MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-15 08:03:08+00:00
I don't think it's that crazy for the language reform to make it through, seeing as the entire political system has been reshaped into a pseudo-American democratic structure for instance. With the emperor going out of fashion and the governance of the country being overthrown, I think it would be the perfect moment for other cultural shifts as well. Had the timing coincided with the introduction of computers (which famously struggled with languages like Chinese and most Japanese) a few decades later, I think the plan would've succeeded.

Most of Europe inherited the Latin script from Christianity, which was spread with less than peaceful means. It took more than a few short years, but it certainly altered culture.
by nullc | 2025-08-15 08:03:31+00:00
I think the multiple clipboards are great. My only regret is that there aren't more of them. Three would be excellent. But having multiple is very good, both for the pattern of "paste one thing over and over again, interspersed with copying and pasting other things" and for the pattern of "copy 1; copy 2; paste 1; paste 2" or "copy1; copy2; paste 2; paste 1" with only a single application switch.

When firefox screwed up the address bar so that the left-click/middle-click didn't work right was easily the worst step down in computing for me in modern history. Initially you could recover the non-chrome like behavior with a preference but they eventually broke that too.
by omgtehlion | 2025-08-15 08:04:06+00:00
> so it’s hard to make the case for keeping it.

How about “not breaking stuff” which can not be upgraded? Like old sites/services without active maintainers but still useful. Or hardware appliances that still work, but will not get firmware update ever. Let alone rss feeds, brought up multiple times in the linked thread.

Looks like builtin polyfill (similar to pdfjs in FF) would do. But google seems to be reluctant doing it.
by klausa | 2025-08-15 08:04:51+00:00
Not the question you asked; but something that actually surprised me, as someone who has taken multiple language tests in the EU:

The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels.

You don't need to speak a single word, nor write a single character to pass the exam, it's all single-choice answers.

AFAICT, the equivalent exams for Chinese and Koreans do include writing, at least on the higher levels; but still don't have a speaking portion.
by phatskat | 2025-08-15 08:04:54+00:00
It always blows me away how, historically, actual two-state progress has been intentionally hindered. There was a point way back when at least some meaningful work towards peace was at hand, but when Kissinger got wind of it and he wasn’t the one who could get the credit, he sabotaged the whole thing.

Fast forward to Benji saying that the best way to ensure funding for Israel is by having a strong Hamas, and things never change.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-15 08:06:41+00:00
A regular "chatting" LLM is a document generator incrementally extending a story about a conversation between a human and a robot... And through that lens, I've been thinking "chain of thought" seems like basically the same thing but with a film noir styling-twist.

The LLM is trained to include an additional layer of "unspoken" text in the document, a source of continuity which substitutes for how the LLM has no other memories or goals to draw from.

"The capital of Assyria? Those were dangerous questions, especially in this kind of town. But rent was due, and the bottle in my drawer was empty. I took the case."
by johnvanommen | 2025-08-15 08:07:39+00:00
> They also often time have versions of old movies and shows that have been modified due to silly things like license agreements on music expiring! I have felt gaslighted when I rewatch and old movie and some scene isn’t how I remember.

1990s Beavis and Butthead episodes seem completely bizarre/pointless without the music.

When Mike Judge started releasing new episodes back in 2012-ish, it's noticeable how he mostly avoided music clips and focused on satirizing reality shows that were on the same network (MTV.) I assume this was to avoid licensing nightmares.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-15 08:07:44+00:00
> A bigger UX problem (on Linux) imo is the multitude of clipboards, we have x11, vim... Those can be synchronized or not, they manifest different behaviors

It's funny though because I'm so used to it I actually have it as part of my workflow and use the different clipboards differently. If I have to use a non-Linux machine for a while I suddenly feel crippled by only having the one.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-15 08:07:50+00:00
The us spends more money on healthcare per capita than any European nation (including those with tax funded healthcare). Yet the very same drugs are cheap over here. The very same drugs Europe produce, put in airplanes and fly over to the US for the US market.

