MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-01 06:46:34+00:00
Signal has been used widely in US intelligence for many, many years. Nothing about this is new, though perhaps people that never paid attention are just now becoming aware of it. As for the rest of Five Eyes, they use WhatsApp the same way. I’m not sure that WhatsApp would be considered an improvement.

It is clear there is a gap between how people imagine this works, or should work in theory, and how it actually works.
by viraptor | 2025-05-01 06:46:46+00:00
> Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.

1. It doesn't return us to monoculture - Monoculture of ie6 gave us multiple browsers, which recently all merged into Chrome. We already have a monoculture which will now lose funding.

2. We're not losing any of that progress. Actual documented standards exist now, all players implement the same basics, and you can create most websites without browser specific quirks. That's not going away.

3. We've had so much progress that Electron is its own massive OS now. We could do with a bit less progress and a bit more "how do we make this mess maintainable".
by mariusor | 2025-05-01 06:49:11+00:00
We've tried multiple ways over time, and the one we settled on is to wrap it in a clean kitchen towel (of pretty thick cotton) and then place it in a plastic bag. With just the plastic bag it will grow mold, with just the kitchen towel it will lose too much moisture. Even like this by the end it gets pretty tough, but it is still edible as toast. :)
by stevoski | 2025-05-01 06:50:02+00:00
If you get a one- or two-person SaaS to $10K MMR, and then tell the detailed story in places like HN, you get copycatted many times.

People will reproduce what you made - to the pixel.

It is really, really frustrating. Founders who have experienced this learn to avoid sharing the stories on HN, etc.
by donavanm | 2025-05-01 06:50:30+00:00
I spent a few years at Apple, a decade+ in AWS, and now at another mega cloud co. IME expect 3 months to understand whats going on and become useful. Ask questions or “raise your hand” when stuck for a day, you should have an “onboarding buddy” coworker and manager who are invested in your success. Keep track of what youre doing, when youve asked for help, and what youve accomplished on a daily or weekly basis. Use this as a (bi)weekly 1:1 topic to set expectations with your manager.

Re: complications, increase your sense of scale beyond anything you imagined. Youre now inside of an industrial process. Depending on your company youve gone from ~100 coworkers to literally 10-40,000 other SDEs working in the same environment. There are probably more dev teams than previous coworkers. All sorts of things get complicated at that scope.

Check my profile if my experience is relevant and youd like a virtual coffee chat.
by ghaff | 2025-05-01 06:50:51+00:00
https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-sourc...

There's also a link to a transcript of the whole series at that link. https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Opensourceinevitability...

I did the series early in the pandemic as an activity until things blew over in a couple months. :-(
by andelink | 2025-05-01 06:50:55+00:00
Perhaps Mozilla will spend money more effectively now? I'm not sure and frankly I don't care. For sure, it will be a sad day if Firefox formally goes under[1]. Still, it wouldn't change the validity of the decision to forbid these payments, spin off Chrome, etc.

[1] I think Firefox will survive. Orion browser, which has been my main browser for maybe a year now, was developed with far less money than the Firefox budget and something like only two people. Is this a fair comparison? I have no idea.
by abhisek | 2025-05-01 06:50:56+00:00
> Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly

What you are saying seems much larger than the web itself. I don't think Chromium or for that matter "technology" is responsible for that. I think it has more to do with massive capital in funding technology startups building on every random idea which in turn led to the tremendous demand for platforms with the promise of "shipping fast" at the cost of short sighted technical decisions.
by tetris11 | 2025-05-01 06:51:03+00:00
I'll never forget the day when the DB went on strike, and Swiss trains crossed the border to pick up passengers from Frankfurt.

Smoothest, quietest, roomiest train I've ever been in. Even the aesthetics were calming, with nice wide windows.

No random stairs or narrow corridors, no garish yellow or red colours, no speakers or beeping doors yelling at top volume.
by brendangregg | 2025-05-01 06:52:19+00:00
The answer has always been in the source of flamegraph.pl:

# This was inspired by Neelakanth Nadgir's excellent function_call_graph.rb # program, which visualized function entry and return trace events. As Neel # wrote: "The output displayed is inspired by Roch's CallStackAnalyzer which # was in turn inspired by the work on vftrace by Jan Boerhout".

Neel's did upward "flames" and I think CallStackAnalyzer did as well from memory, so based on the ones I was familiar with this was the precedent. We were also dealing with stacks that were commonly less than 30 frames deep, so it tended to fit on the screen. Also in my original flamegraph.pl implementation was an option to invert the flame graph (--inverted), so I've always let people choose. But I guess I had to pick something as the default.

Neel's was the biggest direct inspiration. I changed it to put the alphabet on the x-axis and reduced the color hues, but they look similar.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-01 06:55:02+00:00
> "It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders."

