MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by okanat | 2025-05-19 20:55:02+00:00
You can setup local and limited user accounts under Windows. Many applications including every development tool out there doesn't need any admin permissions.

Spyware and adware is a government policy / regulation problem. Thanks to GDPR and DMA, using Windows in EU is significantly better experience (try setting a Windows desktop with an EU image). You can remove almost all of the apps including Edge and Copilot. There are no ads in the UI. Neither in Explorer nor in Start menu.
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-19 20:55:27+00:00
Yes so the problem is this is not about random f-up, the CRA is full of buzzwords concepts like "Cyber security by design", "Cyber security by default" "according to risks" which will be evaluated by the courts if you end up there.

Every software you provide have to be secure and if not you are liable for damage. So this is not just a random f-up, and we know how hard security really is in practice.

I also know that when you are a provider of a software most vulnerabilities and risks are usually requested/created by the client who usually exercise pressure on you (especially if you are a small actor). It is often done in a sneaky manner, putting the provider in an impossible situation. You will need to document this the best you can because now you are liable big time.

EDIT: What I mean is I understand they did that to force big manufacturers of IoT device to care more about security. But if you are now a small provider setting up some customized software you fall under the same rules.
by jopsen | 2025-05-19 20:56:22+00:00
The US and Europe is tightly integrated, this integration can be used as leveraged. Especially, since we've allowed the US to play the bigger brother in most of these relationships.

But you can only use this in a big way once. And all parties have pretty much assumed the US would never use its leverage as Trump has been doing.

The same way we dare invest in the US stock marked, because we're confident the US won't do a Cuba-style nationalization of private assets.

Obviously, the orange man is gambling EU won't decouple from the US. He might be right, this probably isn't big enough.

Decoupling all systems is expensive, it cheaper to wait 4 years.

That said, the orange man did get EU defense investment -- the investments are just not being made in the US.

Sadly, I don't think anyone will decouple, people still laugh at the idea of using LibreOffice.
by einpoklum | 2025-05-19 20:57:07+00:00
> who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.

LibreOffice has gotten quite good over the years, including decent(ish) MSO file format interoperability, and Thunderbird seems to support Exchange Server.

So, I suppose things like MS Project or MS Visio many not have decent counterparts (maybe, I don't really know), but otherwise, it seems like you don't need-need to use Windows for productivity apps.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-19 20:57:12+00:00
> LLMs are now being positioned as "let them work autonomously in the background"

The only people who believe this level of AI marketing are the people who haven't yet used the tools.

> which means no one will be watching the cost in real time.

Maybe some day there's an agentic coding tool that goes off into the weeds and runs for days doing meaningless tasks until someone catches it and does a Ctrl-C, but the tools I've used are more likely to stop short of the goal than to continue crunching indefinitely.

Regardless, it seems like a common experience for first-timers to try a light task and then realize they've spent $3, instantly setting expectations for how easy it is to run up a large bill if you're not careful.
by 0x457 | 2025-05-19 20:57:30+00:00
> For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows.

This is correct, but let's not pretend that linux is perfect. 99% of linux _for me_ is my terminal environment. WSL delivers on that _for me_.

I don't see any start menu spam because I rarely use it, when I do I type what I'm looking for before my eyes even move to look at that start menu.

oh, I can play destiny 2 and other games without shenanigans. Also don't need to figure out why Slack wants to open links in chromium, but discord in firefox (I have to deal with edge asking to be a default browser, but IMO it's less annoying).

Oh and multi-monitor with multiple DPI values works out of the box without looking up how to handle it in one of the frameworks this app uses.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-19 20:59:18+00:00
>There's not much of a braindrain of engineers as far as I can tell

Not in your bubble: top university in the tax heaven EU country with some of the most US companies. Of course those grads can just stay and get FANG jobs there but not everyone comes from the NL.

>the people running succesfull startups in the US do not posess any particular brilliance

Their advantage is easier access to more capital than those in the EU. Capital helps with success even more than skills. Hence why the US has more big successful companies than Europe.
by rolph | 2025-05-19 20:59:18+00:00
Mars has a chlorine problem, organic compounds depend on carbon chemistry, and are limited by oxidative process.

you need to workaround the apparently planetary perchlorate cycle.

Geophysical Research Letters: The origins of perchlorate in the Martian soil.[2017]

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

A Synthetic Biology Architecture to Detoxify and Enrich Mars Soil for Agriculture[2017]

https://www.nasa.gov/general/a-synthetic-biology-architectur...
by DebtDeflation | 2025-05-19 20:59:21+00:00
>The sale of this data should be treated as PII and "transfers of ownership" should not be implied.

Completely agree. The usual social media esque "it's a free service so you are the product" arguments don't apply here, people paid 23andme for genetic testing.

