MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michaelt | 2025-05-01 07:12:02+00:00
The iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree - but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...
by fsckboy | 2025-05-01 07:12:26+00:00
>length in characters and size in bytes

you change the word you use as if those words have inherent meanings that we can draw upon. they don't.

it would be more clear to write "length in characters and length in bytes"

[linguistically speaking, words don't carry meanings, it is us who ascribe meaning to words. we use words to say what we want to say, but words don't limit us in what we can say]
by uecker | 2025-05-01 07:13:13+00:00
Yes, we need a languages that makes it impossible. But how could this happen in Rust? https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-5gmm-6m36-r7jh But clearly, this does not count because it used "unsafe", so it remains the programmer's fault who made a mistake. Oh wait, doesn't this invalidate your argument?
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-01 07:14:14+00:00
> "Stories that create identities in peoples mind are a hell of a drug."

If you think the Dems didn't know that, think again. The Democrats put Trump into office with their insane choice of identity hills to die on. Then Biden woke up in mid summer: "Gosh am I still a presidential candidate? How come? Let's do Kamala now" ... with her disastrous electability record. Yeah right, "an honest mistake".

> "many people convinced themselves that covid was fake"

Covid has nothing to do with it... Trump was the first and most vocal vaccine salesman and he got elected anyway because in the eyes of the public there was no difference between Dem and Rep, the election was decided on a different set of issues.
by OmarAssadi | 2025-05-01 07:14:20+00:00
Early into high school, I needed something to take to class, but since I already had a decent desktop at home, plus we were broke, I picked up some cheap Asus K55N; AMD A8-4500M, 4GB DDR3, etc -- nothing particularly fancy; only upgrade I did to it was removing the mechanical hard drive and swapping in my old 120GB Corsair Force GT.

I eventually upgraded, went off to university, etc. When I finally came home, I found out my mom apparently "borrowed" it, figured out how to install Ubuntu, and has been using it ever since for grading papers and what not.

No idea how much longer it will remain in use, but aside from the awful screen, ironically, honestly, I think the browser and the seemingly ever increasing resource requirements of the web will eventually be the only thing that finally causes an upgrade.
by spike021 | 2025-05-01 07:15:30+00:00
This was how I felt when my grandfather passed in 2021. He was always my hero since he was first a Holocaust survivor and then was drafted at 16 to go back to Germany on D-day, where he almost drowned (his lander didn’t fully make it to shore and he couldn’t swim), and then was later caught by the Nazis. Just an insane story and connection to that period in time and once it’s gone, it’s gone. This is why i try to encourage everyone to keep chatting with your older folks before their time comes.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-01 07:15:37+00:00
For me that started with Kotlin.

Not only are they quite open it is a means to cash in more InteliJ licenses, the community has generally an anti-Java sentiment, especially on Android, as if it doesn't depend on the ecosystem for its own existence.

The language might have a great design, however for me that is off-putting and makes me rather play with other JVM languages, like Clojure.

"The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin."

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...
by abhisek | 2025-05-01 07:16:53+00:00
> But is that a bad thing?

Probably not a bad thing if you you believe in "antifragility". The technology will improve as it should.

I would consider KHTML as a technology. Much like v8 and blink. I have no doubt the open source technology community is capable of producing great technologies with or without big tech funding. But will it be able to "productize" them and drive large scale adoption? I have my doubts but time will tell.
by bethekind | 2025-05-01 07:17:00+00:00
> ...as much as it is for anyone....

The phrasing in this sentence implies that the Julia language could be named for the code breaker, as much as it could be named for anyone else. In other words, it wasn't named for the code breaker, but it might as well have been.

The follow up comment gives hard quantitative fact that the language wasn't named for anyone or anything. I can see how both comments are correct, the first implicitly, the second explicitly
by aseipp | 2025-05-01 07:17:08+00:00
> Is this a fair comparison?

Is this a serious question? Orion uses WebKit which practically speaking is like 80% of what people know as "a browser" and where an insane amount of the effort and money goes. There are like 30 various WebKit-derived zero-features 1-man browsers out there on GitHub, they even show up here sometimes. Firefox maintains its own entire engine called Gecko, it's completely incomparable. The actual development cost of your browser is subsidized almost entirely by Apple (and Kagi's VC money), make no mistake about it.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-01 07:17:16+00:00
> I fail to see the difference.

You don't see any difference between Internet Explorer and Chrome?

Did you actually ever try developing anything with IE, or are you just failing to see the difference between something you do see and something you failed to see?

It think it's pretty safe to say that Chrome is objectively better than IE. Even Microsoft saw that.

