MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by archvile | 2025-05-01 11:13:22+00:00
Regarding 3. Battery life - I’ve had a ThinkPad Nano for several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6 hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be said about Linux in general just being so much more “light weight” so to speak vs windows, which has become such a bloated mess. But the main issue I had was your point 4, since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).
by palata | 2025-05-01 11:13:49+00:00
I think that Proton works pretty well. I am very impressed by Valve's effort there and the amount of games that are now available on Linux.

But I don't think it's related to the Desktop environment, is it? Somehow I feel like many people who complain about Linux not being "mainstream material" want Windows, but free and without ads/trackers.

I don't want Windows, I want freedom. Freedom to choose my init system, my window manager, my filesystem, my terminal, hell even my libc.

The thing is, I don't think it can happen with a mainstream system. The industry won't care about supporting Linux unless there is critical mass, and in order to have critical mass you have to onboard all those people who want Windows (but free), not Linux. Already now, too many projects only work with the latest Ubuntu and assume systemd and some specific dependencies.

If Ubuntu were to become mainstream, instead of having Windows, macOS and Linux I fear we would have Windows, macOS, Ubuntu and Linux. Not sure it would change anything for me.
by jonnat | 2025-05-01 11:15:10+00:00
I admit I've not been following the Chrome saga, but what does the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based on Chromium?

I truly don't understand how you could force someone to divest from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice of search engine?
by n4r9 | 2025-05-01 11:15:55+00:00
One problem with the Fermi paradox is that the Drake equation simply multiplies expected values together without regard to the underlying distributions. You can think about it this way: what if the actual mechanisms of the evolution of life result in there being a very high probability of 1 or 2 space-faring civilisations evolving, and a tiny probability of trillions of space-faring civilisations? The expected value coming out of the Drake equation would be large but useless.

A few years ago some researchers at the Future of Humanity institute explored what happens if you take distributions into account. It turns out that this makes a surprising difference and results in a substantial probability of no other intelligent life. No need for speculation about great filters, predatory civilisations, etc... . The paper is freely available on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404
by awesomekling | 2025-05-01 11:16:37+00:00
Whatever happens, large parts of the codebase + dependencies will be C++ (or C) for the foreseeable future.

We're working on integrating with Swift, but despite the team's earnest efforts, Swift/C++ interop is still young and unstable.

On a personal note, I'm increasingly feeling like "C++ with a garbage collector" might actually be a reasonable tool for the task at hand. Watching the development of Fil-C in this space..
by sgarland | 2025-05-01 11:17:01+00:00
From your link:

>> gsd

> gnome-settings-daemon.

>> no-longer

> Don't think that's in the OED

>> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than editing logind.conf

> I don't like the tone in this sentence.

I am dumbstruck that someone can be so utterly full of themselves that they can smugly correct someone’s grammar, and an obvious acronym, only to turn around and clutch their pearls that their victim said mean things in the nicest way possible about their software.

I knew there was a reason I haven’t liked GNOME for years. XFCE is the way.
by atombender | 2025-05-01 11:17:10+00:00
My layperson's understanding regarding the criticisms against Julian Baumgartner is that he uses a lot of invasive methods that don't meet the strict technical standards employed by professional conservators, and this creates a misleading impression of what conservation actually is.

For example, you will frequently see Baumgartner do over- and in-painting of fairly large areas that have been lost. Modern conservation has slowly evolved to distance itself from mere restoration; the objective of conservators who work for museums or major collections is to only apply non-invasive procedures that can bring the artwork closer to its original state (e.g. grime removal) and shore up the structural integrity of the physical object to preserve it, but without adding anything non-original if possible. Baumgartner claims that all his changes are reversible, but you still see him prying lacquer off with a scalpel, completely replacing the wood of wood-panel paintings, and many other techniques that cast doubt on those claims.

I'm not a professional, so I can't judge whether all of this is accurate, but I find the drama fascinating. In the field of conservation, Baumgartner is an outsider, as he mentored under his father rather than study conservation in an academic setting. Baumgartner's videos look absolutely world-class, but he probably wouldn't meet the bar for qualifications imposed by major museums, which typically require a postgraduate degree in conservation, including formal training in chemistry. So there's probably an element of disdain for amateurs to the criticism, as well.

