of the world? I do not think any country has ever claimed that title. The closest to it would be some of the remarks that are supposedly made to each Pope upon becoming Pope.

That said, there is the similar sounding title called “the leader of the free world” applied to the U.S. president since the end of WWII. I always thought that was the result of military alliances, not the CVE program, which post dates it.

Edit: To the downvoters, I take issue with the assertion that the U.S. has claimed the title “leader of the world”. That is applied to the Pope during papal inaugurations and as far as I know, has never been formally applied to the United States. It seems to have been invented this year as part of claims that the U.S. has an obligation to spend money on programs that benefit others, given that the current political situation has made a number of them appear to be in jeopardy, but that appears to be a rewrite of history, rather than any historical truth. My sole interest here is the historical truth, and not politics.
by mkl | 2025-04-23 10:53:36+00:00
Make default search be a version of ChatGPT and put ads on it? Could work (I wouldn't use it though). The way a lot of people use their browser they might be fine with it if it puts navigation-type links up top (I have literally seen a technical colleague with a PhD do a Google search for "x" and click a link rather than type the ".com"). The inference costs would surely make it hard to profit from though.

Having just closed a $40 billion USD funding round [1], OpenAI might actually be able to afford a fair price for Chrome (supposedly $15-20 billion USD [2]).

[1] There are some catches to that: https://www.investopedia.com/openai-closes-up-to-usd40b-fund...

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chrome+sale+valuation
by p_ing | 2025-04-23 10:53:45+00:00
The issue with the Adobe suites is that their alternatives need to be workflow-identical, it's not just how good or bug compatible the competitor needs to be.

The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.
by zahlman | 2025-04-23 10:53:50+00:00
> what the hell numpy is

Did they try using a search engine? But more to the point, if they don't understand what it is, how did they find out it exists?

> how to get it (venv, conda, pip, uv, uvx, …)

uvx is a command from the same program as uv; venv is not a way to obtain packages; and the choice here isn't a real stumbling block.

> because python arrays are shit

I can't say I've seen many people complain about the standard library `array` module; indeed it doesn't seem like many people are aware it exists in the first place.

If you're talking about lists then they serve a completely different purpose. But your use of profanity suggests to me that you don't have any actual concrete criticism here.

> Then they notice that some other dependency requires a previous python version

Where did this other dependency come from in the first place? How did they get here from a starting point of dissatisfaction with the Python standard library?

> but their python is installed globally and other dependencies were installed for that.

... and that's where actual environment management comes in, yes. Sometimes you have to do that. But this has nothing to do with teaching Python. You have necessarily learned quite a bit by the time this is a real concern, and if you were taught properly then you can self-study everything else you need.

> These are uniquely python-specific problems.

No other languages ever require environment management?

> Lisp doesn’t have those problems

Please tell me about your experience using Qi.
by mxuribe | 2025-04-23 10:54:47+00:00
I think others have already stated about the U.S. having a leadership position by running this...So i'll just comment on the the funding of this DB. I mean, sure, i'm all for optimizing things...but it strikes me that some decisions by the current U.S. administration - like not wanting to fund this - seem very penny wise and pound foolish. Like, for whatever it costs to run this DB (and i truly have no idea of the costs), i bet you that the operational benefits to U.s. companies, organizations is well worth the spend. Separate of any political benefits, i'm referring to hard and tactical benefits that arise from this existing. Someone is simply looking at a long list of items on a budget, not understanding that each item might have different weights, values, etc...and simply slashing like a toddler...and either not caring the ramifications, or not understanding them (or secondary trickle effects).
by chongli | 2025-04-23 10:55:06+00:00
You’ve given me much food for thought, thanks!

I know that at one time we did mathematics without the number zero and that its introduction was a profound (and controversial) change. The empty set seems like a perfectly natural extension of zero as a concept. Perhaps the universe with no empty set also has no zero? Would be very interesting to see how mathematics would develop without either construct.
by ryao | 2025-04-23 10:56:07+00:00
Leader of the world and leader of the free world are two different things. As far as I know, no country in the past century has called itself either of them. I would not be surprised if the title was applied to countries such as the Imperium Romanum and 中國 in the distant past. Even more distant would be possibly Greece given that it’s leader was called the King of Kings around the time of Troy.

