MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgro | 2025-05-01 09:03:59+00:00
Are people perplexed by the prevalence of bacteria in residential washing machines? That’s what the smell is when clothes are left wet for too long or the door is left open, preventing drying.

Though I wonder what effect a standard load with bleach would have when used in a load or if that’s simply what the article refers to as their disinfectant test.
by timonoko | 2025-05-01 09:04:03+00:00
There are certain points, when you just have to have newer computer.

1982 -- Cant Play MS Flight Simulator 1992 -- Cant play MP3 2002 -- Cant play DivX 2012 -- Cant play Counter Strike 2022 -- Cant Play CS2

Very Strange Pattern.

I predict that in 2032 you need better computer for your personal AI to be fully capable, compatible and independent.
by atoav | 2025-05-01 09:04:44+00:00
As someone who programs embedded systems the bloat people have grown to accept in the userspace is utterly mindbogling to me.

Sure it is a challenge to write performant code, I know that as well as any other embedded programmer, but my feeling is that in userspace or web programming most people have stopped even trying to be performant.

They will give you paginated content with 10 items per page, items whose data makes up less than 1% of the javascript they are loading. Meanwhile you could literally give people all items with no javascript and be faster (if you have the luxury of knowing the number of items).
Automation Test Reporting Options
by pratik-tgx | 2025-05-01 09:05:46+00:00
I am struggling with Playwright tests analysis—how do you manage complex test data?

I'm researching pain points in automated testing reporting, specifically for Playwright. Our team is hitting some roadblocks with current solutions, and I'm curious if others are experiencing similar issues.

Current limitations we're facing:

1. Basic pass/fail metrics without deeper analysis

2. Hard to identify patterns in flaky tests

3. Difficult to trace failures back to specific code changes

4. No AI-assisted root cause analysis, we are doing that manually with chatgpt

5. Limited cross-environment comparisons

I'm wondering:

1. What tools/frameworks are you currently using for Playwright test reporting?

2. What would an ideal test analysis solution look like for your team?

3. Would AI-powered insights into test failures be valuable to you? (e.g., pattern recognition, root cause analysis) - Did any one tried AI MCP solutions

4. How much time does your team spend manually analyzing test failures each week?

5. Are you paying for any solution that provides deeper insights into test failures and patterns?

6. For those in larger organizations: how do you communicate test insights to non-technical stakeholders?

I'm asking because we're at a crossroads - either invest in building internal tools or find something that already exists. Any experiences (good or bad) would be super helpful!

Thanks for any insights!
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:05:51+00:00
> And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.

And if KHTML was as good as either WebKit or Blink, it would still be a major player in the browser engine race today. Except it isn't, because the corporate sponsors moved on and the team behind KHTML wasn't big enough to actually compete with post 2012 browsers. KHTML died, like Opera's browser engine did.

Browsers as they exist today, exist because it was in Google's interest to make the web more capable. We're about to lose that. In its place, I expect a surge in apps instead.
by eigenspace | 2025-05-01 09:06:09+00:00
Here in Germany we very much have 'real rail', and every high speed long distance train has a dining car. Our trains have very high passenger counts too. I think the standard ICE-4 carries around 800-900 passengers depending on the number of carriages. The dining car takes up just one carriage and is a very nice addition to the train experience. The hot food is usually not the best, but it's better than nothing, and it's very nice to go grab a beer, coffee, or pastry and stretch your legs in the middle of a journey.

This is normal pretty much throughout europe on long distance trains. I know at the very least it's standard in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. Maybe you're thinking of regional commuter trains that don't have dining cars?
by rasz | 2025-05-01 09:06:15+00:00
>it caused CD burner malfunctions

>Spore installations damaged burners

Say what? The only thing that comes to mind is burner build to a lowest price point, for example using very flimsy Laser sledge build with assumption drive will only be used for linear writes with minimum amount of seeks

https://goughlui.com/2025/04/20/project-the-24x-dvd-burning-...

Original PlayStation had similar problems with high seek loads https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps1/CD_drive#:~:text=stuttering%20... and was originally build to last 70K seeks with those crappy plastic sleds https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/06/making-crash-ba...

'Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”'
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-01 09:08:19+00:00
> That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation

Honestly I can't believe that anyone who was around when Chrome came out would say this. IE7 was around, and terrible. Firefox was trying hard, as was Opera, but web tech has become infinitely better with Chrome around, and Google funding it. Without Google funding Firefox as well, Firefox would be nowhere near what it is today.
by swores | 2025-05-01 09:08:45+00:00
This is one of those times when I wish HN still displayed comment karma publicly, not only to the author of the comment. Because I'm sure various Microsoft employees read HN, and they should see what I assume will be a large number of upvotes on that comment, especially for this:

> «Even as a paying customer, all the Office apps and services are now so aggressively pushy it's gone beyond "Rude", is now passing "Annoying" and accelerating toward "Yeah, I can't do this." I just want to ask Satya "How much more do I have to pay you to simply STFU and let me NOT use (and not even know about) services I already pay for but don't need?"»

Office used to be software that justified its cost, it's now just consistently annoying to use.
by smarx007 | 2025-05-01 09:09:14+00:00
I am afraid this is a very narrow reading of the CRA. Did you read the act yourself or some qualified opinion by a European lawyer? Security updates are the default demand of CRA and not having them is an exception that requires an assessment of risk (which I would assume mean that it's only viable for devices not directly connected to Internet).

An (equally narrow ;)) quote:

"ensure that vulnerabilities can be addressed through security updates, including, where applicable, through automatic security updates that are installed within an appropriate timeframe enabled as a default setting, with a clear and easy-to-use opt-out mechanism, through the notification of available updates to users, and the option to temporarily postpone them;"

Thus, I expect RED to stipulate only radio firmware to be locked down to prevent you from unlocking any frequencies but the CRA to require all other software to be updatable to patch vulns.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-05-01 09:09:41+00:00
> Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.

It was the other way around. Other product like VPN, MDN Plus, Pocket was a way to diversify revenue which could be channeled to Firefox, although the problem is Mozilla isn't the best company at making money.
by pama | 2025-05-01 09:10:14+00:00
The human processing is still autoregressive, but using multiple parallel synchronized streams. There is no problem with such an approach and my best guess is that in the next year we will see many teams training models using such tricks for generating reasoning traces in parallel.

The main concern is taking a single probabilistic stream (eg a book) and comparing autoregressive modelling of it with a diffusive modelling of it.

Regarding mixing diffusion and autoregressive—I was at ICLR last week and this work is probably relevant: https://openreview.net/forum?id=tyEyYT267x
by nickd2001 | 2025-05-01 09:10:31+00:00
Also in my understanding, it was a gamble by David Cameron. He promised the referendum before the previous general election, believing the Tories wouldn't get a majority and he could blame the Lib Dems coalition partner when they blocked the referendum, then the Tories did win outright and oopsie, what do I do now, I've got to hold a referendum with no plan. Basically unintended consequences. Moral of the story... be careful. Maybe Cameron had had a long day and was tired or something when he made that decision ;)
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:12:14+00:00
I'm assuming people with such a hatred for browser complexity absolutely love the way those Delphi programs worked back before Web 2.0 made browsers a viable GUI platform, because that's the direction we're going in if browser start dying. Browsers have become the de-facto way to work for most people, and it's a major why Microsoft has been losing market share.

People say HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is complex, but the Ladybird team is proving that a very small team can make a working browser in a few years. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated developers behind browsers, most of the web API, including rendering algorithms and such, has been painstakingly written out in detail.
by KronisLV | 2025-05-01 09:12:22+00:00
> LibreOffice is so visually gross it’s pretty hard to use.

I don't know, I quite like it, reminds me of the old Office look.

Plus, there's at least a bit of customization that you can do, which is pleasant: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0

Very much seems like a matter of preference.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-01 09:13:15+00:00
Some places are wanting to go dual 5 GHz radios on APs (for general client density) rather than 2.4 GHz and 5GHz radios but 2.4 GHz only IoT devices force you into keeping a 2.4 GHz radio infrastructure active. These kinds of environments tend to turn the power down on 2.4 GHz anyways as "goes through walls" can actually be a bad thing for coverage when multiple APs are at play (SNR is more important than raw power).

For a typical consumer home use case continuing to use 2.4 GHz is most likely ideal though. Though some apartment complexes have such bad 2.4 GHz interference even that might not be universal.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:15:53+00:00
If you consider the BSDs and Illumos to be operating systems, you might as well consider Lynx/Ladybird/Servo/Netsurf/Trident as browsers.

For 97% of the world, there are four operating systems: Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. There are three browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Edge. The rest is an irrelevant sidenote that only hobbyists and developers care about, existing at the grace of the megacorporations that sponsor them.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-01 09:15:55+00:00
Universal voting is the opposite of the direction to go. See: Australia. Of course going in the opposite direction is probably impossible, because it's not about knowledge but about susceptibility to typical forms of manipulation, emotional highest among them.

