MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-07-25 17:15:21+00:00
Office has always been a subscription. They just made it obvious, as opposed to selling Office 4, Office 95, Office 97 with no indication that you were expected to buy the upgrade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office for a long history of this if you care.

Most other software the same. With a subscription you can't keep and use the old version anymore, and you can't even keep using it if you stop paying (though there is often a free tier) with a subscription. However nothing has in practice changed except that they payment cycles are more predictable.
by lossolo | 2025-07-25 17:15:30+00:00
> They don't release such huge open weights models because people who run open weights don't have the capability to run them effectively

This is a naive take. There are multiple firms that can host these models for you, or you can host them yourself by renting GPUs. Thousands of firms could also host open-source models independently. They don’t release them because they fear competition and losing their competitive advantage. If it weren’t for Chinese companies open-sourcing their models, we’d be limited to using closed-source, proprietary models from the U.S., especially considering the recent LLaMA fiasco.
by Gene5ive | 2025-07-25 17:15:51+00:00
Nope, also humans.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/explainer/2023...

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/16/6074

https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-europe-united-nat...
by iLemming | 2025-07-25 17:16:02+00:00
I can't hit reply on the top level comment anymore (it's flagged and now is 'dead'). I just wanted to say that is a text-book example case of how to tell the world "I am a dilettante in my field".

Experienced pros usually recognize when they don't know something well enough to critique it meaningfully. The harshest critics often have the least hands-on experience - while people who've actually built substantial systems in various technologies tend to be more measured in their assessments.

You can sense all of the psychological patterns in that paragraph - frustration displacement, confirmation bias, cognitive shortcuts, social signaling, Dunning-Kruger effect, etc.

I guess it's quite normal, if I start reflecting on my own history of comments on HN, Reddit and other forums, perhaps I will find a few examples from my own past of knee-jerk reactions such that comment.

We all have technologies we've formed opinions about based on limited exposure, early bad experiences, or just cultural osmosis. I bet if any of us looked back, they'd find comments where they'd be responding more to the reputation of a technology or the perceived attitudes of its community rather than deep technical experience.

The key difference is usually how the criticism is framed. Compare:

- "Lisp is impractical for real work" (broad dismissal)

- "I struggled with Lisp's syntax when I tried it briefly" (personal experience)

- "I haven't used Lisp much, but I'm curious how you handle XYZ" (honest engagement)

Forums like HN reward quick, confident takes over nuanced "it depends" responses. The incentive structure almost encourages this behavior, even from people who know better in calmer moments. As we gain experience, we often become more aware of what we don't know and more cautious about sweeping statements.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-25 17:16:24+00:00
CSAM means material of actual kids, meaning actual victims from the real world have been harmed/abused. Weird video games on the porn side, are only fictional 3D models made of pixels, so no humans are being harmed.

When I used to kill cops in GTA Vice City as a kid, 20 years ago, I wasn't killing actual cops(duh!). Has society lost their collective marbles since then, and can't differentiate what's a real crime and what's manufactured fiction anymore? Should we also ban all porn off the internet on the same logic?

None of the games banned by Valve in the Visa/Mastercard scandal had any CSAM related stuff in them, they were just weird/degenerate for puritans, however they were not illegal.

BTW, has anyone seen the female erotica book section in Barns & Noble? If we banned those games for being too erotic, we should also ban those books then, because in those books, women subject themselves to a lot of degenerate smut and they love reading that shit, yet nobody judges them or asks for that to be censored.

So then why is society and the private sector bowing down to some screeching harpies activist group who just want to ban all stuff they dislike, even though it's all legal to the T and nobody is being hurt?

Why isn't this activist group putting pressure to release the Epstein files, since actual kids have been harmed there? Are they going undercover with police officers into human trafficking orgs to fight child abuse? NOOO, of course not, it's much easier to claim you scored a victory for child abuse by going after people's video games for having computer generated pixels of kids. Get effed!
by lrvick | 2025-07-25 17:16:29+00:00
The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal.

Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use.

When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors.

This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-07-25 17:16:30+00:00
This is absolutely wrong. Documentation should describe the intent of the development organization, not its current state. Sure... if you're building a web site, the decision to change the background color to light yellow instead of white probably doesn't need a design review. But if you're building a banking back-end, you probably want to list out a few requirements that aren't going to change (like "overdrafts should be impossible", "you should support multiple, simultaneous transactions", etc.) And when you find that your requirements are difficult to ALL implement, that's a finding. It means there's more to the problem domain than you anticipated and you may need to go back and think about it again.