However, I believe both titles are applied to specific office holders in the modern day. The U.S. president is called the leader of the free world by many. I believe the title leader of the world is bestowed upon the Pope during Papal inaugurations.
by justin_ | 2025-04-23 10:56:12+00:00
> The camera integrates incoming light into a tiny square [...] giving a brightness (and with the Bayer filter in front of the sensor, a color) for the pixel

This is where I was trying to go. The pixel, the result at the end of all that, is the single value (which may be a color with multiple components, sure). The physical reality of the sensor having an area and generating a charge is not relevant to the signal processing that happens after that. For Smith, he's saying that this sample is best understood as a point, rather than a rectangle. This makes more sense for Smith, who was working in image processing within software, unrelated to displays and sensors.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-23 10:56:36+00:00
> Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle.

Not in the US, but _slightly_ sceptical of this one, because (a) I'm pretty sure that they were available in supermarkets _here_ (Ireland) in the 90s and (b) because there was a Seinfeld episode about them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mango - 1993, Kramer is banned from his favourite fruit store, is horrified at the suggestion that he buy supermarket mangoes).

> frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables

Again, we're talking the 90s, right? I'm pretty sure that had already happened; that'd be more 70s-80s.
by mordae | 2025-04-23 10:57:50+00:00
There's pixels and pixels.

Screen pixels are (nowadays) usually three vertical rectangles that occupy a square spot on the grid that forms the screen. This is sometimes exploited for sub-pixel font smoothing purposes.

Digital photography pixels are reconstructed from sensors that perceive cone of incoming light of certain frequency band, arranged in a Bayer grid.

Rendered 3D scene pixels are point samples unless they approximate cones via sampling neighborhood of the pixel center.

In any case, Nyquist will tear your head off and spit into your neck hole as soon as you come close to any kind of pixel. Square or point.
by hello_computer | 2025-04-23 10:59:41+00:00
If you are talking about the MNT reform, that is utterly fatuous. Same with f-droid. These are toys for IT fanboys--nothing that will significantly dislodge Europeans from the US tech teat. Europe needs iOS & Google-tier replacements ASAP. China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Baidu, Alibaba. Even Russia has Yandex & Telegram. Europe has zilch.

I figured that after we were caught bugging Merkel's telephone, Europe would have at least gotten started, but I figured wrong.
by AndrewThrowaway | 2025-04-23 10:59:48+00:00
Looks like some kind of a gatekeeping ritual to rationalize why upper management salaries are in millions. I think we can also see in other industries too.

You hire hundreds of interns and entry level workers to let them fight in the bloodbath for 100h a week. Pay peanuts. Let them do all the work.

The ones who survive get a bit bigger salaries. Those who still persist in upper level bloodbaths are upgraded into millionaires. And paying them millions looks acceptable as it is so hard to reach the top.

While you clearly could share all those millions between entry level and paid internships, don't have 100h weeks and have a healthy industry.
by bradfa | 2025-04-23 10:59:48+00:00
I know of a bunch of people, some who only have high school degrees, who are entirely self-taught and are doing tinytapeout (https://tinytapeout.com/) chip designs. Yeah, that's not nearly at the skill or scale of designing CPUs for Intel/AMD/NVIDIA/Apple/Marvell/etc but it's still chip design!

Your concerns about horribly long hours and lower than IT/software pay are the most concerning part to me. But, if there's really a shortage of engineers who know how to do chip design, hopefully the market will take care of that via supply/demand at least once things get really out of whack.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-04-23 11:01:15+00:00
> I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising. With their own browser they control the full length of the wire between the ad-server and the user. Without it, they don't.

They've already been convicted of anti-trust behavior for precisely this reason. Now the trial is in the remedy phase where the DOJ is asking that they be forced to divest ownership of Chrome and other properties.

