MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Juliate | 2025-05-01 08:49:06+00:00
> But what you or I think doesn't matter.

1/ It does (because, it's false to say that "a CEO must do this or that" - or that's not a chief, a CEO, just an algorithm).

2/ it's less a matter of opinion than a matter of observing facts: shareholders are not the all and everything of a company. But my perspective may be that, being French, we have a history of having demonstrated the reality of this in actual actions, that USAmericans haven't yet.
by v1ne | 2025-05-01 08:49:33+00:00
Well, it's a bold hypothesis that a household washing machine should sterilise clothes. It's a machine to reduce the load of microorganisms to a manageable level and to remove dirt, fat, and odours. I don't get how the authors arrive at their hypothesis. Before washing machines, people washed clothes with their hands. Cooking them in a pot was only viable with very robust fabrics made from cotton/hemp/flax. I seriously doubt that the microbial load would have been lower before the invention of washing machines. And with older washing machines, using those nasty aggressive washing agents: Maybe, but your clothes would not last that long (there's this difference between old US-style washing machines that just stir and don't heat and EU washing machines that have a drum that turns and always heat the water).

And then, "potential pathogens" in the biofilm in the machine. Ah, well. My skin and mouth are also full of potential pathogens. I don't know what this study is trying to show. Washing machines are not sterile, I guess.
by metaPushkin | 2025-05-01 08:50:46+00:00
That is not the goal of current geopolitics. In the 70s, the Tavistock Club was tasked with “To stamp out cultural optimism”. After that, the world began to slide into neoarchaism, where we are now, and futurism was essentially stolen from us. Unfortunately the collapse of the USSR made it very easy for this to happen and now we read about medieval madness in the middle east instead of flights to mars.
by oatmeal_croc | 2025-05-01 08:50:57+00:00
Floodlight companies don't appear overnight. I suspect they won't appear at all, given the instability of the tariffs and the fact that the next President (or even the current one) could wipe them off, rendering their shiny new Floodlight factory completely useless overnight. This extends to any industry.

Tariffs need to be stable and updated with several months of advance notice - otherwise they don't serve their purpose.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 08:51:16+00:00
It depends on what you're trying to do. Some bacteria and viruses will survive 60 degrees. There's a reason running a very hot wash (>60C) can quickly get rid of weird smells inside of a washing machine occasionally.

Extra annoying: enabling eco mode (the one that is tested when generating the power usage stats on the sticker for these machines) on some machines will make it run "60 degree equivalent", which usually means "longer but at a lower temperature", which obviously doesn't work for sterilization at all.

Of course, this is rarely an issue for consumers who don't need to sterilize their clothes (except when a family member is sick with some specific illness maybe?). But, for hospital workers, which this paper is about, that's a different story.
by cruzcampo | 2025-05-01 08:51:45+00:00
I really dislike the idea of having to have a window for everything I want to interact with. It feels cluttered and messy - not everything needs to have a whole damn window imo.

Too bad, because I like a lot of the rest of the Gnome UI. But this pattern is the wrong way to go imo.

With syncthing-gtk, how do you quickly pause/continue sync for example? Do you need to open the whole damn thing just to do one simple action?
by alias_neo | 2025-05-01 08:51:52+00:00
I run gnome on all my machines with displays, for many years now. I never paid much thought to what "AppIndicator" is, but I've always used what I believe you're calling "systray", if I understand correctly?

I have temperature and network gauges on the top right next to my battery/audio/WiFi indicators. My work laptop (Ubuntu) has indicators up there for Livepatch and Mattermost, or are these not the same thing?

As far as I recall, I've not had to do anything particularly special other than install the extension for the thing I want, Freon etc, and the Livepatch and Mattermost ones were just there whether I wanted them or not.

It's possible I did something when I setup Gnome on my personal laptop (Arch) but other machines are running Ubuntu and I think it just did this OOB.
by concinds | 2025-05-01 08:52:27+00:00
That comparison has always been nonsense. People can't keep pretending like ActiveX was the same thing as, say, WebMIDI, or that stuff like WebMIDI is Chrome's "moat". Chrome simply has superior, less buggy support for basic, uncontroversial web APIs, the kind that every browser maker agrees on. Look at the massive gap in Interop 2025, possibly the most conservative Interop yet (due to Apple's constant behind-the-scenes vetoing). It's not magic. Google invests more in their browser, and the Chromium codebase attract more contributions from a wider variety of companies. And Firefox has exponentially fewer issues than Safari anyway (which is deliberate, Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly).
by collingreen | 2025-05-01 08:52:37+00:00
He knew better when saying Clinton's behavior amounted to treason.

We don't need to argue about if he knew better; he did, from his own mouth. We need to argue about if it is ok and if it is ok for the people in power to do nothing about it because it's "their team".

