MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaza | 2025-08-26 03:28:55+00:00
iOS market share: 56% in Australia (where I live) [1]; 58% in United States [2]; 47% in UK [3]; 64% in Japan [4]; 60% in Canada [5]; 55% in Denmark [6]; 54% in Switzerland [7]; 55% in Sweden [8].

Yes, I've cherry picked from the minority of countries with near or over half iOS market share. But, they're all high GDP countries with a very valuable customer base. Apple and Google care about these markets, they don't care about global market share.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/australia [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan [5] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/canada [6] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/denmark [7] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/switzerlan... [8] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden
by al_borland | 2025-08-26 03:29:14+00:00
At one point I had 2 accounts. One was on my phone and one was on my laptop. I was in the process of moving to the one on my laptop (I know migration exists, but I'm weird and didn't want to do that). Anyway, I was on my phone and saw a post with my one account from some other federated server. When I went on my laptop I couldn't find it. I figured it might just need to propagate. I waited days... nothing. I've seen behavior like this a lot. You're not seeing a problem, because you can't know what you don't see.

If you're just scrolling a bunch of random stuff, you might not care. But what if we want this to be like old Facebook, where you follow people you actually know? Am I going to miss wedding and birth announcements? Party invitations? Other important life updates from friends and family?

You could criticize the modern algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook for not showing some of these things as well, if they don't think it will engage you enough, but at least the post is there and available. When I ran into that issue between my 2 accounts, I looked for the post specifically, I had the ID... it simply wasn't available to me.
by nxobject | 2025-08-26 03:29:37+00:00
I'm finding it a little harder to visualize rotation numbers, though. My best attempt at a description is to imagine continuously tracing the curve '\gamma(t)', going through every point that it passes through, while looking top-down on it. At every point on the curve, the vector field 'v' produces a vector 'v(\gamma(t))' that begins at '\gamma(t)', lies flat on the sphere (i.e. is tangent to the sphere), and is of nonzero length. (The last assumption is the assumption we are making for contradiction).

The idea is that, as we trace the curve '\gamma(t)', we are constantly measuring the angle - with a positive-negative sign - between (a) the tangent vector 'v(\gamma(t))', and (b) the current velocity vector of '\gamma(t)'. As we trace the curve, if this angle rotates counterclockwise 0...90...180...270...0, we add "1" to our rotation number, and we subtract one for a clockwise rotation 0...-90...-180...-270...0.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-26 03:30:33+00:00
That's interesting, thanks for drawing my attention to it. I would need to go spelunking around to see how they reference an .apk from the Play Store, which I got the impression used crazypants gRPC shenanigans for building download URLs

---

I went sniffing around and while I didn't go through all tens of pages, it sure does seem like that's only used for non-Play Store style verification, and thus my assertion seems to stand https://gitlab.com/search?group_id=28397&project_id=36528&se...
by lettergram | 2025-08-26 03:31:28+00:00
One crazy thing you can do with color spaces is dramatically improve detection algorithms and store massive data.

https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/

Think of it this way, a QR code is binary. If you modify color spaces correctly you can get 6 bits (or more) per pixel. In addition, you can improve the detection at distance, localization for robots, and speed (120 fps).

Done this to great effect previously and you can do a lot of awesome things with it. Pretty much the easiest hack in computer vision.
by troad | 2025-08-26 03:32:25+00:00
> The debate about MAID is another example where a lot of otherwise rational people fall prey to misguided sloganeering.

This is the same level of argument as saying that people who vote for the other guys must have been tricked by FOX News / MSNBC / Russia / Tik Tok / transtrenders / tradwives, and if only they truly understood their actual self-interest they would agree with you on all things. It's a bad style of argumentation, albeit very popular in academia ('why do the poor keep voting wrong?').

There are legitimate reasons to oppose Canada's euthanasia program on its own terms, and it's not surprising the Canadian government has very carefully shielded MAID from any sort of public input or oversight, since it's deeply unlikely it would pass a majority vote in its current form. There is consistent public opposition to euthanasia being available to anyone but late-stage terminally-ill people (and even then, it's divisive at best). There is strong public opposition to euthanasia solely on the grounds of mental health.

More broadly, I think people are increasingly sick of the misuse of the term 'healthcare' (or 'public health') to sneak unpopular or controversial policies past the electorate, and the idea of 'death as healthcare' is probably the most extreme example of this trend. When people cannot express democratic opposition to policies they deeply oppose, don't be surprised if you get pushback and populism.
by medhir | 2025-08-26 03:32:46+00:00
This is a great point. Not sure if it’s possible, would be great if there was some way to reclaim the notion of installing software as a general practice, regardless of whether a computer is “mobile” or “desktop”.