This is the reason that politics has largely shifted from a game of knowledge and vision, to one of mud slinging, ad hominem, and appeals to emotion, fearmongering, and so forth. It's not because the electorate doesn't know enough, but because they have poor emotional control, making them easy to manipulate. It's exactly how conmen, operate with Wiki offering the typical pattern as exploiting "the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed." [1]

And I see no clear solution to this.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam
by firecall | 2025-05-01 09:16:17+00:00
"A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other as well as agreeing not to compete with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market. A cartel is an organization formed by producers to limit competition and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas. Jurisdictions frequently consider cartelization to be anti-competitive behavior, leading them to outlaw cartel practices."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel

I don't agree that the current situation in the browser market fits the definition of a Cartel, as I understand it! :-)
by troad | 2025-05-01 09:16:31+00:00
The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0]

>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
by ffsm8 | 2025-05-01 09:17:41+00:00
That sounds like pure hopium to me, honestly.

I get where you're coming from and I find it just as bad how individual devs are being treated - but talk with some of your family members and non-tech friends about what they've got installed on their phones... And what they'd miss if it got removed.

It's gonna be

1. Social media / chat / SMS apps 2. Games (not one specific one - they'd be fine if any one game is removed, because alternatives exist)

Most if them will not even have a single app installed that can remotely be categorized as indie developed.

There are countless indie devs around that make great games etc - they're just not being discovered by normal people.

Following the money insinuates that is by design, but there is no proof for that... Only circumstantial evidence like the previously mentioned statistic of app store revenue and the way they treat individuals. But still no conclusive proof and both can be argued to be coincidences (i.e. because of low user count they don't consider them important to their platform, hence low visibility in store etc)

Personally, I find it highly suspect that the app/play store so heavily favors apps/games that are borderline user-hostile. Especially if I look to probably the only mainstream store that's looks pretty neutral to me: Steam.

Here your often get 1-4 dev projects hitting the charts. It makes you wonder if the same would happen if Valve became just as profit oriented and started to siphon money via in-app/game purchases too
by badestrand | 2025-05-01 09:17:58+00:00
> What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely.

As a counterpoint I love that feature on desktop and use it all the time.

Often I don't even click videos but just watch them with the preview autoplay (with sound enabled). I also zoom in on my mousepad so that it covers the whole screen and I only need to click through to like the video or for the comments. Much more seemless experience for me.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-01 09:18:08+00:00
It has some cartel-like aspects but lacks others, probably because the software industry has a unique structure in which there are nearly no distribution costs.

Cambridge Dictionary: A cartel is a group of similar independent companies or countries that join together to control prices and limit competition. It involves restricting output, controlling prices, and allocating market shares.

Group of similar but independent companies (check) that join together to control prices (no, but they do join together to control the web in other ways), and limit competition (yes, by constantly adding features to HTML whilst market dumping they prevent competitors from arising). It involves restricting output (not in the literal sense, does apply if you consider the synchronized way they implement standards), controlling prices (yes, forcing them to zero instead of the natural market rate), and allocating market shares (yes, if you consider iOS browser restrictions).
by collingreen | 2025-05-01 09:18:37+00:00
Thanks for the link! It looks like this affair over webmail sparked a lot of investigation and resulted in a firing, two years probation, and a $100,000 fine. That sounds like a great start for this kind of thing and they were just talking dirty, not actively sharing mission details!

Overall, yes let's please investigate and appropriately punish wrongdoing at all levels.
by mistercheph | 2025-05-01 09:18:38+00:00
Not to be that guy, but at some point, if you ever decide that fighting a war with Microsoft to have control over your own computer and not be surveilled stops being worth it... linux. Yes, there's an upfront cost you pay to learn, and there are ongoing costs as defaults and tools change over the years.. but at least the relationship is not adversarial.
by o11c | 2025-05-01 09:19:04+00:00
To be even more clear, LibreOffice also has a splash screen.

I haven't run it this boot, and I just timed myself taking 7.5 seconds to start Writer, close the welcome popup, and quit. By feel, about half of that was waiting for the loading bar and the other half was figuring out how to dismiss the welcome popup.

On a hot start, with several attempts it takes between 2.1 and 2.5 seconds to start and quit it. For some reason the welcome popup has disappeared.

