MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esskay | 2025-05-01 12:23:31+00:00
For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help. And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of the UI.

And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box it should be pretty damn well polished so that you don't need to.

Ubuntu's probably got the closest but it still just doesn't quite feel like they've nailed the experience.
by tempeler | 2025-05-01 12:23:42+00:00
Rather than signaling AMD's bankruptcy, this could be seen as a strong indication of how heavily China is investing in legacy technologies. That's why I wouldn't be so quick to draw conclusions. China’s eagerness in this area doesn’t mean that the investments are efficient. What truly matters here is the ability to build a full ecosystem. They practically wiped Huawei off the global smartphone market simply by banning Google services on their devices.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-01 12:23:45+00:00
Huh? I am still here and I am still annoyed by both. If anything, people who opposed 'but her emails' crowd to sufficiently penalize Hillary, made the current situation possible to begin with.

edit: To the lazy down voters. Address the 'my side never does anything wrong' issue and I might concede.
by sybercecurity | 2025-05-01 12:24:56+00:00
I used MailMate (https://freron.com/) before and I liked it. Very customizable and the search functionality is better than Apple Mail or Outlook. Has some tool extensions to allow it to interact with some other apps.

It does not have a built in calendar though, so you will need to either get something else (there is an extension to allow MailMate to work with some calendars).
by steebo | 2025-05-01 12:25:15+00:00
With the release of OpenAI’s latest model o3, there is renewed debate about whether Artificial General Intelligence has already been achieved. The standard skeptic’s response to this is that there is no consensus on the definition of AGI. That is true, but misses the point — if AGI is such a momentous milestone, shouldn’t it be obvious when it has been built?

In this essay, we argue that AGI is not a milestone. It does not represent a discontinuity in the properties or impacts of AI systems. If a company declares that it has built AGI, based on whatever definition, it is not an actionable event. It will have no implications for businesses, developers, policymakers, or safety.
by p_ing | 2025-05-01 12:25:40+00:00
Yeah, I'd take that with a giant grain. You can't "hide" features that the system uses -- they're all visible. This is why NT APIs get used, even though they're not supposed to be leveraged outside of the kernel/critical system components. There's no "hiding" a pipe.

Mail Slots are on their way out, though. Not that they're useful today.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-01 12:26:10+00:00
I think in those stories the speed of light is the same but the speed of thought differs. Close to the center of the galaxy you cannot be very smart and faster than light drives don't work, if you get too close to the edge you get victimized by those things that Yudkowsky is worried about. There's a certain range in which you get space opera.
by CPLX | 2025-05-01 12:26:44+00:00
That’s not correct. Google believes the more people use its search engine the more money it makes from ads. That’s correct.

So it monopolizes the distribution platforms for search engines.

The easier analogy here is an oil monopolist paying off all the tanker and rail and pipeline companies so nobody else can get oil to customers, and then splitting the massive profits with the shippers.

By the way this example actually happened and is the origin of the term “antitrust” which is the area of law that Google was found guilty of violating by multiple judges. So the analogy is right on the nose.
by gcanyon | 2025-05-01 12:26:50+00:00
Thanks! This wasn't it -- the story I read was a short short story, maybe only a page or two. It was basically:

1. Humans despaired that the stars were impossibly far away, due to lightspeed limitations 2. They realized it is possible to <do something> to get around that 3. They worked hard to try it out 4. Surprise! They made it worse/it was worse. 5. The end

I don't remember any characterization, or narrative, beyond the above.
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-01 12:27:39+00:00
Not just campaigning. Resourcing. By now (by 8 years ago, to be !@#$ing honest) there should be a very clean, crisp website that's a searchable list of topics/talking points, with immediately available videos, audios, screenshots of Trump contradicting himself, along with links to easily digestible facts.

This alone will never convince anyone of anything who isn't already convinced. But as an absolute minimum, it should be effortless for anyone to demonstrate his lack of ideology every single time he speaks about how he's always/never supported something.

Maybe we could even educate "journalists" and the media on its existence so they can do more than "agree to disagree" whenever they talk about things.
by 9dev | 2025-05-01 12:27:41+00:00
As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.

Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.
by nashashmi | 2025-05-01 12:27:46+00:00
> There isn’t a bridge or tunnel to accommodate a train to Queens, although a long-planned freight tunnel is under construction.

Which one? Hope she isn’t referring to the gateway project.

This is a classic Elon musk project-problem. Hyperloop freight to NYC for the next ten years and then converting that to people travel. And then to commuter travel over the course of fifty years. Govt funding would be needed because no one would be able to predict how much travel will change in the next 50 years. But a gamble is worth it.
by p_ing | 2025-05-01 12:27:48+00:00
The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this rumour stuff from.

https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K...

