MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sylware | 2025-06-25 10:57:50+00:00
Yep, in-house PDF generators should be some sort of good middle ground, but I dunno if this 'weasyprint' is open source, is _lean_ open source? (no c++, java, etc).

When dealing with an ultra-complex file format which cannot be dodged, usually a good way to deal with it is to only use a very simple but coherent subset and enforce this usage with validation tools.

For instance, the web, noscript/basic (x)html (or you are jailed in the 2.5 web engines of the whatng cartel).

With PDF, I dunno much of the format (since I did not manage to download easily the specs), but when I have to print some text, I have a very small PDF generator for that (written ~25 years ago, so no utf-8 for me).

But what's important: such attempt must be sided with re-assessing the pertinence of the usage of the information systems, and yes, it will annoying and much less comfy and that MUST be acknowledged before even trying.

And big tech is not the only one trying hard to do vendor and developer lock-in.
by clejack | 2025-06-25 10:58:23+00:00
Not only does a lot of news have no real value a lot of news does not generate value of any kind (real or otherwise) until someone reads it.

For example, an opinion piece is meaningless unless someone reads it, so writers find themselves in the same situation as every other artist, even if their writing isn't artistic in nature.

Attention is a finite resource. This might be unpleasant to hear, but just because you're working on something, doesn't mean it has intrinsic monetary value.
by uzername | 2025-06-25 10:58:29+00:00
I've been paying for NYT for five years. I remember the NYT paywall before that. I've been interested in local news so after my 5th hit in recent memory hitting my local newspaper's paywall, I finally bought a year subscription.

On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.
by nasmorn | 2025-06-25 10:58:52+00:00
A 10kw heating element costs 250 euros, lets double that to make it able to switch off by the smart meter. Now if you used it 1% of the year and saved 5ct per kWh you would gain 43 eur a year. Not a super convincing ROI but compared to your 10kw peak solar array a very small investment. If you used it just 2% of the year it would already be pretty good and the switch might become very cheap in the future if most houses use load steering for all kinds of things
by gus_massa | 2025-06-25 10:59:19+00:00
> Anything specific details you are wondering about?

Nothing in particular, but if in few months you have some time, it may be interesting to read a blog post with more details. There are many details that no one realize until they try to write the code and that is usually a good starting point for a good blog post.

(As an example, I thought about the "same year" rule. But you probably have a rule to try to balance military and sport events, and perhaps more...)
by adornKey | 2025-06-25 10:59:40+00:00
The worst is probably Marocco DST

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

Calculating Ramadan is something software packages most likely won't do. To get the visibility of the moon correct, I think you have to know the exact location - and maybe check, if there is a mountain obstructing the view.
by squishington | 2025-06-25 10:59:42+00:00
People with addictions don't act sensibly because they have unresolved trauma. To dismiss this as simply being unsensible is extremely ignorant, and pretty typical of a lot the conversation I see on HN. Most of us on here have the privilege of being functional enough to make money in tech, because we don't have that level of untreated trauma. Have some humanity.
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-06-25 11:00:56+00:00
So from what I understand from this theory, a smartphone carries more "temporal weight" than a simple molecule based on its assembly history.

Feels complementary to quantum emergence rather than contradictory. Maybe quantum correlations create the substrate for temporal experience, while assembly complexity determines how much temporal depth objects carry within that framework.

Both treat time as emergent from physical processes rather than fundamental, just at different scales.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-25 11:02:45+00:00
Oh that would be pretty clear to me:

Corporate tax paid by Berkshire Hathaway / Sum of Corp Tax paid by all US corps = 5/100 = 1:20

It's clear what it means, how they measure it would be another story, but I'm sure there is public budget information that clearly indicates what the 2024 taxation for that type of tax was.
by pchangr | 2025-06-25 11:03:00+00:00
I can tell you, I have personally worked with a global corporation and we estimated that for one of their websites, supporting the 3% that we exclude by using “modern standards” would be more costly than the amount of revenue they get from them. So in that case, it was a rational decision. And up to the 10% cut, management just didn’t want to do the extra investment. So if something falls below that 10% threshold, they just don’t care to get it fixed.
by CineSnaccs | 2025-06-25 11:03:09+00:00
I don't know how many people don't know this, but now you actually can't release app on Windows without it showing your warning while installing unless you sign it with EV certificates, which cost upwards of 500$ for a year.

