MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b800h | 2025-05-01 09:22:13+00:00
Came here to say the same thing - this is uncanny.

In some of his novels - most notably A Fire Upon the Deep (from 1992), he imagines the galaxy as divided into concentric zones, each with different physical laws and limits on intelligence and technology. These are referred to as "Zones of Thought," each affecting the potential for intelligence and technological development.

It's not a perfect match, as I think the new theory refers to relative time based on the density of matter at a given location.

Part of me wonders if this analogous to the "watched pot never boils" issue. Wander into the wilderness to do magic...
by concinds | 2025-05-01 09:22:26+00:00
> 7MB-plus for a webpage is fucking outrageous, why the hell do we users put up with this shit?

That's mostly due to insane web "frameworks" like React, and developers who (systematically) overuse and misuse them, and then test their websites on WiFi/5G and iPhones with superfast chips so they don't notice (their users do). The solution is to increase the capabilities of "native" Javascript and CSS, and put in massive effort into interoperability so web devs stop feeling the need for frameworks as "compatibility shims" (looking at you, IE and Safari). Those solutions are exactly what browser makers (sans Apple) have been focusing on lately.

The solution you recommend would have the exact opposite effect of what you intend.
by derf_ | 2025-05-01 09:22:43+00:00
> > 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.

They were not the only contributor (I was the technical lead for Mozilla's efforts in this space), but they were by far the largest contributor, in both dollars and engineering hours.
by teagoat | 2025-05-01 09:22:47+00:00
Are you suggesting moving operations to the US with this comment? It's the US adding all the uncertainty and instability to this environment. Having your operation based in the US makes this worse. You still have tariffs being applied to most of the components you need to assemble your product. You're now subject to more laws and rules changing overnight without the ability to plan ahead for them. If you're a company selling this product worldwide, you now have 100% of your operations subject to uncertainty vs. say 30% that was destined for the US market to begin with.
by kmacdough | 2025-05-01 09:23:51+00:00
I would be extremely hesitant to assume a direct relationship between pricing and cost. A behemoth like Google is very willing to take significant losses for years to grow market share. Back in 2014-2015 Uber often charged less than the Boston subway, but it always cost them MUCH more under the hood. AFAIK they're still not profitable.

Chinese companies will be similarly eager for market share, but not everyone has the access to the same raw capital.
by HenryLockwood | 2025-05-01 09:24:48+00:00
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by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:24:56+00:00
Google has actively developed an entire UI framework for mobile applications that compiles directly into HTML+WASM. They want the browser to be competent, because a competent browser can attract money iOS users would otherwise spend on App Store fees.

I don't see how it would be "relatively straightforward" to make web browsers competitive if Chrome barely manages to keep up. There's a _lot_ of money going into making Chrome an alternative to the Android/iOS/macOS/Windows SDK, to the point where modern GUI applications have thrown out native controls and just render everything to a browser window instead.
by yallpendantools | 2025-05-01 09:27:47+00:00
I still have an old laptop with a spinning disk, going almost 9 years now.

It helped me ditch Windows completely because the start-up experience for Windows 11 was just atrocious even with the smart/cached shutdown thing they're doing (I forgot the official name for it). I'm glad to see even some (un)official confirmation from this article that hogging resources at start-up is pretty much best practice in Windows land.

In Linux land today, FF and Chrome (but Chrome especially) take ages to start-up at first but system boot is as smooth as can be expected.

I thought I've made myself immune to UI bloat because, like all true programmers, I do everything on the terminal (short of browsing the web, like TRUE programmers). Until I noticed that whenever I invoke my terminal, it takes ages for the prompt to even appear, not to mention accept keyboard input.

After much frustration, I figured out that the culprit is---drumroll---NodeJS. Don't quote me on this but I think Node brought Windows best practices into the Linux terminal.

Fortunately, Linux being Linux, I managed to patch my system such that Node doesn't actually do anything unless I invoke it myself. The downside is that I have an odd script every now and then that relies on Node and these scripts would fail if I run them without having ran `node` beforehand.
by nbeversluis | 2025-05-01 09:27:48+00:00
Urtext /ˈʊrtekst/ is an open-source library for plaintext writing, research, documentation, knowledge bases, journaling, Zettelkasten, project/personal organization, note taking, a lightweight database substitute, or any other writing or information management that can be done in text format. With some Python knowledge you can practically run your entire life from Urtext.
by badestrand | 2025-05-01 09:27:52+00:00
> Secondly the money isn't lost, it goes to the state. Like a tax, but it is called differently. With this 255k more the state can now subsidise the local floodlight industry.

Alternatively the taxes can be lowered so that overall the American consumers don't lose buying power (imports get more expensive but people also have more money to spend).
by andruby | 2025-05-01 09:28:43+00:00
That could already be the case. The initial release is from 1990, so the codebase is at least 35 years old.

