MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neepi | 2025-06-10 10:48:14+00:00
I assume it went as well as an acquaintance of mine found out. Wanted to go Linux and open source so dumped O365 and got Fastmail, libreoffice in to start with. His two office staff found rather quickly that they were up shit creek as they didn't know how to do anything and stuff didn't work quite how they expected it to. So they ended up switching back to O365 in under a couple of months. This was for a company that cuts out bits of foam and sells them.

A lot of computer users are drones. They have no conceptual idea or care about what they are doing. Moving stuff, even simple things, is crippling for productivity.

Now scale that up to hundreds or thousands of people. In local government people don't like to talk about the failures at all because there is fallout so we probably won't find the truth about what really happened but I suspect it wasn't all about politics and cash backhanders and MSFT investment.

If you really want to move off MSFT you will probably have to start again and run two completely isolated silos.
by braiamp | 2025-06-10 10:48:39+00:00
I am very disappointed by most comments here. Firefox is not a simple product. Mozilla funded Rust because it could help their other products (specifically Firefox). Mozilla has, depending how you count, 4 engines to support for all their target platforms.

They have a bunch of frameworks to deal with networking, layouts and JS. They maintain the second most used repository of Root CA. And all those projects all work towards the betterment of the browser, Firefox. If people think that MS with all their resources decided to use Chrome because it was cheaper, you will be missing the full picture: browsers are very complex beast that have to deal with swats of devices, platforms, interactive code, and all of that while being the biggest surface of attack for all your users. That's not easy, nor cheap.
by lordnacho | 2025-06-10 10:49:04+00:00
I think he's saying that before, when you searched for "elixir books" you would get:

- Elixir for Dummies

- Elixir for Beginners

- Elixir Programming with Phoenix

- General programming book

- Some other general programming book

- Etc

And this list would end up being a full page.

After you got a few Elixir specific books, you only had those, but the page was shorter. So ranking was lower.
by MacNCheese23 | 2025-06-10 10:49:14+00:00
This is without a doubt the worst App I installed in the last years. It is predatory and has the worst user experience I have ever seen. I'm serious.

It begins with that i haven't even tried out anything, before logging in - that the google store popup comes up that I should rate the App - on the same screen you even tell users please rate us - HOW?? HOW should i rate something now that i havent even used yet.

Then, like in the 20th century i have to supply an e-mail/password and wait for a OTP instead of just using the Google EcoSystem and let me login with my existing Google Account.

After that, i went through at least 10 pages of bullshit were I have to give my information, weight/height/metabolic rate etc - even adjusting the calorie deficit didnt work outright if it is 0 and you want to put a minus before it it just goes away. You first have to enter a postive > 0 value to be able to ad a Minus.

Mind you, i just want to see what that App is about what can it do - i don't want to enter and click next next for a gazillion informations first after being annoyed by "please rate us".

Then, after completing the "setup" i get a fullscreen overlay to annoy me about PREMIUM membership - AGAIN I HAVE NOT USED ONE SINGLE FUNCTION OF YOUR APP YET.

But not enough, I want to try it out with a photo from my meal today and on the camera lense screen it annoys me again with PREMIUM!!! You can only do 3 Photos a day. Dude your app is so predatory its just trash.

Then i select the photo from the gallery and have to CROP it??? Its a fullscreen picture of just the meal - nothing else and you annoy me with cropping it?

Then, the actual function - while it recognized my meal it was off by the calorie count and weight by a factor of 2. The same picture, for free, google gemini flash recognized correctly too and gave an accurate display of average calories (it approx. 450g). I added the exact weight to gemini afterwards to have the correct estimation and it gave me the real value.

I tried to do the same in your app, instead of 300g i edited the entry and choose 600g. And clicked save. I was puzzled that nothing changed. Then i saw the portion size went from 1 to 0.5 - just by me changing from 300g to 600g. What a stupid user experience. So i had to change the weight AND return back the portion size to 1.

Again, everything your App does apart from massively annoying users, gemini and chatgpt can do better for free.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-10 10:49:52+00:00
They give up and switch to Windows (again).

The highest profile was in Munich where they did migrate >10,000 desktops to Linux and OpenOffice, but eventually they migrated back to Windows and Office:

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

Lower Saxony:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-scores-a-win-over-linu...

Vienna:

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

Note that even when these projects succeed, the software users are running is invariably just Firefox, and often users have both a Windows and Linux PC side by side. There are no actual Linux apps being developed or maintained, in the sense of apps that use Linux APIs.
by nialv7 | 2025-06-10 10:49:53+00:00
Ladybird is building a browser with a couple million dollars, why can't Mozilla do the same? The total amount of donation Ladybird got so far probably isn't enough to pay half of a year's salary of Mozilla's management, this is absurd.