The good news is:

>"Regeneron pledged to comply with 23andMe’s privacy policy, which allows customers to have their personal information deleted upon request."

There needs to me a massive campaign to convince every single customer to file a data deletion request.
by caspper69 | 2025-05-19 20:59:22+00:00
I hear this a lot, and I do seem to remember back when I first got Windows 11 I might have seen something stupid like Candy Crush, but I'll be honest, I literally never see ads anywhere in the OS. Truth be told I hardly ever use the start menu since they ruined it, but this complaint about ads everywhere make it sound like a typical webpage. I just don't see it. Maybe because I'm on Win11 Pro?
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-19 20:59:22+00:00
I agree with your disagreements. People are accustomed to fractional stars on product ratings, so rounding 4.5 up to 5 would be misleading. If I see a full five stars on something, I'm inclined to wonder if it's only gotten a few votes from the seller's buddies so far. I could see rounding to the nearest half-point, as long as the star icons match. The icons should match whatever numbers are displayed.

And skipping the ratings that have gotten no votes yet would be weird and bad.
by SilasX | 2025-05-19 20:59:33+00:00
>Human learning doesn't involve making a copy (or any other use of an exclusive rights) as defined in copyright law (the human brain not being a fixed medium), AI training does, because digital storage is.

That's just false -- AI models themselves only store parameter weights, which represent a high-level, aggregated understanding across all data that was learned on, i.e. what human brains do. This is clear from all the examples where you have to painstakingly trick them into producing exact text.

And even if they did store something that's "effectively a copy", that's no more copyright infringement than when Google caches a site in order to handle search queries. It's not copyright infringement until they start redistributing [non-fair-use] content from the sites.
by porcoda | 2025-05-19 20:59:35+00:00
I’m guessing this isn’t just to optimize for binary size. If you have the resources to avoid third party dependencies you eliminate the burden of having to build a trust case for the third party supply chain. That is the number one reason we sometimes reimplement things instead of using third party packages where I work: the risk from dependencies along with the effort required to establish that we can trust them is sometimes (not always) greater than just replacing it in house.
by CoolCold | 2025-05-19 21:00:49+00:00
> Running a Linux VM on Windows is nicer than just booting into Linux

Indeed, it does. Having stable system and not dealing with Linux on Desktop, clear tradoffs (like "just add another 16gb RAM stick in laptop/desktop and you are golden") is great for peace of mind.

The average uptimes on my laptops (note for plural) is ~3 weeks, until next Windows Update to be applied. I don't have nostalgia on the days of using Linux on desktop (~2003 student times, ~2008 giving it one more try, ~2015 as required by dayjob)

Of course it adds up that I can tell people around me (who are not tech guys often, but smart enough to know basic concepts and be able to run bash scripts provided to them) - "yep, machine with 32GB+ of RAM will work fine, choose any you like" - and it works.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-19 21:00:51+00:00
Why the need for incentives? A lot of these electric implements are so awesome they need no incentives.

Electric leaf blowers don't have the same top-end power as gas, but are so much more useful that you use them in unexpected places. Take them into your laundry room and blow out your dryer vent. Never sweep your garage again - just blow the dirt out. Want to get a small fire in your fire pit rip-roaring quickly? No need for gasoline or lighter fluid! Just point the leaf blower at it!

Does this photo work? https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/vol-16-hybrid-wa...:*

Even Ferrari uses them when their hypercar comes into the pits during the distance races :)

PS, I also have an electric chain saw - it is truly awesome.
by Spivak | 2025-05-19 21:00:52+00:00
> If the teams working on the two are different, or even if the expertise level is uneven, something like a typed serialization library is a great boon.

You don't even need that, I use typed serialization on both sides when talking to myself. How else do I guarantee the shape of what I send and receive? I want my codebase to scream at me if I ever mess it up.
by shepherdjerred | 2025-05-19 21:00:55+00:00
> You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back.

What do you mean?

If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save" 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs $5 and I pay $4, I saved $
by jopicornell | 2025-05-19 21:01:03+00:00
Well, I'll have to hardly disagree. You want a laptop that its battery life is not 1 hour at best. That wasn't a thing in Windows/Linux laptops until M1 started using arm64. 6 Hours of intense work? Good luck with that.

Not only that, but being able to run very intensive work (Pro Audio, Development...) seamlessly is an absolute pleasure.

Its screen is one of the best screens out there.

The trackpad (and some keyboards) are an absolute pleasure.

The robustness of the laptop is amazing.

I don't care about the marketing of Apple, I don't buy anything new they launch, and I condemn all of their obscure pricing techniques for the tech they sell. But my M1 is rocking like the first day, after four years of daily use. That's something my Windows laptops have never delivered to me.

Apple has done a lot of things wrong, and I will not buy another Apple laptop in the future, but I don't want Nvidia on a Laptop, I want it to be portable, powerful and durable.