Google will have no choice in the matter. It's entirely up to the judge at this point.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-23 11:01:34+00:00
> none of these improvements are really life changing

They don't really cover it, but one literally life changing one has been medicine; a lot of things that were a death sentence (and often a very nasty, slow, painful one) in the 90s are now quite treatable. Particularly cancers, but also there've been big improvements in cardiac treatment, and the treatment of certain diseases (particularly HIV).
by bradfa | 2025-04-23 11:02:26+00:00
If you can do ASIC design, you can probably do FPGA design. FPGA design is a pretty easy thing to do remotely, it's not ALL that different from software work. I know a bunch of consultants who make very good money living where they desire, working from home, doing FPGA design for industrial customers. Granted, these people aren't fresh college graduates since they're experienced engineers, but there are a good number of them out there.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-23 11:02:27+00:00
Funding is irrelevant and a distraction. Dismantling civil cybersecurity is a way to expose a population to influence and other harms that necessitate more "strong-man" solutions later [0,1]. Only after they've destroyed "cyber defenses" can they claim a crisis and declare "cybsersecurity is dead, long live the new cybersecurity". And you can be damn sure it won't be security for you.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/computer-security-is-a-polit...

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/usw/
by surfingdino | 2025-04-23 11:02:31+00:00
A photosite is a set of four photosensitive electronic sensors that register levels of RGB components of light https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-sensors.h... The camera sensor turns data captured by a a single photosite into a single data structure (a pixel), a tuple of as many discreet values as there are components in a given colour space (three for RGB).
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-23 11:02:52+00:00
I have never found a "protein bar" that is not full of sugar, and gooey caramel, and chocolate, and dark chocolate. Perhaps that is mostly the point: that a protein bar is for quick energy, damn the torpedoes.

But I personally have a policy to never keep candy or chocolates at home, lest I eat them in one sitting! And once I figured this out about protein bars, I never keep them around, either. I may purchase one or two at a time if I'm needing a snack while I'm out.

I used to buy a big case of those Quaker Chewy Granola bars from Costco with my parents. And boy, I would eat several of those a day. They did not do me any digestive favors. They were like Rice Krispies treats with semisweet chocolate in them. Very appealing, but very addictive.
by madeofpalk | 2025-04-23 11:04:01+00:00
> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.

To me, this is the most easily agreeable part of what the EU has been after. It is unfair that Apple restricts Netflix from telling it's users that they can sign up and pay for Netlifx on their own website. It's unfair that Netflix can't even tell its users the rules that Apple enforces on them.

It's telling that Gruber is pretty staunchly against EU/DMA interferance in Apple, and broadly thinks they're wrong. But this is the one thing he agrees on

> If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up

https://daringfireball.net/2019/01/netflix_itunes_billing

https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/parsing_cooks_opening_sta...

(I think Apple now has their 'reader app' carveout for apps like Netflix, but it's still pretty obtuse and inconsistent)
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-23 11:04:06+00:00
> If it's not Cygwin, then what is it?

Looking at the source code[1], it appears to be analogous to MinGW in the MinGW:GNU/Linux:Windows relationship, but replace with MinC:BSD:Windows. In other words, a minimal user-mode layer that presents BSD headers (and therefore BSD symbols, macros, and types), libraries, and core utils to end-users, thus abstracting over MSVC†.

EDIT: replace 'MinGW' with 'Cygwin' above. So it is Cygwin.

I'd say calling it a 'kernel' is quite a stretch—there is not much that runs in kernel-mode, and everything runs atop the NT kernel which does the actual 'kernel'y stuff.

[1]: https://github.com/dboland/minc

†: Until one wants to use very recent and very nice Microsoft libraries[2][3], and these fail spectacularly because MinGW doesn't know about nice MSVC-specific stuff like SAL annotations[4].

[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil

[3]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-cpp

[4]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/cpp/c-runtime-library/sal-...
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-23 11:04:31+00:00
> I would insist Apple conforms to the industry standard

Insisting Apple conforms to anything is useless, unless you're in control of government regulations.