To be clear, what Baumgartner does is probably perfectly acceptable for many artworks, where the owner's directive is to restore the artwork back to what it may have looked like when it was made. But I'm not sure he should touch a Vermeer.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-01 11:17:13+00:00
Microsoft either has a good product that is wanted or it doesnt and was anticompetitive. cough cough.

The EU absolutely should try to stand up their own tech infrastructure. Entire supply chain. chips, software, everything. Absolutely needs to happen eventually.

The problem with the EU is singlular; there has been loads of anti-microsoft folks attempting to beat them for basically forever. Unsuccessfully. They dont have anyone who can; if they did they could just me like hey XYZ here's a trillion $, make us independent.

All the EU really has is regulation. Which by itself will prevent investment from ever giving them independence. The irony that their future of independence depends on extreme deregulation.
by ohgr | 2025-05-01 11:18:04+00:00
No Linux desktop delivers what the user wants, needs or expect. Only what the developers think they need and find interesting to fix. It's more fun reinventing wheels badly than fixing shit generally. Some people are lucky this aligns with their needs, but for most it doesn't. It's jarring and unproductive.

It needs corporate (or government!) drive behind it or that won't change. I'm not talking about Redhat either who appears to just be a holding pen for the above.
by hnick | 2025-05-01 11:18:19+00:00
Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.

I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.

Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.
by lukan | 2025-05-01 11:18:58+00:00
"Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought."

Questions usually can be productive. To answer it, we have to look up and apply the (debated) definitions of life and atoms in our understanding clearly don't meet it.

But since we only know so very little when going really small or really big, I do say it is an interesting thought to give room for quark or dark matter based life, or the theoretical organism of a black hole.

We simply don't know and we will never know, if we think we already know.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-01 11:19:49+00:00
> Under Trump 2.0, some Europeans fear that storing their data in the bit barns of Microsoft, Google and AWS is no longer safe

This should be very clear to everyone involved. IMO, the plan should be to disallow US cloud providers this side of the pond.

These days internet services are essential infrastructure. Much like you don't want a hostile foreign nation controlling your water supply or electricity, you also don't want them controlling your internet.
by Qwertious | 2025-05-01 11:20:03+00:00
Here's a metric: remove iron ore/coal shipments that only use a single fixed repeat route on a decaying network at <10MPH on un-electrified rail that hasn't been majorly maintained in 50 years.

If you remove that particular outlier (that basically drowns out everything else), the US's rail is pretty trash.

Or look at coverage; US rail companies will abandon profitable routes because they're fixated on improving the average profitability instead of absolute profits.

Nobody who knows much about railways is impressed by the US's railway system. Electrification is cheaper in the long run, and yet the US railway system is <1% electrified, because it's not profitable in the short term and all the railway companies are horrifically allergic to anything that won't be profitable within the decade. The US rail system is slowly falling apart, because while it makes sense in the long term to maintain it, it won't earn a profit now.
by Mossy9 | 2025-05-01 11:21:13+00:00
First order of business should be to detach the governments from Microsoft. Probably the hardest part of this whole tangle is that the governing bodies are so bound to MS that any move can hit back twice as hard. It's easier to legislate the consumer side, since it's not directly affecting the efficiency and budgets of the organizations making the legislation.

Thankfully, it seems that a movement from inside governments is really starting, with more and more project funding demanding e.g. avoiding vendor lock-in. This helped push one of my projects from MSSQL to Postgres. One step at a time...
by yobi0h | 2025-05-01 11:22:28+00:00
> Japan's WWII history is uniquely bad but they don't learn about it.

I see this claim form time to time, but the unsavory side of WW2 is thought in classes, although not without controversy [1]:

Despite the efforts of the nationalist textbook reformers, by the late 1990s the most common Japanese schoolbooks contained references to, for instance, the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731, and the comfort women of World War II, all historical issues which have faced challenges from ultranationalists in the past. The most recent of the controversial textbooks, the New History Textbook, published in 2000, which significantly downplays Japanese aggression, was shunned by nearly all of Japan's school districts.

