MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 13:03:06+00:00
Totally understandable, your concerns are valid. I will have to figure out the CLI part, I would prefer to keep it private (at least for now), but I get it that people don't want to provide DB access to a completelly new tool.

And yes, you're absolutely right about the lack of screenshots. I realize now how important that is for trust and clarity. I’m working on improving the landing page with proper visuals, and I’m also exploring the idea of a live demo using an in-browser SQLite DB — that should let people try it instantly without setup. It’ll take a bit of time, but it’s now high on the priority list. Appreciate the feedback!
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-16 13:03:10+00:00
> Source? What's the on the job performance of those being forced to do something non-meatgrinder related?

I did signals intelligence in the USMC a decade or two ago.

To paraphrase a discussion I heard: "you do this job or we ship your ass back to the infantry tomorrow and strip your clearance. don't fuck up."

that's how. the option is to learn to do X and Y, or learn to dodge drones.
by delfinom | 2025-07-16 13:03:31+00:00
>That it hasn't been nationalized doesn't change the fact that it's infrastructure (and access absolutely should be free) and therefore everyone should feel free to complain about it not working correctly.

>"But you pay taxes for drinkable tap water," yes, and we paid taxes to make the internet work too. For some reason, some governments like the USA feel it to be a good idea to add a middle man to spend that tax money on, but, fine, we'll complain about the middle man then as well.

You don't want DNS to be nationalized. Even the US would have half the internet banned by now.
by jraph | 2025-07-16 13:03:34+00:00
You are talking about the OS while the person you are discussing with is speaking about the kernel.

The Linux kernel has its own merits outside standard Linux userspace.

I agree, saying that the fact standard Linux distros and Android share the same kernel has no single meaningful implication really undervalues the Linux kernel.

I also agree that it's important to keep in mind the two OSes are mostly incompatible.

The two OSes sharing the kernel have practical implications, including (theoretically) seeing improvements coming from Android dev in the kernel that can benefit standard linux distros, and things like Termux or Waydroid.
by Zigurd | 2025-07-16 13:03:37+00:00
20 years ago my kids were getting hand-me-down work laptops with Linux installed on them. Apart from their peers thinking that they must be in some kind of cult, it did the job of keeping them much safer from malware.

Linux has been very usable for a long time. Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative. That's not going to move the needle in corporate IT but it's enough for a couple percentage points of the installed base.
by elevation | 2025-07-16 13:04:51+00:00
> approximately nobody with a professionally designed corporate identity used Verdana in a printed context like IKEA did

Exactly my point. Verdana gives unprofessional vibes because a pro wouldn’t use it.

In a Midwest town you’ll see a few sun faded signs, printed menus, and service vehicles emblazoned with Verdana. In every case, my assumption is that “the owner made our logo in PowerPoint in 1999 and won’t let anyone change it” or “the technician at the vehicle decal shop pick a font for us”. IKEA having used the font for a season isn’t enough to override the sense of neglect.

If you’re designing print media for business, or a logo of all things, avoid Verdana.
by infecto | 2025-07-16 13:05:15+00:00
Never heard Vincent to be leading in the legal space but I know vlex is more popular outside of the US so perhaps that’s why.

I am not sure why you would think your single anecdote is defensible or evidence to prove much. My perspective is valuations that are going on right now don’t have multiples that are that wild especially if we aren’t compare it to the com bubble.
by mindslight | 2025-07-16 13:05:17+00:00
And? The argument being made was the simplistic "cannot afford" meme, which is trotted out every time the fascists are crushing an agency, yet is conveniently ignored when the fascists spend trillions of dollars for new purposes.

If one wants to make a nuanced argument about NASA or fiscal responsibility despite the current political environment, it is perfectly possible to do so! But you need to work much harder to tease out the nuance and distance yourself from the fascists, lest your effort of espousing your lofty ideals just end up as fuel supporting them. Fascists don't respect ideals beyond power - the open hypocrisy is the point.
by ryukoposting | 2025-07-16 13:05:23+00:00
> people immediately notice that the UI looks different and immediately panic as to how to achieve their current tasks

This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.

I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.

Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
by dvdkon | 2025-07-16 13:06:04+00:00
I don't see the problem. There have been lower-level APIs in the graphics stack for a long time (e.g. Mesa's Gallium), only now they are standardised and people are actually choosing to use them. It's not like higher-level APIs don't exist now, OpenGL is still supported on reasonable platforms and WebGPU has been usable from native code for some time.