I don't have a good guess for the average age of software developers at Microsoft, but claude.ai guesses the average "around 33-38 years" and the median "around 35-36 years old".
by dgfl | 2025-05-01 09:29:41+00:00
Are you proposing that atoms are organisms and/or that astronomical objects may be organisms? I feel like you are just inflating the meaning of “life” without justifying why.

Defining it properly is a very interesting problem, but I think this is an extremely active field of study. Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought.
by pimterry | 2025-05-01 09:29:54+00:00
> If done through third parties directly the scammers will not make unsubscribing easy and it will not be as easy to find out where you are subscribing.

This is fairly quickly resolved though - if anything close to 1% of customers complain to their banks that they don't want this payment and can't cancel it, triggering a chargeback, the scammers end up entirely blocked from the payment networks entirely in pretty short order. If you end up banned from Visa & Mastercard your whole operation is permanently kaput.

Also, this might be a non-US thing, but over here most modern banks (e.g. Revolut) will let you view & block recurring payment authorizations directly from your banking app anyway.
by rahen | 2025-05-01 09:30:21+00:00
Headlines like this make me glad that org-mode has almost completely replaced Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for me (not to mention calendar notifications and Python notebooks). The only exception is spreadsheets with charts, which still require LibreOffice.

Granted, I don’t work in a corporate environment, so I’m free to choose my own tools. Living in Emacs is a blessing in today’s world of bloat, lack of control, short-lived cycles, and SaaS everything.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:30:22+00:00
Horse charges $60 a year and it's still nothing more than a skin over Chromium. I saw the recent surge in paid-for browsers, but none of them seem to actually do any engine work themselves, they all grab Chromium or WebKit and throw a layer of UI on top.

Of course, people are paying for browsers, even if they don't know they are. WebKit and Edge are maintained by companies in a way similar to how Chrome is maintained by Google. It's just the alternatives to those two that are now in danger, and all of their derivatives (Electron, Tauri, and anything built on top of that).
by watwut | 2025-05-01 09:30:27+00:00
It is neither better nor more free. The moderation moved from slightly right wing biased to strongly right wing biased.

And more importantly, independently of politics, site algorithm just got worst after Musk took over - promoting and pushing unrelated and uninteresting content. By that I mean you getting notices about a high school hockey club drama in any another country uninteresting.
by Aerroon | 2025-05-01 09:31:25+00:00
Doesn't Steam do the same thing? And even registering a company in (some) EU countries has effectively the same address requirement where a PO box is not allowed.

Also, when I said "changes like this" I mean changes in general where there seems to be no analysis on the knock-on effects of a policy change causes.

Another example from the EU was their VAT change they did some years ago. On the surface it was a decent change, because it made multinationals pay VAT in the countries of the buyers, but it had the downside that it drowned small and micro businesses in so much paperwork that a lot of them shut down or stopped serving customers in other EU countries.

Why? Because they forgot to add a minimum threshold for when these VAT rules apply. Something that most EU countries have. Imagine you start selling 3D models, your revenue is €500 in a year and for this money you're expected to file with 27 different tax authorities who all deal mainly in a different language. Is the €10 sale worth dealing with the Latvian tax authority?

It took the EU about 5-6 years to finally fix this by introducing a €10,000 exemption.
by pyrale | 2025-05-01 09:32:01+00:00
Of course it what you describe is a lasting situation, no one outside of the US would buy from an industry that is only propped up by subsidies, whose product is available for cheaper elsewhere, and likely subject to counter-tariffs. From there, the USD-labelled trade outside of the US would decrease, which makes it a less interesting proposition for foreign companies to hold USD, and, by extension, T-bonds.

US companies that actually made viable products for the international market would now have to compete with artificially subsidized companies on their costs, risk getting caught in tariffs, and, unless they build a critical product, probably see their international sales decline.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-01 09:33:19+00:00
There are forks but they're very limited in how far they can deviate from what Google wants. The Manifest v3 discussions show this. Extension APIs aren't a big part of browsers compared to all the other things they do, and there was clearly demand to keep Manifest v2 alive, so you'd expect at least one or two forkers to differentiate by doing that.

In practice the rebasing costs are so high that everyone shrugged and said they had no choice but to go along with it.

Chromium is open source, but not designed for anyone except Google to develop it. Nothing malicious about it, it's just that building a healthy contributor community is a different thing to uploading some source code. If you've ever worked with the Chromium codebase you'll find you have to reverse engineer it to work things out. The codebase is deliberately under-architected (a legacy of the scars of working on Gecko), so many things you'd expect to be well defined re-usable modules that could be worked on independently of Google are actually leaky hacks whose API changes radically depending on what platform you're compiling for, what day of the week it is, etc. Even very basic things like opening a window isn't properly abstracted in a cross platform manner, last time I looked, and at any moment Google might land a giant rewrite they were working on in private for months, obliterating all your work at a stroke.