On the other hand, after the occupation, GHQ had imposed a press code [2], i.e. censorship of mass media, that undoubtedly had an impact on postwar Japan, so you could say that the point still stands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_cont...

[2] https://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?p=139387
by delfinom | 2025-05-01 11:22:33+00:00
They are in other parts of the country.

The problem is NYC/NY are quite solidified and building new rail lines is neigh impossible as you'll need to start eminent domaining land or, spending years fighting NIMBYs for land that is already zoned and allocated for the use.

The only news here is they found an existing property with rail connections they can piggy back on.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-01 11:22:37+00:00
A decade ago I managed Cochabamba -> La Paz -> Cusco -> Lake Titicaca -> train to Machu Picchu -> Lima in two weeks, which felt like hitting the major spots (including some of Bolivia) at a reasonable pace. Did involve some very small planes though, and the very unusual "climb to land" of La Paz.
by sgarland | 2025-05-01 11:22:51+00:00
> Ubuntu

Well, there’s your problem ;-)

This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-01 11:22:55+00:00
You would just send him a link in a Signal message. His phone number is widely known and he has Signal installed on his desktop computer.

Signal’s protocol secures the message in transit. But their desktop app may or may not have client-side vulnerabilities. And if he clicks a link, you’re out of Signal and into the browser. If the link downloads a file, you’re into the OS.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-01 11:22:57+00:00
I don't see what the problem with this ruling or forced divestiture is.

Starting a new browser today is a massive, nearly impossible task made harder by the fact that the few browsers we do have continue to push through new specs and features. Sure that's good for consumers, but its bad for competition.

If those new specs and features are only possible because Google is artificially propping up the few browsers we do have, that reeks of an antitrust violation.

We will almost certainly see a slowdown in improvements to the web and browsers if this goes through, but we'll also see the door finally open to potential competitors that want to start a new browser engine rather than just put some paint on chromium and call it a browser company.
by wltr | 2025-05-01 11:24:15+00:00
Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.
by xattt | 2025-05-01 11:24:36+00:00
The toolkit inconsistency between apps drives me crazy more than it should.

Loading up a GTK app and switching to a Qt app is jarring, especially with basic things like a file picker.

Daily driving desktop Linux feels like you are living in a lower-middle income family. Yes, you have some nice things, but you can usually tell they are cost-cut versions that have filler plates or missing features present on higher-end versions of the product (i.e. macOS).
by japhyr | 2025-05-01 11:24:50+00:00
A long time ago I had trouble waking up without hitting snooze a bunch of times. So I started setting my alarm for the latest possible time I could get up and still get to where I needed to be. I aimed to get up the first time I woke up naturally in the morning.

That was a life changing moment for me. I started waking up so much more rested, and without immediate morning stress. I got up later than I used to set my alarm for, but much earlier than I used to actually get up. Alarms that interrupt deep morning sleep are so hard to deal with.
by safercplusplus | 2025-05-01 11:25:03+00:00
This particular memory vulnerability, as I understand it, was a result of a `ReadonlySpan<>` targeting a resizable vector. A simple technique used by the scpptool-enforced safe subset of C++ to address this situation is to temporarily move the contents of the resizable vector into a non-resizable vector [1] and target the span at the non-resizable vector instead.

Upon destruction, the non-resizable vector will automatically return the contents back to the original resizable vector. (It's somewhat analogous to borrowing a slice in Rust.)

While it wouldn't necessarily prevent you from doing the flawed/buggy thing you were trying to do, it would prevent it from resulting in a memory vulnerability.

[1] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpptool#xslta_vector-xslt...
by p0w3n3d | 2025-05-01 11:25:09+00:00
Quite a few years ago I read on Reddit a post made allegedly by a Microsoft programmer, who was telling that the young generation of programmers do not want to maintain the old optimized code (he was saying specifically about pipes in windows) and want to reimplement all fro scratch. In this example (pipes) they wrote a new pipe mechanism which then was lacking that ACL et. al. authorisation features and they had to hide it from normal programmers (made it somehow internal to system)

What it would mean (if we can believe this) is that Windows becomes a legacy burden and without proper management and knowledge will become a big ball of mud (if it's not yet like this) unbearable and unmabagable.

