MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rapnie | 2025-07-21 15:21:51+00:00
TIL about Endless OS: Recommended for Learners, Parents, and Schools

https://www.endlessos.org/

> Many of our technologies are distributed together within Endless OS. This is not your typical Linux distribution. We don’t use rpm, apt, or any other packaging system. In our quest for simplicity and robustness, we use a read-only root file system managed by OSTree with application bundles overlaid on top. Most desktop Linux distributions are oriented towards tech-savvy users and developers, but we have a different target user.
by duped | 2025-07-21 15:22:11+00:00
So the way that this works has nothing to do with user experience. A long while ago, USPS automated the mail sorting at their distribution centers by taking photos of the mail. Anything that could be sorted automatically was, anything that fails falls back to humans to sort.

Someone over at USPS had the brilliant idea to save the photos they were taking to sort the mail anyway and email it to people at the addresses that the mail was being sorted to, and to do it for free.

It's basically repurposing a critical piece of infrastructure to give you a little QoL bonus with your mail, and we should be really thankful anyone thought to do it instead of complaining about what's lacking. Especially when policymakers use every attempt to defund it so they can get their ultimate goal of privatizing mail and package delivery.
by pwg | 2025-07-21 15:22:33+00:00
> it's more of a hassle for me as my wife says "this should have arrived today"

Same here (minus the "stolen" part). Wife overlooks the disclaimer on the page saying "delivery soon" and assumes that today's photos should be of today's deliveries. Continually pointing that fact out has not (yet) dissuaded her from this belief of "today's photos equal today's deliveries"
by withinrafael | 2025-07-21 15:22:35+00:00
Yep, same here. I've closed accounts folks opened with my email address, sent replies to humans confused why I haven't shown up to an appointment, etc. I just can't stop the flow of emails from these folks using my email address for seemingly legitimate business.

Google doesn't offer anything in the way of migration or consolidation of various email-linked data (e.g., store purchases) so I just let mail accumulate and delete everything manually once every few months.
by floppyd | 2025-07-21 15:22:36+00:00
Linux desktop in general suffers from not having good "default" options. I can't really recommend any single distro, can't recommend even a single desktop environment as good for most people. Mint is very good, but it looks painfully dated in many places. Fedora is very good, but Gnome Shell is not for everyone in the slightest and debian base is just too wide-spread to ignore. Ubuntu is very good, but actually it's not that good in 2025 because canonical spent 15 years reinventing the wheel and not finishing any.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-21 15:22:49+00:00
While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?

DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.

And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
by poploser | 2025-07-21 15:23:17+00:00
I like Reeder. It has some things I'd change, especially around the reading view, but I hate having different apps for everything and will trade a few features for streamlining. With this I can read my RSS feeds, social feeds, Reddit feeds, etc. all in one place and save articles for reading later either through all those feeds or other page from around the web with the Save Link feature. Price is right at a buck/month subscription. https://reederapp.com/
by fxtentacle | 2025-07-21 15:23:18+00:00
"But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas."

I don't think many programmers need that advice ;) Looking at the open source community, there's already plenty of people that freely share their ideas and implementations ... (only to be ripped off by cloud service providers later).

And, sadly, the market for cool gadgets or 3D-printable trinkets is even more brutal. There will be 10 clones in stock on Amazon before you get your first batch through customs. My advice would be that nowadays, you should start your product journey with planning what your moat is going to be and how you're going to defend it. Or if you skip that, accept that your moat is only going to last a few months, which seems to be what the article's author was going with.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-21 15:23:33+00:00
What we are learning is that "non hospital" medical facilities suck.

I can tell you that I don't trust you as a doctor unless you are physically located in a hospital, preferably the larger the better.

If I have an appendicitis on the way to my normal procedure, I want to be within less than 100M of an emergency room already.

Small scale/small time medical offices were a mistake and I'll never change my mind.
by the-anarchist | 2025-07-21 15:24:01+00:00
> plans to make it very difficult for European consumers to order from China directly.

This has been the case for over a decade now. As a consumer, ordering directly from a Chinese seller/manufacturer was always met with intense scrutiny and taxation the moment consumers would have to pick up their package at customs. It has been made economically unreasonable for the average person to do these kind of things, which is why ...

> they're just a middleman charging an unreasonable fee for importing Chinese-made products

This has become a notorious trend within the EU. Unlike in the US, where consumers could order directly from Chinese vendors without being taxed, the EU implemented policies that only benefitted the cheeky business (wo)men who wanted to make a quick buck by playing middleman.