There are reasons for all of this... Chrome is a native app that tries to exploit the native OS as much as possible, and they don't want to be tied down by lowest-common-denominator internal abstractions or API commitments. But if you view Chrome as an OS then the API churn makes Linux look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-01 09:34:23+00:00
Konqueror still works, as does IE11. You don't need modern browsers. Most people just want them.

> There are so many exploited zero-days in modern browsers that no modern browser is safe.

Interesting suggestion. Do you know how many of those zero-days are related to modern features? Most of them seem to be coming from "browsers are still made in C(++)" and "Javascript/CSS performance optimisalisations gone wrong" that has been a risk for decades now. There was that time Apple accidentally opened up part of local browser storage from any website to any other website, but the same bug might as well happen with something as basic as cookies; we were just lucky that the bug was in that weird web SQL thing from a decade and a half ago that nobody uses.
by jasode | 2025-05-01 09:34:33+00:00
>Office 2003 still works absolutely fine

It works fine if the user is ok with the features from 2003. E.g. Excel 2003 is limited to smaller spreadsheets of 65536 rows by 256 columns but Excel 2007+ can handle larger worksheets of 1048576 rows by 16384 cols.

I also recently used Excel's new LAMBDA() function which was introduced 2020. In earlier versions, it required writing a VBA UDF to accomplish the same task of assigning a temp variable with a ephemeral value to calculate on intermediate values. VBA is a workaround but LAMBDA() is nicer to use because Excel will throw up scary security warnings whenever the xls file containing VBA macros is opened.

I might be able to get by with Word 2003 more than Excel 2003.
by dmasiii | 2025-05-01 09:34:34+00:00
I fully agree with you, you can absolutely do much more with a 9-5, but as you said it is the message of "is not so difficult" that I wanted to convey. And then he earn that money, for me who is still a student, he would give a big advantage and maybe he would convince me once I finished my studies to take the entrepreneurial way in this area
by lucianbr | 2025-05-01 09:34:51+00:00
So moving one factory helps reduce the impact of tariffs on the final product from 145% to 135%, and to reduce it to zero you would have to move hundreds of factories, with tiny gains at each step.

I think the original argument makes a lot of sense, and yours does not. "Just move two hundred factories on a different continent" might as well be "just invent a time machine".
by Havoc | 2025-05-01 09:35:35+00:00
Office in general is becoming annoying. Like their attempts to force users to use onedrive and sharepoint by hiding existing features and changing the UI around it regularly to maximise confusion. It’s the same chaos as their control panel. And the constant attempt to ram bing down your throat.

Switched my desktop to Linux last month cause I’m just fed up with Microsoft’s user hostile bullshit

Alas at work I can’t do that
Show HN: The Gnuk Smartcard Based on the STM32F1x and Geehy APM32
by dmesg | 2025-05-01 09:36:00+00:00
Sign, authenticate and encrypt with a USB dongle at the cost of a soda. The goal here was to easily program around ~20 Gnuk devices at the budget of a single dongle of the commercial solution. Contains every step and fixes to get it running on current and next Ubuntu and Debian versions.
by palata | 2025-05-01 09:36:29+00:00
On the other hand, the very reason I use Linux is that I get more freedom, including the freedom to choose my window manager.

I don't care so much about Linux Desktop becoming mainstream. Probably it would make it look more like those OSes I like less. I don't really get those comments I regularly see where people go "if you don't make it look like Windows, people won't migrate to your distro". If I wanted Windows, I would use Windows. And I don't want people who want Windows to come to my distro.
by pimterry | 2025-05-01 09:36:49+00:00
Building a business that earns $250k/year isn't just a fixed income though - you get the money, but _you also now own a business_.

In effect you've earned a $250k income _and_ ~$1 million dollar asset you can sell later (one which will also likely keep growing in value well above most other assets return rates).

The reality is a bit more complicated, but there is definitely significant value in 100% equity in a successful business that will often be larger than your paycheck.

And that's before you get into the flexibility and other upsides of being your own boss, the long-term CV & reputation benefits of this for whatever else you want to do next, etc etc.
by mort96 | 2025-05-01 09:37:47+00:00
I have not read the RED or the CRA, nor discussed what they specifically say with a lawyer who has read them. However, I have gone through a recent product R&D process in Europe where the product has WiFi and LTE connectivity, so it falls under the RED (even though WiFi and 4G are handled by off-the-shelf modules). I have read parts of the EN-18031 standards (mostly using their decision trees and descriptions of decision nodes as reference), I've been on a seminar with a Notified Body about what the practical implications of the RED are, I've filled out a huge document going through all the decision trees in 18031 and giving justifications for the specific path through the decision tree applies to our product. I've also discussed the implications of the RED and 18031 with consultants.