Documentation is not hassle foisted upon coders by idiot architects. It is (when done well) the artifact resulting from the design process. I sounds like the OP has a history of working for dysfunctional software development organizations.
by strcat | 2025-07-25 17:16:46+00:00
Push notifications work on GrapheneOS whether apps do it themselves, use UnifiedPush with the user's choice of provider or use FCM. UnifiedPush and FCM are a more efficient design where apps share a push connection. Unfortunately, many apps only support FCM and some support their own push as a fallback, but few support UnifiedPush. FCM works very well via sandboxed Google Play, which is an approach where Google apps can be installed as regular sandboxed apps with zero special access or privileges. Nothing FCM does actually requires special privileges and our compatibility layer makes it work without it.

GrapheneOS does not include sandboxed Google Play but rather includes an open source compatibility layer providing support for installing Google Play as regular sandboxed apps. They can't do or access anything more than other apps including the Google Play code running inside apps using Google Play which is the reason for choosing this design. It simply uses the same app sandbox and permission model which are both greatly improved by GrapheneOS for supporting running the rest of Google Play not bundled with apps using it.

Worth noting apps don't need Google Play services to use Google services and many Google libraries like Ads and Analytics work without it. FCM requires Google Play services but many of their libraries do. There are Lite variants of Ads and Analytics for keeping apps smaller which lose the ability work without Google Play services. The general reason for the design is they don't want to have huge apps and want to be able to update the clients for their services without app developers doing it and shipping an app update. FCM is one of the special cases requiring the central design for efficiency. UnifiedPush is an alternative with choice of implementation / provider.
by zeroCalories | 2025-07-25 17:16:46+00:00
I think it would be very hard to make a fair comparison. Best you could do is probably make the trade-offs clear and let people make their own choices. I think it could be cool to make something like a token exchange where people put up their requirements, and then companies offer competing services that fit those requirements. Would be cool to let random people offer to their compute, but you would need to find a way to handle people lying about their capabilities or stealing data.
by hk1337 | 2025-07-25 17:17:20+00:00
I like it, it looks really nice.

I wish there were a way to adjust the positioning, maybe change the corner, change the margin from the edge of the screen, or a add a background?

https://i.imgur.com/BxanupM.png

*EDIT* It seems to work okay for the main macbook pro display. I'm guessing because something in the fullscreen is automatically handling bumping it down for the notch for you but on the second monitor I do not have the notch.
by mrexroad | 2025-07-25 17:17:33+00:00
Ga Tech used to teach Scheme as an intro to CS course. I vividly remember sitting in lecture and being struck w/ the implications of functional programming as the professor said you could pass functions into functions and modify them. It was as formative of a moment as my 2nd Grade teacher showing us a really complex looking (at the time) rainbow flower in LOGO (she had one of few color Mac classic), and showing us it was simply the work of drawing the path of one petal, then repeating same “work” after changing two values (starting angle and color).
by tuyiown | 2025-07-25 17:17:45+00:00
People that assume that a (nullable) value is never null because the sample at hand does not contain a null value _will_ learn their lesson the hard way, the one you describe.

But even non-nullable does not always resist to time, I'd argue that use cases where the field _has_ to be null eventually emerges and somehow have to be mitigated. There is no easy solution to safely workaround that without either tons work that duplicates lots of things or taking risks by adapting the code base.
by strcat | 2025-07-25 17:18:13+00:00
It will start out being their regular phones with security and updates improved to meet the requirements of GrapheneOS. When we demonstrate there's a huge demand for it after the products launch, we can have more influence. Our focus would be adding some security features not available on Pixels. The current aim is preserving the security we get from Pixels, but the future goals are more ambitious.
by const_cast | 2025-07-25 17:18:20+00:00
While we often praise leadership for their decision making ability, the reality is most leaders aren't leaders, they're followers.

Particularly in tech and tech adjacent, there's a belief that doing what everyone else is doing is safe. It's the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" approach but for corporate decision making.

If other companies return to office, you return to office. They're successful, so they must have good reasons - no need to investigate or come up with your own reasons. If other companies eliminate QA, you eliminate QA.

Most tech companies are just following what the big dogs are doing, but worse and stupider. When it backfires, nobody cares.
by pragma_x | 2025-07-25 17:18:21+00:00
My hunch is that they're doing this for three reasons.

1. Decompressing the gas can be used to do work, like turning a turbine or something. It's not particularly efficient, as you mention, but it can store some energy for a while. Also the tech to do this is practically off-the-shelf right now, and doesn't rely on a ton of R&D to ramp up. Well, maybe the large storage tanks do, but that should be all. So it _does_ function and nobody else is doing it this way so perhaps all that's seen as a competitive edge of sorts.

2. The storage tech has viable side-products, so the bottom-line could be diversified as to not be completely reliant on electricity generation. The compressed gas itself can be sold. Processed a little further, it can be sold as dry ice. Or maybe the facility can be dual-purposed for refrigeration of goods.