As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.
by dzonga | 2025-06-25 11:03:29+00:00
paying for the physical paper made sense specially for local papers - since relevant local ads/ opportunities were in those papers.

now the major papers just run propaganda under the veneer of news - looking at you NYT.

now why would you pay for biased coverage for a piece of news & not even see the relevant business opportunities / ads ?

internet ads are personalized but don't make you 'money' ie show you opportunities such as RFQs/tenders/jobs requested by local businesses as it was back in the paper days.
by krisoft | 2025-06-25 11:03:31+00:00
> Here is an idea to make the automotive industry slightly better, just an incremental improvement. DBC files are used to specify CAN interfaces, they allow big endian and little endian messages within THE SAME MESSAGE, which is madness. [...] Do that an you have actually achieved something.

What exactly? Will your proposed change make the cars more reliable? Cheaper to produce? What is the benefit?
by IlikeKitties | 2025-06-25 11:04:18+00:00
This question always comes up:

The Reason GrapheneOS isn't made for Fairphones Officially is that Fairphones lack a lot of base requirements for official support:

https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

There's nothing preventing anyone from making a 3rd Party port of GrapheneOS to Fairphones, it just seems no one does.
by prasoon2211 | 2025-06-25 11:04:18+00:00
This makes sense. And this is only accelerating - I talk to businesses in Germany and there's a genuine, non-insignificant number of people who want their data to be /physically/ in Europe.

Take this to its logical conclusion and basically, every company will need to segregate their data in regions. Most cloud platforms aren't really designed this way but it's coming.

There was a data locality law that India passed and Stripe had to do this massive migration project to segregate this data. I shudder to imagine what a more complex system would look like under such data locality laws.
by jcelerier | 2025-06-25 11:04:33+00:00
> In my experience users who are used to macOS don't mind slightly blurred text.

It always makes me laugh when apple users say "oh it's become of the great text rendering!"

The last time text rendering was any good on MacOS was on MacOS 9, since then it's been a blurry mess.

That said, googling for "MacOS blurry text" yields pages and pages and pages of people complaining so I am not sure it is that subjective, simply that some people don't even know how good-looking text can look even on a large 1080p monitor
by kergonath | 2025-06-25 11:04:37+00:00
I think you are not familiar with how governments work. They are not going to rely on a random git repo, they are going to have contractors to ensure a basic level of support and bug fixing. And some contractors to ensure development and availability of tooling. And deployment and integration. They are also going to test, audit and validate updates, not just pull from remote.

Also, in some cases there are research agencies doing some work as well (sometimes they have been doing it for a long time on not-so-sexy but vital projects like Inria and the open source tax code in France).
by tialaramex | 2025-06-25 11:04:49+00:00
They need to know the information which functions as key. Because many people don't trust government secrets, the information used for this purpose on a passport is actually just facts about you which were already printed in your passport, plus the passport number. The machine summarises these in a "Machine readable zone" but they're nothing you didn't know.

For a random traveller you can probably guess roughly how old they are, which is a few bits for the date-of-birth, and maybe you could strike up conversation and discover their name (or maybe it's printed on baggage, called out by fellow travellers etc.) but yeah it'll be very hard

For a very well known person you can likely discover everything except the passport number and you might get a decent guess at that from knowing roughly when it would be issued.
by ben_w | 2025-06-25 11:05:31+00:00
Sure, except that SEO-optimised AI listicles are currently on top of the search results for a non-trivial fraction of my searches, and the cost of generating an AI article to match any novel search term is much less than even 1¢, which means any given person will either learn to not bother reading the news at all, or find the AI generated *literally fake news made up on the spot for you when you look at it* is compelling and keep giving their money to it while mistaking it for a real source of truth.