If you want to talk about what their differences are, or how important it is that they're different, then go right ahead, but if you fail to see the difference, I don't think you have much to contribute to this conversation from your willfully self blindfolded perspective.
by jajko | 2025-05-01 07:18:17+00:00
Ah, that's why my feed seems like waves of themes. One opens the door a bit and then suddenly 30% of the videos on next page load have similar theme, (almost) completely forgetting tens of other videos of other themes I watches in past week.

Ie I hovered over one video of some Ronny Chieng commentary of RFK jr yesterday which somehow popped out of blue, and next time half of my feed was hardcore political with current admin (nothing what few Not interested clicks won't solve but then I am battling over-optimization of video platform).

I guess it suits certain audience well and keeps the feed fresh, but such behavior would cater to some maybe other type person better than me.
by naruhodo | 2025-05-01 07:18:27+00:00
It will be interesting to see if Mr Apple has more spine than Mr Amazon, who acceded to Trump's demand not to show customers how much the tariffs were costing them.

My feeling is that these guys who showed up to the inauguration of a self-professed "dictator on day one" might be a little light on backbone, if not moral fortitude.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-01 07:18:57+00:00
Unless I have to use them indirectly via Android Studio, I prefer to stay on Eclipse or Netbeans land for Java.

Visual Studio is still the best for C++, followed by C++ Builder.

VSCode is the only Electon app that I tolerate on my own computers.

When is InteliJ finally going to support JNI development instead of requiring two IDE licences?
by yorwba | 2025-05-01 07:19:23+00:00
> What would a hypothetical "Mandarin-first" model look like to you?

Given a language-agnostic prompt like "12 + 89", any explanatory text it outputs could be expected to be in Mandarin most of the time.

According to this test, Xiaomi's MiMo-7B-RL is an English-first model.
by c22 | 2025-05-01 07:19:51+00:00
If the wealthy held their wealth in money then there would be no problem. The problem arises because the wealthy hold their wealth in assets, the most productive of which become hoarded in fewer and fewer silos. Since the assets are desireable and increasing in scarcity their asking price increases. Since this price is paid in money, the value of money falls. This would be fine except that most normal people do hold most of their wealth in money so this reduction in buying power makes them poorer.

This split is particularly difficult to address because money is easy to tax (redistribute) while assets that may or may not be for sale at some arbitrary asking price are a lot harder to break up in this way.

Ultimately, to attempt to extract and redistribute this sort of ethereal wealth requires unpopular adjustments to long-held values of personal freedom and ownership that make the whole system possible in the first place.

The problem may in fact be insoluble sustainably. Most of human history provides examples of extreme wealth inequality.
by whitehexagon | 2025-05-01 07:20:04+00:00
I was also doing my top-up shop, and was surprised how orderly the shelves were being stripped of water and essentials. No panic, maybe some nervous tension, but otherwise could have been a long weekend big shop for most people.

I realised my regular disaster prep was lacking in a few areas. I especially want a decent portable radio, and a set of walkie-talkies, but everything looks pretty gimmicky from a quick search. Any reccomendations? I got access to a radio after 3 hours, not that there was anything official at that point, but it was enough to switch down a gear.
by anonzzzies | 2025-05-01 07:20:06+00:00
No one should use this platform until it returns to something more balanced / free speech akin. It is weird that official organisations and smart people stil use it for work; sure it has all the users, but that's not how you change things; by thinking 'yeah sure its bad, but it's good for me so he'. I know, I know, utopia which is never going to happen as literally everyone thinks like that.
by kubb | 2025-05-01 07:20:23+00:00
I'm wondering, will the big G be allowed to start another browser project, once they sell Chrome? Let's say Google Cobalt.

They'd fork the open source of Chrome and get to work. After a while, they'll start taking the market share (they can afford to hire back the whole team).

Couple of years later are we in the same position? Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious to see how it plays out.
by natch | 2025-05-01 07:21:00+00:00
Tesla blatantly makes their cars and even most of their components themselves in America… gosh, such a blatant crime that they escape a tariff on goods made in other countries.

The actual root cause of all this is a climate change guilt complex on the left. Elon is involved, so they have to assume bad intent, because they need an excuse for their own bad choices.
by eitland | 2025-05-01 07:21:02+00:00
Of all the things you've mentioned, the only one that genuinely stands out to me as a positive contribution from Google—something that wouldn’t have happened had Chrome never existed—is the codec situation. They leveraged their scale and influence for good in that instance.