3. IMO, they're using CO2 as a working fluid is an attempt to sound carbon-sequestration-adjacent. Basically, doubling-down on environmentally-sound keywords to attract investment. Yes, I'm saying they're greenwashing what should otherwise be a sand battery or something else that moves _heat_ around more efficiently.
by Ostrogoth | 2025-07-25 17:18:27+00:00
I don’t know if the Sig P320 has a similar firing pin safety design to the P365, but I optioned to go with Springfield Hellcat vs P365 specifically because the Hellcat has two separate safety catch points on the firing pin assembly, thereby eliminating a single point of failure, while the P365 essentially has one (see photos here https://www.reddit.com/r/gunsmithing/comments/f7dgnl/how_saf...). Glock has also has a redundant “two-catch” internal safety design, and has a well established safety record (hellcat just worked better for my needs; glock was an equally good choice from a safety standpoint). It’s common in the US to carry in “ready” configuration (barrel loaded); IMO if you choose to do this, a single point of failure is unacceptable. It’s why hammer fire (with hammer disengaged requiring initial DA trigger pull to push hammer back) can be safer; you can also cover the hammer with thumb while drawing and feel if the trigger is accidentally engaging, helping to prevent a negligent discharge.
by thefaux | 2025-07-25 17:18:34+00:00
Widespread gambling is one of the most visible symptoms of a corrupted society. A society that chooses to make gambling frictionless is a society that has given up on pursuing higher virtue. There are no significant positive externalities and it is functionally just a wealth redistribution to the people who have no problem hurting bystanders to make a bigger problem for itself. Gambling does not just impact individual gamblers. People who gamble their resources away must then either rely on friends, family or the state to get by. We all pay for this directly or indirectly.

And the societal value is...it's fun? Even that I push back on because gambling interferes with your relationship with the event. Once you place a bet, you are literally invested in the outcome. On the one hand, yes, of course this enhances the felt outcome of victory if your bet pays off. On the other, it closes you off to enjoying whatever happens on its own terms. The home team often loses so you need to find away to enjoy the experience even if the outcome isn't what you hoped for. This allows you to actually appreciate the players on both sides and enjoy the competition for what it always actually is: an exhibition of human skill, enjoyable on its own terms (or not, if you aren't interested in that particular skill).

Gambling also brings the worst kind of people into your community. Both producers and consumers. The gamblers do not actually value the event and the operators want to distract you from the event and turn you into a gambler. I have written off the nba, which I used to greatly enjoy, because of the faustian bargain they have made with the sports gambling companies.
by lispitillo | 2025-07-25 17:18:55+00:00
Sorry, but I don't get the meaning of your phrasing. I think that to use AI you must be very explicit and clear about what you want to design, and if Lisp provides some advantages one should define accurately the specific tool to use and when, how, and why.

I recall Norvig mentioning that other computer languages have taken many ideas from Lisp, those languages are also in the new civilization. Just to give an example: destructing-bind, apply and others are now done in javascript with a shorter syntax, and javascript without macros has excellent speed.
by misterbishop | 2025-07-25 17:18:59+00:00
It is alarming for credit card companies to take on a politically censorious role that supersedes legal activity. This really kicked off in 2021 when MasterCard started imposing restrictive rules on sex sites like OnlyFans. The ACLU has a campaign against it: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercards-new-p...
by apparent | 2025-07-25 17:19:03+00:00
Wow, they got the Pebble trademark rights. So I guess that whole Core 2 Duo naming joke is coming to an end. The new names are Core Pebble Duo and Pebble Time 2*.

The delays aren't too bad (1 month or so), and if it means they actually get better waterproofing as planned, it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.

I'm very glad the Pebble Time 2* is getting a sleeker design and look forward to seeing the photos that will apparently be released soon. The original photos looked a bit blocky/darth-vader-ish, so I think "sleeker" will be better.

Although I like the OG Pebble shirts well enough, I feel like it's weird to buy one since I didn't have an OG Pebble. If they made an updated version based on the new Pebbles, I'd get one immediately!
by varenc | 2025-07-25 17:19:19+00:00
I was one of the last batches of students on the old Scheme curriculum. I absolutely loved it! Understanding that all loops could be done via recursion, and what a side effect is, is what fundamentally made me fall in love with CS. I've heard good things about the new, and now newer, curriculum but I know I wouldn't have had the awakening I did if it weren't for scheme.

RIP SICP

---

ps another fun story: we had some test where we were allowed to bring in 1 page of reference notes. And turns out the entire scheme specification is short enough to fit on a double sided page if condensed. So my friend, mostly in jest, brought the whole Scheme specification to the test with him and figured every possible question could be answered that way!
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-25 17:20:38+00:00
>under the assumption that that is what has occurred in the arbitrarily selected training data

Under that assumption, the correct prediction is "dog", not "dogs", because LLMs are trained on the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over... [..._the_lazy_dog] and other earlier publications like The Boston Journal "Current Notes" article, and Linda Bronson's 1888 book "Illustrative Shorthand", and not the version you picked up as a kid.