Are Europe just better at R&D then? Does Europe have more lax medication regulations? That is what your argument would suggest. But i somehow doubt that.

Looking at the share prices of the top medical industry companies in the US, from insurance to medicine production to private hospitals, it would seem there is plenty of margin going elsewhere for some reason.

Are we also ignoring that a lot of medical R&D is funded by grants and government investment? Its odd how the pharmaceutical companies are sooooo strained for money from the (partially already paid for) R&D that they have to take out a 600% margin on the product to cover it for decades after the drug has been on the market.

But it's clearly the famously harsh American bureaucracy that cripples the US market compared to Europe and Asia (the very same bureaucracy that created a self inflicted opioid crisis by being overly swayed by pharmaceutical lobbying)
by tempodox | 2025-08-15 08:08:35+00:00
Theories:

- Those weapons get field-tested in a real-life (or rather, real-death) scenario. Kids always want to play with their newest toys. The weakest of the weak also have no lobby and no(?) way to fight back.

- “We kill them all before 0.001% of them could become suicide bombers”. Has the additional dubious “benefit” of being merely incompetence, not malice (/s).
by aikinai | 2025-08-15 08:08:38+00:00
It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese.

They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-15 08:09:26+00:00
Three questions:

(1) If an author is named Vladimir, would the initial be "В" or "Вл"?

Usual English practice is to do initials purely by spelling. So Sharon Stone would be reduced to S. Stone, not Sh. Stone, even though no S-sound is present in the name.

(This is also the Chinese practice - Shanghai gets abbreviated SH, which feels appropriate until you realize that it's S for shang, H for hai.)

(2) How is Перро pronounced? Would that correspond better to Perrault or Pierrault?

(3) Why is Darwin "transliterated" with в rather than у?
by bayindirh | 2025-08-15 08:09:43+00:00
> The GPL doesn't mandate public disclosure of code, just offering code to your users...

That's the theory, and it's correct. We have discussed this with you before. However, a SaaS running AGPL code has to put it "out there", or mail to any user as soon as they register, so in this case it's moot.

Considering many GPL software is also distributed over the net, the code has to be "out there", again, in practice. Unless you are RedHat and selling the GPL software in question, which is perfectly fine.

> The external pressure thing applies to the permissive licenses too,...

Finding the copyright notices buried at the bottom of a text with the length of a Hollywood movie end-credits roll which is in turn buried 5 levels of menus is practically impossible if you don't try it. I can argue that GPL's condition is "in your face" when compared to permissive licenses.

Also, who will dig and find that I have used a specific library if I conveniently forgot to add its copyright line to this already long wall of text? "What will they do? Sue me from their mother's basement?" the companies think 99% of the time.

busybox has a tool to detect their inclusion in an embedded image, but that's GPL to begin with.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-08-15 08:09:56+00:00
The Germans weren't a stateless people who had lived under an oppressive foreign military occupation for over half a century, after getting kicked out of their homeland. They were a major world power that decided to launch a war of conquest against the rest of Europe and beyond.

These are more not remotely similar situations.

What is the ideology that is even supposed to be eliminated in Gaza? Killing people who are oppressed is not going to make them start loving their oppressors.
by danielbln | 2025-08-15 08:10:06+00:00
I'm not sure what any of what you just wrote has to do with LLMs. If you use LLMs to rubber duck or write tests/code, then all of the things you mentioned should still apply. That last logical leap, the fact that _you_ wouldn't trust LLM to touch your code means that people who do aren't at the same level as you is a fallacy.
by koiueo | 2025-08-15 08:10:46+00:00
Totally agree on ANSI escape. But then to me windows manipulations is also an entirely different "layer".

Conceptually copy/paste could fit into that layer. It's like cross-window interface.

But what do we do with ctrl-z and ctrl-a, which are strictly text manipulation?