These experiments were performed using LibreOffice 7.4.7.2 40(Build:2) - wow, are they also copying version numbering from Microsoft? - on the cheapest 120GB SSD I could find in early 2019.
by dmasiii | 2025-05-01 09:19:28+00:00
As for the texts, I thought a lot about what tone to use, it is true that as you say they can create a barrier towards the user, but I wanted to use a more peaceful liniguage in a way to differentiate myself from the rest.

How can I re -evaluate the testimonials in your opinion?

Privacy-dome is something waiting, I am trying to study and understand how to build and write a decent, for now I have done what I have been able to, in order not to continue to postpone the launch of the app
by pama | 2025-05-01 09:19:41+00:00
I am still jetlagged and not sure what the most helpful reference would be. Maybe start from the block diffusion paper I recommended in a parallel thread and trace your way up/down from there. The logic leading to Eq 6 is a special case of such a math proof.

https://openreview.net/forum?id=tyEyYT267x
by tulert | 2025-05-01 09:20:08+00:00
If the developers really wanted to you have the key, they could just write the per device unique key in the box or on the pcb. What you’re suggesting is more or less possible, the problem is you represent a very niche case. 99.9% of consumers don’t want to reprogram a chip already soldered to a board and it’s not worth the time catering to them. Also some IOT devices are left in physically insecure places like on the exterior of the home, you’d never want some to be able to extract the firmware key or re-flash those devices.
by dubcanada | 2025-05-01 09:20:38+00:00
1800 ish devs from the last figure I could find. 700 ish on Firefox.

Now there is no way 700 people actually work on Firefox code. Throw in team leads, QA, dev tools, UI, specialized developers like WebRTC and that number makes a little more sense. But still seems inflated.

Most of Mozilla is already remote.

I mean Mozilla and Firefox should survive. But I do imagine we’ll lose Thunderbird and anything not Firefox related. And dev will drop heavily. CEO salary of almost 7 million will need to go as well.

It may be good for Mozilla to return to a streamlined company. Rather then a bloated one as it is now.
by bgro | 2025-05-01 09:20:55+00:00
This is the kind of genius move you get when all your devs play leetcode all day and then have leetcode battles as an interview service.

Hundreds of millions of hours spent microfussing over leetcode and gatekeeping work because your solution isn’t copied from the top 5 solutions character for character. Only for the same devs to just abandon all optimization in the real job where it actually matters and implement an o(n^2) fraudulent time metric bypass.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:21:29+00:00
Mozilla has been trying to come up with a profitable business model for years. VPNs, privacy masking services, their own mobile OS, feed readers, you name it. Nobody is interested, new attempts at making money turn into cost centers, and the next attempt is burdened by the early shutdown of previous attempts.

Every time they try something, the open source crowd cries out in pain because money isn't going towards their three preferred bugs instead, and the mainstream doesn't care about anything Mozilla does.

They have made stupid decisions to be sure, and the money squandered at the top is definitely infuriating, but no amount of incentives or donations is going to replace the money Google is handing Mozilla to get out of the antitrust laws.
by codethief | 2025-05-01 09:21:30+00:00
What other type of encryption would you use for state secrets? You seem to be implying that governments and three-letter agencies use some vastly superior cryptographic scheme, whereas AFAIK Signal is as close to the state of the art as it gets.

Also, to be clear, Signal doesn't use public-key cryptography in the naive way (i.e. to encrypt/decrypt messages) as was/is possible with RSA. It uses asymmetric key pairs to first do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, i.e. generate ephemeral symmetric keys, which are then used for encryption/decryption. This then also guarantees forward secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ . (Add to that they incorporate an additional post-quantum cryptographic scheme these days, and I'm probably omitting a lot of other details.)
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-01 09:21:34+00:00
I've been tempted to look into API-based HN access having scraped the front-page archive about two years ago.

One of the advantages of comments is that there's simply so much more text to work with. For the front page, there is up to 80 characters of context (often deliberately obtuse), as well as metadata (date, story position, votes, site, submitter).

I'd initially embarked on the project to find out what cities were mentioned most often on HN (in front-page titles), though it turned out to be a much more interesting project than I'd anticipated.

(I've somewhat neglected it for a while though I'll occasionally spin it up to check on questions or ideas.)
by arghwhat | 2025-05-01 09:21:44+00:00
> how much people invest in other types of education in the US, which I presume is what you're talking about.

No, where I live all education is provided as a free service. The US education system, putting people into a life of debt just acquire the minimum of marketable skills, is broken beyond repair and not a valid point of comparison.

On the other hand, people with qualifications also demand reasonable salaries and need to pay taxes. "Private tutoring" is not a 10 minute zoom call.