MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by topspin | 2025-09-18 18:19:39+00:00
> For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.

It has. I believe this is a consequence of the 4.x debacle 18 years ago. KDE was doing great in the 3.x release, capturing a lot of users, and then everything went sideways with 4.x.

They recovered: by the later releases of 4.x most of the problems were fixed and 4.x was entirely livable. The KDE developers learned a hard lesson and have been very conservative since then. Since the release of Plasma (5.x) in 2014, KDE hasn't self-inflicted any great regressions or misfeatures, and now there is 10+ years of "polish."

It is very nice.

I too have used the "Window Rules" mentioned in the blog post. Very useful for game development where you want certain windows to appear at precise locations on different displays every time, day after day, for years. KDE just gives you features like this, whereas this is considered unnecessary elsewhere.
by gangtao | 2025-09-18 18:19:54+00:00
Thanks for sharing, ocaml is an interesting language which I think has it's pros and cons

Pros:

1. High Performance with solid safety guarantees

2. Greatly improve developer productivity through advanced type features

3. Exceptional reliability for mission-critical systems

while I also have some concerns about it as well

Cons:

1. Steep learning curve with significant paradigm friction

2. Constrained ecosystem and limited career opportunities

I know like Kevin Kelly is a fan of such kind language like Lisp he mentioned in his book, out of control, which is my favorite one, but still, I dont like learning another new languages, yes, I am very lazy!
by gopher_space | 2025-09-18 18:20:01+00:00
> Go's error handling is boring in a bad way. Manually clicking through screens again and again because you failed to write UI tests is boring in a bad way.

Go's error handling is useful if your system needs to be correct more than it needs to be available, and you should be manually clicking through screens even if you wrote UI tests.

Looking at why something is boring and who it's boring for can be helpful, especially in a team setting. It's entirely possible to automate away a bottleneck that exists for a good reason while sitting across from someone who'd love to handle the issue correctly.
by jasonpeacock | 2025-09-18 18:20:08+00:00
This is why I de-Alexa'd my house.

I was fully invested in Alexa & Echo devices to have a voice-activated computer agent in every room, but each new "feature" was launched enabled-by-default, and every interaction started including "follup-up" prompts....which is all just ads.

I know that such devices are another sales channel (funnel?), but when you compromise the customer experience in the name of increasing sales that's a failure of the product.

The Kindle doesn't inject ads into the books you're reading because it's a successful product that already drives increased book sales by good at what it does.

There's an ad-supported Kindle, but that's opt-in for a discounted device price, and the ads are non-intrusive while reading a book - unlike Alexa/Echo where the ads get in the way of using the product :(
by saberience | 2025-09-18 18:20:29+00:00
As a really long term C# engineer, I feel quite strongly that C# has become a harder and harder language over time, with a massive over abundance of different ways of doing the same thing, tons of new syntactic sugar, so 5 different devs can write five different ways of doing the same thing, even if it's a really simple thing!

At this point, even though I've been doing .net since version 2, I get confused with what null checks I should be doing and what is the new "right" and best syntax. It's kind of becoming a huge fucking mess, in my opinion anyway.

If you want a kind of proof of this, see this documentation which requires 1000s of words to try and explain how to do null/nullable: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-ref...

Do you think most C# devs really understand and follow this entire (complex and verbose) article?
by mixmastamyk | 2025-09-18 18:20:50+00:00
- Four, no really four ways to copy...

- Change encoding? I have never changed the encoding of my terminal, not once since first using a computer, circa 1982. UTF8-FTW.

- Adjust scrollback, on the context menu?

- If you hide the toolbar/menu I believe it adds the main menu to the context menu. And that is where the majority of the hundred options live. And at the end, where a Properties or Preferences entry should live.

- Last but not least, no "New Tab" entry, which is the thing I use it for 90% of the time.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-18 18:20:54+00:00
The article discusses the lynx, but cites the protected status of the European wildcat. Search for "Felis silvestris" in the article. (It's hard to find sources in English for Polish practices, so I'm relying on English sources citing those sources.)

Unlike cats, domestic dogs have been bred for specific tasks, so they do have enough differentiation that they couldn't fill each others' niches. It's crazy that a chihuahua is more closely related to a gray wolf than the gray wolf is to other wolves. Wolves themselves are so close to coyotes that they can interbreed. We could probably breed dogs to match any specific wolf niche, but chances are there's already wolves somewhere that are close enough.

Cats breeds, on the other hand, are rarely more than a set of superficial features.
by yongjik | 2025-09-18 18:21:07+00:00
Another fun arbitrary thing is which meridian you decide to cut, because the earth is round.