In my opinion, this pseudo-protectionist behavior by EU lawmakers was a key reason for Amazon's uprising in Europe. Amazon offered the cheap Chinese products the population wanted, yet undercut local middlemen at large.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-21 15:24:20+00:00
I try to explain to people the absolute absurd state of affairs that refined high quality goods are often cheaper from China than it is to import the raw materials. Our financialized economy is dependent on cheep Chinese goods and dodgy accounting practices.

The EU-Russia and US-China would be of the same broader conflict. Both the US and China are corrupt but at least in a China the politicians are the owners so they can more easily act in their own interest (less agency cost), the US has a competing oligarchy which leads to looting. There is a right-wing CIA cutout Theilverse faction putting together a bit of a coup and I guess once they are in control the plan is to use Anduril, Palantir, and PMCs to end the looting and create a parallel system of governance / military. I don’t know if that’ll be enough to keep US hegemony, but given the options I guess they’ll think they have to try.

China is very much incentivized to wait which we are told we should interpret as weakness. I think being able to take the hits and wait for more advantageous circumstance is a sign of strength. We’re told that the fact that neither Russia, China, or Pakistan will give Iran nuclear weapons is a sign that they are scared, I think that ignores the fact that these conflicts are serving their goal of wearing down the west. If they succeed they might win WWIII without much of a fight.
by estebank | 2025-07-21 15:24:37+00:00
Valhalla is indeed the one effort that could close the biggest gap with native languages. Java Vs C or Rust for networked applications have comparable CPU utilisation with comparable throughput, but memory consumption can be >100x. Project Valhalla is the only thing that could potentially change that. The problem I do see is that even after the language and JVM have value types, the vast extense of libraries that people use are unlikely to change to leverage them. But for projects that control most of their own dependencies, it will be a clear win.
by mcv | 2025-07-21 15:24:52+00:00
I hadn't noticed that yet. I wonder if my youngest son also gets that message and if he could make that change; he has no admin rights on the Windows laptop he uses for Minecraft, so I would hope he can't do that.

Although he also often gets the nag screen to upgrade to Win 11. That should also not be possible for him, but with Microsoft, you never know.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-21 15:25:05+00:00
So should X give information to Iran on any Jewish account it suspects of engaging in "foreign influence"? How about to Russia on any Ukraine account, or vice versa? What about to everywhere else in the world and information on US accounts some country somewhere suspects of engaging in "foreign influence"?

Somehow rules seem to no longer apply when we start consider them being applied against our interests. This is a big part of the reason why the 'rules based order' is now mostly just sardonic mockery.
by fxtentacle | 2025-07-21 15:25:10+00:00
"I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction"

... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.
by chasd00 | 2025-07-21 15:25:18+00:00
aren't there kiosk modes for various linux distros? I wouldn't be suprised if a kiosk mode can be configured to only allow a browser and wifi config, set it up once and then image it. There you go, now you can just write the image to whatever hardware is supported by that particular flavor and it's installed.

edit: i'll add, link your image to a github repo with a readme describing how to get it on disk. there's the project.
by duxup | 2025-07-21 15:26:09+00:00
I feel like you answered much of your own questions.

Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.

But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-07-21 15:26:40+00:00
I think the factory egg industry has already stripped the resources/comfort down as far as possible, so I don't see how this could make that any worse.

I'm normally resistant to claims that a new technology is going to make an unpleasant situation better, but in this case, I'm sympathetic. I'd rather get rid of the egg factories and have eggs raised the way my grandma did (and I still do). But that's not going to happen as long as people live in large cities. So if there's a way to identify the male eggs so they can be used as food before the chicks start to develop, rather than letting them hatch and then grinding up living, breathing birds, I'd have to say that's an improvement.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-21 15:26:41+00:00
That's an apples and oranges comparison; EJB was designed as an alternative to CORBA[1], not the dependency injection and "convention over configuration" that Boot really leaned into

I think that EJB was trying to get into the same resource utilization problem that Kubernetes is currently solving: "I have a shitload of generic boxes, please bin-pack compute onto them so I get a ton of throughput" but it turned out that no one's applications used that much compute versus the absolutely staggering amount of debugging and "onoz now I have a network hop in my call graph" woes

1: I know I'm cheating you a little because there were local EJBs, and also the ORM part of the specification remains to this day
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 15:26:43+00:00
Trump will do a lot more harm to US tech companies than Biden. A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech, and as we are building more of our own it's very unlikely we will come back.

Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
by encom | 2025-07-21 15:26:53+00:00
What's the point of a service that emails you pictures of your snail mail? You'll know about it anyway when it's delivered, and unlike a parcel, no action is required to receive it. Not snark, I'm legitimately asking - I'm probably missing something.

I legitimately can't remember the last time I received actual mail in my mailbox. Everything goes to e-boks.dk.
by rtkwe | 2025-07-21 15:27:36+00:00
These could be backed by the same SEC and FINRA requirements kind of have to see how the regulation plays out. I'm not super optimistic about it given their current attitudes towards crypto but this does more directly mix with the normal stock market so who knows where the rules will come down on this, they can regulate anyone claiming to offer tokenized securities to hold them purely 1-1 on the stock transfer agent of the companies for example, you don't have to regulate the 'blockchain' as an amorphous concept there will individuals/companies offering these tokens after all.
by tomrod | 2025-07-21 15:27:37+00:00
Unsurprising.

Over a decade ago I was searching for a dissertation topic and a self-reporting fracking site had come online (only CO and TX were required to track IIRC) that showed promise for helping to assess impact.

Before jumping blindly into the data, I interviewed several former field workers and engineering professors. The consistent narrative was that water spills with the fracking chemicals where extremely common and only had to be reported under a very limited set of situations, if they were even reported at all.

To the person, the field hands were personally worried about future cancers and other health conditions. All the field hands had since moved on to graduate school themselves, several in medicine.

Further, not all the chemicals being leaked, spilled, or entered into the water supply via bad casings were reported, as any that had trade secrets (at the time and to the best of my recollection) were excluded.

EDIT: https://archive.is/gaQ5x
by fxtentacle | 2025-07-21 15:27:46+00:00
Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...
by em-bee | 2025-07-21 15:27:49+00:00
but if we go there we need to ask a more fundamental question. (to avoid a misinterpretation of what i am saying, i'd like to make clear that i am not vegan or vegetarian, i do eat meat and eggs)

the question on where life begins is rather irrelevant until we answer the question of where the life of a chicken is supposed to end.

if the possibility that life may begin at conception is going to be a consideration when destroying eggs because they are male, then the same consideration must be made when we chose to eat eggs in the first place.

we can't argue that eating eggs is ok, but destroying them is not.

consequently, as long as we eat eggs the question of when life begins is not really relevant.

the relevant questions are: can we avoid destroying/wasting those eggs at all (can we eat them?) and if ee have to destroy them, what is the most humane way to go about it? my intuition suggests that destroying the eggs is more humane than letting them hatch
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-21 15:27:52+00:00
And they apparently didn't even learn all that much: literally this week, but with hot chocolate and an 8-year old: https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/young-girl-s...

Maybe this time they won't go on a PR campaign against the victim (it's also the UK where you only get real damages, so they probably won't care enough, no million pound lawsuits here even if it was as serious as the original case, which it isn't).

There's definitely a balance between hot drink being hot and absolutely scalding, especially when you know you're going to be handing it into a vehicle from a window. And it's not an especially onerous thing to turn the temperature down, and as you say, no one likes getting 98 degree paper cup of lava that you can't even sip for 10 minutes. They say they did control the temperature, so maybe it's indeed all on the customers, but I do know I have been given some really hot hot drinks in paper cups that seem excessive.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-21 15:28:12+00:00
Not just negligent, chronically negligent to the point that a court hit the "fuck you fix it" button (punitive damages). They had all the chances in the world to turn down the heat, use better cups, etc, etc, after any one of the prior accidents. They didn't, they just kept paying the settlements and the lawsuits, until someone got hurt so badly that the court said enough is enough.

It's a textbook perfect example of how punitive damages are supposed to work.
What can I do differently to find employment?
by javajosh | 2025-07-21 15:28:32+00:00
I've been actively looking for a job for the last 18 months, and having no luck. I've applied for many roles, both directly and, occasionally, through recruiters. All of these roles were very close to my existing skillset (webapps with Java, React or Angular, microservices, k8s, distributed messaging, ETL, etc), but recieved no response.

I've signed up for various job boards (indeed, ziprecruiter, jobboutique, jobhire.ai, etc) and I only get misleading "X is interested in you!" spam email from them. I'm not sure where or how they get their data, but it seems very low quality. I've taken to only applying directly or, on occasion, through LinkedIn.