That is changing now, and it's amazing. I want my laptop to be mine, and to be able to install any OS I like. New laptops with arm64 and Intel Lake cpus are promissing, but we're not there yet, at least not that I have experienced.

Each to their own for sure, and for you, the nvidia requisite is important. For me it's not about brands, but usability for my work and hobbies.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-19 21:01:08+00:00
this has been possible in photoshop using the AI prompt tool (just prompt "remove background") for a while but i haven't used it in long enough to tell you exactly how. depending on how you compiled the source image, i think it should be possible to get at least close to what you intend.

edit to add: honestly, if you take the old school approach of treating it like you're just cutting it out of a magazine or something, you can use the polygonal lasso tool and zoom in to get pretty decent results that most people will never judge too harshly. i do a lot of "pseudo collage" type stuff that's approximating the look of physical cut-and-paste and this is what i usually do now. you can play around with stroke layer FX with different blending modes to clean up the borders, too.
by jraph | 2025-05-19 21:02:03+00:00
> As a buyer, how am I supposed to know which manufacturer did their homework and on which laptops?

You first option is to buy a laptop with linux preinstalled from one of the many manufacturers that provides this. This requires no particular knowledge or time. Admittedly, this may lead you to more expensive options, entry grade laptops won't be an option.

Your second best bet is to read tech reviews. Admittedly this requires time and knowledge, but often enough people turn to their tech literate acquaintance for advice when they want to buy hardware.

> Afaik, support for hardware accelerated videoplayback on browsers was broken across the board only three years ago.

Yes indeed, that's something we didn't have. I agree it sucks. Now, all the OSes have their flaws that others don't have, and it's not like the videos didn't play, in practice it was an issue if you wanted to watch 4K videos for hours on battery. Playing regular videos worked, and you can always lower the quality if your situation doesn't allow the higher qualities. Often enough, you could also get the video and play it outside the browser. I know, not ideal, but also way less annoying that the laptop not suspending when you close the lid because of a glitch or something like this.
by rfoo | 2025-05-19 21:02:15+00:00
There's a very large gap between being super nice to a human and being a jerk.

I don't think it benefits me much by very politely suggesting that its approach may not work and emphasize on the good part of the idea it generates and it would be better if it could try to push in another direction for example X. Like I do when talking to junior engineers.

I usually just say, "This does not work because of ..., Y is good though, change your mind and assess X now". I can also say this when I'm not actually sure whether X works or not, without worrying about my words sending an intern / a junior engineer into days of struggling on a deadend.
by const_cast | 2025-05-19 21:02:20+00:00
Yeah the typical way programs are run is by using a .desktop file that's installed. The reason nobody cares is because running random executable that have a GUI is a pretty rare use case for Linux desktops. We don't have wizards or .msi installers, we just install using the package manager. And then it shows up where it needs to.

If you're on KDE, you can right-click the start menu and add the application. Also, right-click menu should give you a run option.
by yubblegum | 2025-05-19 21:02:53+00:00
Repeated games. Think relationships. Once you have an accurate grasp of the 'character' of your playmate you can approach optimal results.

For example, the character with the flower hat is a 'detective'. We can assume the initial encounter is a coin-toss choice for her and the rest of her choices determined by 'character'. Of course even her first choice is 'in character' (she is 'testing') but if you know her, even if she starts off with a 'cheat' on her first choice, you start off with a 'cooperate'. After that, there is little mystery as to her choices. Or consider the 'grudger'. If for whatever reason you end up choosing 'cheat' once, you know they will never 'forgive' you. etc.
by agnosis | 2025-05-19 21:02:59+00:00
Thats an interesting point. I think that if the climate difference is important I would allow the user to toggle between summer and winter. Or choose based on the context if you are showing specific events like wars that were impacted by winter weather. From my research (not professional or scientific) ice sheets didn’t move much between seasons so I wouldn’t include them. When you have very large intervals of 100k years when you go further back there could be several ice ages in between so I don’t think it makes much sense there. In what context do you think that this would be important to consider?
by cjm42 | 2025-05-19 21:03:00+00:00
The most reliable fix is to get Windows to use UTC for the hardware clock, which is usually the default on Linux. (It's more reliable because it means the hardware clock doesn't need to be adjusted when DST begins or ends, so there's no need for the OSs to cooperate on that.)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_time#UTC_in_Microsof...
by palata | 2025-05-19 21:03:04+00:00
> WSL is more powerful than Linux ...

Are you a Windows user who is happy to have a good way to run Linux on Windows, or are you a Linux user trying to convince other Linux user that instead of using Linux, they should use Linux in a VM running on Windows?

