MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Delphiza | 2025-05-01 10:18:18+00:00
While governments may be interested in moving stuff off Azure/AWS/GCP, in my experience, most businesses don't care enough. It is difficult enough to get them to spend money on the bare minimum needed for security. Yes, they will want 'sovereign data' because it looks good on the annual report, but most would not do it for double the cost.

Europe and other parts of the world should reduce their dependency on American tech, or any other tech that locks them in - regardless of it is geopolitical or something else (SAP?). They're not going to be able to do it soon, so will wait out the next four years. Governments do have a serious problem though, but are going to struggle to get the investment together.
by stevenhuang | 2025-05-01 10:18:56+00:00
It's incoherent to think the ability to reason requires the reasoner to be able to change permanently. You realize that LLMs do change; their context window and model weights change on every processed token. Not to mention the weights can be saved and persisted in a sense via LORAs.

The belief LLMs cannot reason maybe justifiable for other reasons, just not for reasons you've outlined.
by asmor | 2025-05-01 10:19:20+00:00
It feels like different teams at Microsoft don't work with each other; they work against each other. I've noticed that too with Edge, it seems to be a competition at which team can put short term metrics (shopping and "creator following" vs privacy, shouldersurfing other search engines vs setting your search engine to bing) over respecting the user or engineering a coherent product.

Maybe stack ranking does create terrible culture.
by sylware | 2025-05-01 10:19:34+00:00
The whatng cartel has only 3 web engines which can compile with only 2 c++ compilers:

The web engines are: - mozilla geeko - apple webkit - gogol blink (fork of webkit)

The compilers are: - gcc (MIT) - clang (apple).

Providing real-life alternatives to those are close to zero. Namely, the only real alternative is a regulated technical compatibility with orders of magnitude simpler computer languages, file formats and protocols.

For instance, for the web, where reasonable, it would mean noscript/basic (x)html (basic HTML forms can do wonders with proper HTTP redirects) and if really too alien to noscript/basic (x)html, some public web APIs or other protocols (IRC for instance). Secrets/keys setup would have to be easily available via some noscript/basic (x)html portal or some other easy means of identity verification, could be a very rate limited and constraint anonymous web API.

Keep in mind the obvious: most of the work for a service which is public on internet is keeping it safe and available, certainly not the GUI/protocol which have to stay minimal in order to maximize technical interoperability anyway and will mechanically easy the tasks to keep it safe and available.
by Quinzel | 2025-05-01 10:20:07+00:00
Turned my afternoon unhealthy snack time to an apple and a walk to the car after work by parking 1km away from the work place and putting an apple in my bag so everyday I have instantly got an apple, and am also forced to walk.

Morning me (that wakes up full of good intentions and motivation) sets up strategies for lazy afternoon me so lazy afternoon me can still be lazy but achieves the minor goals morning me see out to achieve.
by bflesch | 2025-05-01 10:20:18+00:00
Hyperscaler is such a middle management buzzword.

Who actually needs hyperscalers? Is it a whole company or just a single app of that company which needs hyperscaling along a certain requirement (storage, processing, bandwidth)?

And if you go into a US vs Europe comparison, SAP seems to be scaling fine. And datacenters used by netflix, cloudflare, etc. are all over the place.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-01 10:20:27+00:00
SAP is German. "Largest non-US software company by revenue", says wikipedia. Doesn't make it suck less, though.

Re: investment, there's long been a solid set of EU open source contributors, from Torvalds himself through SUSE etc. I think if we identified the right 100 people and gave them money and a sense of civic mission, the EU could achieve a lot in this area. However, the EU's own anti-subsidy rules trip it up here.

The history of Munich is very interesting here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

Of course it's also political. If you want an alternative to US megacorps you have to put up with reds and greens.
by lazide | 2025-05-01 10:21:32+00:00
Yes, one of the biggest cons (in practice) with DC is the lossy and fragile voltage regulation (both up and down). It is a far simpler form of power delivery though, for better or worse.

AC is amazing for that due to the ease of making/using transformers, as well as efficiency in situations with simple spinning motors, and due to the way it behaves is ‘more safe’ in a number of fault condition.

AC is much easier to manage with fault protect as it has a zero volt crossing point each cycle, and safer for humans from a shock/electrocution hazard perspective due to the reversing voltage/zero crossing point. Muscles won’t ’freeze’ in a given position like with DC, but rather spasm (though it can be so fast it’s basically the same thing), and the zero voltage crossing point tends to allow arc self extinguishing at much lower thresholds.