This is already happening, so I'm not saying this hypothetical is worse than the status quo, but I'm also saying it doesn't help with the status quo.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-06-25 11:05:43+00:00
> Unfortunately there seems to be bad blood between the two :(

There's is no bad blood here, it's merely that fairphone doesn't meet the required standards for them to be a target the graphene team is interested in supporting offically. There's nothing preventing anyone from porting it themselves and nothing preventing fairphone from porting an inferior version of grapheneos to their phoens.
by dmurray | 2025-06-25 11:05:50+00:00
Not at Bloomberg's end of the market.

I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
by tonur249 | 2025-06-25 11:06:35+00:00
The tech specs for the Fairphone 6 say the following:

USB-C 2.0 (OTG capable) can be used to connect USB Sticks/SD-Cards/Audio Amplifier/Network-adapters directly

I was really looking forward to use this with a pair of display glasses, like the XREAL One Pro, but this seems like the Fairphone 6 might not support display output? That's sad. Especially since the Fairphone 5 had this in their tech specs:

USB-C 3.0 (OTG capable) can be used to connect USB Sticks/SD-Cards/display (also Android™ desktop mode)/Camera/Audio Amplifier/Network-adapters directly

But maybe it was not used enough?
by sudhirb | 2025-06-25 11:06:43+00:00
A more naive but less complex way to avoid overflows would be to use the original factorial expression but work with logs - in a rough experiment with python for k=10^8 and N=10^17 (numbers plucked out of thin air), the calculation takes ~20s on an M1 MacBook Pro.

This didn't feel too egregious until I looked at the space of inputs and outputs for SHA-256, which is 2^256 out and an absolutely stonking 2^(2^64) - 1 possible inputs.

It feels obvious but I'm still surprised by the efficiency of approximations.
by dqv | 2025-06-25 11:07:41+00:00
> Well, how do we know what timezone is "2026-06-19 07:00" in, to be able to know that the time rules for that timezone have changed, if we do not store the timezone?

The website uses their system timezone America/Los_Angeles. It would be better to store that as well, but it's probably not much of an issue if the website is dedicated to meetings in that specific locale.

> Additionally, how do we really "detect that the time rules for that timezone have changed"? We can stay informed, sure, but is there a way to automate this?

My first attempt would be to diff the data between versions. If a diff of 2025b against 2025a has added/removed lines which include America/Los_Angeles, you recompute the timestamps. This, of course, requires that the library support multiple timezone database versions at once.
by thibaultamartin | 2025-06-25 11:07:55+00:00
Author here, that's a great question. I only host a handful of services on the VPS, including Nextcloud. I was mostly interested in storage, not so much in compute power.

Netcup offered VPS with 1 TB of storage for €30 / month back when I subscribed. The server has always been oversized for my needs, but that was the most financially interesting back then.

I recently switched to another ISP at home that gives me a fixed IP. I decided to move my services at home to shave off the VPS costs. Since I already had a Raspberry Pi 4, I only had to buy a SSD and an enclosure.
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-06-25 11:09:25+00:00
Thank you! Although don’t go back too far, season one is admittedly a bit of a mess, conceptually ok in places but narratively scattered, but like a corporate handbook that's been photocopied too many times. Season two focuses on space (the big), quantum (the small), and space history (the old) and of course the corporate comedy.
by kmac_ | 2025-06-25 11:09:42+00:00
Sure, two dozens, sorted by most popular. Half of them will be gone:

MG, BYD, ORA, Haval, Omoda, Lynk & Co, NIO, Xpeng, Zeekr, Maxus, Leapmotor, Hongqi, Aiways, Chery, Jaecoo, BAIC, Forthing, DFSK, Seres, Voyah, SWM, JAC, Bestune, Skywell
by ksec | 2025-06-25 11:10:42+00:00
It is just a spec on something widely implemented already.

