MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zmmmmm | 2025-07-06 00:15:10+00:00
I think the article overlooks that it is not really an accident that apps and operating systems are hiding all their user interface affordances. It's an antipattern to create lock in, and it tends to occur once a piece of software has reached what they consider saturation point in terms of growth where keeping existing users in is more important than attracting new ones. It so turns out that the vast majority of software we use is created by companies in exactly that position - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta etc.

It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.
by bix6 | 2025-07-06 00:16:53+00:00
So economics becomes intelligence driven, which I don’t really understand what that means since AGI is more knowledgeable than all of us combined, and we expect the AGI lords to just pay everyone a UBI? This seems like an absolute fantasy given the tax cuts passed 2 days ago. And regulating it as a public good when antitrust has no teeth. I hope there are other ideas out there because I don’t see this gaining political momentum given politics is driven by dollars.
by worik | 2025-07-06 00:19:17+00:00
Many commenter's here saying they cannot avoid Amazon. I am not here to deny their reality, but I have a different story

I have avoided Amazon since ~2004 when I accidentally bought two box sets (double clicked) and there was no way to undo one. Clearly a Dark Pattern. Fuckers

I have succeeded. I always find another source for everything (mostly books, some small electronics).

I am not in the USA, I am in the South Pacific, a long way away however you measure it (except we speak English, mostly, here too). I have to wonder if that is a reason? Yet we use the same Internet

I started avoiding Amazon because they dishonestly ripped me off 20 years ago. I would start to avoid them today because they are evil
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-06 00:19:18+00:00
>It ships with a very terrible wizard.

Terrible how? It just needs to zip and unzip and it does that fine for most users. What else do you expect for casual users? For power usurers there's 7zip or WinRar or other solutions.

> Maybe I should say, why does the Windows unarchiving feature suck?

And what stopped you from saying that? HN rules say comments should be in good faith. What you said has clearly different meaning than what you say you meant.
by m11a | 2025-07-06 00:19:50+00:00
It's not clear to me that these approaches aren't already being tried.

Firstly, by some researchers in the big labs (some of which I'm sure are funded to try random moonshot bets like the above), at non-product labs working on hard problems (eg World Labs), and especially within academia where researchers have taken inspiration from biology before, and today are even better funded and hungry for new discoveries.

Certainly at my university, some researchers are slightly detached from the hype cycle of NeurIPS publications and are trying interdisciplinary approaches to bigger problems. Though, admittedly less than I'd have hoped for). I do think the pressure to be a paper machine limits people from trying bets that are realistically very likely to fail.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-06 00:20:01+00:00
They are fundamentally absolute fucking goofballs.

This administration is the best argument for DEI I’ve ever seen in my life, if it had anything to do with avoiding this.

Just the other day, RFK’s top vaccine nutjob (new chair of ACIP, Robert Malone) tweeted something to suggest that the Amish’s existence despite waves of infectious disease and ~no~ low vaccination is evidence that vaccines aren’t necessary.

Apparently ignorant[0] of the fact that the Amish are notoriously cloistered and isolated from the rest of society.

[0] By “ignorant” I don’t mean “has never heard the idea,” but that the degree of motivated reasoning has rendered his mind actually incapable of integrating this fact — like many others — into his world view. I’m drawing this distinction because I don’t think this is a matter of smart people pretending to believe stupid things. They are actually, at rock bottom, very stupid people, rendered such by their own ideological commitments if nothing else.
by elcritch | 2025-07-06 00:20:08+00:00
> The Cobb-Douglas production function (Cobb & Douglas, 1928) illustrates how AGI shifts economic power from human labor to autonomous systems (Stiefenhofer &Chen 2024). The wage equations show that as AGI’s productivity rises relative to human labor decline. If AGI labor fully substitutes human labor, employment may become obsolete, except in areas where creativity, ethical judgment, or social intelligence provide a comparative advantage (Frey & Osborne, 2017). The power shift function quantifies this transition, demonstrating how AGI labor and capital increasingly control income distribution. If AGI ownership is concentrated, wealth accumulation favors a small elite (Piketty, 2014). This raises concerns about economic agency, as classical theories (e.g., Locke, 1689; Marx, 1867) tie labor to self-ownership and class power.

Wish I had time to study these formula.

We already have seen the precursors of this sort of shift with ever rising productivity with stalled wages. As companies (systems) get more sophisticated and efficient they also seem to decrease the leverage individual human inputs can have.

Currently my thinking leans towards believing the only way to avoid the worse dystopian scenarios will be for humans to be able to grow their own food and build their own devices and technology. Then it matters less if some ultra wealthy own everything.

However that also seems pretty close to a form of feudalism.
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-06 00:20:13+00:00
Your characterization is under-exaggerated to make this problem sound normal. It's not.

> Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer

Being a Pixel or GrapheneOS user should never be a "clue" of criminality. It should never result in police detaining you or rummaging through your phone. Any police that acts in this way is indeed an "idiot."
by jchw | 2025-07-06 00:20:44+00:00
Windows has shipped with "ZIP folders" and the ability to create and extract ZIP files since the late 90s/early 2000s I believe (not sure exactly what version.) As of the latest versions of Windows 11, Windows ships with libarchive-based archive extraction, which should let you extract many archives natively (including 7-zip and RAR) via the UI as well as the CLI (via BSD TAR, which also ships with Windows these days.)
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-06 00:21:21+00:00
It's a double edged sword though in that it can discourage users from trying their interface.

Apple's interface shits me because it's all from that one button, and I can never remember how to get to settings because I use that interface so infrequently, so Android feels more natural. Ie. Android has done it's lock-in job, but Apple has done itself a disservice.

(Not entirely fair, I also dislike Apple for all the other same old argument reasons).
by bigfatkitten | 2025-07-06 00:21:47+00:00
Because the device records detailed usage information with timestamps such as device locks/unlocks, the screen lighting up and going dark, apps going in and out of focus, and in many cases details of exactly what you were doing in the app.

https://cellebrite.com/en/how-a-suspects-pattern-of-life-ana...

https://cellebrite.com/en/samsung-rubin-digital-forensics-va...
by fracus | 2025-07-06 00:22:27+00:00
They discuss people from the educated, democratized world see rectangles while a group from Namibia see circles because, they hypothesize, their world isn't highly "carpenterized" with right angles and straight lines. So could this not be simply because they don't know what a rectangle is, and so categorize these close loops as circles? I don't understand the acceptance it is an optical illusion.
by ashvardanian | 2025-07-06 00:22:43+00:00
2012 Retina model had all the relevant ports, a great keyboard & screen, an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU - the go-to choices for professional software development to date, making it much easier to design locally & deploy remotely.

Build quality was also stunning. It’s still good, but the gap between brands is shrinking.

Arguably the worst part about modern MacBooks is software. I don’t know anyone who finds it more stable/convenient to use or pleasant to develop for :(
by zrail | 2025-07-06 00:23:06+00:00
Portland, Oregon completed a project in 2011 that successfully eliminated almost all of the combined sewer overflows into the Willamette river and Columbia Slough (a swampy area on the south side of the Columbia river near the airport).

There was a ton of work done to reduce the amount of water ending up in the sewer during storms followed by some large infrastructure improvements to improve the carrying capacity of the sewer itself.

https://www.portland.gov/bes/about-big-pipe
by jchw | 2025-07-06 00:23:16+00:00
I think you're talking about the extraction feature that came with ZIP folders. Aside from being clunky it's also rather inefficient and slow, it doesn't have any provisions for handling issues like mojibake, and is generally just not very robust. So why? AFAIK it's because the ZIP Folders/Visual ZIP code was basically integrated with Windows and then never updated. When it shipped in Windows XP (and possibly earlier, but I don't remember for sure) I think it was perfectly serviceable... it just didn't improve much over time.

I can't really stomach Windows 11 so I don't personally use it but my understanding is that the latest version of Windows 11 has finally integrated a better solution, implementing archive extraction based on libarchive.
by joe_the_user | 2025-07-06 00:23:25+00:00
The other thing is local retailers have cut back on all specialty items because they expect people to buy those items online.

The problem is that buying specialized things actually makes sense to do online. But online buying has the problem that an average online retailer gives no guarantee that they will fulfill an order faithfully (I still remember trying to order shoe from Target online and getting ... a used masked and I assume others remember online "burn" as well) so Amazon has a key position of online guarantor. As a "natural monopoly", one might imagine such a role would be regulated but not in the present climate, ha ha ha.
by zie | 2025-07-06 00:24:17+00:00
What we do, is automated restores. We have a _hourly and an _daily restore that just happens via shell script.

We encourage staff to play with both, and they can play with impunity since it's a copy that will get replaced soon-ish.

This makes it important that both work reliably, which means we know when our backups stop working.

We haven't had a disaster recovery situation yet(hopefully never), but I feel fairly confident that getting the DB back shouldn't be a big deal.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-06 00:24:38+00:00
> Saving a handful of experimental users is not the main benefit.

Kent himself argued otherwise here[1].

And even if that were the case, there's no need to take a stand on trying to get it into the kernel. If he gets booted out of the kernel tree, then the end result is the same for his users: they have to compile their own kernel. So it makes no sense to push this so hard.

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux...
by gertop | 2025-07-06 00:25:09+00:00
I wish 7-zip would support .tar.gz the way WinRAR does.

WinRAR allows you to browse a .tar.gz without extracting it, 7-zip extracts the .tar to a temp file. It makes working with large .tar.gz files impossible.