That's why Alt, IMO, would be a better modifier. And it all organizes into layers like this:

Ctrl - common ctrl sequences (like on Mac today)

Alt - app layer (still works for terminal UIs btw, even today)

Win - os/de/win layer
by archaeans | 2025-08-15 08:11:57+00:00
And the often missed caveat is that we should only care about whether the software does what it is supposed to do.

Under that light, LLMs are just buggy and have been for years. Where is the LLM that does what it says it should do? "Hallucination" and "do they reason" are distractions. They fail. They're buggy.
by doix | 2025-08-15 08:12:27+00:00
Which one do you recommend? I tried multiple when switching, but none of them quite worked right. I want:

* Two seperate buffers

* Separate shortcuts to paste them

* Selecting text _anywhere_ automatically puts it into the second buffer

I couldn't find anything that did this, so I just gave up and deal with it on my work laptop (and occasionally whine about it on HN when it comes up)
by phatskat | 2025-08-15 08:12:34+00:00
> That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money.

They know they can’t drown out the problems, nor do most of them want to. The privatization of government work is just a dog and pony show that lets rich assholes give taxpayer money to other rich assholes.

Not to say the left doesn’t do this too (assuming the US political speak, “left” referring to democrats is really just barely right of center), but part of the conservative playbook has always been to rip apart the federal government (or the parts that they don’t like, such as providing social services). The easiest way is to tank a group by hiring a private company to do a shit job and then saying “see how bad they did? We should just axe food stamps.”
by exe34 | 2025-08-15 08:12:40+00:00
> which is largely unrelated to the mortgage costs

It's not unrelated - if the costs go up, they won't operate at a loss. They might sell to somebody who can buy it outright - but then many won't and just raise the rent. And then others can claim "muh market rates" to match them.

There's a shortage of housing in most places with jobs, so they have a large queue of people willing to pay through the nose. What are they going to do - live under a bridge? They will cut out most other expenses before they give up on housing.

Only two of those points weren't bullshit: the ability to up and move in the next year or the concern that you may be about to lose your job in the next few months. Anything else makes buying cheaper in the long run.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-15 08:13:23+00:00
You dove a little deeper than I intended. In short:

- Companies use Free or Open Source Software: That's great. - Companies give feedback (bug reports, RFCs, developer time etc.) to said projects: That's awesome. - Companies wait for the developer and have no hard feelings when their requests are done for free, or rejected because it doesn't fit developer's vision: That's the way it should be. - Companies pressure/threaten developer for features, timeline, requests and expect the developer to do as they say for free: Hell no!.

If they see eye to eye and let the developer be, it can be done for free. If they try to treat said developer as their employer who works for internet cookie points, now we have a problem.
by Mentlo | 2025-08-15 08:13:30+00:00
This is a valid hypothesis, and had this software been something you could update in the background, a valid experiment to run and see whether users like it.

But when it's embedded software on physical devices where the business will have to incur cost in order to ship and hit those users, I can absolutely see why management would do the same thing as what all of the competitors are doing.
by gyomu | 2025-08-15 08:14:28+00:00
The OP1 is a genius piece of design tbh. It is very flexible and powerful for its small size, and devices in its category were very rare when it first came out (it helped define the modern incarnation of that category).

It was pricy but still under the $1k mark - pretty standard for a piece of consumer creative gear.

The design made it extremely approachable, which means a ton of techie people who wouldn't be into music gear otherwise still wanted to grab one just to try it and who knows, maybe it'd turn them into musicians.

So yeah, fantastically designed piece of kit. Lots of respect to TE for having brought that into the world.

I think a lot of the frustration directed at TE more recently is due to the fact that that base equation around price/features/quality of the product, which was very good for the OP1, has only gotten worse for later products.

And the OP1 itself, despite being an almost 15 year old product, has gone up in price A LOT (and the 1f upgrades don't justify the bump).
by miki_oomiri | 2025-08-15 08:14:28+00:00
The quality of the github comments: accusing developers of being dictators, being overly emotionally, the hate towards people who actually made the web happen (Smaug, Anne, Emilo, etc…), the "why not just…" or "hire more people" remarks...