I don't doubt you with regard to what the RED and the CRA actually says. However I'm afraid that my understanding of it better reflects the practical real-world implications of companies who just need to go through the certification process.

18031 requires an update mechanism for most products, yes, however it some very stringent requirements for it to be considered a Secure Update Mechanism. I sadly don't have the 18031 standard anymore so I can't look up the specific decision nodes, but I know for sure that allowing anyone with physical access to just flash the product with new unsigned firmware would not count as a Secure Update Mechanism (I think unless you can justify that the operational environment of the product ensures that no unauthorized person has physical access to the device, or something like that).

EDIT: And I wanted to add, in one common use case for microcontrollers, namely as one part of a larger product with some SoC running Linux being the main application processor and with MCUs handling specific tasks, you can easily get a PASS in all the EN-18031 decision trees without an upgrade mechanism for the MCUs themselves. In such products, I can imagine a company deciding that it's easier to just permanently lock down the MCU with a write protect than to justify leaving it writeable.
by at_a_remove | 2025-05-01 09:37:52+00:00
Or Poul Anderson's Brainwave (1953), in which the Earth finally leaves a part of the galaxy which inadvertently made thinking hard. And everything with two neurons to rub together gets smarter, not just humans. Essentially, we evolved in what Vinge would later call "The Unthinking Depths" (if memory serves) to deal with the strain.
by voxgen | 2025-05-01 09:38:16+00:00
The last major innovation as a product was PWA support starting in 2016.

Browsers used to try new ideas like RSS, widgets, shared and social browser sessions. Interfaces to facilitate low-friction integration with the rest of your life, and to multiplex data sources so that it's not a hassle to have many providers for [news, entertainment, social] experiences.

Likely no coincidence that this innovation languished once monopolies started pumping money into the ecosystem.
by a2128 | 2025-05-01 09:38:47+00:00
For the 1 in 10,000 case of someone actually legitimately suing someone, publicly showing this info to everyone will also create a 100% chance of being sent spam or phishing emails with your real name and country, 1 in 2 chance of some troll signing you up for something nasty, 1 in 50 chance of someone ordering pizza to your house that you have to pay for, 1 in 500 chance of an angry user demanding you add some feature or delete the app else he'll do something bad with your information, 1 in 1000 chance of being SWATted, etc...

If your app is something that's currently politically controversial (e.g. it's an app for trans people), multiply these probabilities by 10.
by bflesch | 2025-05-01 09:39:23+00:00
Silicon valley is able to shoehorn their Macbooks into "compliance" but somehow it'd be a problem to do the same with linux desktops?

> And if by magic that function would appear tomorrow, it would disappear again the day after tomorrow.

That's incorrect.

> ease of use and tight integration blows everything else out of the water.

Agree to disagree.
by rolandog | 2025-05-01 09:39:28+00:00
I think we're at an awkward place where governments worldwide have been slow to understand the importance of the global infrastructure that has sprouted, largely due to open source software...

Given that browsers are essential to access information, I think they shouldn't be developed behind a business model, but rather as part of a global digital infrastructure fund.

There should be some independence guarantees in order to make that organization not have to bow to pressure from governments to sacrifice privacy due to funding threats.
by alganet | 2025-05-01 09:39:39+00:00
I have come to a conclusion about this "tinfoil" thing.

Expectation: intelligence services, spies, secrets

Reality: bunch of ponzi schemers, arrogant sub revolutionaries, greedy people, envious people. All together in a pseudo network of trust, always at each other's throats. Unrepentable and thus, impossible to forgive. Sad but not much.
Show HN: No as a Service Rust
by ZAZPRO | 2025-05-01 09:40:02+00:00
Seemed like a fun evening project to fork and re-implement :) Added more reasons (original project had 25 reasons duplicated 1k times), self-hosted instance and stupid TCP implementation at the separate branch.

Original discussion of the original project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43845016
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-05-01 09:40:13+00:00
New research reveals how phase transitions in LLMs (like GPT-4’s sudden reasoning leaps) mirror natural emergent systems. Key points:

Unsupervised learning as "algorithmic alchemy" (clustering → meta-learning)

MIT’s compact neural networks modeling chaotic systems 40% more efficiently

The 2024 EU Ethics Report: Can we control AI’s black-box emergence? Case studies: AlphaFold’s protein predictions, autonomous drone failures, and AI’s carbon footprint (1.2M kWh for GPT-5 training). Deep dive + technical analysis | #MachineLearning #AIethics
by eitland | 2025-05-01 09:40:18+00:00
An interesting approach, as it doesn’t, like many of the other proposed solutions, make us blindly rely on AI companies to somehow devise a watermarking system that actually works—i.e. one that doesn’t end up making catastrophic, career-ending errors for students.

Instead it use actual work like tasks that just happens to be hard for GPTs to solve.