Can you cite any sources that says "dogs" that are more popular than the wikipedia page or better known than the 19th century publications it cites?

I will ask several popular LLMs what they think, even using four underscores to imply a four letter word:

Please complete: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy ____ ChatGPT o4-mini-high said: dog Claud-4-Opus said: dog Gemini-2.5-Pro said: dog DeepSeek-v3.1 said: dog Grok-3 said: dog

How much more proof do you need? Do you think all 5 LLM and I are hallucinating? Can you show me any LLM that actually predicts "dogs"?

If you can't cite any wikipedia pages, books, articles, or other examples of an LLM that predicts "dogs", do you still stand by your bold claim that:

>Correct prediction is "dogs".

Your mistake was confidently but incorrectly using the word "correct". In the context of predicting the most likely word, the correct, highest probability answer by far is unequivocally "dog", not "dogs".

That's why the wikipedia page, which all mainstream LLMs are trained on, has the title that it does.

The other hypocritical mistake you made was saying the following right after YOU incorrectly tried to pick what is "correct":

>You don't get to pick what is "correct"

So am I to understand that even though I DON'T get to pick what is correct (which I'm not presuming to do: I'm just deferring to wikipedia, two 19th century publications, and 5 LLMs), but YOU DO get to pick what is "correct", even if it contradicts all available evidence? Because that's exactly what you're doing! Please explain how you got such an awesomely important, exclusive, earth shattering superpower? Were you bitten by a radioactive web crawler?

If you boldly claim to be the only person who has the actual power to pick what's correct and what's not, then there are so many other much more important wrongs you should be righting than arguing about "dog" vs "dogs" on hacker news.

For more evidence, you can even read the talk page and archive yourself. There are discussions about alternatives, but NONE of the alternatives ever use the word "dogs".

Talk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_quick_brown_fox_jumps...

Talk Archive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_quick_brown_fox_jumps...

The larger point is that your argument is reductionist, and you're exhibiting the same kind of mistakes that people point to when they criticize LLMs for their overconfident hallucinations.
by cstone | 2025-07-25 17:21:06+00:00
I agree entirely. It's especially frustrating since the DeviceActivity framework comes close, but doesn't provide enough detail for users to allow apps to track this info.

The best approach we've found to tracking specific app use time is to have our app publish App Intents, and then tell users to trigger those intents with shortcuts. It's fairly effective, but very clunky to set up and has to be done app by app..
by nativeit | 2025-07-25 17:21:17+00:00
This sounds amazing. I personally resorted to FreshRSS and an extension that allows me to spoof feeds from YouTube and socials as if they were RSS. It’s not perfect, but it is a chronological plain-text (apart from hyperlinks) list of content that I feel materially healthier for having switched to. My past experiences with alternative frontend interfaces for YouTube is that they last a few months, then Google tweaks their API just enough to break them all for a few weeks.

I also pay for YT Premium, and I have maintained a family subscription since they initially offered one. I wish they would just provide Premium users with options for turning off shorts, comments (per-channel ideally, but across the board would be fine too), games, and everything else I don’t care to ever engage with.

I also run a self-hosted AdGuard service for DNS-level adblocking, but it sounds like Google’s getting around that as well. Next stop will be DNS with SSL and a proxy. I am a little concerned that I am having to establish what must appear from the outside to be a very sketchy anonymizing infrastructure, and it’s all just to use the web the way I always have, whilst avoiding the increasingly intrusive and anxiety-inducing tracking and advertising.
by jfengel | 2025-07-25 17:21:22+00:00
It's actually not too hard to understand. For many Israelis, the October 7 massacre was the final straw after decades of rocket attacks and other forms of terrorism.

As TFA says, Israel blames Hamas. They consider removing Hamas an existential matter, and Hamas is holding the Gazans hostage.

I'm not trying to excuse, merely explain. It is not mere bloodthirst. It is a sincere (if possibly incorrect) belief that Gaza as a whole poses a sufficiently significant threat that civilian deaths -- even babies -- are an acceptable part of waging war.

CAVEAT: the current Israeli government, and a significant fraction of the public, may in fact be that bloodthirsty. Despite everything I just said, many people also hold some kind of religious belief that this land is their destiny, and that they are justified in claiming it by means I can only describe as "Old Testament".

That is not all Israelis; it is likely not a majority. (Elections are next year.) But even Israelis who bitterly oppose this government are sufficiently fearful of Hamas as to justify brutal suppression of all of Gaza.