That pretty much sums up the delusion of the Left. The buck stops with the government, oligarchs understand that and work skillfully to turn the government into their tool. It wasn't ONLY Obama and Reagan who did that (the tool thing), it was the Democrat and Republican parties who almost unanimously did that, helped by a few gatekeepers who made the process more effective.
by Nursie | 2025-05-01 06:55:04+00:00
> What does it say that people who voted "yes" without a clear plan of action already on the table?

The UK government explicitly refused to make a plan of action.

It turned out to be a foot-gun moment.

The leave campaign was not representative of people in office who were basically all remainers, and the referendum would not change the makeup of Parliament because it's not an election. As a result they had no ability to make an official plan or even an unofficial one which could be put into place afterwards, because they did not have the power to do that and the vote was not going to give it to them.

The government's reasoning for not making a plan seemed to be that it might be too appealing if there was a plan, and they didn't want to give leave campaigners the ability to say "See, there's a plan, it'll be fine", when remain campaigners could instead use the lack of plan to say "Are you crazy, you're voting for the unknown! There's no plan!". And they were confident that the leave vote was DoA so making a plan was a waste of time and money anyway.

This seems like dirty pool to me, and it backfired anyway. Turns out that chaos and uncertainty was more or less explicitly what some leave voters wanted - give the whole establishment a kick in the pants.

I voted remain, FWIW, but I think holding "there was no plan" over leave-voters heads is a bit rich given why there was no plan.
by freeone3000 | 2025-05-01 06:56:26+00:00
Microsoft uses a mixture of Visual Studio (classic) and VSCode internally. The AI assistant is Copilot. The exact same stuff that the users use, albeit slightly buggier. To get the True Microsoft Experience, take VSCode, install the Git, GitHub, Azure, Typescript, and Copilot plugins, and disable third-party repos. A cohesive IDE!
by corimaith | 2025-05-01 06:57:31+00:00
That's one factor, but really, the Qing themselves being considered foreign minority (Manchu) that enacted a highly authoritarian and regimented society that forced cultural customs to the majority, then didn't have the strength or success to justify such oppresive policies probably had more to do with it. And then you've got famine, increasing banditry, corruption and then you're ripe for the loosing the mandate of heaven. Most of this has to do with failures of domestic policy than foreign intervention.

In any case with Opium, Qing estimates themselves only measured around 1% of the population to engaged with the drug, and domestic production actually became more competive than imports at around the 1900s. Nor was the average peasant actually able to realistically afford opium at the time. A large moral panic yes, but USA probably consumes more drugs as a percentage of the population today.

Even with regards to trade, the problem is that Qing had basically no idea or control over any of their finances. Many historians today believe that opium was not really the most signficant factor in heavy trade deficit, but a wider issue of domestic artisans being unable to compete against cheap mass manufactured foreign goods, but we don't know because the Qing didn't even know themselves.

That is to say, it's more accurate to say that Chinese peasants were being dicked over by the Qing (and the Ming beforehand), and foreign imperialism was the symptom, rather than cause of their structural problems. They were authoritarian, corrupt, could not modernize, didn't have control of their finances, all of these factors would have led to their collapse regardless of foreign actions, only that foreign actions revealed the extent of the rot.
by nottorp | 2025-05-01 06:57:37+00:00
Let's play devil's advocate:

> Webrtc. Google’s implementation is super widely used in all sorts of communications software.

Webrtc uses the user's bandwidth without permission or notification and it used to prevent system sleep on macs without any user visible indication.

> V8. Lots of innovation on the interpreter and JIT has made JS pretty fast and is reused in lots of other software like nodejs, electron etc.

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

> Sandboxing. Chrome did a lot of new things here like site isolation and Firefox took a while to catch up.

That's useful but only because the bloatware above. If you didn't give code running in the browser that much power you wouldn't need sandboxing.

> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible.

Could agree. Not sure of Google's real contribution to those.

> SPDY/QUIC. Thanks to Google we have zero RTT TLS handshakes and no head of line blocking HTTP with header compression, etc now and H3 has mandatory encryption.

It's also a binary protocol that cannot be debugged/tested via plain telnet, which places a barrier to entry for development. Perhaps enhances Google's market domination by requiring their libraries and via their control of the standard.
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-01 06:59:10+00:00
"We've gone too far. Give us back html"

Absolutely! Looking at this objectively, most of the web and browser developments over the last two decades have been for the benefit of Big Tech and business—not typical web users.

These developments have been forced on users to allow that mob to sell us more stuff, confine what we do, and spy on us and collect our statistics etc. Moreover, complicated web browsers provide a larger surface/more opportunites for attack.

Everything I want to do on the Web I could do with a browser from the early 2000s.