> The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-01 12:29:38+00:00
In the homogenous cosmology there is the parameter Ω which determines if the universe is flat or not. Observations seem to show that Ω = 1, but if Ω>1 it will collapse back into a black hole and if Ω<=1 it expands forever.

Since the universe as a whole is balanced I'm wondering if you're in the dense part of the timescape your fate is to wind up in a black hole.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-05-01 12:29:43+00:00
I too am very annoyed by the "save water" trend in appliances that then produce inferior results. Yes, I know there are parts of the world where this is a concern, but I'm in the great lakes region on a well that produces 20GPM of water and I do not have this concern. Water for me is copious and basically free and when I'm done with it it goes into my septic to reabsorb into the water table.

We switched from a front loading washer back to a top-loading one hoping we'd get results similar to the top-loading washers from our youth. But nope. Funky smells, poor distribution of detergent, clothes that don't fully clean.
by gambiting | 2025-05-01 12:30:55+00:00
The thing that always surprises me about HOAs is that a country boldly calling itself "land of the free" is the one where people are willingly entering agreements telling them what they can or cannot do with their washing, how they can park their vehicle on their property, or how much and how often they can cut their own grass in their own garden. I don't see how these two are mutually compatible, I always expect a more boisterous "don't tell me what to do" attitude from Americans but it looks like a lot of them do in fact enjoy being told what to do(or they put up with it, at least).

Obviously other countries have various regulations around this stuff too, but it's just not as aggressive and not as wide spread as HOAs are in the States.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-01 12:31:54+00:00
Its not a dollar value. It’s an ongoing percentage based tax on your business relationships and consumption with other providers.

For instance, say Netflix has an iOS app with 10M installs. Apple wants 30% of the subscription revenue even though their costs are static. The only variable cost is payment infrastructure which to some degree is proportional to amounts (fraud etc). But what is the market value of that? A couple percent at most? Are apple even taking any risk?

And honestly, Apple could easily take 5-10% and I’m sure lots of vendors would still use them due to user preference - it’s trustworthy, provided an overview of ongoing subscriptions, and importantly you can cancel without being on a 30min retention call with absolute garbage companies.

But that needs to be played out by the markets. Competition will make Apples option cheaper and most likely competitors will step up to match the UX at lower prices. Free markets, like democracy, have this paradox of tolerance, ie bad faith players can abuse the very system to destroy it in self-interest.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-01 12:32:07+00:00
90s web was fun in a wild west kind of way. Sites were small, but the net in general was slow.

00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and ads everywhere.

10+ brought in the age of large social media and the feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the forums that felt special and interesting started disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then those large sites started moderating anything interesting away.
by m_st | 2025-05-01 12:32:30+00:00
What version are you using? Click 'Settings' -> 'Profile' (huge button on top) -> 'Subscriptions'. I don't know how it could be easier than that. Ah wait, pull down on the home screen for search, type 'subscriptions' and tap on the result for direct access to the setting. From there you can see and cancel any subscription made in the App Store.
by Jugurtha | 2025-05-01 12:32:48+00:00
May your parents forever live in your heart.

>I'm grateful, but I also feel very alone and a little lost. I’m not sure what to do next — with my time, my energy, or even with my life.

You may be tempted to fill your time and spend your energy and money on things that take your mind off of "life". Drugs, alcohol, gambling, carnal pleasures, clubbing, etc. It will spiral and you'll lose your life, health, and wealth. You are a prime target for leeches and parasites who smell a lonely soul with a full wallet a mile away.

Were you to need an addiction to "cope" and "avoid reality", make it an addiction that could:

1 - fade a way

2 - not ruin your health, wealth, and time.

3 - become a net positive

For instance: picking up a sport (judo, jiu-jitsu, wrestling), hiking, pursuing a degree, going to workshops that make you work with your hands (masonry, ceramics, carpentry, agriculture, stonewalls, manufacturing/fabrication). These may be coping mechanisms and just a "transition", but they are virtuous coping mechanisms and I don't see you regretting your masonry classes; on the contrary, you will have acquired a skill for life even if/after your interest "fades away", and may even become your business.

In other words, please be very careful and deliberate about how you spend your health, time, and money.

You'll also be tempted to brood and stay home or on the contrary, be out all night and chasing pleasures, hence my recommendations on physical activities (judo and masonry) for you really ought to stay connected with your body and physical being especially now. If you work out, don't stop. If you don't, start.
by int_19h | 2025-05-01 12:33:29+00:00
The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be very advanced these days.

Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to detect the cheat code itself. But this requires sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally, and we're still far from that.
by shakna | 2025-05-01 12:34:34+00:00
No, the negotiation is in plaintext. You don't get to choose whether or not you use a vulnerable encryption method.

That same problem in STARTTLS is how we ended up with CVE-2011-0411.

> The TLS protocol encrypts communication and protects it against modification by other parties. This protection exists only if a) software is free of flaws, and b) clients verify the server's TLS certificate, so that there can be no "man in the middle" (servers usually don't verify client certificates).

There's no certificate verification in FTPS - it's too early - so you're screwed. [1]

FTPS is the vulnerable encryption method. It's the reason that SFTP is recommended, and FTPS is not. [2]

[0] http://www.postfix.org/CVE-2011-0411.html

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-5361

[2] https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/networking/articles/sftp-vs-...
by mrbombastic | 2025-05-01 12:34:38+00:00
Yeah it has ruined the old zombie movies where the government ends up the bad guy but a competent bad guy that makes unilateral decisions like quarantining a city or bombing a civilian center to contain infection. I am pretty sure they are gonna all be either 1) running around panicking with the rest of us 2) infighting and useless 3) denying the truth before their eyes if such a catastrophic crisis ever were to happen.
Show HN: Metaphor, an LLM Prompting Language
by tritondev | 2025-05-01 12:34:40+00:00
For the last 6 months I've been building and using an open-source structured LLM prompting language called Metaphor. It has a prompt compiler that lets you use a modular approach to constructing LLM problems, rather like a normal programming language.

I, and some early adopters, have been using this for doing things like complex software design and document generation work. It's sort of the opposite of vibe-coding because this is much more about deliberate planning and iteration using AIs, including having AIs help with reviewing and improving the work that both they and the humans have done. It also helps build up the sort of documentation that's so important when you're building something complex you want other people to be able to work on too.

Metaphor prompts can be committed to source control, just like regular source files, and then reused as desired.

The latest version of the m6rc prompt compiler also lets you template parameters so you can build reusable AI tools just by describing the behaviour you want.
by card_zero | 2025-05-01 12:35:00+00:00
This "auto mode" is not a pure and simple thing. What I'm describing might be a lifetime preference, rather than conditioned. But surely an element of the automatic has crept in. I probably reach unthinkingly for reading matter like I reach for a spoon, exhibiting what I think is called utilization behavior. Then again I don't think a person's conscious intent can ever be permanently shut out; I think any supposed conditioning of a human will have a degree of conscious oversight.
by jt2190 | 2025-05-01 12:35:08+00:00
Like Sam or hate him, he’s not wrong about AI creating a need to distinguish humans from bots. We’re only just starting to see the damage that AI-powered scams can do. Further, why not try and develop Proof of Humanity (PoH) tech that limits itself to knowing you’re a human but not your personal details like name and address?
by myrmidon | 2025-05-01 12:35:23+00:00
I'm quite skeptical about the improved performance for everyone from earlier segregation; this neglects the negative feedback effects from sticking low performers together I feel, and I dont see how you preserve any semblance of "common baseline", meaning that counting on a kid knowing some prerequisite concept is gonna be a complete gamble (especially after school transfer).

Your outcomes as child are also likely to plummet if you ever get sorted into the wrong bucket, which I feel is super unethical.

Personally I also really question the whole concept of pushing a grade schoolers "performance": What do you hope to gain from it? Looking e.g. at asian english tests I can see a likely worst-case outcome: Genuinely difficult and stressful tests (that even native speakers would struggle with) that just test some meaningless grammatical minutiae.

I fully agree that having optional programs and learning opportunities for talented/interested children is a very good thing, but I don't think dismantling the current system would really help at providing those (and they are always gonna be an additional cost, just like more segregation would be in practice). I also think that attempting to railroad children into (or out of!) those options is not desirable at all.
by rafaelmn | 2025-05-01 12:35:26+00:00
Yeah but on the flip side if your usecase is not blessed by daddy Apple - or you're not a fan of their hardware design - there is zero variety in the ecosystem and full lockdown. Like iPad is great hardware - but they will never let you run unlocked OS on it because it cuts into their profit source. In fact I suspect they will try to push MacOS into that direction more.