Like people still download software packages from the web on Windows, MacOS, and Linux… right? Maybe hard to grasp for the kids that grew up with tablets with no notion of a file system, idk
by LPisGood | 2025-08-26 03:32:51+00:00
There is no relationship between n and N, of course. N is some fixed constant.

Log(n) is unbounded, yes, but if a Turing machine halts in sub-linear time then there is some length input for which that TM halts before it reads every cell of the input tape. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how the size of the input grows, that TM must halt in constant time. Make sense?
by egberts1 | 2025-08-26 03:33:04+00:00
I bought my first Closed Captioning device in 1976. PBS stations in selected cities were using NTSC Line 21/22 for all their captioning and one-way tele-texbtbox needs (CC2/TEXT).

Also Sacramento NBC 3 started delivering closed-captioning in 1977.

FCC didn’t standardize until 1980.

I still have the decoder box.
by dang | 2025-08-26 03:33:09+00:00
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. The other user did it as well, but I have the impression that your violations were somewhat worse.

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-26 03:33:10+00:00
I've long held that this is one of those areas that if Apple really cared about privacy they'd disallow in-app browsers. They'd add the rule that an app that is not a browser must list in its manifest 10 or fewer domains that its webview is allowed to access. All the rest would be denied.

This would mean many apps like the Facebook App, Messenger, Google Maps, GMail, Line, WeChat, Slack, Discord, etc would effectively not be allowed to open links to the entire internet but only domains directly related to the app and would be a privacy win.

They'd have to have some wording that would have to distinguish between a browser app and a non-browser app but i'd argue that's probably not that hard to do.
by skydhash | 2025-08-26 03:33:20+00:00
It seems that my computer usage is mild. I use ffmpeg to convert albums (which I don't usually do because I download everything in flac), and I've got a couple of convert.sh lying around. My most advanced usage of ffmpeg was enabling streaming in aac for gonic (you can't do gapless with mp3 and opus wouldn't play).

This just to say anything that is more than a couple flag usually find themselves as alias, function, or shell script.

> I could look up all those flags, but I haven't. But the command did seem to work! I'm sure the HN crowd can critique. =)

Not critique. But just highlighting that ffmpeg is a power tool. Most of the intricacies are codecs and audio/video knowledge. Not ffmpeg itself. You have stuff like containers, video codecs, audio codecs, audio channels, media tracks, resolution, bitrate, quality (lossy), compression rate (lossless),... and a bunc h of manipulation depending on the media type.

Just for you to know, H.264 (the standard) is one of the most supported video format, playable on anything not from the stone age, it's successor is H.265 (which restarted the license controversy) which is mostly used for 4k media on the sea. Then you need a container (MP4) that can contains both the video and audio track. MKV is another type of container. yuv420 is how color is represented (Chroma subsampling), much better than RGB when you want free compression. faststart is to be able to start playing the media as soon as possible, instead of having to download a good part of the file. I think PDF have something like that too.
by danielheath | 2025-08-26 03:33:44+00:00
I've spent a bunch of time in this space, and there are some really interesting options (SSB, matrix, etc).

They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.

In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.
by dang | 2025-08-26 03:35:42+00:00
I just responded to you in a different thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021981), but you broke the site guidelines egregiously here as well. Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, so please stop doing that, and please also don't post in the flamewar style generally.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-26 03:36:00+00:00
It's worth noting that they are using bluesky feeds and moderation services/labellers. They just have written their own rust implementations for the tools/services and their frontend (which is largely a fork of bluesky-social upstream) changes the default experience/settings.

So there's still full interop. You can use the blacksky feed and labeller from other bluesky apps and likewise for the reverse.

TLDR: They wrote their own implementation of the tooling in their language of choice (Rust instead of Go) and their version of the "app"/frontend sets the defaults for their community.
by atomicfiredoll | 2025-08-26 03:36:17+00:00
Looking at what's been going on in the E.U. vs. the U.S., it seems pretty clear that one of the only things companies this big, with this much control over the markets fear is regulation.

Maybe people live in a country where adding new regulations is difficult at the moment. In that case, push at for it at the state or province level. Push for it wherever you can. Suddenly these companies have to figure out how to work around 50 different state level laws? Painful. Good. Make it hurt to be evil.

People need to come together and push for regulatory roadblocks to things like this at every level. I think that's part of how you keep control of your own property and stand up against it.
by linguae | 2025-08-26 03:37:05+00:00
This is exactly how I feel as someone who enjoyed the Mac during the Jobs era of Mac OS X and has been quite disappointed with the state of personal computing since then. The Apple experience is not the same today as it was during the Snow Leopard days. It seems to me that the old guard at Apple is gone and that the people making the key decisions at Apple in the past decade or so are taking Apple in a different direction than what I would like, as someone who is a big fan of both the classic Macintosh and Jobs-era Mac OS X.