Not that long ago I would have 10 recruiters with offers in a week of showing availability on LinkedIn. Now this. I'm not averse to working harder to find a role, but now I can't even get an interview for a heads-down corporate job, let alone anything more interesting.

Any help or advice appreciated.
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-21 15:29:16+00:00
My email address is my full name. It’s not a common one, there are four of us that I can discover online.

My Floridian namesake has a troubled existence - I get emails from debt collectors, the police, court summons, and his employer, an HVAC company.

He also likes Dolly Parton and crystal meth, and goes to rennaisance fayres.

My namesake from BC likes to go to nightclubs and Costco, and is very busy on the gay dating scheme.

I find it sweet they like to keep me in the loop.
by asveikau | 2025-07-21 15:29:17+00:00
The thing that the responses are not capturing is that the stuff on freshmeat was often kind of frivolous desktop widgets or themes. People were excited about Linux desktops and lots of people were authoring small stuff to customize it.

Network monitoring/visualization widgets that sit on your WindowMaker dock or similar was a common theme.

So that is sort of the reference being made here
by pythonaut_16 | 2025-07-21 15:29:32+00:00
In many places though it's more like most of the stadium is made up of various levels VIP booths. So one of the options is to replace those VIP booths with more dense traditional stadium seating. Only it's not enough to convince the ticket holders of one VIP booth to sell their tickets so more dense options can be sold, for some reason all of the VIP booths around that one also have to agree, and they're not so excited that plebeians might get to sit in dense seats right next to their pristine VIP booth to watch the show.
by jchw | 2025-07-21 15:29:42+00:00
I've noticed this too.

That said, it's not really terribly unusual to actually just receive someone else's mail. I've gotten mail that was meant to go to my neighbors a number of times. So I reckon that an issue like this probably isn't a big deal in the long run; if it was that big of a concern, then actually accidentally delivering to the slightly-wrong-address would be worse.
by lotharcable | 2025-07-21 15:29:55+00:00
Netbook boom happened and then people actually started trying to use them.

That is why the netbook boom died. Because while they promised to make cheap Linux devices that anybody could use none of them actually delivered on it.

In fact the whole thing was a fiasco.

The classic Linux problem can be described as "9 clicks to shit". Meaning that a Linux desktop looks, on the initial viewing, as something that is actually usable and modern, but once you start clicking around things start going bad. Going bad quickly.

A major problem cause of the problem is "linux is about choice" mentality.

Another problem is that programmers specialize at being good at programming, but things like documentation and UI testing are their own disciplines that are separate and distinct in a lot of meaningful ways. So, in attempt to make up for this, they leave configuration and details up to user choice. It is effectively pawning off the last stages of development onto the end user, who are generally most ill-equipped to make technical decisions on software they are not familiar with.

Instead of presenting something that "just works" users are presented with a myriad of choices and options that they have to make decisions about before ever actually being able to use the software.

Having lots of choices in applications, widget libraries, desktops, ways to install software, init systems, etc etc... results in very significant complexity as it all has to work together.

And complexity breeds bugs.

So each and every user experience ends up being its own unique things. There is no "standard configuration" no "supported configuration" and no "documented configuration".

The end result is that each user is forced to find ways to make the desktop work for their specific use case. Essentially finding a magic combination of things that isn't broken for what they specifically want. The desktop will still be full of buggy behavior, but just not in the way that that particular user cares about.

This creates a extraordinary of frustration and friction when time comes to doing the things that the desktop is actually intended for... which is getting actual work done.

This isn't a problem for a certain class of highly technical users that love technical minutia and configuring things. Knowing how to carve a working system out of a OS riddled with historical artifacts and highly technical choices is a badge of honor for many people.

But this isn't how most people want to do things.

Netbook boom tried to fix this in certain ways, but all that ended up happening is that each little corporation tried to do their own thing and then abandoned it when they realized there was no money to be made and they really lacked the resources and expertise to make it work.
by n20benn | 2025-07-21 15:30:02+00:00
I find this data counter-intuitive. I've always heard anecdotally that the market for new grads was really good in the 2017-2021 window, yet this seems to show the opposite? Unless I'm misunderstanding the data and it's the slope that matters here.

Either that, or else the people pushing the idea that the market was really good were those in the top 5% of grads that were getting offers north of 150-200k...