So I'm hoping to be able to transition out of the ecosystem because I hate their model and like choice. But at the same time I have work to do and last time I tried it wasn't there yet. It was better than it was 3 years ago, and that was better than 5 years ago, etc. I would say not a lot left and the momentum is building, I just don't have the 20 year old energy to be the early adopter anymore :)
by roenxi | 2025-05-01 12:35:38+00:00
I think that is a mistaken view, but rather than argue that I'll put a more interesting question. If you believe that there is a cartel here and the result is that we the plebs get high quality products for free, do you think cartels are a bad thing? Because it seems to be all upside for pretty much everyone. If this is a cartel (which, again, I don't see it), we should be looking to get cartels involved in food and housing.

Breaking up this 'cartel' is literally going to mean that the best 4 web browsers won't get quite as much development effort directed towards them. The plan seems to be to choke them of so much development that even dodgy hobbyist projects can complete. That is a low-quality bar.
by damnitbuilds | 2025-05-01 12:35:44+00:00
Headline incorrect. Shame on the FT fossils.

- They had too much power being generated ( largely solar ).

- Their system handles too much power by turning off fossil fuel generators.

- There weren't enough of those connected to reduce the power enough.

- The system broke down.

So it is INCORRECT to blame "solar power dependency". What is to blame is a system that cannot handle too much power properly.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-01 12:36:28+00:00
> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it.

Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers.

> LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.

Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.
by bjackman | 2025-05-01 12:37:02+00:00
Makes perfect sense. It recently became clear to me (e.g. [2]) that it's not a cohesive concept but to me personally this is the meaning of POSIWID [1].

Basically making Windows a good desktop OS is not in any meaningful way the "purpose" of that part of MS. The "purpose" of any team of 20+ SWEs _is_ the set of objectives they measure and act upon. That's the only way you can actually predict the outcomes of its work.

And the corrolary is that you can usually quite clearly look at the output of such an org and infer what its "purpose" is, when defined as such.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
by trealira | 2025-05-01 12:37:54+00:00
> At some point soon we need to realize we the people are on one team and everyone saying otherwise is trying to hurt us.

This might be good for a generic politician running for an election to say, but it's not true. We're not on the same team; we're different groups of people with different values who hate each other. Our politicians are the people we've voted to represent us. It's not like Trump, for example, hoodwinked Republicans; they like everything he's doing, and have for ten years, and a lot of it is because people like me hate him. We're not on the same team.
by MauryMarkowitz2 | 2025-05-01 12:38:25+00:00
Actually, this page is a perfect example of why I copied all these programs by hand:

101 BASIC Computer Games != BASIC Computer Games

The former is in various DEC dialects of BASIC which varied greatly even among each other, let alone with other vendors. For instance, BASIC on the EduSystem 50, a PDP-8 setup, was incompatible with BASIC on the EduSystem 30, let alone BASIC-PLUS on the PDP-11.

The latter has all of its games converted to a Microsoft BASIC-like format, which is outlined in the front of the book. But that is not all, a number of the games from 101 are removed (like Can-Am), others are added, and many of them are updated.

So while they are indeed similar, they are also different collections and this page makes the common mistake of failing to notice this.
by avar | 2025-05-01 12:39:09+00:00
The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing.

Seriously, this is one of the top 10 largest companies in the world, and they're playing chicken with the court in order to preserve their ongoing revenue. These weren't random employees, but people part of "Project Michigan", Apple's "activities relating to Injunction compliance".

How doesn't every single person that's a part of that project have an Apple lawyer hovering over them every time they get near any sort of device that can put anything on the record?
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-01 12:39:31+00:00
Word 2000 definitely was not very quick on a contemporary office PC (Pentium II or III), though I'm pretty certain it was much, much faster than desktop O365 is on a contemporary office PC today, despite those being >100x faster. So Fermi would estimate modern office to probably require at least 1000x more resources than Office 2000.
by int_19h | 2025-05-01 12:40:12+00:00
It's not "C structs dumped to disk". It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_Structured_Storage, which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file. And it has been documented for a long time, ever since Microsoft was forced to write docs for Office file formats because of antitrust:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocol...
by morkalork | 2025-05-01 12:40:55+00:00
Even before thus, Ukraine learned painfully that it shouldn't share every plan and every detail with the US. It kind of looks like a sad, self-fulfilling proficy. Ukraine makes a plan, some details get leaked state side, plan goes disastrously. Ukraine plans another operation, doesn't say anything, the plan goes off ok. The US feels betrayed and Ukraine looks like an ungrateful ally abusing trust, the relationship is strained. The election happens and Trump points at how they're a bad partner yadda yadda. Ukraine is blamed for the outcome of what is originally an American problem, the US leaking like a sieve.