As for true portability of those low-level APIs, you've basically got Apple to blame (and game console manufacturers, but I don't think anyone expected them to cooperate).
by antonvs | 2025-07-16 13:06:21+00:00
You can use it, you just need to set the DNS over HTTPS templates correctly, since there's an issue with the defaults it tries to use when mixing providers.

The templates you need are:

1.1.1.1: https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query

9.9.9.9: https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query

8.8.8.8: https://dns.google/dns-query

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/networking/... for info on how to set the templates.
by allthedatas | 2025-07-16 13:07:00+00:00
As an original firefox backer I knew the daily version updates were the beginning of the end.

I knew people at mozilla at that time and complained loudly to them about breaking my extensions with their constant releases.

And then there's all the dark pattern default config values which are totally unethical

The list of user hating behavior is long.

There is no saving anything there now. The good people have left and been replaced by the author of that awful article.
by amiga386 | 2025-07-16 13:08:08+00:00
1. A marketing department that can get it more than 2% market share

2. A legal and advocacy department that can work with governments to stop monopolists like Google and Apple privileging their own browsers on platforms they control

3. To use its seat on standards boards to stop abhorrent practises like the W3C endorsing DRM, or Google dropping effective web-blocking APIs from extensions.
by criley2 | 2025-07-16 13:08:50+00:00
Having a widescreen monitor is irrelevant to me unless I fullscreen my browser (which I don't and I assume most don't). My (multiple) browser windows on my very big wide screen are all roughly in 4:3 ~square shape and top tabs make a lot more sense.

And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.

Every once in a while I wouldn't mind for a specific window to have vertical tabs with nested tabs, as a psuedo live-bookmark organization system for a current project. But it's not a daily driver for me.
by Sebastian_09 | 2025-07-16 13:09:00+00:00
Quite a bad piece, the end note is ironic: the author doesn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention for a film critic apparently interested in litteralicity.

> An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”

I cannot see any common denominator in the multiple examples that the author gives and cannot relate to them (what point is there to put on an equal footing a micro analysis of a dialogue in Megalopolis -voluntarily grotesque- and the choice of film format in The Architect?).

Maybe there’s an intuition here, but I feel it is not well illustrated. The author probably hopes that she will be remembered for coining this wishy washy concept.
by spython | 2025-07-16 13:09:33+00:00
Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?

My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :) https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/

And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great): https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-16 13:10:24+00:00
>This is an amazing rant!

Is it? The guy is "highly offended" (???) by playful language and color themes and does the performatively enraged internet guy thing of being shocked that Mozilla has a political agenda, despite the fact that Mozilla, a purpose driven non-profit has had a manifesto written by Mitchell Baker since 2007?

If you're enraged by an emoji or by someone saying thank you for loving our browser it's probably time to turn the computer off or something
by falcor84 | 2025-07-16 13:10:32+00:00
Interesting idea, but it sounds like you're advocating for a change in existing competitions, and I don't expect them to be open to this, especially as it seems that it would make assessment an order of magnitude more subjective and complicated.

Perhaps launch your own online competition and see how it goes?

EDIT: Thinking some more about this, I think it could be even more interesting as a two-round competition. I'm imagining that in round 1, you give all participants an example/theme that they have to stick to, and they have to discover and prove a conjecture about it, under a relatively short time limit. Then, in round 2, all participants are given the conjectures from all other players (perhaps even in a "prove or disprove" form), and players then get points both for proving each other's conjectures and for having proved one in round 1 that is particularly difficult for others. In this way, you don't have to rely on subjective assessment.
by rglullis | 2025-07-16 13:11:16+00:00
My point is that the choice of protocol (much like the browser) is not a relevant factor if your goal is to be able to participate in the www without dealing with the issues.

We can have all the upside of an http-based web, without dealing with the downsides. The converse is not true. A Gemini network is by design limited in functionality, which is a downside that can not be mitigated.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-16 13:11:54+00:00
This is a popular argument, just one small problem with it: the 4:3 displays of old (640×480 et al) were also "wide" rather than "tall". So by this logic, there would have never been a time where horizontal tabs (or indeed, a horizontal taskbar) would have "made sense".