You can stick to Apple's ridiculous custom APIs, or you can release your software without Apple support. Luckily, VisionOS seems to have gone the way of the Apple Pippin, so I don't think many people will care much about Apple's headsets not being supported by VR games. Apple certainly doesn't.

If Godot wants VisionOS support, this is probably the way to do it. The question then becomes: is an alteration this heavy worth the maintenance cost, especially for hardware that expensive and uncommon? You don't want to end up in a situation where the one guy with such a headset falls ill and suddenly you can't test your engine anymore without spending a couple thousand on new hardware.
by zahlman | 2025-04-23 11:05:56+00:00
The quality of documentation is a known, highlighted concern in the community. There is particular interest in adopting Diataxis principles to improve documentation, both for Python itself and for packaging (see e.g. the user guide at https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/ , or the PyPA main site https://www.pypa.io/en/latest/ ).

If you want to help, there's a section on the Python forum (https://discuss.python.org/c/documentation/26) and a Discord server, and issues with documentation can also be reported on the main Python GitHub issue tracker (https://github.com/python/cpython/labels/docs).
by aeonik | 2025-04-23 11:09:45+00:00
You can absolutely etch silicon at home. Processes like wet etching (KOH, HF), reactive ion etching (RIE), laser ablation, and even electron beam lithography using repurposed CRTs are all viable at the DIY scale.

They're not used in high-volume manufacturing (you’re not replacing ASML), but they’re solid for prototyping, research, and niche builds.

Just don’t underestimate the safety aspect—some of these chemicals (like HF) are genuinely nasty, and DIY high voltage setups can bite hard.

You're not hitting nanometer nodes, but for MEMS, sensors, and basic ICs, it’s totally within reach if you know what you’re doing.
by madeofpalk | 2025-04-23 11:09:56+00:00
Also, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

> The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation [to allow third party app stores] in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels.

This is great to hear. It sounds like they've just found Apple non-compliant in making alternate app stores as discouraging for both developers and user as possible. I guess it'll take another 12 months for any fines or changes from Apple.
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-23 11:10:40+00:00
I have never done any chip design work, but I have seen some hobbyists going on with HDL without a degree. It's definitely not professional level but I suspect they are hireable materials at least. This leads me to ask the two questions:

1) If chip design (or X, anything) is so vital, so important to national security, why do universities insist that a degree of X include a lot of unrelated courses? You can argue that universities are not just for employment (yeah, as if most people go to university just for fun), but by the name of God, I really hate it when my university forced me to go through all those BS selective courses to reach 120. If you ask me, it's just money grabbing.

2) Why can't students go straight to a fab or whatever after bachelor and do their masters THERE? Isn't the industry a much better place to do that? Actually, why don't the industry simply hire high school students and go from there? Companies used to do that in the 50s/60s. I don't know if they still do that but I think it's rare.
Show HN: ForeverYOU – Create an AI-powered version of yourself [video]
by ForeverYOU | 2025-04-23 11:11:00+00:00
Hi HN!

I'm Pedro, and I recently started working on ForeverYOU, a platform to help people preserve their voice, memories, and emotions — creating an interactive AI-powered digital self that can live on as a legacy.

I'm building this solo, without a technical background, but with a passion for innovation and storytelling. The platform is in early development, with some core features already live.

I'd love your feedback! - Do you see value in a product like this? - What would make it meaningful for you?

Pitch Video: https://youtu.be/4IThN0shjV4

Thanks for reading!
by Someone | 2025-04-23 11:11:07+00:00
> As part of a vectorization engine you need to trace the outline of all pixels of the same color in a bitmap. What other choice to you have than to think of pixels as squares with four sides?

I think that’s a bad example. For vector tracing, you want the ability to trace using lines and curves at any angle, not alongside the pixel boundaries, so you want to see the image as a function from ℝ² to RGB space for which you have samples at grid positions. Target then is to find a shape that covers the part of ℝ² that satisfies a discriminator function (e.g. “red component at least 0.8, green and blue components at most 0.1) decently well, balancing the simplicity of the shape (in terms of number of control points or something like that) with the quality of the cover.