Assuming Next gen PNG will still require new decoder. They could just call it PNG2.

JPEG-XL already provides everything most people asked for a lossless codec. If there are any problems it is its encoding and decoding speed and resources.

Current champion of Lossless image codec is HALIC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38990568
by twiss | 2025-06-25 11:11:27+00:00
I don't think it's easy to not carry a phone, nowadays. Let's say I'm meeting up with someone: I'll need to use navigation, potentially message them if I'm running late, and so on.

Then once I'm there, what do I do with the phone? Ask to put it in a separate room and hope that the microphone isn't powerful enough to pick up our conversation?

I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?

For me, as a user, the easiest solution would be to have a killswitch. I understand that building it would be more work, of course :)
by roflcopter69 | 2025-06-25 11:11:43+00:00
Is it just me or does the discourse about a product like the Fairphone often feel kind of "culture war"-y? So many times I read comments where people are very upset and offended how a Fairphone costs way too much compared to other smartphones or how it supposedly is completely unusable because one feature does not work the way they expect. It's just strange. If you don't like it, don't buy it, no need to engage. But so many people seem to feel obliged to present their strong dislike for the Fairphone as if it's sole existence attacks them personally.
by prasoon2211 | 2025-06-25 11:11:44+00:00
Exactly this. In Germany, the median software developer is treated (and paid) pretty much the same as a blue collar worker, both by their company and by society at large.

From calling it "IT" to paying peanuts, no wonder no one smart and ambitious wants to get into CS here. All the smart kids seems to want to go into consulting and finance. So, of course Germany doesn't see the kind of outsized success in the Tech industry like the US or even the UK.

Volkswagen's (and in general other automaker's) software sucking is simply a fact downstream of that.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-06-25 11:12:34+00:00
I'm actually wondering why it's "only" buried under ~100m (which is already on the higher end of the depth estimates).

Why not pick a mountain where you install the bunker 300m under the peak ?

The way I understand it, is that they drill horizontally, so it doesn't really matter how high the mountain is, but it does matter how high it is for protection obviously.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-25 11:12:38+00:00
The US' military supremacy "illusion" comes from an era when the US had no peer competitors of a similar size -- waging wars in this era is really cheap.

It's highly debatable whether the US can contain china at its present size, let alone in a few years. China is vastly large than the soviet union, in comparison to the US, at the height of the cold war -- and merely to contain a smaller adversary, the US had to significantly outspend it.

The US can dominate its region relatively cheaply (ie., the western hemisphere); but if it wants to retain the ability to project power across the world, and be the primary power in theatres of interest (middle east and china esp.) then it's woefully underspending.

The US is armed to take on a world without peer competitors. If it had to fight a proxy war with china, dominate the middle east, and supply a land war in ukraine -- it would loose all three.

The asymmetry of power needed for the US to dominate the world is enourmous -- this was only cheap when the single adversary was a much smaller russia.

The US does not have the manufacturing capacity to replace 50% of its bunker-buster arms "suddenly". It simply cannot do it. So if a war breaks out tomorrow, where it needs these arms, they're gone.

The west is simply not equipped to wars with peer competitors. It's equipped for the taliban, not nations with fleets of air craft carriers.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-06-25 11:12:55+00:00
> they'd effortlessly at least double their market potential.

I doubt they'd even get the RND cost for that change back, this is a feature no one cares about except a very very small minority within a small minority. I'm a hardcare FOSS only user and only use grapheneos/fedora linux on my devices for privacy and security reasons and even I am not remotely concerned about hardware switches when i can just powerdown the wifi/Gps/wwan connection.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-06-25 11:12:56+00:00
The technical descriptions are clearly lacking, up to the point where this product page almost makes me angry... the dimensions seem to be "156.5mm x 73.3mm" with "9,6 mm" thickness, but just right below in the isometric view it says 162mm x 75.5mm x 10.5mmm. I would be really interested in this product as replacement for the iPhone SE, but how can they screw up something so simple?
by masfoobar | 2025-06-25 11:13:20+00:00
About a month ago I heard Microsoft had their own Linux distribution to help Microsoft Windows users feel more at home. From memory, it was a rather simple GNOME setup. Nothing special.