But the same thing that makes it much easier to voltage regulate (using transformers) is also what creates inductive losses and complicated in some other scenarios (like conversion to DC for non-motor loads, PF issues, etc.).

No one needs a bridge rectifier for a DC to DC power supply, for instance, and DC to DC ripple is dramatically easier to deal with than typical half phase residential AC.

Commercial can have the luxury of 3 phase AC at least, but that is also typically at power levels that it still isn’t going to be cheap building a AC to DC power supply. And god help that power supply if you get phase imbalance.
by imtringued | 2025-05-01 10:21:36+00:00
Autoplay has been broken since major browsers have silently added autoplay permissions. The fundamental problem with autoplay is that the getAutoplayPolicy() query is still a draft and only experimentally implemented in Firefox.

There is no way to handle autoplay correctly. It's simply been broken for the past few years. There is also no way to detect autoplay using workarounds. I.e. autoplaying a silent audio, because you can only prove the existence of autoplay, but never its absence, since autoplay could be delayed for whatever reason and happen outside of your timeout based hack.
by rafaelmn | 2025-05-01 10:21:39+00:00
It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and :

- fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps

- I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1

- Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've had desktop crashes

- When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable

- Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay

- Guitar Amp simulator software I use does not support Linux, neither does Ableton (which supposedly can run on proton but with many glitches)

- The audio DAW situation was way too complicated and buggy

- I spent days to get the distro functional and usable with Ardour and it would still crash constantly - I just wanted to run some amp sims :(

It's just the little things and rough edges, but for example the fractional scaling stuff already improved because more apps that I use added Wayland support. And the emulation is getting better, with more users I could see larger DAWs supporting Linux as well. Not sure about the audio progress - JACK was a complete mess.
by crabsand | 2025-05-01 10:21:42+00:00
What I have in mind as an analogy is house cleaning or laundry. In the past these would consume so much time and when washing machines appeared, they probably didn't wash as the "best washer" but they let a large percentage of population to spend less time with laundry and people began to see having clean clothes as a standard.

As you said the current state of LLMs is not dependable but we'll learn how to deal with their poor quality and come up with solutions. The overall secondary effect may be increased standards for the knowledge work everywhere. No one would bother to read TOS for a SaaS, now you can ask for a summary from LLM, or ask it to write a privacy notice to your blog.
by yardie | 2025-05-01 10:22:25+00:00
2 things happen repeatedly in the European tech scene: you get large enough to be noticed by Google, MS, Amazon, and they acquire you. Or, in order to continue to scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify.

If the EU stepped in to block the acquisition or corporate move, in order to keep their tech homegrown, it would be seen as government overreach and not respecting the free markets.
by Gareth321 | 2025-05-01 10:23:13+00:00
The judge referred the case for review of contempt of court, which makes individuals responsible for their criminal actions, and carries possible prison sentences. The judge has clear evidence of lying under oath and withholding evidence, and people have gone to prison for less. Alex Roman appears primarily culpable, but given the evidence reported, Tim Cook may also be complicit, and others. There is a real chance they are arrested at some point.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-05-01 10:23:38+00:00
I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft.

As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755953

On my machine, the power button is recessed and requires quite a bit of force to press. It is impossible to press accidentally, but the GNOME developers apparently know best.
by pyr0hu | 2025-05-01 10:25:37+00:00
Anti-cheats are not really compatible on Linux IIRC. Maybe there have been improvements on this front but I think this was the main issue for a lot of gamers. This and there were cases when they were getting banned for playing through Wine.

I once tried to set up a GPU passthrough setup to a Windows VM to play WoW but there were a ton of report that Blizzard just banned players for using QEMU VMs because they were marked as cheaters.
by brobdingnagians | 2025-05-01 10:25:43+00:00
I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-01 10:26:15+00:00
So, let’s assume the child in question lives in a household without trauma, is not neurodivergent, and is otherwise emotionally stable. In that case what works best is reinforcement. Reward good behavior with praise and treats while punishing bad behavior both emotionally and with reprisals. It’s the same as training a dog and it works well with children, especially when there are multiple iterations and parental consistency.

For children with trauma this might require extended learning time. For children with autism there is not a straightforward or predictable answer.