For a browser developer, this is depressing. I've worked on Gecko for 10+ years, and we were constantly called names for absolutely any change we would do. Insulted and accused of the worst intentions.

I see it hasn't changed.
by user____name | 2025-08-15 08:14:36+00:00
The problem with browsers is that they rely on other standards. If a browser needs to maintain backward compatibility and requires an evolving standard that ALSO requires backward compatibility, this acts like a multiplier on implementation complexity. This also means it becomes increasingly difficult to spin up a new browser engine, and the fewer of those there are, the easier it is for the big ones to just add what they want and have it become a standard, reinforcing the issue.
by UmGuys | 2025-08-15 08:15:01+00:00
It's marketing. Usually free speech absolutists just want to be able to say bigoted things. Often, they're simply racist.

People are very volatile and polarized because of their social media's marketing. GOP marketing is insane. They're marketed as fiscally responsible, good for the economy, conservative, pro free speech, pro liberty, capitalist, and recently anti-war. And somehow people believe that despite reality. I can't grasp how anyone could ever support someone so awful as Trump. The man is a pathetic spoiled rotten bully in clown face who can barely string together a coherent sentence. Not to mention all the (sex) crime.
by bobthepanda | 2025-08-15 08:15:24+00:00
One of the major differences with the American system is that the Japanese government only has twelve types of zones that local governments are allowed to use. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

American zoning codes get really complicated really fast, particularly around what businesses are considered low-nuisance in what neighborhood. Especially the moment people start getting worried about parking. Particularly home businesses, like daycare, hair salons, even the humble lemonade stand can all be zoned down to a single hair.
by npteljes | 2025-08-15 08:15:30+00:00
I completely agree. If only Windows also had WinKey+C/X/V as shortcuts, it would make so much sense in other Windows software too. Same with ALT+TAB and ALT+F4, CTRL+SPACE etc, these should also be handled by the win key. Then the Win/Cmd key would be assigned to OS functions, and the rest of them could be assigned to application functions, providing a clean separation.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-08-15 08:15:59+00:00
`Meta + .` opens an emoji picker on KDE. And you can type unicode with `Control + Shift + u`.

I've been meaning to look into this, but what I'd really love is a composer which can insert any text, emoji, or unicode character based on whatever alias I give it. I'd probably leverage more of unicode if I should hit a shortcut and type wd to summon a wave dash (〜).
by Propelloni | 2025-08-15 08:17:37+00:00
> We already had a universal copy/paste in Linux: Mark with left mouse button, paste with middle button.

We still have it, at least for text. I just copied the little quote above with left mouse highlight, middle mouse paste while writing this comment in Firefox in Gnome 48 with Wayland. I use it a lot on the terminal.

What doesn't appear to work anymore (at least in Wayland) is copying a selection as a bitmap into a bitmap editor, ie. paint. Only a few decades ago that used to work, I remember that.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-15 08:18:19+00:00
We should make insurance companies not allowed to negotiate special pricing for drugs and hospital expenses, and make everyone pay the same regardless if it goes through insurance, which insurer, or out-of-pocket.

Then the cost intensive flips. Insurer wants cheap healthcare and drugs so that they won't have to pay as much. This was part of what the original "affordable care act" tried to do, but was ultimately removed from the version that was passed.

It's also how insurance works by default almost everywhere except in the US.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-08-15 08:19:22+00:00
> It won‘t but I don‘t get why.

Remember that Erlang was open-sourced as a last-ditch effort to save it, in 1998, after Ericsson internally switched to C++ and banned using Erlang on new products.

The sad fact is that the software industry as a whole relies heavily on mainstream languages, and not on educating your engineers to leverage the strengths of your specialty language. There's rationale to that, in that it costs a ton to maintain your own platform when you can just leverage a more public one. As a random example, why spend a ton to try and optimize your compiled language when you can... just use GCC (or clang nowadays). See: ongoing complaints about the performance of Go.