We don't need strategy, we don't need vision, or any of that kind of bullshit. We just need a team of good developers sitting down and write a browser.
by bilekas | 2025-06-10 10:50:19+00:00
This is such a nothing burger and what happens when you let UI take control of your whole business model.

"Look at our presentation, UI updates"

What happened to actually innovating?

They really are promoting "set your alarm without closing your streaming video"

... I mean. Great. My life is gonna be so much easier.

> Users love widgets

MMmm Apple. Time to stop with the mushrooms
by rollcat | 2025-06-10 10:50:25+00:00
This.

Apple in the past couple of years was all like, "oh look, gaming on macOS is good now".

I can run a 1995 game OOB on my Windows laptop in 2025.

My question is: on macOS, what's the actual market for casual games, like most of what's on Apple Arcade - especially against iOS? What's the market for the few AAA titles they promote - vs Windows?

People want their existing libraries. With Arm64 in the way, developers who up until now only had to target x86, will care even less. Factorio only cared because they already had a Switch port underway: <https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-371>

Dropping Rosetta2 will be the final nail in the coffin. If Apple did actually care about games, they would strike a deal with Codeweavers to integrate Crossover directly with the system.

Maybe I'll finally get a proper Windows gaming machine.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-10 10:50:26+00:00
I do not care whether LibreOffice looks ugly or not.

What I care is that the documents that I generate with LibreOffice look beautiful and that depends on me choosing beautiful high-quality typefaces (not the default ugly typefaces of LibreOffice) and on choosing adequate formatting of the documents.

All that LibreOffice has to do is provide adequate support for all OpenType features and for all formatting options that one might want. LibreOffice does this and at least LibreOffice Writer does it better than MS Word.

In LibreOffice one can still discover quickly in which menu or dialog box the desired option can be found. I have been using MS Office for decades, but in recent versions I can spend many minutes searching for some option that has been moved into some random menu/toolbar that has no obvious logical relationship with it.

While MS Excel remains much better than LibreOffice Calc (but the latter is adequate for most simple tasks), I would consider as a cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to use MS Word instead of LibreOffice Writer.
by oblio | 2025-06-10 10:50:51+00:00
> Isn't that exactly what it means? Like smoke free means no smoking. Why this "abolish the police" situation again?

Watch the video linked inked above, it answers your exact questions.

Also, smoking as a thing isn't banned. Smoking is just banned in reasonable places.

But instead of debating me, please watch the video. No place on this planet with more than, say, 10 000 people (so places where probably 80% of the world population lives) banned cars. A few amusement parks (or equivalent) are basically the only places where cars are banned.

> But it's a lot more expensive, e.g. I live in Stockholm and it's about $4 per 90-minute trip, per person.

What is this insanity? Doesn't Stockholm have a fixed cost monthly pass?
by bgwalter | 2025-06-10 10:51:33+00:00
"We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example."

This is really bad. "Basic functionality" is typing something into a form, which Mozilla has no business spying on.

I'd pay for a browser that just follows the standards, does not change layout and menus in every release and does not spy on me. Also, I'd not finance an overpaid CEO.

In this instance though Mozilla is shutting down annoying services like Pocket, so maybe they'll recover.
by dragochat | 2025-06-10 10:51:40+00:00
as a non-American reading this, only reaction can be... "WTF?!"

can you elaborate on that?

centralized systems for identity are used all over the f world, and de-facto you have them in the US too (hello credit cards, hello driver licenses, hello... SIM card?)... they can be used as _tools_ by regimes with fascist tendencies, but their existence alone is quite neutral

ALL countries with functional governments NEED centralized identity systems to function (hello... IRS?), and they all get them even if you like to pretend they don't exist.

...why not just accept they are there, and focus on properly securing them from attacks, making them unalterable by corrupt officials (from simple checksumming and write-only permanent archives to full-on blockchain solutions), and preventing unrestricted access to them, all technically doable.

If you PRETEND you don't have a centralized identity system, don't you just leave all these problems unfixed and just go on with a broken system forever?
by Traster | 2025-06-10 10:51:47+00:00
I think this has put into words a reason why I bounced off using AI this way, when I need something done I often have a rough idea of how I want it done, and how AI does it often doesn't match what I want, but because it's gone off and written a 2,000 lines of code it's suddenly more work for me to go through and say "Ok, so first off, strip all these comments out, you're doubling the file with trivial explanations of simple code. I don't want X to be abstracted this way, I want that...." etc. And then when I give it feedback 2,000 lines of code suddenly switch to 700 lines of completely different code and I can't keep up. And I don't want my codebase full of disjoint scripts that I don't really understand and all have weirdly different approaches to the problem. I want an AI that I have similar opinions to, which is obviously tough. It's like working with someone on their first day.

