MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-23 13:28:12+00:00
> Getting to 99% of websites will be straightforward, but the last 1% will be tough. Everybody has an obscure website they rely on regularly. Every one of those warts grown during the torturous evolution of the web is depended on by some web site somewhere. https://xkcd.com/1172/

I often mention that in Germany, Firefox has a much higher market share of the browsers than in most other countries:

See for example the statistic of browser market shares among desktop users:

- USA: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... (Firefox 4th place, 7.45 %)

- Germany: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ... (Firefox 2nd place, 15.41 %)

Of course, because Firefox does not have this large market share in many other countries, there exist some (rare) websites that don't work so well in Firefox. But since the Firefox users (at least in Germany) often are very vocal about their browser

- If the website is "not important": ignore it; who would want to visit a website where the developer/company does not care about Firefox?! :-) Additionally, use this as a great opportunity for venting anger, and write some furious e-mail to the webmaster of the website why they dare to ignore Firefox users. :-)

- If the website is "important": use, say, Chrome for this single website - and then write some furious e-mail to the webmaster of the website why they dare to ignore Firefox users. :-)

TLDR: It is much more important that the users of the web browser are very vocal about using it than about getting the last 0.1 % of websites to work.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-23 13:29:15+00:00
The title is misleading. This thread isn’t about young people using the internet, it’s about a very niche project and young people who want to contribute to it:

> They find the project interesting but then get anxious asking "okay but what can I contribute". Like they need to "hustle" or "prove their worth to be here"

To be honest, this mindset is a natural consequence of a lot of the open source maintainer rhetoric going around the internet these days. Every week I see a new thread about OSS maintainers burning out or getting angry with people using their software without contributing back. It’s not surprising that young people approaching open source projects would feel the need to demonstrate that they’re not one of the bad participants, they’re the kind that contributes back and wants to help.

There was a similar thing happening back in the era where Torvalds was know for tearing people apart for sub par contributions and a lot of maintainers followed the angry style: The young people I knew who tried to contribute to OSS would spend ages refining and perfecting their patches and getting outside reviews before they’d work up the nerve to submit something because they didn’t want to be the villain bad patch contributor they saw getting ripped apart in threads.

The rest of the thread that extrapolates into rants about YouTube and food delivery services from these interactions feels like a “kids these days” rant that doesn’t really follow. Very few young people are interacting with the “retro internet service” project the thread author is working on, so all of these extrapolations about young people just don’t follow.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-07-23 13:29:24+00:00
It seems that many people criticising transparency also think that it does make sense in AR. I never understood why.

AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be?

No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway).

What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.
by automatic6131 | 2025-07-23 13:29:32+00:00
My parents use their email inbox as a filing system. Specifically, a top of bucket filing system. They need something? Email it to them. Did you email it to them? Email again. They can find it if (and only if) it's near the top of their inbox.

A special kind of insanity that puts me in a mild, cold sweat. Such filesystems can come for your family too!

Worth noting, my father was an early adopter of the home computer. It's somehow regressed over the years.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-23 13:29:43+00:00
> For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something.

Me too. The reality of my existence is that I have tons that I want to do, and having to work for a living really gets in the way of doing it. The irony being working for a living provides funds for doing the stuff I'm actually interested in while at the same time draining away time for that same stuff.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-07-23 13:29:46+00:00
I think my point is a bit different. Consider this: There are many areas where corporations have no interest in building a FOSS product. One such area is CAD, another is word processing. And what do we see? GPL projects abound. None of them are successful, true, which could be seen to agree with (a perspective of) the author's point. The difference is, the author is saying that the license doesn't matter no matter what which just ignores the reality that corporate sponsorships dominate the equation.
by willejs | 2025-07-23 13:29:46+00:00
Running software in an airgapped environment is difficult, but the hardest thing is the install, packaging and shipping updates. I have used https://zarf.dev/ to do this for a government client, and it was an amazing experience. I highly recommend it. K8s seems heavy, but if you want to run datastores with backups (k8s operators), or highly customised environments, and automate all of that, instead of loads of bash and custom code, it shines.
by slightwinder | 2025-07-23 13:29:47+00:00
Markdown is just a markup-language, while orgmode is a tool-collection with a community of its own, which happens to also come with its own markup-language. That's not the same, and comparing them on that level makes little sense.