(Yes I know that because of how .tar works WinRAR must decompresses it to build the files list. But it beats having to write a 1TB .tar to disk just to see the file listing.
by brewdad | 2025-07-06 00:25:19+00:00
I would argue the majority of voters did actually want this. Anyone who voted third party in the presidential race was at the very least fine with this. By not casting a vote for the only person who could possibly defeat Trump, Trump became our President.

They got to keep their ideological purity though. I guess that will keep them warm at night when it's their turn to get rounded up.
by ndegruchy | 2025-07-06 00:25:59+00:00
I honestly wish this were the case for 80% of the calls I make to local stores. Most people they have working the phones do not care about the inventory and will just say they're out of stock or don't know if there are any on the shelves. This goes double for requesting a special item from a store that would normally carry it, but doesn't. They put the order into their "system" and then it disappears, never to be heard from again.

Calling retail stores to do anything other than to see if they're open or, in the case of restaurants, get a reservation is just wasting time. At least for the retailers that I've communicated with.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-06 00:27:29+00:00
It's not meant to be read. The people who produced it don't care what's inside, only that the book exists. The book existing is enough for the target audience to accept that there are valid arguments within. The target audience does not need to read the book, they've already been told what they need to know.

The producers and the audience prefer it that way. It's less effort for everyone involved.
by jqtippett | 2025-07-06 00:27:59+00:00
Hey @leakycap, Jacob here, creator of Hued. Thanks for trying it out! I'm still making adjustments to the controls to try to improve the smoothness on desktop, so I definitely appreciate the feedback. If you press the crosshair at the bottom left, you can activate fine-tune mode where the controls become much more controlled. I'm pushing an update tomorrow that will hopefully improve the main controls for the color circle. The game is 24 days old as of today, so this journey has just begun!
by jonas21 | 2025-07-06 00:30:06+00:00
> If you want to lock the door, then the hidden control problem becomes evident... to lock the door, I must know that the hidden control to lock is the pound key. To make matters worse, it's not a simple press of the pound key. It's a press of the pound key for a full five seconds in order to activate the lock sequence. The combination of the long temporal window and the hidden control makes locking the door nearly impossible, unless you are well acquainted with the system and its operation.

Isn't that kind of the point? You don't want people accidentally locking the door, but if it's your door, it's easy enough to remember how to do it.
by chipsa | 2025-07-06 00:30:19+00:00
> for example, the US has stopped sharing weather data with canada.

Citation needed. Most weather data from NWS is required by treaty to be disseminated through WMO compliant methods. The Metsat data is transmitted unencrypted from the GOES sats. I don’t believe they even have the capability to encrypt it. It’s only DoD weather data that’s not being widely disseminated, AFAIK.
by aaron695 | 2025-07-06 00:31:16+00:00
China being normal is preparing for cold war?

I see no evidence of nuclear stockpiling or long range capabilities. All their cool war tech is short-medium range.

They are strengthening a nation for a billion people in a non-isolationist way.

They are doing what the US did before it became soft.

China builds hard infrastructure for themselves and others. They teach hard science. Their propaganda was to get a popular person to visit.

Europe lives off American R&D and does art projects like decommissioning nuclear power. Because China contributes it's cold war?
by mek6800d2 | 2025-07-06 00:31:38+00:00
@kens beat me to it-I too was going to suggest Ken Shirriff's "Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack". The page has a Sinclair Scientific emulator that displays the running, underlying calculator chip instructions.

I bought the Sinclair Scientific in 1974 for a physics lab class in college. It was much less expensive than the TI and HP scientific calculators of the time, but it was painful to use in the lab class. I subsequently changed majors, so I only had to bear with it that first year, but, all these years later, I'm still in awe of what Sinclair achieved with it though!
by tombert | 2025-07-06 00:31:52+00:00
I think a lot of people, for reasons that will forever remain unclear to me, didn’t genuinely think Trump would do any of the stuff he said he would do. I heard a lot of people say that he wasn’t serious about tariffs for example.

But I don’t want to pretend I understand what compels people to vote for people that I don’t like. Maybe the majority of people really did want to have RFK Jr. in charge all of our health stuff.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-06 00:32:10+00:00
There has been plenty of speculation about this for a couple months right now - especially given the infighting in the CMC. I have some speculation around it as well, but it is essentially unsubstantiated and I have very mixed feelings about some of sources.

We will see what happens in the Fourth Plenum. If Xi resigns from one of his positions during the Plenum, then that is indication of a changing of the winds. If not, then this purging within the CMC and MOFA can be viewed as cleaning ship and solidifying primacy before potentially offensive action.

That said, this is all Beidaihe-ology until then.