I don't know if it's giving the tools less self-confidence per se, but I think it's exposing more the design process. Like ideally you want your designer to go "Ok, I'm thinking of this approach, i'll probably have these sorts of functions or classes, this state will be owned here" and we can approve that first, rather than going straight from prompt -> implementation.
by adyrcz | 2025-06-10 10:52:24+00:00
As more autonomous agents emerge, we’re facing a big problem: there’s no standard way to describe what an agent does, what it needs, or what it claims to be good at.

So I’ve been working on a lightweight open standard, the Agent Definition Schema (ADS). Think of it like a package.json, but for agents.

Article: Why Every AI Agent Will Need a Birth Certificate by 2026

Project site: https://agent-manifest.org GitHub spec: https://github.com/agent-schema/ads-spec

Would love your thoughts, especially around skill validation, security claims, and how this might support future marketplaces or VC-based credentials.
by ochrist | 2025-06-10 10:52:34+00:00
I'm Danish, and yes: I can confirm. Everything is Microsoft. I have talked about this a lot in many years, and I was very (positively) surprised to read about this, as it will be a large job to move everything out of Microsoft. Most companies (both public and private) I have worked for in the last twenty years or so are almost entirely on Microsoft solutions: Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Sharepoint, Teams. You name it. Occasionally you meet something like JIRA or AWS and more technical systems, but the backbone of anything related to management, communications and documentation is based on MS solutions.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-10 10:52:41+00:00
That is the problem. Death of the birthrates is by a thousand cuts. The more friction you put in society to having children, less of them you will have. There are thousands of small inconveniences of having children that accumulate.

In my country we have had in the last decades the following - car seats, prohibition small children to roam free, prohibition for kids under 12 to be left alone at home, the size of the city apartments has shrunk substantially - from two bedroom to one. The impossibility of stay at home parent. You can add to the list.
by em-bee | 2025-06-10 10:53:02+00:00
right, and the same thing is true when hiring software developers as a non technical[*] person. you need to make an effort to understand what the devs are building and you need to guide them to work towards the goals you want to achive and the constraints you have (budget, time, etc). if you don't they will focus on things that are not important and you will spend more money than you planned on a solution that doesn't quite fit your needs.

(*) as a technical person too, but then the understanding part takes less effort and you can skip using AI to do it
by ericol | 2025-06-10 10:53:05+00:00
I've been thinking about this ever since I heard that is defined in the protocol.

I think the biggest issue is that it can create loops in the flow of programs that would burn through usage quotas pretty fast. It could also allow for "impersonating" the client what opens up a lot of possibilities.

But yeah, the fact that Claude doesn't even implement this is... telling.
Learn TypeScript as First Language
by ontouchstart | 2025-06-10 10:53:19+00:00
Make a self study plan for an experienced mathematician who had no experience in programming and programming languages to learn TypeScript as his first language.

I started this the other day in my iPhone GitHub app to kill time. If you are interested, feel free to post your LLM assisted progress in that thread. Let’s see how far we can go.

Have fun.
by jamesblonde | 2025-06-10 10:53:27+00:00
David Heinemeir Hansson (ruby-on-rails) writes extensively about the risk to Danish sovereignty if they don't have digital sovereignty.

In particular, Microsoft have already shown they will acquiesce to Trump's wishes. Turn off Microsoft in Denmark in the morning, you get Greenland by the afternoon.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/denmark-gets-more-serious-about-di...

P.s. this thread will be gone within 1-2 hrs when the mods on PT time wake back up. Anything about European Digital Sovereignty is killed quietly and quickly here.
by bradley13 | 2025-06-10 10:53:34+00:00
Exactly not. The non-profit is the foundation. Mozilla-the-company is owned by the foundation, and has the job of making products. Specifically Firefox.

All of the activism, all of the politics belong in the foundation, not in the company. Which is the reason for my question: WTF is the company doing with 750 employees? They need to run a website, they need to coordinate with Google, they need to maintain their code (and coordinate pull-requests). That sounds like 30-40 people to me, not 750.
by elktown | 2025-06-10 10:53:54+00:00
> Take it as an opportunity to engage in calm debate

At some point people need to understand that this is just completely ahistorical and incredibly naive. It feels more like a cop-out to never take a stand for anything. I respect the exasperated outburst of the GP, at least it shows that there is some kind of backbone that will hurt when reading all this bullshit gaslighting.