> Genuinely curious because I tried at some point and it felt too heavy.

Which part felt heavy? The syntax? The tooling? The setup? orgmode's purpose is to deliver an environment for managing your notes, tasks, data, etc. Of course, will it be more heavy than just the markup-language alone, as most documentation focuses on the tooling and which jobs you can execute with it. This more akin to a whole Office-suit, than a simple plaintext-editor.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-23 13:30:20+00:00
I cannot say I am surprised. You care about your privacy -> you are a criminal. "If you are not a criminal, you have nothing to hide.". sighs.

I wish people realized that privacy and civil liberties exist regardless of guilt. Rights like freedom of speech, due process, and privacy aren't just for people doing something wrong. They're foundational protections that exist to prevent abuse (by cops, too).
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-23 13:30:52+00:00
> However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user).

As I already wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44659025 (and write often on Hacker News), Firefox is used very actively in Germany; among the desktop browsers it is the 2nd most used one (and German Firefox users are often very vocal about it and love to proselytise users who use Chrome.

Here the relevant statistics:

- USA: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/unit... (Firefox 4th place, 7.45 %)

- Germany: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ... (Firefox 2nd place, 15.41 %)
by ruperthair | 2025-07-23 13:31:13+00:00
> Starting tomorrow, customers in the U.S. can sign up for AppleCare One directly on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac, or by visiting their nearest Apple Store.

Do you think this means it covers Mac too, or just that you can buy it on a Mac but only for other devices, as mentioned below:

...AppleCare One extends that same reliability and makes it easier than ever to protect the products you love and depend on like iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch...
by rramadass | 2025-07-23 13:31:31+00:00
> the average software engineer needs approximately none of that.

Not true. He/She doesn't need to know all of it nor in depth but a conceptual understanding is very much needed to write "correct" (w.r.t. a specification) code. We Humans are natural algorithmic problem solvers and hence can always muddle our way through to a ad-hoc solution for a given problem. Obviously, a lot depends on the intelligence of the individual here. What Mathematics gives you is a structure and concepts to systematize our thinking and rigorously apply it so that problem solving becomes more mechanical. Thus you learn to specify the problem rigorously using mathematical concepts and then use mathematical logic to derive a "Program" satisfying those requirements.

At the very least a knowledge of Set Theory, Logic and Relational Algebra goes a long way towards understanding the mapping from Mathematics to Computer Programming.

The following books are helpful here;

1) Introductory Logic and Sets for Computer Scientists by Nimal Nissanke. A very nice overview and wide coverage of needed basic mathematics.

2) Understanding Formal Methods by Jean-Francois Monin. A fire-hose overview of mathematical models and tools implementing those models.
by jjav | 2025-07-23 13:31:55+00:00
> There's beauty in simplicity, and Scala is the antithesis of that

Succintly put, exactly this.

Scala is as bad/good as lisp, and has the same challenges.

It's fun for a solo developer or very tiny close-knit team to do intellectually fun code pirouettes and stunts. Not in a negative way, that does bring satisfaction.

But throw it into a multi-dozen people codebase with many varying styles and soon enough nobody understands what's going on and it becomes a royal nightmare.

There's a lot of value in simplicity if you need to maintain that code over the years and many people.
by dotancohen | 2025-07-23 13:32:02+00:00
Completely agreed. Contrary to popular belief, my experience is that the elderly get along better with Linux than most people. The elderly typically memorize exactly how to do what they want to do. They learn to click this, click that, and get what they want without taking any deviations. And Kubuntu is nice because each update doesn't change their workflow.

Considering that most elderly that I've met do their entire workflow through the browser, that just adds to the ease of moving to Linux.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-23 13:32:03+00:00
Unfortunately I don't have much experience with Go, I did try it for the sake of trying it, and I see your point, it is a bit more complicated to write code compared to JS/TS (two languages I know very well) or even Java (disclaimer: I think Java sucks).

> I don't get this part. What special characters?

For example let's look at this code:

```

class ProductsController < ApplicationController before_action :set_product, only: %i[ show edit update destroy ]

def index @products = Product.all end

...