At this point, the only outside commentator I trust to analyze Chinese elite politics is probably Nakazawa Katsuji at Nikkei [0]

[0] - https://www.nikkei.com/topics/17101600
by temporallobe | 2025-07-06 00:32:45+00:00
My car’s audio system seems to go out of its way to bury sound settings (bass, treble, balance, etc.) in as many nested menus as possible. And when you do finally find the settings, they are greyed out. I had to actually watch a youtube video to figure out that they are configured at the individual source level. Super confusing and unintuitive, and especially egregious considering that this is in a vehicle you are DRIVING - confusion, distraction, and frustration are the last things you want drivers to experience.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-06 00:33:42+00:00
> Kent himself argued otherwise here[1].

I said "main" for a reason. The current users that need to recover data are a part of the picture, but they're a few trees out of the forest.

"Please tell that to the users who lost data." is not arguing against what I said.

> And even if that were the case, there's no need to take a stand on trying to get it into the kernel. If he gets booted out of the kernel tree, then the end result is the same for his users: they have to compile their own kernel. So it makes no sense to push this so hard.

He's not giving an ultimatum here. The goal is to figure out something that works for everyone.
by 1shooner | 2025-07-06 00:34:15+00:00
I consider myself an introvert, and this article seems like an impossible anxiety spiral-inducing checklist.

>Don’t waste their time with “Great party.” Say something more vivid. “The lighting is perfect.”

What? I think someone needing this level of instruction would be better served by basic mindfulness and small, manageable exercises in active listening or empathetic dialog, rather than a grab bag of non-contextual tips like this.
by bpye | 2025-07-06 00:34:27+00:00
I'm still running my gen8 microserver - it was <200 GBP when I bought it something like 9 years ago, and I still haven't found anything worth replacing it with.

With modern HDDs I can however saturate the SATA controller, whilst it has 2x SATA 3 and 2x SATA 2, I can only achieve ~5-6 Gbps cumulative, not the 18Gbps you would expect. It's certainly not a disaster, but does mean writes especially are slower than expected (2x write amplification).
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-07-06 00:35:24+00:00
2024 voting-eligible population: 244.6M

Voted for Trump: 77.3M

Voted for Harris: 75M

Voted for other candidates: 2.6M

Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M

Unfortunately, the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.
by tombert | 2025-07-06 00:37:01+00:00
> Just the other day, RFK’s top vaccine nutjob (new chair of ACIP, Robert Malone) tweeted something to suggest that the Amish’s existence despite waves of infectious disease and no vaccination is evidence that vaccines aren’t necessary.

What a strange argument. Did anyone suggest that people would stop existing if there weren’t vaccines? We haven’t had vaccines throughout most of human history.

People just (correctly) think that not being vaccinated will lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths.
by maxbond | 2025-07-06 00:37:22+00:00
I knew someone who started a farm of Spirulina (a microscopic, edible algae [cyanobacteria]) in a very different climate from where the seed culture originated. They did really poorly for the first few days, they were the wrong color and the culture wasn't growing. But eventually they adapted to the new climate and bounced back, and he was able to scale the culture up to multiple greenhouses and harvest it on an ongoing basis.
by giardini | 2025-07-06 00:37:27+00:00
babymetal states "the text rolled up to the top and bottom edges of the pages as well as the sides. As a bookseller this was a big red flag for me: either the book was poorly self-published, or no-one big (and sometimes reputable) wanted to publish it, and it looked like they were trying to save paper and ink."

Also babymetal admits he didn't read the book. How can anything he says of the book be trusted?

I read the book. Actually there are two stories in the book, the first mostly about Fauci and COVID-19 and the second about Fauci and AIDS. FWIW I'm glad RFK is in power now.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-06 00:38:45+00:00
I think you picked a hypothesis and assumed it was true and ran with it.

Consider that all the following are true (despite their contradictions):

- "Bloated busy interface" is a common complaint of some of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. people here share a blank vscode canvas and complain about how busy the interface is compared to their 0-interface vim setup.

- flat design and minimalism are/were in fashion (have been for few years now).

- /r/unixporn and most linux people online who "rice" their linux distros do so by hiding all controls from apps because minimalism is in fashion

- Have you tried GNOME recently?

Minimal interface where most controls are hidden is a certain look that some people prefer. Plenty of people prefer to "hide the noise" and if they need something, they are perfectly capable to look it up. It's not like digging in manuals is the only option
by bGl2YW5j | 2025-07-06 00:39:27+00:00
I don’t think the problem is “how to optimise tool selection for the LLM”. I think the real problem is using an LLM to do tool selection at all. This is control flow and I believe should be handled with hardcoded rules and/separation of concerns.

If LLMs could handle determinism better, I’d say having a single chat-based entrypoint into a plethora of services makes sense. But as they stand, it doesn’t make sense. Simpler control flow and constraining the number and type of downstream services that sit behind a single interface I think is the way to go.

That said, I agree we should keep the ambition to move to the one size fits all approach.