There's not even a hint in the last 20 years - on both this site and the internet in general - that "calm debate" has done anything to stop fascists from gaslighting every step of the way. Despite their claims to the contrary, they aren't even looking for a debate.

Instead they just get the platform they so actively always wanted and are defended by the tone police to spread their bs, and the more influence they get the looser some people's already frail backbone get. They won't stop. Don't expect it. Don't wait for it.
by Arch-TK | 2025-06-10 10:55:21+00:00
You know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to do CAD in solidworks would be rightfully pissed if you told them they had to switch to another equally powerful but different CAD tool.

Not sure what the solution is there aside from offering incentives to retrain, offering the option to keep using the proprietary product, and hiring staff specifically advertising that you want people who are happy using libreoffice.
by vijucat | 2025-06-10 10:55:38+00:00
I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]:

"Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44103131#44105292
by neepi | 2025-06-10 10:56:34+00:00
This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade.

Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged.

At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.
by agarttha | 2025-06-10 10:57:03+00:00
Random thoughts from physics researcher: - Too much imitation delays innovation. - For all the emphasis on high risk research, the system doesn't reward it. - Creativity isn't valued as much as it should be. - negative results and failed experiments hold back careers but are signs of attempts at innovation - the VC world may understand that only 1/100 projects will be novel and perhaps successful, but funding agencies don't
by amiga386 | 2025-06-10 10:57:38+00:00
The answer is, sadly, still more political than technical.

Munich moved to Linux in 2004 and was mostly complete by 2013.

Then Microsoft turned up the charm, and moved its headquarters in Germany to Munich, and Munich decided in 2017 to switch back to Windows by 2020: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.html

But then different politicians were elected, and in 2020 it decided to switch back to Linux again: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/238252/munich-says...
by justanotherjoe | 2025-06-10 10:57:39+00:00
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this article. To me, the most obvious and earliest case of mass tech layoffs was the Twitter 50% layoff by Musk. The whole lines written fiasco. The lack of mention anywhere is gaslighting me. Couldn't that have been the precedent as well? We know the market hanged on his every word (at least in 2022).
by tomhow | 2025-06-10 10:58:07+00:00
Words like that have a complicated past. They may be have been used with a veneer of friendliness but in truth they’re diminutive or derisive. The person I replied to here has used it repeatedly in a derisive way on HN. We wouldn’t tolerate equivalent words being used for Asian people or others of different origins. I haven’t heard the word used in ordinary conversation for decades, hence it’s jarring to see it here.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-10 10:58:14+00:00
> Why are you keen to hold a human accountable?

Because there are companies like Tesla that keep putting up cars with inadequate technology (cameras instead of LIDAR/radar) or testing on the road and people die as a result of this penny pinching, but no one at Tesla got punished in any way or form for this decision.

On top of that we got the way over the top marketing claims, which routinely leads to one scenario: Tesla drivers engaging the autopilot and playing games on their phones, followed by the autopilot either unable to detect a dangerous situation or disengage once the crash becomes inevitable so it doesn't get counted as an Autopilot incident [1].

At this point, it is willful negligence but we don't have a way to hold Tesla accountable. That is why I want to see high-ranking executives, up to and including its CEO, be held on trial for manslaughter at least.

And hell even here in Europe, Tesla's garbage on wheels causes issues. Both in Germany [2] and Sweden [3] we have had drivers fall asleep for minutes while Autopilot was engaged. This kind of crap was promised to not happen, but apparently someone at Tesla fucked that up. I'm amazed that Autopilot has held up and prevented either driver from actually crashing into something, but the failure of engaging safety mode and come to a safe stop if the driver becomes inattentive for whatever reason is inacceptable, period.

And it's not just Tesla that fails to deal with the damages their shit technology causes. Remember Waymo's honking incidents that went on for weeks [4]? At a minimum, this shit should have led to a) immediate cessation of operation, b) damages being paid to the neighbors who got hit by this noise and c) to a fully transparent audit which uncovers why that happened and what steps were made to prevent a reoccurence.

I'm sick and tired of multi-billion dollar megacorporations using the general populace as a free testbed for their crap instead of doing the proper thing that everyone else does - test on closed-off roads and dedicated test tracks.

[1] https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/tesla-fans-exposes-shadiness-...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/police-in-germany-chase-tesla-for...

[3] https://www.carscoops.com/2024/04/sleeping-tesla-driver-crui...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/11/24218134/waymo-parking-lo...