Right now I can access at least five styles of UI, from different epochs, each one is doing something important in the system, BC one cannot rewrite everything to the new style without enormous funds
by mr_mitm | 2025-05-01 11:25:44+00:00
We do know a lot about the very small and the very big, though. We understand quark interactions extremely well. It's very hard to imagine interactions at that scale complex enough to yield something anyone would be comfortable calling "life". The defining property of dark matter is no or only weak interaction (which we also understand very well), so imagining life there becomes even harder.

> We simply don't know and we will never know, if we think we already know.

That's a very defeatist and intellectually lazy point of view. As is "just asking questions" which lack support by even a shred of plausibility.
by ohgr | 2025-05-01 11:25:54+00:00
My Linux desktop experience...

I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.

In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.

In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.

I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
by proc0 | 2025-05-01 11:26:16+00:00
Oh I haven't looked at Solidjs yet, interesting will take a look. And yeah you may still need to design your application, but having hooks be something that is out-of-the-box pushes you into certain patterns and needs to be actively ignored to avoid its design influence. I've worked in large codebases where they make almost everything into hooks, and they start getting ridiculous, breaking composability but at the same time giving the illusion that you are making your code more modular.
by lukan | 2025-05-01 11:26:53+00:00
The other way around.

"development of chrome on desktop Linux have any benefits for mobile Linux?"

Android is the big market, that gets prime support.

Otherwise android and linux desktop just share the kernel (and not even the same one).

So the developement of chrome on android probably makes it a bit easier to target linux desktop, but not much.

(I still don't have WebGPU on my linux desktop but since quite a while on my old android phone)
by tyingq | 2025-05-01 11:26:56+00:00
Pretty impressive. One watch out is that MS has control of many knobs that can ruin it. At the moment, your app is what comes back first if I click "Apps" and search "Wiki". I imagine MS can change that on a whim. Then things like app reviews and so on. Have you considered expanding it as a plugin/app for other tools...to sort of spread that risk out to more than one vendor?
by jajko | 2025-05-01 11:28:15+00:00
Well if one big dictatorship bully starts attacking around for made up reasons, stating wiping out half of continent with nuclear strikes repeatedly, or just roll over the place with a massive conventional army to enslave its population... only a fool remains still.

And worse than fool in case of said dictatorship which already enslaved half of said continent for decades in the recent past, infecting those societies with their corrupt ways of life, terror and ruling that still affect those places to this day very negatively.

I know about this a bit since I was raised in one such place and saw it all before, during and after fall of Iron curtain. Russians/Soviets were feared even when they were liberating these lands from nazis - they stole everything they could from common folks (soldiers carrying many watches on their hands that needed to be removed in propaganda photos later) and raped whom they could. Not all of them just to be clear, but many many (stories of my grandparents).
by sgarland | 2025-05-01 11:28:57+00:00
Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn’t nearly there. If I need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already have prebaked Debian images.

For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone, and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.
by agumonkey | 2025-05-01 11:28:58+00:00
Windows is making people annoyed more and more (saying this as a guy who grew up with it and is still not anti windows) and with the recent trump 2 / use-european-tech .. it might be a clear enough narrative for people to try linux distros. Fedora 41 on a 2015 laptop is lean and cute.. enough for most normies IMO. It could be a boost for everybody, no need to buy a new laptop, simpler times without Microsoft pulling shenanigans every year, more open source market share.

ps: just in time for https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1kc074t/linux_us_mar...
by readingnews | 2025-05-01 11:29:04+00:00
Wow, I read your informative link. Where are these jobs? I went through a round of interviews last year for Sr. positions, across a number of locations in the U.S., and quite frankly, the average salary for the positions interviewed for was $80k less than most of those in the list, and $230k less than the SWE manager in the list.