Erlang's silver lining is it found some measure of success outside of Ericsson, which led it to being unbanned there (and the banner to being "promoted sideways")
by atoav | 2025-08-15 08:20:35+00:00
Well yes and no. If I give people a 16 mm camera, a roll of film and a black sack, the likelyhood they will make a positive learning experience is limited. That means some theory is needed first, especially if you have varying levels of knowledge and confidence within a group.

That doesn't mean theory has to be boring or abstract. It just means some things need explaining and some people profit from having had them explain to them. In some cases this may even be a legal requirement, letting a student use a table saw or a turning machine without explaining the ways in which it may kill them can land you in jail.
by globular-toast | 2025-08-15 08:21:24+00:00
How would you be copy/pasting in a terminal emulator without a mouse?

Any time I've seen someone do it it's: mouse to select, keyboard to copy, mouse to select other place, keyboard to paste.

I cringe every time because it could be just: mouse to select, mouse to select and paste it in the other place with one click.
by 1dom | 2025-08-15 08:21:41+00:00
I think this is a fair and valuable comment. Only part I think could be more nuanced is:

> The fact that I wouldn't trust any LLM to touch any of my code in those real world cases makes me think that most people who are touting them are not, in fact, writing code at the same level or doing the same job I do. Or understand it very well.

I agree with this specifically for agentic LLM use. However, I've personally increased my code speed and quality with LLMs for sure using purely local models as a really fancy auto complete for 1 or 2 lines at a time.

The rest of your comment is good, bit the last paragraph to me reads like someone inexperienced with LLMs looking to find excuses to justify not being productive with them, when others clearly are. Sorry.
by bfg_9k | 2025-08-15 08:24:06+00:00
I think you'll find if you spend a quick second googling, that Pharma is by and large the biggest spenders of money on R&D out of every major industry as a % of revenue.

https://www.strategy-business.com/feature/What-the-Top-Innov...

And what you're failing to account for, is all of the failed research that they do that goes nowhere. Yes, they charge big margins on old drugs, however what do you think happens to all the money that gets spent on drug research that doesnt do anything?
by UmGuys | 2025-08-15 08:24:24+00:00
The judicial system is a wreck and obviously works for rich people only. This sort of obstruction of every day life by people seeking to destroy democracy should be filtered out of the system otherwise they can get their way or keep filing lawsuits. How? It starts with education which is why they're attacking it.

Especially with the new Tr*mpian ethos of rules for thee, not for me.
by bawolff | 2025-08-15 08:24:26+00:00
The wikipedia api has an option where you can add an xslt stylesheet to its output.

When i was young and stupid and learning to program i made an xslt stylesheet to extract dictionary definitions from the api.

It was meant to be combined with a bookmarklet that when you double clicked a word opened it in an iframe.

It was terrible, but i was so proud of it at the time.

It seems like it stopped working at some point, i guess browsers are probably more strict with mime types now. https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=parse&format=xml&...

Sorry if this is too off topic, it just triggered some memories
by pjmlp | 2025-08-15 08:24:34+00:00
Delphi is still around, and I really don't see what cool stuf that would be.

Other than the expectation JetBrains would make it cheaper than Embarcadero.

Well they could do a better Delphi with Kotlin Native, still waiting for it actually happen, instead of relying on Android and JVM, or trying to compete with React Native on iOS.

Prove that they actually don't need Java, as many Kotlin advocates parrot all the time.
by CalRobert | 2025-08-15 08:24:58+00:00
Arguably it would make more sense for drivers to be wearing helmets considering how bad head trauma can be in a car crash.

My kids don't wear helmets when cycling, but we live in the Netherlands and they ride pretty slowly. I do wear a helmet when I bike on anything but the stationfiets, but I also like to ride fast (and I think a helmet saved my life as a teenager)