So I think it's reasonably easy to see that this is not and was never the actual driver behind this decision. It's completely retconned.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-16 13:12:19+00:00
Can someone with better search-foo than I tell me when the last time was that the US passed an actual budget? Not a continuing resolution, an actual budget. And maybe what the time before that was?

My impression is that it's happened maybe twice in the last 15 years, but I am open to correction.

This is the most basic duty of Congress, and they've been incapable of fulfilling it lately. (If you wonder why the president rules so much by executive order, it's because Congress can't or won't do its job.) So it will be interesting to see if the current Congress is more functional than recent ones.
by p_l | 2025-07-16 13:12:20+00:00
There are some legacy programs in DoD that are developed in a variant of Algol 58 called JOVIAL that are still supported and edited despite over 40 years now of mandate to update to something newer (Ada). Also used in some other places, like UK Air Traffic Control at least until 2016 (that was the last date I've seen for replacement plan)
by anthk | 2025-07-16 13:12:23+00:00
Gopher user there from texto-plano (and seldomly, SDF).

Gopher often sucks for 40x25 devices or mobile ones. Yes, word wrapping, but everyone uses the 72 char limit or even doesn't give a heck and I have to set my own $PAGER calling fmt, fold or par before less.

On TLS, you are right. But I've got to build BearSSL and some libreSSL for for Damn Small Linux. The 2.4 kernel one, were ALSA was a novely and DMIX was hard to set, the one you got with Debian Woody... with the bf24 at the LILO prompt.

So, if DSL can run some BearSSL based OpenSSL-lite client, a gemini client for it should be totally doable.
by slightwinder | 2025-07-16 13:12:33+00:00
> Recovering from scratch a whole infrastructure managed by many people over the years is a titanic task.

Half of the work is to know what you need, the other half is to know how you do it, while the third half is to cope with all the undocumented tinkering which happened along the way. So in that regard, starting from scratch can be acceptable, as long you are not starting from zero, and can build up on the knowledge and experience of the previous run(s). I mean, there is a whole gaming-genre about this, which is quite popular. And usually you have the benefit that you might be able to fix some fundamental failures which you had to ignore because nobody wanted to take the risk.
by simonw | 2025-07-16 13:12:52+00:00
Related, the concept of the "golden path" advocated by Charity Majors: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-pa...

> 1. Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers

> 2. Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).

> 3. Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.
by jkhdigital | 2025-07-16 13:13:34+00:00
I’m going to assume the savings were accumulated after you got sober? ;-)

Just wanted to say hello to a fellow class of 2014 “graduate”. I failed out of CS @ UIUC in 2003 because I just skipped class and got high most days. Now, after 11+ years of sobriety, I have most of a PhD and I’m teaching CS to undergrads. It’s amazing how much better life turns out when you’re not actively burning everything down in the fires of addiction!
by sschueller | 2025-07-16 13:14:03+00:00
I hope we get to a point where enough "professionals" are using it to force companies like Acrobat to offer Linux versions of their software (cough Fusion 360). It is the only thing keeping me from completely ditching my windows VM. Using CAD in a virtulabox VM is torture. FreeCAD is sadly not a viable replacement (maybe in the future but a lot of work is needed). I was able to switch to other tools for other things like KiCAD for PCB work, Blender and DaVinci Resolve also work great.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 13:14:31+00:00
You're right, and you're not the only one who's raised this, totally fair concern. As a developer myself, I get why running a CLI tool that touches your databases without access to the source is a hard sell.

I hadn’t initially planned to open source it, but this feedback is making me seriously reconsider. At the very least, more transparency is clearly needed, and I’m thinking through the best way to approach that.

Curious though, would you feel any more comfortable if it were a packaged desktop app (with no source) instead of a CLI? Or is open code the baseline no matter the form?
by graycat | 2025-07-16 13:14:45+00:00
Moreover, in WWII we had Turing's code breaking, England's radar, the US proximity fuse, and "the bomb, the ATOMIC bomb".

Then Garwin and Tukey talked, and we got the FFT (fast Fourier transform), talked about the test ban treaty and detecting underground tests.

GPS is nice, but the first version, with the relativity considerations, was done at the JHUAPL for the US Navy missile firing submarines.

Then, as I recall, some people in the US concluded

"Never again will US science operate independently of the US military"

or that since WWII nearly all the reason for all the science funding -- Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence-Berkeley, Stanford Linear Accelerator, Fermi, Brookhaven, Hanford, JHUAPL, NASA, along with DOE and NSF funding of academic research in the STEM fields at Berkeley, U. Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, etc. -- was intended for US leadership in the STEM fields and, thus, US national security.