What I'd give for a modern OS with an interface designed with the principles of people like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in mind, combined with rock-solid underpinnings taking advantage of the best that OS research had to offer in the past 30 years. In other words, I want an updated Smalltalk/Lisp machine with a classic Mac interface brought up to 2020s standards regarding networking, security, and other concerns.

Modern macOS to me is a disappointment compared to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and don't get me started on the lack of user-upgradeable RAM in modern Macs. However, Windows 10/11 is even more disappointing to me compared to Windows 7, which was a nice OS and is my second favorite version of Windows, my favorite being Windows 2000. Desktop Linux seems to be in an eternal Sisyphean cycle of churn.

So, today I begrudgingly use Windows on my personal machines and macOS on my work-issued MacBook Pro, longing for a compelling alternative to appear one day that pushes personal computing forward.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-26 03:37:08+00:00
>An eventual output of a calculation has to be a finite result, but the concepts that we use to get there are often not.

This is so true but it can be good if you're flexible enough to try it either way.

With massive tables of physical properties officially produced by pages of 32-bit Fortran it really did look like floating-point was ideal at first. Because it worked great.

The algorithm had been stored as a direct mathematical equation, plain as day, exactly as deduced with constants and operations in 32-bit double-precision floating point.

But when the only user-owned computers were still just 8-bit machines, there was no way to reproduce the exact results across the entire table to the same number of significant figures, using floating point.

Since it's a table it is of course not infinite, and a matrix to boot. A matrix of real numbers across an entire working spectrum.

The algorithm takes a set of input values, calculates results as defined, and rounds it off repeatably in the subsequent logic before output, so everyone can get agreement. The software OTOH takes a range of input values and outputs a matrix. And/or retains a matrix in "imaginary" spreadsheet form for later use :)

Every single value in the matrix is a floating-point representation of a real number, but they are rounded off as precisely as possible to the "exact" degree of usefulness, making them functionally all finite values in the end. This took a lot of work from top mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. And as designed, the matrix then carries the algorithm on its own without reference to the fundamental equation.

The solution turned out to involve working backward from the matrix reiteratively until an alternate algorithm was found using only integers for values and operations, up until the final rounding and fixed.point representation at the end. Dramatically unrecognizable algorithm but it worked and only took 0.5 kilobytes of 8-bit Basic code which was a fraction of the original Fortran.

This time the feature that showed up without having to make extra effort was the property of being more precise based directly on increased bitness of the computer, without need for floating-point at all. Of course the Fortran code accomplished this too by the wise use of floating-point but it took a lot bigger iron to do so. And wasn't going to be battery powered any time soon way back then.

>somehwere this finitist foundation disagrees with the results obtained by the standard foundation,

>there's no reason to think the standard foundation is in error.

This is "exactly" how it was. There were disagreements all over the place but they were in further decimal places not representable by the table. The standard was an international standard having carefully agreed-upon accuracy & precision, as defined by the Fortran which really worked and was then written in stone, with any nonmatched output being a notable failure.
by dang | 2025-08-26 03:37:14+00:00
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We've asked you this more than once before, and we eventually have to ban accounts that keep doing this. I don't want to ban you.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by 827a | 2025-08-26 03:37:32+00:00
Personally: the idea that a "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy has always seemed like bulllshit to me. The vast majority of reasoning for why the judiciary makes the decisions it does is because of "precedent". Slippery slope is how the world operates. It surfaces everywhere, and when the slope we're sliding down matters, like this one, we have to fight back with fervor. Google isn't doing this in a vacuum; they're doing this because there's precedent for it, and because all they want is to assert more power over the world.

Google's behavior is utterly and entirely disgusting, unacceptable, despicable, and dishonorable. Everyone who even glances near this decision should feel overwhelming shame. If you have a shred of political power to fight this internally, you are a failure to yourself, your customers, and the world if you choose to stay silent. They'll read comments like these and think "we're right, we're being brave", because they have convinced themselves that there is bravery in wielding overwhelming power against their users.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-26 03:39:06+00:00
When getting to the attention part, I really wish people stop describing it as Key Query Value. There is nothing special about Key or Query or Value in the sense of their implied function in the transformer. The KQV matrices themselves are computed by multiplying the input vector by learned weights, which are arbitrarily random matrices that come together in the end to the correct result. I.e it doesn't matter if you have 26 or 34 for a final result of 12.