As a parent you must accept the reality that when your child starts school they are entering a world beyond your control under rules and influences that are not your own. If, as a parent, you cannot stomach that loss of control, you might have to consider home schooling. This is something every parent goes through.
by verisimi | 2025-05-01 10:26:18+00:00
Let's imagine we do go to warlordism and I do get to see how immoral it is.

At least I won't have to pretend that the coercion and theft is actually moral and good, right? At least I won't have to doublethink myself, turn myself inside out to justify the unjustifiable.

Ackonwledging the problem (immoral government) is just the first, esxential step towards making an actual difference. Why continue to pour in more effort to support an already failed system?
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 10:26:31+00:00
I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!

Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.

I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.
by asmor | 2025-05-01 10:26:36+00:00
I've ran Linux on my laptops since 2012, but avoided it for my desktop. I made the jump last week, and it only took slightly modifying my NixOS config (unlocking amdgpu for instance) for everything to just work. Oblivion Remaster runs noticeably better. Most multiplayer games also just work. And I'm no longer dealing with Windows search randomly not working, SMB connections stalling, random sleep issues... it all just works.

I had to invest a little into getting Sunshine to work with virtual displays (like Artemis), but even that took like a day and it'll be easy to set up if I ever need to reinstall.
by technothrasher | 2025-05-01 10:26:37+00:00
My favorite is The Little Street. (https://www.johannesvermeer.org/the-little-street.jsp). I just love the quiet calmness of it. I had a copy of it made from one of those cheap Asian oil painting places online (the frame I put it in cost me more than the painting!), and was surprised what a good job the artist did. When I went to Amsterdam a few years ago, I made a point to go see the real one. But I wondered how well I'd visually remember my copy in order to make a direct comparison to the actual painting. I remembered well enough to be blown away by the real one. As pleased as I am with me copy, it's definitely not the same.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-01 10:26:53+00:00
Only a few years ago, before I owned a smartphone, I had service through Consumer Cellular and a KaiOS feature phone.

They offered a "rideshare concierge" service. You could call in to the Consumer Cellular number, and converse with a real live human being, who would broker the ride on Lyft, and you would be connected to the Lyft service via text message, without needing an app, a Lyft account, or anything.

It really worked like a charm, but unfortunately, they were eventually forced to shutter it.

Nowadays I do not enjoy opening apps for Uber or Lyft (or DoorDash for that matter). They have far too many geegaws and distractions, and when you need a ride, you just want to book a ride and get on your way. The last thing we want is a bunch of garbage marketing to us, advertising "deals" and "promotions" and all sorts of things. This is yet another point in favor of Waymo, whose Waymo One app does none of that, and only books your ride and gets you where you need to go. Thank you, Waymo!
by promiseofbeans | 2025-05-01 10:26:59+00:00
If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.

* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough
by c12 | 2025-05-01 10:28:13+00:00
Yes. When I started working in hospitals it wasn't the case. We had an onsite laundry facility and tailor. You would obtain your uniform from the tailors, tailor made to fit, they would also repair any damaged uniform.

You would place worn uniform in a bag labeled with your name and drop if off at the laundry to collect the next day.

Then privatisation came, first they shut down the tailors and you were expected to both purchase your uniform and pay for alterations and repairs (costs you could claim back as a tax rebate if you knew how, how not being advertised.) Then they privatised the laundry, shutting down the one on site and shifting everything to a central location, by everything I mean just the bedding, you were now expected to wash your uniform at home.

The only exception I am aware of is Surgical scrubs, those were provided in sterile wraps and were to be returned to a certain laundry bin for cleaning.

You're right about the food industry, when I worked in kitchens that days uniform was provided, freshly cleaned and returned for laundering at the end of my shift.
by bArray | 2025-05-01 10:29:11+00:00
> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),

Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.

Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.

> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago

I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.

> poor performance

For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities

It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-01 10:29:24+00:00
I just installed Pop!_OS about 4 days ago since I had some money to spend and managed to get a new SSD on the cheap, dual booting with Win10 (I would rather get beheaded than ever use W11 again, I don't care if I get ransomwared every day for the rest of my W10 life once support ends).

Honestly, there's literally nothing missing from the experience for me. Dev tooling works way better (obviously), it feels much faster than both W10 and especially W11, I can still play Factorio and most other games in my 900-game Steam library (minus MP games with rootki- err, "advanced" anticheats), GPU and CPU drivers were a non-issue and bundled with the install, speakers work, bluetooth works, Wifi works (I'm on LAN but still).