If you do an image search for, say, "world atlas," you'll see all the maps have cut the Pacific in half, so the West Pacific is at the right edge and the East Pacific is at the left edge of the map.

Now, if you search for, say, "세계전도", then you'll see that most maps have cut the Atlantic in half, because otherwise kids (for whom those atlases are intended) would see their own hometown shoved all the way to the end of the map.
by hu3 | 2025-09-18 18:21:15+00:00
Great example. I'm talking about the default behaviour of apps in the OS.

GOG Galaxy is an app that redraws everything from scratch with bad UI.

It's funny because they use floating controls with excessive spacing, just like Apple's new theme. And that was the culprit in their case: https://i.imgur.com/dsey4c3.png

I would file a bug if I worked there as QA.
by InitialLastName | 2025-09-18 18:21:17+00:00
To be clear (not that I agree with this situation): Fox News (where that presenter works) is a cable network, beholden to the cable providers but not a broadcaster. The FCC has relatively little leverage to regulate it, because it does not rely on broadcast licenses.

ABC is a broadcast network. It relies on a network of affiliates (largely owned by a few big companies) who selectively broadcast its programming both over the airwaves and to cable providers. Those affiliates have individual licenses for their radio broadcasting bandwidth which the FCC does have leverage over (and whose content the FCC has a long history of regulating, but not usually directly over politics, e.g. public interest requirements, profanity, and obscenity laws).
by RealityVoid | 2025-09-18 18:21:47+00:00
Yes. I already address that in my post. Block the features the use bandwidth.

Them keeping the _chat logs_ history hidden has nothing to do with bandwidth costs. They store the data, they already pay for that, and it's not that large to begin with. The reason they do this is to hold you hostage so you have to pay them a ton of cash. It's extortion. You can defend it all you want, but they're all pretexts, not the real reason.
by bko | 2025-09-18 18:22:06+00:00
> All of those would keep on existing if Meta died today, so who cares

Try second order thinking or thinking into the future. This company that built much of the modern web and created trillions in value. It's like the communists that just nationalize companies and institutions after they come into power thinking that wealth is just something that spontaneously comes into existence and can be captured with no ill effects.

> permitting Meta to help governments oppress people

Oppressive governments often ban Meta and other social media. But somehow Meta helps these governments.

Try and create a consistent world view that doesn't devolve to [company] bad
by conductr | 2025-09-18 18:22:35+00:00
The majority of new-ish master planned suburban communities I’ve seen do have walking paths, bikeways, and parks baked in. Usually with some large HOA maintained pool, theater, I’ve even seen man made beaches (100s of miles from a coast). Although, they still usually have fenced yards and cutting through someone’s fenced yard without explicit permission is highly frowned upon, I would actually say dangerous when combined with gun situation being what it is.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-18 18:22:46+00:00
Not really. Stand in front of a car, squint, and observe the size of its silhouette. Now move slightly so that you can see the outline of the door handle, and consider its relative size compared to the rest of the car.

This isn't a perfect comparison. You could design car handles that look like little parachutes attached to something with the drag profile of a dolphin, but that's not a likely situation. In general, the area of the rest of the car is going to be many thousands of times that of the door handle. Given the difficulties in measuring, let alone modeling, turbulent air flow, it would be hard to detect a door handle's drag compared to the rest of the car.

I guess you could attach a meter to the door handle itself to detect how much drag it experiences from its own perspective, and that'd be pretty accurate. My hunch is it'd be an insignificant rounding error compared to the rest of the system.
by 0x457 | 2025-09-18 18:23:41+00:00
> There's some but there's been some for a long time. Isn't AMD re-unifying their architectures?

Yes.

> Other than the market segmentation over RAM amounts, I don't see very much difference.

The difference between CDNA and RDNA is pretty much how fast it can crunch FP64 and SR-IOV. Prior to RDNA, AMD GPUs were jacks of all trades with compute bias. Which made them bad for gaming unless the game is specifically written around async compute. Vega64 has more FP64 compute than the 4080 for context.

I think if AMD was able to get a solid market share of datacenter GPUs, they wouldn't have unified. This feels like CDNA team couldn't justify its existence.
by wrs | 2025-09-18 18:23:46+00:00
Absolutely. It’s a sore point for me because I spent a couple of years with all the traffic from my computer in Seattle being routed through Bentonville. :) The tradeoff is split tunnel setups usually mean you also need an endpoint firewall and/or DLP installed on your laptop.

Anyway, yeah, I was responding to the comment, not the politicians. We can only hope it’s a moot point.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-18 18:24:10+00:00
>We may already be there.