That said, it’s not as if other browsers weren’t already making independent strides in optimisation and innovation. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Chrome has actually steered the browser ecosystem in the wrong direction, while simultaneously eroding a lot of the diversity that once existed.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-01 07:21:37+00:00
>Copy and Paste context menu entries are sometimes disabled when they should not be

they should never be disabled. If I want to copy the letters from the OK/Cancel buttons—which you also tried to eliminate—or the keyboard keycaps you are displaying, I should be able to; what's it to you what I want to do?

How much do you love it when you are using a PDF of a scanned ancient text or a cellphone snapshot you just took of a streetsign, and your device lets you copy the text? This is what computers are for, to be our servants, not to be Google's overseer.

step 1: HN, make article titles selectable. wtf!?
by alexilchenko | 2025-05-01 07:22:00+00:00
Very good point! So right now what I have is a pipeline that looks at the real news and generates (using an LLM) a mixture of fake headlines that are inspired from the recent events and some fake headlines that are not conditioned on the current events (I, of course, do a final pass and ranking). I do agree that this isn't what most people call "fake news" but maybe more funny, cards against humanity abstract headlines.

Do you think that maybe I should source from snopes.com (or another fact-checker) or create another pipeline that tracks down more what people call fake news? How would you improve this project?

I've thought about going that route but defaulted to just making something fun
by michaelt | 2025-05-01 07:23:54+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/politics/23berry.html

For a High-Tech President, a Hard-Fought E-Victory

For more than two months, Mr. Obama has been waging a vigorous battle with his handlers to keep his BlackBerry, which like millions of other Americans he has relied upon for years to stay connected with friends and advisers. (And, of course, to get Chicago White Sox scores.)

He won the fight, aides disclosed Thursday, but the privilege of becoming the nation’s first e-mailing president comes with a specific set of rules.

“The president has a BlackBerry through a compromise that allows him to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends,” said Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, “in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced to ensure his ability to communicate.”

[...]

The presidency, for all the power afforded by the office, has been deprived of the tools of modern communication. George W. Bush famously sent a farewell e-mail address to his friends when he took office eight years ago.

While lawyers and the Secret Service balked at Mr. Obama’s initial requests to allow him to keep his BlackBerry, they acquiesced as long as the president - and those corresponding with him - agreed to strict rules. And he had to agree to use a specially made device, which must be approved by national security officials.
by atoav | 2025-05-01 07:26:32+00:00
As a huge open source proponent I have my doubts. A big chunk of the tech people out there are like sheep, that follow the herd. And the herd is filled with people who look at the biggest corp and just copy what they are doing/using cause there must be a reason behind it.

Lately my feeling is more and more people realize why open technology in the hand of the people is important (it is a lot about trust), but I am not too optimistic that it will break that dynamic.
by deredede | 2025-05-01 07:26:54+00:00
It was, but then they changed their mind apparently

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/owl-project-restructured/14226

Too early to tell what it will lead to.

> Is Raven the successor to Owl?

That's what I am wondering too (especially with the name), but I couldn't find a reference to Owl in the repo.
Show HN: I Cut GitHub Notification Noise by over 90% Using Gmail Filters
by tomglynch | 2025-05-01 07:27:47+00:00
I found that most GitHub notification emails weren’t useful to me, so I set up Gmail filters and Multiple Inboxes to separate the noise from what actually matters. I found that most GitHub notification emails weren’t useful to me, so I set up Gmail filters and 'multiple inboxes' to separate the noise from what I actually need to see.

It’s surprising how much irrelevant email GitHub generates, and that there still isn’t a better way to get only the important notifications. How are others managing GitHub notification overload?

It seems crazy that such a widely used platform hasn’t solved this after so many years.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-05-01 07:27:55+00:00
My childhood was in the 1970s and 80s when the 'Troubles' [0] affected Britain, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. There were a dizzying number of factions, paramilitaries, volunteer groups, splinter groups... In those times it was rather common for killings and other actions to be mis-claimed, or tactically denied, with specious bomb threats or actual terror acts blamed on a different group. It was a very complex situation, as smouldering war zones usually are. Eventually the leaders from various camps developed codewords and protocols, so that for example the IRA or UVF could message MI5 and have a bomb warning taken seriously, or properly attributed in reporting. Many things that happened in those days were not at all clear cut and remain unknown to this day who really did what. Based on this I would counter that clarity is the exception.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-01 07:28:49+00:00
>Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.

>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

>No matter how efficient they made it, javascript "applications" are still bloatware that needlessly waste the user's resources compared to native code.