The only thing is that it's kinda ugly (personal taste, I actually like W10 aesthetics :p), but one GNOME Tweaks install later and I got it looking more like how I like it, plus they're (System76) working on Cosmos or whatever they're calling it and it's looking promising. Also text is a bit blurry/hard to read for me, but it could also just be my shitty monitors (and me being used to the excellent Macbook screens)

Now, if you have some software you rely on like the Adobe suite, understandable, but I think for most people it's honestly the superior OS compared to Windows. I'm sure the experience on other friendly distros like Mint are similar, too.
by Clubber | 2025-05-01 10:30:18+00:00
Stick at it for at least 2 years, keep improving, it will get better. I got a BigCo on my resume early on and I'm glad I got it, but I don't particularly care for BigCos; all the friction makes it too hard to get anything done and it drives me nuts.

>The quality of the apps I'm seeing seems vastly technically overengineered, almost like 100 different hero engineers added their own "tricks" just to seem clever, make a name for themself, make everyone else's life harder, and then pat themselves on the back while writing extensive documentation about why their little chrome extension or alternative way of doing things solves X,Y,Z (while completely ignoring how convoluted and burdensome they've now made something that, while technically inconvenient, was utterly simple to understand prior).

This is what endless interviews full of leet code questions buys them. At least all their engineers can estimate how many ping pong balls will fit in a school bus.
by jasode | 2025-05-01 10:30:20+00:00
>; however, I think big data files should be handled in a db rather than in a spreadsheet. And sqlite can query Excel files (with an extension)

A lot of normal users of Excel are not users of database software like SQLite or MS Access. That's too cumbersome. E.g. they download a csv file that has ~100000 rows (which really isn't that "big") and clicking on it gets them an instant visual grid as a GUI in Excel. Slicing & dicing and pivoting data is way faster in Excel than coding SQL WHERE GROUP BY statements. I've commented previously on why databases are not substitutes for the workflow ergonomics made possible by spreadsheet tools : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987638

It's similar to reasons why Python/R or Jupyter notebooks are also not substitutes for Excel for the typical users of Excel.

The low row count of 65536 in Excel 2003 was just a legacy limitation of 1980s 16-bit computing that was carried over into 32-bit computing for many years for backwards compatibility reasons. Spreadsheet users don't really want to switch to databases or Python just to get more usable rows than 65536.
by ENGNR | 2025-05-01 10:30:21+00:00
Was super interesting.

I of course feel for them as a small business. They took risk and did the numbers and are trying to bring something great to their customers.

One angle I didn’t see covered in response… dropping the quality on the product. If America just isn’t there yet on manufacturing, and people still only want to pay $139 for a computer case… surely someone in America can sell the customer a box of some sort for $139. It might be pretty crap, but there’s already local industry selling trailers and park benches and other things made out of metal. A barebones steel case seems within reach for $139, and they can improve from there.
by treetalker | 2025-05-01 10:30:22+00:00
Perhaps our present age will give rise to a new idiom — calling pigs to slop — meaning publishing a webpage that contains low-quality LLM-generated text, especially one that follows a preset pattern to match other content entries on the website. (By this I refer to the website's owner, not the HN poster.)

This page raises more questions than it answers. Why and how would sucking on an egg teach an orphaned chick how to eat? Alternatively, why would someone eat a raw egg by sucking out its contents?
by rollcat | 2025-05-01 10:31:00+00:00
Yep that was a silly assumption on my part; I've just remembered a story from like 10 years ago. One of my skate buddies, very chill and motivated guy. He's had a terrible accident. He was in his home, mixed alcohol with his new medicine (which he had no idea he mustn't), and suddenly woke up strapped to a hospital bed, guards in the room. Turns out he drove a car and killed a person. He doesn't remember any of that happening, but he's had alcohol in his blood, the verdict was "obviously guilty". He served 2 years in prison, now can't find a job. Sometimes shit happens.
by aniforprez | 2025-05-01 10:32:03+00:00
Now that even Google search is garbage, can't really claim they're good at search. It's also always been true that their search at anything aside from the main search product is horrible. YouTube search is its own level of colossal uselessness and has always been that way and has only gotten worse over time. These days it doesn't even show you 10 videos related to your search before going out of its way to show other "related" categories.