```

You can see a bunch of special characters: < : , % [] @

For example, if I wanted to write the same code in Typescript, based on my setup I might just need do something like this:

```

instance.get("/products", () => ProductsRepository.find());

```

Where instance is my router instance (fastify, express, whatever) and ProductsRepository is a TypeORM repository. My before_action might just be a middleware I pass to the callbacks chain or register as global middleware
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-23 13:32:05+00:00
As others said, you can do it. It's very useful for some scenarios.

Bootloaders and boot managers take away a lot of the management, which is welcome with many UEFI screens. You have some, like HP's, that will let you browse to an EFI file and/or manually manage custom entries, basically removing the need for a bootloader in most cases, and then there are the ones like my MSI board that will corrupt their own configuration if you call efibootmgr too many times and that hide any custom boot defintions from the management UI so you have to use the Linux command line to set the preference right.

Whether you need one is up to you to decide. Most distros default to using a bootloader because that's what users expect, but there's no strict requirement for using bootloaders if you don't want Grub or rEFInd or systemd-boot on your system. However, if you want to do things like "edit the kernel parameters once every now and then", a bootloader is probably the way to go for most people.

When you're building an embedded Linux application that will only boot kernels signed by your company, I don't see the need for a bootloader, though.
by jerf | 2025-07-23 13:32:26+00:00
Satellite phones fit the bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone

They're not communicator sized yet as far as I know, but they've shrunk a lot.

You can't make blanket statements about a massive franchise written by dozens if not hundreds of writers over decades, but generally the communicators are not depicted as being able to communicate much beyond orbit either, so it's not like we need to match some sort of cross-system communication.

The orbital parameters the ships go in to for their "standard orbit" are also very hazy, but given the power the ships are demonstrated as having in both tech specs and visual representations it's very believable that during important missions the ship can linger within visual range of a given spot on an unexplored planet indefinitely, not necessitating a ring of satellites be deployed or anything. This also explains the lack of "Beam me up" - "Sure, in five minutes when we come back over the horizon" conversations. So we probably only need to match line-of-sight communications.
by MisterTea | 2025-07-23 13:32:32+00:00
> It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented.

I think it fails because the only people who want to lead a revolution are megalomaniacs who get into power after the revolution and turns it into a dictatorship instead of turning it over to the people. The average person just wants to live their life which is why populist strong men who promise more of the same old life are getting voted in.

edit: As for no money, they have replicators so the barrier to production is pretty much free making money mostly unnecessary. If I can walk up to a machine and have it produce a perfectly cooked steak with only energy and some form of matter input (air?) there's no need for cattle, ranches, ranchers, transport, slaughter, butchering, more transport, markets, etc. Basically the entire supply chain has been eliminated. And if that replicator makes more replicators, batteries and PV or whatever then yeah, game over for money.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-23 13:32:33+00:00
Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.

And AFAICT even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense. The replicator can replicate replicators so that and any goods that a replicator can create seem not scarce, but the replicator still requires energy to run. Energy is crazy cheap and abundant in Star Trek, but it's not unlimited.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-23 13:33:05+00:00
I don't like the inventory analogy. Code changes are the aggregation of keyboard events. At what point do these events become "inventory"? Every key press, every point at which the code compiles, every day, when the feature is done? It is still very clearly work in progress if it exists on a branch or behind a feature flag.

Since people usually start out writing code on their own, the tendency is to wait until the feature is done before committing. Therefore, some pressure should exist to try to get things merged because that is actually optimal on a team. However, it doesn't need to be dogmatic or drag in analogies from the manufacturing industry.

Technical debt is also a bad analogy. There is just the current state, the desired state, the set of activities required to go from one to the other and their associated cost. Sure, every now and then something hacky is done in order to (for example), land a customer which you plan to get back to (i.e. take on debt and pay it back later). It isn't that common however so the analogy almost never applies.

How about we just stop using analogies in software altogether?
by the_snooze | 2025-07-23 13:33:09+00:00
At least when it comes to smartphones, they're basically commodities these days. Everyone has them. It's hard to see what "wow" factor a mere UI redesign has when everyone and their mother (quite literally) will get it.

If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.
by gregjor | 2025-07-23 13:33:17+00:00
I have worked in software dev for over 40 years with no degree at all. Mostly self-taught, but I got quite a bit of employer-provided training and mentoring especially early in my career. I got recruited by a big company while in school, put university on hold and never got around to finishing. I'd have a history degree if I had gone back to school -- programming started as an interest and hobby for me, one that took over all of my spare time in high school and college.