I am surprised Micrsooft didnt use the opportunity to create a micrsoft specific Linux distro that replaces bash with powershell, or Edit with vim, nano and other choices as well as .NET and Visual Studio Code by developer installs.

Micrsoft could have used this as their default WSL install.

It may not have won the war against typical distro like Ubuntu or Debian but it could have gained a percentage and be a common choice for Windows users - and there are a lot of Windows users!

Microsoft cannot dominate the Linux kernel but it can gain control in userland. Imagine if they gained traction with their applications being installed by default in popular distributions.

This Microsoft Edit is available for Linux, like Powershell is and others. If they had played their cards right -- perhaps -- 10 years ago, their distribution could have been in the top 5 today, all because many windows users use it as their WSL.

Giant companies (like M$) can inject their fingerprints into my personal space. Now, we just need Micrsooft Edit to have Co-Pilot on by default...
by mhitza | 2025-06-25 11:16:00+00:00
> But maybe it was not used enough?

Likely not used enough, yet. It would be premature to drop support this quick, as Google seems to just now move Android in the direction (DEX by Samsung is the same thing, but it's Samsung specific).

At the same time, only last year I saw a device in which I'd "dock" my phone (the Nexdock looked reasonably priced) and having both a phone and the steam deck with desktop mode would make such a device more useful.

I know you're talking strictly from the perspective of display glasses, but convergence is the main category under which I'd classify this feature.
by stringsandchars | 2025-06-25 11:16:06+00:00
I'm genuinely hoping that this is just an early beta omission because, contrary to the very limited use-case presented in the article (iPods) Firewire is still an essential part of many professional workflows: an enormous amount of very expensive high-end music-studio equipment uses Firewire, as well as film scanners such as the CoolScan range from Nikon, that still outperform camera scanning - even using modern 'medium format' cameras like the Fuji GFX100.

Replacing that equipment would be extremely expensive - disincentivizing buying new Mac equipment.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-06-25 11:16:12+00:00
40s here - I see it a bit differently. I definitely get what you're feeling, and it's not easily fixed, but I feel very differently about the 50% of life gone.

I feel like I've had ~20 years of 'conscious adult' life, and I have at least 40 left (hopefully) - so only ~33% is gone !

Anyway, "Life is not the amount of breaths you take, it's the moments that take your breath away"
by atomic_cowprod | 2025-06-25 11:17:10+00:00
Diesel locomotives are already hybrids (pretty much all diesels built since the mid-20th century are diesel-electric). I imagine that a generator large enough to charge up a locomotive would add too much extra weight to the design, however I could see a modified diesel locomotive being utilized to both push a dead electric train and to at least partially recharge that train's batteries during the journey.
by masfoobar | 2025-06-25 11:17:10+00:00
Thank you for this!

I had to open Notepad and see it for myself. Wow! I see the Icon.

I remember Co-pilot just suddenly appearing in my taskbar and finding it annoying. Despite removing it, I still see it lurking around... and now I see it is a SIMPLE TEXT EDITING PROGRAM named Notepad.

Wow.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-25 11:17:19+00:00
> The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.

And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
by sodimel | 2025-06-25 11:17:39+00:00
You can learn more about weasyprint on their website (https://weasyprint.org/ ). It's an open source Python package that can be launched using cli or from Python code. It uses pypdf, which is "pydyf is a low-level PDF generator written in Python and based on PDF specification 1.7" (from their README at https://github.com/CourtBouillon/pydyf ).