Bluntly put.

Right, Simons funds a lot. And Hopkins has the Whiting School of Engineering from the widow of Whiting of Whiting-Turner Construction, etc.

Sorry about war, but I do like the science.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-07-16 13:15:20+00:00
If you cut that compensation in half you could have funded a small team of devs to have finished Oxidation of Firefox and have a really interesting browser, and potentially a really rich GUI stack, JavaScript Engine and who knows what else for Rust itself as a result, on top of it all being production ready and proven because of the nature of Firefox's reach.

There were major noticeable speed differences in Firefox when they implemented key component in Rust. I say this having used Firefox since 2004.
by microtonal | 2025-07-16 13:15:59+00:00
I think that's pretty pedantic. When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.

Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call it Linux.

Even Wikipedia says: Linux (/ˈlɪnʊks/ LIN-uuks[15]) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.
by anthk | 2025-07-16 13:16:10+00:00
It actually was between PIII and IV on capabilities. Altivec allows to play h264 videos on some settings. A Pentium III, well, SSE and FFMPEG can do magic, but not as well as Altivec. SSE2 it's better, much better. Basically the minimum for x86 and 'modern' browsers.

On the architecture itself, PowerPC did far more per cycle.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-16 13:16:28+00:00
I think the foundation projects hold a lot of potential, but what they release as "stable" is rarely ready for a production setting. People do use Blender for small side tasks commercially, but would you honestly bet your company reputation/job on their 31 years of shenanigans?

Updates still permute the core to break parts of the program, and brick countless add-ons or custom code. People turn users into Beta testers, partners into IT support, and hide workflow details under layers of feature-creep kludges.

When Blender updates for feature X, they will usually brick feature Y. YMMV

The Foundation may intend to improve user adoption, but they can't even cover there own unit-tests on internal add-on code. =3
by Aeolun | 2025-07-16 13:17:35+00:00
> we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole

You are citing a source that talks about unintended pregnancies (often as a result of sexual abuse) in developing nations. With nearly half of those being prematurely aborted in some (medically safe or not) way.

I’m inclined to believe that the support system throughout most of history was better than what these girls get.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-16 13:17:37+00:00
It turns out, it is actually you "translating" views. Here you are "translating" and "stripping out all specifics to build a straw man", as you put it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571293

Is that because, as you adroitly put it, you couldn't respond to the actual views on their merits?

Is there a reason you can't be civilized and simply say "I personally believe that government tracking and control of individual spending on legal stuff is okay if [insert your preferred benefits here] are realized, but I respect those who don't agree with me on that"? Here, let me lead by example:

I personally believe that crimes which harm others are bad, but not enough to justify government tracking and control of individual spending on legal things. I also respect people who feel differently (including you), because their opinions here are no more or less valid than mine.

Now you try?
by ApolloFortyNine | 2025-07-16 13:17:58+00:00
Just to add to this, somehow the current plan for getting to the moon involves over 15 launches (or 25, the number does seem to vary). With Starship actually having a larger payload than the Saturn V at least to LEO, how 15 launches could possibly be required, and such a plan been approved to spend billions of dollars on, I just don't know.

So as much as I like the idea of NASA, something needs to be done there.
by ragnese | 2025-07-16 13:19:23+00:00
Is this different than how military spending is spread, though? That's not a rhetorical question- I'm not tuned in enough to know.

Even though I've seen military bases in the middle of nowhere, I've certainly seen some bases and defense contractors (Raytheon, Lockheed, etc) in non-rural areas.

I'm cynically, and pessimistically, kind of assuming that it's really just about what's being funded in this case. Military spending is pretty much always supported by both politicians and the public, whereas there is a VERY strong anti-science and anti-academia wave in our culture at the moment (even more so than I always used to think there was...).
by andreygrehov | 2025-07-16 13:19:25+00:00
> No one is going to invest there for a very long time after what Russia did.

Many large businesses have returned to Russia. "No one is going to invest" is a naive childish thinking. They outperformed growth expectations in 2024, unemployment rate dropped from 5.8% in 2020 to 2.3% in 2025. GDP is surging, insane tech and energy investments from China. Plus Russia has a very low public debt. All in all, their economy is pretty resilient despite what they say in the mainstream media.