At some point soon we need to realize we the people are on one team and everyone saying otherwise is trying to hurt us.
by ukuina | 2025-05-01 08:52:44+00:00
I can't remember which carrier initially compelled Google to do this, but it was done to save their networks rather than save cost for Google. It may have been Verizon when the HTC Thunderbolt launched. Now all the carriers are on-board.

e.g., https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html

> All detectable video streaming is optimized for your mobile device so you can watch up to three times more video using the same amount of high-speed data.
by praveeninpublic | 2025-05-01 08:53:24+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful response. It’s rare to get this kind of engagement, especially from someone on the other side of the AI-art conversation.

You’re right about a lot: the work is early, it’s rough in places, and there’s still a lot I’m figuring out. But what looks like lack of polish to you feels like forward motion to me. The alternative isn’t mastery. It’s paralysis. I’d rather be making progress than waiting for perfect conditions that may never come.

You called the blog post counterproductive. I don’t think it was. Without it, I wouldn’t have sparked a discussion like this. The post wasn’t trying to make a universal claim, it was just me writing down what I noticed, and trying to understand the reactions I got. That’s been useful.

I get that the work doesn’t meet everyone's standards. Some call it lazy because I used AI. Others call it unfinished because I didn’t use AI enough. That tension is actually what I’m exploring, how to use these tools just enough to get the work closer to what I see in my head, without losing the part that feels like me.

I’m not building this for a gallery. I’m building a record of progress. A timeline. Something I can look back on and say, "I made that, and I kept going".

I might not agree with everything you said. But I’m paying attention. And I’m still drawing.

I am running a 90 days challenge to learn, explore, challenge my past beliefs and build systems that will help me accelerate. If you're interested, you can follow me here on X: https://x.com/PraveenInPublic/status/1917824031660859667
by pizza234 | 2025-05-01 08:53:33+00:00
Libreoffice/Openoffice have been doing this since quite early on (reason is that the ancestor StarOffice was designed as monolith, always loading the full suite of programs, and splitting it is probably very hard), so it seems to be an unofficial standard.

On the other hand, it's disappointing, since I remember early M$ Office version being blazing fast (but again, I suspect that there was some preloading going on).
by shafyy | 2025-05-01 08:54:08+00:00
Sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

We simply don't know how browsers would have developed in the past years if Google did not have a monopoly. However, we know that monopolies are almost never good for consumers. Therefore, there is a high chance that in an alternative timeline, where one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world did not have a monopoly on browsers, we as consumers, would have been better off.
by pxoe | 2025-05-01 08:54:28+00:00
People just don't do that. If they did, the state of things wouldn't be the way it is. It's also kinda unfair to creators whose content people consume but just don't pay for in any way, because of a variety of possible reasons (they just don't even think about it, or they don't deem them "worthy" of being paid, or it's about having to go out of their way to pay someone, and then people only paying a limited amount of "chosen" people, etc.)
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-01 08:56:04+00:00
I think you'll find at least 1/4 of HN comments are indicative of stating things from a place of strong instinctive tribalism, but this crowd are just very slightly better at using words to defend our position in a more noble way.

That's OK, it shows we're human, it's not all AI slop here (yet?).
by mort96 | 2025-05-01 08:57:05+00:00
A cr2032 has somewhere around 200mAh. The low-power ESP32-C3 uses somewhere around 20mA when its radios are off but the CPU is running and peripheral clocks are running, which gives a roughly 10 hour runtime. This calculation ignores the fact that the battery's voltage will drop below where the ESP browns out before it has delivered all its power (or assumes that it's regulated up at perfect efficiency), but most cr2032 batteries are a bit above 200mAh so it probably mostly evens out.

Though note that for most of its life, the cr2032 will deliver slightly below the ESP's minimum spec of 3V. From experience, that's not really an issue.

If you can get away with spending most of your time in the ESP's deep sleep state however, battery life is gonna be way better, and that's probably what you'd want to do if you're using a cr2032. In deep sleep, the ESP32-C3's data sheet says it consumes around 5µA (0.005mA). With 200mAh, this gives a battery life of 40 000 hours, or 4.5 years. At those time scales, battery self-discharge becomes relevant, so let's say a couple of years.

So a decent mental model is: you can do a few hours of cumulative compute over the course of a couple of years.

Unless you decide to boost the voltage of the cr2032 to be within the ESP's spec. In that case, the whole deep sleep discussion might be moot; I suspect the regulator's own power draw would absolutely dominate the 5µA of the ESP. But I'm not super familiar with the world of power regulators, maybe there are ultra low power regulators which can do the job with minimal losses even in the µA regime.
by WickyNilliams | 2025-05-01 08:57:25+00:00
I live in a deprived area that voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit, despite almost everything good in the area being bankrolled by the EU development fund. It was very much not in our interest.