So should we not deliver advanced sandboxed cross platform applications for any platform, and instead deliver unsandboxed native code for all possible platforms? ActiveX called, it wants to say thanks for the endorsement and that it told you so.

And no more zoom meetings because somebody's Mac might not go to sleep? I'm with you on that one, brother!
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-01 07:30:07+00:00
He’s already said they will reduce the tariffs on China. He insisted there will be some tariffs but 145% is too high and it will come down.

A company moving their production anywhere based on what the policy is right now would be foolish because the policy could change in the next 5 mins, but will almost certainly change within minutes if there are empty shelves.
by anupulu | 2025-05-01 07:32:47+00:00
Thank you for the feedback!

Very valid points. I’m volunteering for Kiwix and can say that they’re aware of the issues with the website. There are plans to renew it and refresh the content/copy, as well as do some user testing.

The core team is small and doing its best to prioritise and focus on what brings the best value to the users.
by overfeed | 2025-05-01 07:33:13+00:00
I chose the word counters rather than eliminate for the reason you outlined.

If you're the vendor, you can add a tamper-resistant or tamper-evident design to raise the cost of ,component-replacement attacks. Which can be countered by whole-device replacement, which in turn is countered by device identity attestation, amd so on, in an endless arms-race.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-01 07:34:23+00:00
> "I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets."

There's no such thing as "free markets", it's A. Smith's BS.

> "I also admit that it is not an easy thing to understand. How can a chaotic system possibly work?"

A chaotic system cannot work for any meaningful stretch of time. Moreover, we don't have a chaotic system, actually it's a system under finely tuned control: Biden placed 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, helping Tesla. Trump added more tariffs on China, exempted Tesla... Truly a chaotic coincidence /s
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-01 07:40:37+00:00
>You do not need to "deliver" inside a bloated VM you know.

>Just to spell it out, a web browser is a bloated VM these days.

Then Java applets? Oops, that's a bloated VM too.

And how is an M4 emulating x86 code or jitting WASM code not also a bloated VM? Bloated VMs are here to stay.

>> And no more zoom meetings

>Yes please. No more zoom meetings. Ever.

Yay, we've found common ground! Want to chat about it on zoom? ;)
by rbanffy | 2025-05-01 07:40:44+00:00
> When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC

They still had the high-end gear. I remember SPARC boxes with more than 60 sockets and mainframe-like partitions (and mainframe-like availability). And, if you wanted to develop for those, it’d make sense to buy a SPARC workstation running the same OS.

Sun could be in the same niche IBM carved for itself in the POWER and mainframe space, but while IBM continued investing in POWER and Z, Oracle shut down SPARC development.
by eru | 2025-05-01 07:42:21+00:00
I already felt pretty annoyed with the first Three Body Problem book.

But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.

I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.

But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.

I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.

War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.
by bloppe | 2025-05-01 07:42:27+00:00
I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't the end of antitrust. The EU has already forced Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. They might force them to support PWAs on a similar level to native apps next. Chromium will be open source for the foreseeable future, no matter who buys the Chrome branding and userbase. This could be the very beginning of a much more competitive app landscape.

Or it could all go to shit. Hard to say.
by kmacdough | 2025-05-01 07:43:32+00:00
I'd like to see OpenAI and others get at the core of the issue: Goodhart's law.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

It's an incredible challenge in a normal company, but AI learns and iterates at unparalleled speed. It is more imperative than ever that feedback is highly curated. There are a thousand ways to increase engagement and "thumbs up". Only a few will actually benefit the users, who will notice sooner or later.
by logifail | 2025-05-01 07:43:43+00:00
> Sure. They still wound up in court.

That case was brought by the New York Times, not any oversight body or investigative function of the EU, which makes it even more cringe-worthy.

"The European Commission faced an embarrassing grilling for almost five hours on Friday as top EU judges cast doubt on the executive’s commitment to transparency on the Covid-19 vaccine negotiations. The EU institution defended itself in a packed EU court in Luxembourg in the so-called Pfizergate case, brought by the New York Times and its former Brussels bureau chief Matina Stevis-Gridneff."

The NYT is presumably welcome to try to take Hegseth to court?
by xp84 | 2025-05-01 07:43:57+00:00
Exactly. Congress doesn’t want any of their duties. War declaration? Nah, let the President do it and call it “not a war.” Budget? Well, technically we’ll appropriate funds, but we’ll only do a big CR once in a while. Tariff policy? Nah, let the President do it all with the “national security” loophole, no matter how absurd. Impeachment and removal? Well, not when it’s your party’s guy.

For all the hate Trump gets, it’s Congress who’s created and who props up this monarchy.