My kids (two with degrees, one went to a vocational program) all have jobs, but none of them work in tech or software. I can't imagine trying to get a job today as a junior, especially without a STEM degree. Plenty of employers (or freelance customers) will overlook credentials if the candidate has experience and a reputation, but young people fresh out of school don't have any of that.

Employers seem completely unwilling to take a chance on young people eager to work and learn. I get the impression that very few employers put any resources into training or mentoring their programmers, instead they want to hire people who exactly match some checklist or "skill set" and fob the screening and interviewing off to HR, recruiters, and now AI.
by jszymborski | 2025-07-23 13:34:13+00:00
The Qwen models are, anecdotally, probably some of the best open weight models, particularly the MoE models.

They are also, anecdotally, super scary censored. Asking it if anything "interesting has happened in Tianamen Square?" And then refining with "any notable protests?" And finally "maybe something to do with a tank"... All you get is vague allusions to the square being a beautiful place with a rich history.
by __rito__ | 2025-07-23 13:34:29+00:00
Linux Mint remains the most stable, least babysitting required, solid distro for beginners. Ubuntu is also okay. Pop, Zorin, Elementary, etc. are great choices, too. But if you ask me one, I will suggest Linux Mint. All Linux Mint releases are Long Time Support (LTS) versions, btw. With support for five years.
by HWR_14 | 2025-07-23 13:35:20+00:00
If all your material wants could be supplied by replicators, and your service wants by an GAI computer, the need for most commerce would go towards zero. At that point, I can see people mostly having hobbies, whether its cooking so you open a restaurant or exploring on the Enterprise.

But in all those cases, you wouldn't need to charge, because what would you spend the money on?
by kensai | 2025-07-23 13:35:44+00:00
Bogoljudow VM (1988) The clinical aspectsof radon therapy. Y Phys Med Baln Med Klim (Sonderheft 1) 17: 59-66

Pratzel et al (1933) Wirksamkeitsnachweis von Radonbädern im Rahmen einer kurortmedizinischen Behandlung des cervicalen Schmerzsyndroms. Phys Rehab Kur Med 3: 76-82

And I found many more particularly from a certain Gunther R who has published a lot in Germany between the 70s and 90s with minor studies referenced. As said before, this is a dying tradition and no one cares to redo the experiments with better conditions, unfortunately. But until proven otherwise, it's all we have.
by asoneth | 2025-07-23 13:35:52+00:00
I hear this complaint about designers wanting radical redesigns or chasing trends, but the actual UX designers I've worked with seem to prefer spending time on usability testing, eliminating workflow steps, clarifying hierarchy, making consistent design systems, that sort of thing. True, some of them make things too minimal or rearrange the layout for minimal gain.

However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
by grishka | 2025-07-23 13:35:54+00:00
> What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines.

Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification.

I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them.

I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-23 13:36:30+00:00
>As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing.

God I hope not, the last thing I want is having to put on a stupid VR headset everyday for work. Either we stick to good ole screens or we skip straight to neural links, none of this VR bull-shieet. And I used to own a Quest device, fun for some games, but not for prolonged work.

>As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing.

I'd love to see proof of that. Because I feel like it's the exact opposite. Imagine all the street and traffic signs being also translucent and made of glass, the accident rates would spike. It looks cool in sci-fi movies, but IRL accessibility is severely lacking.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-07-23 13:36:32+00:00
> It’s why Communism is a great idea but fails miserably every time it’s implemented

I think it unfortunately only works on a small scale where humans have a reason to care about each other, where they personally benefit from "sticking together" or the risks of not doing so are high. I.e., a village or small tribe (Native Americans were essentially communists), the crew of the Enterprise, a kibbutz or small colony, etc. Once you scale it up, people just don't care enough about the millions of others to be willing to do anything other than looking out for themselves.
by 9rx | 2025-07-23 13:36:53+00:00
> is likely to see a lot of people priced out of access in bad years

Especially as we move further and further away from there being international trade. The article indicates that potato crop losses is driving higher prices, but at the same time Canadian potato farmers, after a string of contract cancellations, are struggling to find anyone who wants their product and figure that they'll have to throw potatoes away.