I mostly run my browsers without JavaScript. That kills most ads and makes pages load so much faster (as pages are much, much smaller). Without JavaScript I often see a single webpage drop from over 7MB down to around 100kB.

7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?

It seems to me if all that Google infrastructure were to be busted up and browsers went their own way then the changes in the browser ecosystem would eventually force lower common denominator standards (more basic APIs, back to HTML, etc.).

With simper web tech being the only guaranteed way of communicating with all Web uses this would force the sleazeballs and purveyors of crap and bad behavior to behave more openly and responsibly. Also, users would be able to mount better defenses against the remaining crap.

In short, the market would be less accessible unless they reverted to lower tech/LCD web standards, and that'd be a damn good thing for the average web user.
by prof-dr-ir | 2025-05-01 06:59:38+00:00
Similarly HYTE, mostly known for their PC cases, gives a remarkably detailed insight, both into their cost structure and how they are impacted by tariffs, in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W_mSOS1Qts&t=1394s

They also address the question of moving their production to the US.
by jajko | 2025-05-01 07:00:04+00:00
One way to travel, between certain destinations. Not so much in other cases.

Case point - Switzerland, the place of trains - coverage, precision, cleanness, small dense place. I live here. If you take a family of 4 they are roughly 4x more expensive than taking a car, even with their half-card (which for a family of four would be maybe 600 annually). Highways are still chock full of cars and its growing every year steadily. Unless you travel between train stations (or sometimes from city A to city B), but rather from/to rural areas (which are anyway connected via Post buses, having trains everywhere would ruin this country) they are much slower (ie 1h vs 3h to get to/from some mountain hiking spot). God forbid you want to travel further, cross sea or even big lake.

Don't look for salvation of personal transport there, that's a very definition of pipe dream currently.
by jonplackett | 2025-05-01 07:00:35+00:00
This is what I got from full-fat 4o. Maybe thinking less helps!

ChatGPT:

Option 1 — Add the cold milk immediately — will result in a lower final temperature after 2 minutes.

Why: • Heat loss depends on the temperature difference between the coffee and the environment (usually room temperature). • If you add the milk early, the overall temperature of the coffee-milk mixture is reduced immediately. This lowers the average temperature over the 2 minutes, so less heat is lost to the air. • If you wait 2 minutes to add the milk, the hotter coffee loses more heat to the environment during those 2 minutes, but when you finally add the milk, it doesn’t cool it as much because the coffee’s already cooler and the temp difference between the milk and the coffee is smaller.

Summary: • Adding milk early = cooler overall drink after 2 minutes. • Adding milk late = higher overall temp after 2 minutes, because more heat escapes during the time the coffee is hotter.

Want me to show a simple simulation or visualisation of this?
by nottorp | 2025-05-01 07:01:43+00:00
But is that a bad thing?

Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.

And if those cash starved tiny companies that develop Safari and Edge lose their Google bribes, I'm sure they'll manage alright.

By the way who funded KHTML? Before everyone except Firefox took that code to make a browser...
by butz | 2025-05-01 07:02:02+00:00
Some interesting news from Dropbox app this morning: "Your desktop environment doesn't support the Dropbox tray icon. Starting May 27, 2025, Dropbox updates will require App Indicator support. To continue using the tray, update your environment."

Only Unity and KDE Plasma desktop environments are supported, others, e.g. GNOME, XFCE, MATE will require installing an extension or plugin.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-05-01 07:03:00+00:00
How to lie with statistics, exhibit A.

In the locales where one has a decent chance of earning more than $100,000 (like the Bay Area) that income is significantly below poverty level, even as a household of one. That is definitely not "upper class" by any definition.

Put differently: this chart shows the average temperature of the patients in a hospital. You can't just show average income across all of the US without considering cost of living and pretend that this result means something.
by valunord | 2025-05-01 07:03:24+00:00
I don't think I'd use the term `great` - as it is a very grave and serious matter and should be reserved for the most serious of situations where they cannot resolve the situation in any other way. Again, I would only reserve it for injurious situations where bodily harm or risk of death is part of the equation. It is a form of communication that is very hard to recover from if it is not done properly and with supernal parental love.

There are many other ways to resolve other issues, but you are definitely correct about the ego monster that arises from being treated as royalty. Children must be balanced, and there are definite ways to do that that do not require spanking.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-01 07:03:24+00:00
A man of culture I see :)

I watch his restorations with onesie, but his narrative (when it's not technical) is tiring because it wants to be fancy but it sounds fake to me.

His technical work looks great to me, I have no idea about conservation outside his videos. I heard that he got a lot of hate from conservators (which I do not understand) and actively fought critical comments on his videos (which I find petty).