I think there were a good number of people to whom it was a coin toss: "maybe it'll turn out ok". I have friends in this group. Those, I suspect, have changed their mind. There have been no tangible benefits, and they weren't particularly attached to the idea.

For others it was a chance to give the establishment a kick in the balls. They were fed up with the stagnation and rot at the heart of our country. An honest assessment would have pinned the blame on conservatives that had been in power for a decade. But the EU made a convenient scapegoat for their own failings. By and large the media and politicians opposed Brexit. So the attitude was let's stick a knife in. Shake things up. I'm not convinced this group have changed their mind. Maybe some of them. But the Reform party promise to fix the whole mess (which they championed) in exchange for their votes. And I think they will get them.

For a more hardcore contingent it became an entire political identity. It's them, fighting for Britain's future, versus the "remainiacs" and the "media elite" etc who are frustrating the process. It would have worked out if people _just believed_ in it more! If we'd hard a harder Brexit. These people will never change their mind.

The politicians who told them (even for the time) quite obvious lies have not suffered any political consequences, far from it. A photo circulated on the night of Brexit where Farage was stood in front of a chart of GBP tanking while laughing. You'd think that would be his death knell! He likely shorted the pound for personal gain. Yet today he is more successful and more prominent than ever.

In short, I don't think there has been a reckoning. We are still dealing with the consequences, and likely will for a long time whether directly or indirectly
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-01 08:57:26+00:00
That’s a common misconception taken from an engineers perspective but you have to understand their job isn’t about engineering, it’s about risk mitigation. And when viewed from that perspective, they are doing their job.

The real problem is that the domain has gotten so complicated that a traditional risk mitigation approach to is an outdated role and is now better fulfilled by technical staff who specialise in security. But that’s an organisation problem caused by senior management (C-suite and above) rather than a particular individual in that specific role not doing their job well.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-01 08:58:59+00:00
It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people discovered it started just as fast on Linux as on Windows. The secret was a special in-house linker but that was a trade secret until many years later, I think.

Back then there was much less understanding in the software industry of why 90's Microsoft was so successful. A lot of people couldn't work it out and - combined with their anti-trust moves against Netscape - just assumed the whole thing was built on cheating. In reality it was a combination of really buying into GUIs and their own Windows platform early (not an obviously successful move back then), combined with having some truly wizard-level systems hackers. It's hard to understand these days because clever hacking is hardly ever a competitive advantage now, outside of maybe game engines. It can even be a disadvantage, as it causes you to focus on micro-optimization whilst your competitor is shipping another useful feature.

Windows 95 was a massive hit, but it didn't have any particularly unique killer features from the end user's perspective. Apple had similar features in theory. The gap was the quality of their kernel and toolchain. Windows made the transition from being a cooperatively multi-tasked single address space system running on a driver-less "OS" (barely more than a fancy library), to being a pre-emptively multi-tasked OS with a wealth of loadable hardware drivers, and they managed that architecture shift in a way that preserved the hard work of their ecosystem's developers. Apple failed the same transition completely and Microsoft's other competitors were big iron UNIX vendors who delivered the same stability and features only through very expensive proprietary hardware.

This new story is emblematic of Microsoft's trajectory over the years. Their apps used to beat everyone on startup time by using tricks so clever everyone assumed they'd cheated, and now their hacking is so un-wizardly they actually do resort to cheating. These days the wizard level systems hackers are all at Apple. Oh how the wheel turns.
by drcongo | 2025-05-01 08:59:43+00:00
The system I built it for was invite only so the mesh was self-building, and yeah, there was a karma-like system that affected the trust levels, which in turn then gave users extra privileges such as more invites. Most of this was hidden from the users to make it slightly less exploitable, though if it had ever reached any kind of scale I'd imagine some users would work out ways to game it.
by kilotaras | 2025-05-01 09:00:21+00:00
Team X is responsible for feature Foo; feature Foo is slow; team X introduces Foo-preload, metrics go up, person responsible gets a bonus.

Multiply that by tens (or even hundreds) of teams and your app startup (either on desktop or mobile) is now a bloated mess. Happened to Office, Facebook iOS and countless others.

One solution is to treat startup cycles as a resource similar to e.g. size or backend servers.
by microtonal | 2025-05-01 09:00:57+00:00
This is certainly the case. I have noticed this in voting patterns as well. I often comment strongly in favor of EU regulations (I believe capitalism is fairer and benefits consumers more with stronger regulations). During times the US is asleep such comments often get a lot of upvotes. During times where EU and the US are up, there seems to be much more contention in the voting, with votes swinging up and down a lot.