The thing that makes transformers work is multi dimensionality in the sense that you are multiplying matricies by matricies instead of computing dot products on vectors. And because matrix multiplication is effectively sums of dot products, you can represent all of the transformer as wide single layer perceptron sequences (albeit with a lot of zeros), but mathematically they would do the same thing.
by ricudis | 2025-08-26 03:39:14+00:00
Before quickly running to dismiss this move, please at least do your research with regards to the situation in the countries mentioned in the article, especially Singapore and Thailand.

Side-loaded malware has been an epidemic in SE Asia, and there are MILLIONS of dollars stolen (mostly from pensioners!) via side-loaded malware disguised as gambling apps - the local population is particularly suspectible to gambling, especially the older generations that are not so tech-savvy.

It's good they decided to do something about it.
by asdefghyk | 2025-08-26 03:40:18+00:00
RE ".... hospitals and journalists are never valid targets ...." According to the laws of warfare they are under certain conditions. Like if enemy fighters and/or their military assets being at the hospital. My GUESS is the camera was recorded spying on Activities of Israel military ..... Is this another example of Hamas sacrificing gaza people? Why not Hamas use a drone to spy on Israel military .....?
by HocusLocus | 2025-08-26 03:40:31+00:00
No, I just know the mechanism (UV/spark) is missing and the air has no odor of it. I know the smell of O3 because an old boss had one of those cracking sparking monsters that projected blue on the ceiling when the light was off. It blew its power supply in short order and no one suffered ill effects, but no one missed it either.
by KingMob | 2025-08-26 03:41:24+00:00
Sort of. In practice, there's a hierarchy of name servers, with authoritative root servers at the top of the tree, organized by ICANN.

You can run your own name server, but there's no good way for large numbers of people to voluntarily opt out of the existing system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
by evanelias | 2025-08-26 03:42:10+00:00
Ugh, sorry to hear that, yeah the whole setup process is just so insanely frustrating. I'm really dreading having to re-validate my identity documents once they expire.

For what it's worth, in my experience it was even worse with EV certs though - all the same steps including removing WHOIS privacy, plus some extra ones like voice phone number validation that had to be repeated every single year.

And then there were extra WTFs with the EV cert expiration being 365 days after an issue date which is several days before you actually receive the hardware token. Or one year they sent the hardware token fairly promptly, but forget to send the password needed to use it, and it took a week to get a response from support etc. Then again, Azure Trusted Signing has similar ridiculousness with billing being based on calendar months, with no proration for your first month even if you started at the end of the month... I mean it's just $10 but it really adds insult to injury after that signup gauntlet.

Anyway, I've heard that if your Azure Trusted Signing process gets stuck in limbo, it can be best to submit a different document, but I'm not sure if there's any alternative permitted for the DUNS step. That's especially annoying because trying to update outdated info with Dun & Bradstreet is problematic in my experience, i.e. their web forms just plain did not function properly.
by tzury | 2025-08-26 03:43:03+00:00
after the fall (literal + season) there will be no more money.

billions were poured over AI companies (and yes, nowadays, if you are writing a stateful loop on top of LLM API you are considered as an AI company).

it will take sometime for new money to arrive into the cycle.

this CTO was simply naively trying to fulfill the Sam Altman (and the likes) promise "the future of AI", "90% of our code is written by AI" and so on.

this is the is on the borderline of scam, sure enough misleading the public.
by derbOac | 2025-08-26 03:43:19+00:00
So where do we complain? (Aside from shaming Google on social media or writing to politicians.)

If I look through Google's contact links, it's all oriented around getting help with a problem rather than letting them know I'm going to move to something else if they go through with this. (And yes, even if Apple has the same types of restrictions on app store, if a more open alternative OS didn't work out for me, I'd move to them to punish the one dropping freedom of use.)
by skydhash | 2025-08-26 03:43:45+00:00
> I guess the killer app (for AI coding) will be a framework to successfully structure projects in appropriately sized complexity morsels LLMs can efficiently chew through.

AI is a step too late. We already have a solution. They are called SDKs and Framewoks. Where the few things left is the business logic which you'll gather in meeting. The coding is mostly tabbing (for completion), copy pasting (you already have something 80% similar), and refactoring (a new integration is needed, and the static configuration isn't going to cut it).

A lot of the coding work is hunting down bugs (because you assumed instead of knowing) and moving things around in a way that won't make the whole thing crashes.
by Guvante | 2025-08-26 03:43:54+00:00
Him making an anti consumption policy would fall under the "broken clock is right twice a day" situation.

Arbitrary policies can be found to align with arbitrary ones if you inspect on a different metric than is used to create them.

In this case I would assume from what has been released isolation via destabilization is the goal. (Not major destabilization mind you just "ruffling feathers" enough that we naturally pull away)

The fact that destabilization results in reduced consumption is a coincidence.