I am a longtime Linux user, and I can't see a reason in the universe why I would want to access my Linux through a VM on Windows. That seems absolutely insane.
by kubb | 2025-05-19 21:03:08+00:00
The claim that conservatism is rooted in an inability to process reality is a misrepresentation.

The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.

Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-19 21:03:15+00:00
I don't know about this specific tech (which seems to be vaporware given the AI photos...) but the fire properties of some of the composite wood products are terrible they pose a massive danger to firefighters.

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/i-team-lightweight-beams...

They are very commonly used in new house construction past a certain year for the central support beam, or the side beams, or both - that virtually everything rests on.

In a house fire, the beam heats up, the binder/glue weakens, and the beam suddenly fails - causing the interior of the house to collapse partially or entirely which not only sends the firefighters into the basement and possibly under a pile of debris, but it breaks up a bunch of housing materials that are suddenly exposed to the fire..

Done solely to make the profit margin for the contractor slightly bigger...

If you have such beams, it's probably worth looking into how to add insulation to extend the time before the beam fails.
by jopsen | 2025-05-19 21:04:08+00:00
Forking it and setting up the CI for all tests, monitoring performance regression, etc -- no thanks.

Having worked on Firefox CI infrastructure years ago, it's a huge and complex setup. As I recall back then it was >100 compute hours per push.

Fork it and keep synching in from upstream, sure that's easy. But are you an independent browser?
by foresto | 2025-05-19 21:04:19+00:00
Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful.

One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)
by lblume | 2025-05-19 21:04:53+00:00
One of the strongest example for me is newtypes. I strongly believe in Parse, don't validate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476261) and think Rust's newtype pattern is able to really enforce this strongly.

When writing a Rust program, I can often basically express it as a single value (the input) being sequentially converted in type. The typestates, if you choose this name, allow great compile-time verification of most desired properties. You are really forced to describe the way the core logic flows in a modular way.

However this is just one and likely not even the most prominent aspect making Rust so great. Local reasoning also becomes easier via explicit opt-in mutability, and function signatures always being the only relevant source of truth when regarding their compile-time evaluatability (especially compared to C++ templates). No accessing uninitialized memory, a very simple implied notion of a constructor as merely a method without a self parameter, soundness of all received types, likely much more...
by rpgwaiter | 2025-05-19 21:05:07+00:00
I’m not sure what the solution is here. Personally, in-person college is a non-starter for a number of health reasons. Online classes was a huge boon to people like me, I never would have been able to get a degree otherwise.

I know I’m in a small minority, and this wouldn’t apply to a large number of courses where online classes don’t make sense, but I don’t think the solution is exclusion.
by noqc | 2025-05-19 21:05:09+00:00
You cannot deport citizens, and I believe that I am not arguing that you can, however, the process due to non-citizens is very minimal. You and your belongings are being returned to your country, where you will be free to do with them whatever you please. It's not incarceration, or a fine, we're just kicking you out, and we can basically do that at our discretion.
by hoppp | 2025-05-19 21:05:42+00:00
You are right.

Eu has great plans but unable to fulfill them.

I have been waiting for the Capital Markets Union for 11 years.

THe European blockchain infrastructure? Dead because only some universities can use it.

Eu is unable to fund innovation and it's not able to fund risky businesses. No VC culture either.

some Scandinavian countries have a little startup culture and government sponsored grants but the tax system drives startups that serve international audience away.
by MrSkelter | 2025-05-19 21:06:19+00:00
90% of the BBC wasn’t crud. Even if you didn’t like it. Until the early 90s it was making programming commercial companies couldn’t justify or take a risk on. This programs were fantastic and impacted the entire world.

This was a corporation (the BBC) who made their own cameras and microphones.

Go and watch “Ways of seeing” on YouTube. It’s 50 years old and still as exciting and relevant as it was then.

It was most when conservatives decided that the truth felt a little too left wing and they became vocal about not wanting to fund things they didn’t find entertaining.

Hence quality was traded for populism.
by conradev | 2025-05-19 21:06:25+00:00
I studied this for a year fellowship, and there are lots of problems, but problems with permitting and interconnection are pretty unique in the US.

NREL, NFPA, UL, and Tesla got together and developed SolarAPP (https://gosolarapp.org). It enables instant online permitting for standard installations, and California passed a law mandating its adoption.

It's also sales. Solar is currently sold by salespeople and they need to be paid. The small solar companies contract out to the larger solar companies for crap rates because top of funnel is very hard for them. There is a YC company going after that opportunity: https://projectsolar.com/

Software providers like Aurora (https://aurorasolar.com) are used for making proposals, but they sell software to solar installers rather than vertically integrating and going after it themselves.

Tesla sells online, but the online experience ends after you pay and they try to sell you too much solar. Everything, including design, is subcontracted out in my understanding.

Sunrun is a great option even though you don't own the panels. PPAs are more popular at the moment because interest rates are so high.