It's been two weeks he has not uploaded anything and it is annoying :)

BTW I also watch cow hoof trimming and always wondered how many people have such weird lists of videos (art, hoof trimming, software dev, history, action movies, science, cooking, middle age, tables building, ...) - some I do a lit, some not (I saw a cow live twice)
by xp84 | 2025-05-01 07:04:15+00:00
Indeed. I’d add a fourth category: the medium-to-long tail of ad-infested casino games for children. None of those apps are successful because of the App Store. People don’t generally start at the App Store and go looking for games like this. They are all installed from CPI ads in other ad-infested apps or on websites.

Apple is exactly like a mobster demanding a cut for “protection” — except they’ve designed and controlled the system so well that your business just cannot exist in the first place until your automatic extortion payment system is in place.
by ViscountPenguin | 2025-05-01 07:05:40+00:00
One nice thing is that trains niches can expand slowly overtime, and the marginal expense of running a train is much lower than the fixed cost of laying rail. As long as your government isn't dumb enough to rip up preexisting rail (here in Australia we got hit really badly by this in the 60s), the amortised cost of rail should only decrease.

The positive externalities of rail also make it cost effective to subsidize. Here in Queensland, all public transport now only costs 50c a trip (about 30 eurocents), making travel between our two largest cities (a trip of about 71km) super fast and cheap.
by vichle | 2025-05-01 07:07:21+00:00
You are working under the assumption that everyone who takes property also wants to do physical harm. It's very sad. Most people who take property are otherwise peaceful individuals and more importantly, they are rational just like you and me. They do not want to risk a bigger penalty by using force. Your mindset is one that escalates any given situation. With your mindset you are putting yourself in much more risk than necessary.

I'm going to assume that you are American, and that many Americans agree with you. I can only say sorry. You can keep turning a blind eye to the stats, but it will not change the facts. You will need to change this way of thinking to save your country.
by kubb | 2025-05-01 07:07:25+00:00
When you feel real love for your favorite celebrity convict, whose incompetence is beyond denying, you'll put your mind to work to search for any device that will enable you to excuse anything he does and who he nominates.

People will talk about "politicians being incompetent", or act like actually anyone who has ever been in the office was like this. It's a pretty close and comforting way to deal with the reality of supporting a fraud without having to admit that you were duped.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-01 07:07:47+00:00
That’s definitely a consideration, but alongside the rise of Blink within the web dev sphere there’s also been a growing culture of sitting on the bleeding edge of new features regardless of how necessary doing so is, which influences both hobby and production projects alike.

On other platforms it’s still much more the norm to stick to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt new APIs when there’s high adoption and adequate justification for doing so.
by senko | 2025-05-01 07:08:42+00:00
Money quote:

> That’s when I decided to dive deeper into analyzing what other problems Microsoft Teams users were facing and what kind of service I could offer them. I was confident I’d find a niche because the traffic and activity on the marketplace were high — a ready-made customer base was just in front of me. I just needed to find a product idea that would solve a real problem.

> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot. It was slow and inconvenient.

OP has done actual research and found a real problem to solve. Amy Hoy has been popularizing this exact approach under "Sales Safari", but it boils down to "find your user's watering holes and listen to what they complain about to each other."
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-05-01 07:11:34+00:00
Keep in mind many painters of the day would intentionally distort the perspective to compensate for the viewing angle.

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

Beauty is complicated, and imperfection itself can form a timeless lesson:

https://sambourque.com/blog/kintsugi-beauty-in-imperfection

In many ways, some suggest it is an allegory for how people grow throughout their life... and for others it is just broken pottery.

Have a wonderful day, =3
by mrweasel | 2025-05-01 07:11:42+00:00
I use and love Firefox, but Mozilla screwed up badly in their funding model and now it's to late to fix it.

Mozilla should have take a large chunk of their yearly income and put it in an endowment, as Wikipedia does. Yes, yes I know Wikipedia bad, rich bastards begging for money, but they have a point. You can't expect money donations and income levels to remain stable forever, you need to plan for the future. Mozilla could easily have had a billion dollars in the bank and if invested semi-wisely that could have generated a steady continual income for decades to come.

Mozilla apparently made no good long term plan for how they'd deal with search engines cutting their funding. They tried becoming a services company, but they are not a company (I mean they are on paper, but they are an open source project more than anything).

You're right money was plentiful and without people to sensibly guide them they lost focus.
by apelapan | 2025-05-01 07:12:00+00:00
There is something called "tillsynsplikt" in Swedish law. Hard to translate, but perhaps "obligation of exercising care/authority".

This normally applies mostly to the parents of a child, but is taken over by the school during school time. The obligation comes with fuzzy yet extensive rights to enforce order, in whatever way and towards whatever goal can be argued to be in the big-picture-best-interest of the child or group of children.

Of course there are various laws specifically granting rights to children. To decide if a particular act is lawful or not, you (or a court!) needs to weigh all the relevant laws against each other.