By the way, I don't think this is a good way of voting. IMO comments should be upvoted if they provide good insights (even if you disagree with them) and downvoted when they are low-content/trolling/full of fallacies.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-01 09:01:00+00:00
iAd is stated as being built differently to how other adtech networks work.

I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.

Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.

Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.

It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
by alias_neo | 2025-05-01 09:01:04+00:00
Perhaps people like you (and I) are not the target audience. I've always felt Dropbox was more of an "typical user" (as opposed to power user) file sync; I used it some years ago but never really liked it, I roll my own now.

I wonder whether Dropbox looked at some stats and realised that many of their users are on beginner-friendly distros/desktops and that such a requirement would help (them) more than it would hurt (users).
by TGrumser | 2025-05-01 09:02:02+00:00
I’m a solo dev and just launched pixel-gen.ai, a tool that lets you generate high-quality pixel art using AI. It uses OpenAI’s new gpt-image API, image processing algorithms and clever prompt engineering to get crisp, game-ready (pixel-perfect) sprites, icons, etc.

You can generate images without login (but get x10 more credits if you sign up).

Unlike most AI tools that churn out blurry or style-inconsistent results, this one focuses entirely on clean, grid-aligned, retro-style output suitable for actual use in 2D games. You can generate in three quality modes (low, medium, high), with results optimized for readability at small sizes.

You don’t need to create an account to try it—your browser starts with 10 free credits for instant generation. Just type a prompt like “mighty knight in red silver armor holding a enchanted sword” or “cyberpunk knight sprite” and it outputs a PNG. If you run out of credits, join our Discord to ask for more and sharing prompts, feedback, and showcasing results.

Curious to hear what this crowd thinks — any feedback welcome.
by bflesch | 2025-05-01 09:02:33+00:00
LibreOffice has several themes that makes it look like MS Office (e.g. ribbons, modern UI, etc).

Select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED > Enable experimental Options (WARNING this is experimental and may be unstable) > OK and then RESTART LIBREOFFICE. On restart VIEW > TOOLBAR LAYOUT > NOTEBOOKBAR. You can then play with the options with VIEW > NOTEBOOKBAR > CONTEXTUAL GROUPS/ CONTEXTUAL SINGLE / TABBED.
by bambax | 2025-05-01 09:02:37+00:00
> using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage

Ah, the same advanced analytics package used by most consultancies and all politicians, which consists in prolonging a trend as a straight line until it reaches then end of times, and beyond.

The same very powerful analytics package that was recently used by AI fanboys to predict AI will consume 100% of the world electricity in a few years.
by Retric | 2025-05-01 09:03:20+00:00
> I thought a majority of Chinese businesses are state owned.

That’s not how things work, they care about control not micromanaging everything. There are rules favoring majority Chinese owned companies, but that doesn’t need to be government ownership.

The CCP only really cares about large companies or specific industries like media. There’s minimal interference in a food truck and thus most companies that are small, but things get more involved as you scale. Critical industries like shipping and electricity have government owned businesses running things.
Ask HN: Why are Americans on this site acting in an anti-free speech way?
by cruzcampo | 2025-05-01 09:03:31+00:00
Dear HN community,

it has long been my impression that people here in particular (as well as Americans in general!) consider free speech one of the most important values and themselves as upholders of that value - think of Musk buying Twitter and calling himself a "free speech absolutist", a move that was widely applauded in this community.

Yet, I have noticed that many of my comments and submissions get censored by people abusing the flagging functionality to shut down political views they don't agree with or issues that - while clearly tech related - don't fit in with their ideological agenda. This tends to happen right around the time Americans start waking up.

How does this fit in with this vision of free speech being such a high value? Is this a forum where free speech is practiced and valued? If so, are there any plans to reign in this obvious political censorship?

Here's some recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43793875

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728870

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43810880

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43845934
by herbst | 2025-05-01 09:03:47+00:00
Recently needed windows for a single piece of software (I hate myself for it) and used a PC I had around (dell Wyse 5070) manjaro Linux Bootet in about 9 seconds.

Windows 10 on the other hand takes nearly a minute to get to login and it hasn't stopped booting then, another 20 seconds or so after login it's not responsive.

And only if it doesn't decide to update or do system repairs for 5 minutes, or more if it goes into one if it's restart update loops.

It's not a little more, it literally killed at least an hour of productivity in just a few weeks

(That's not counting the productivity killers once the system is running)
by iLoveOncall | 2025-05-01 09:03:48+00:00
Probably because you have a way better computer.

My girlfriend and I work in the same company, I have an M1 mac because I'm a dev and she has a shitty Dell laptop with Windows. Sometimes it's easier for her to send me an Excel, make the edit for her and send it back, because Excel constantly hangs on her laptop.