Numbers prove we aren't. Sales figures show very few customers are willing to pay $200 per month for the top AI chatbots, and even at $200/month, OpenAI is still taking a loss on that plan so they're still loosing money even with top dollar customers.

I think you're unaware just how unprofitable the big AI products are. This can only go on for so long. We're not in the ZIRP era anymore where SV VC funded unicorns can be unprofitable indefinitely and endlessly burn cash on the idea that when they'll eventually beat all competitors in the race to the bottom and become monopolies they can finally turn a profit by squeezing users with higher real-world price. That ship has sailed.
by Nzen | 2025-09-18 18:24:23+00:00
It looks like [0] access to gemini will only be for subscribers, given that it costs them money. This is, "of course", distinct from ai mode [1] in google search that happens from the address bar in chrome. The first video implies that the difference involves throwing the current web page into the query as context so someone can ask "is this recipe gluten-free?" on a recipe webpage.

[0] https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-app-updates-io-20...

[1] https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...
by stopachka | 2025-09-18 18:24:28+00:00
Oo cool idea! We don't limit the input size, so you could add more context. I wonder if giving it some docs on Instant's presence [1] could help it do the right thing with Doom. Ideally movements should be ephemeral rather than stored in the DB, and the system prompt we have doesn't say too much about that.

[1] https://www.instantdb.com/docs/presence-and-topics.md
by Const-me | 2025-09-18 18:24:48+00:00
I have recently needed a decently performing FFT. Instead of doing Cooley-Tukey, I have realized the bruteforce version essentially computes two vector×matrix products, so I have interleaved and reshaped the matrices for sequential full-vector loads, and did bruteforce version with AVX1 and FMA3 intrinsics. Good enough for my use case of moderately sized FFT where matrices fit in L2 cache.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-18 18:24:55+00:00
Configuration files need to be powerful programming languages (in terms of expressiveness) while being restricted (in terms of network and I/O and non-determinism). We need to aim very high for configuration languages especially when we treat them like user interfaces. Look at Cue (https://cuelang.org/), Starlark or Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/) for inspiration, not JSON, unless your configuration file is almost always written programmatically.
by audiodude | 2025-09-18 18:24:57+00:00
Behind the scenes: https://gist.github.com/audiodude/8eb6934539f3f54a2bd1ee6d83...

TODO: 1. Automate registering the domain 2. Automate setting up the DNS 3. Better automate deploying to Netlify (Claude kind of choked on this one)

I also used my trick of immediately changing the Namechep NS records to AWS Route 53, to avoid getting a parking page and having to wait for an hour TTL to expire.

The most frustrating part was waiting for Netlify to figure out the Let's Encrypt cert. It takes ages and I have to manually recheck. Fix this Netlify! (If anyone from Netlify is reading this, it seems like I click "veryify DNS" it says "Success!" but if I reload the page it asks me to verify again).

Time spent: ~30 minutes Total cost: - Claude: $0.56 - Domain: 12 bucks of course ;) - Hosting (Netlify): $0.00
by ch4s3 | 2025-09-18 18:25:01+00:00
You can both care about the issue and not see the dastardly hand of Israel in every shadowy corner. The grandparent comment by volleyball is clearly not a reasoned take and is conspiratorial in it's linking of Jews and Netanyahu and the constant bugbear of certain types, Bari Weiss.

I am neither Israeli, Jewish, or particularly vested in Israel, I just find the constant banging on about Jews lately in the discourse to be troubling. A lot of it has a real Protocols of the Elders of Zion vibe where anything a public Jew does is linked to a shadowy Israeli conspiracy. Particularly this volleyball keeps posting about epstein conspiracies involving random Jews. several of those comments have now been removed.

People like you should be careful about who you're taking up cause with, because eventually you'll find yourself in very unsavory company.
by josefresco | 2025-09-18 18:25:16+00:00
3rd Active thread today flagged:

Others: Trump designates anti-fascist Antifa movement as a terrorist organization https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-targets-antifa-moveme... UC Berkeley gives personal information for 150 students and staff to government https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/uc-berkeley-turns-over-...
by dvt | 2025-09-18 18:25:23+00:00
I read it and their methodology is embarassingly bad, especially for the kind of study that can be done en masse so easily (heck, a Twitter poll would be more useful). N=28, where all were undergraduates, and 24 were women. Could easily be influenced by the college campus, location, student housing, etc. It's literally the kind of project you'd do in middle school for a science fair.

Absolutely terrible study. Full paper is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258189192_Spatial_M...
by tavavex | 2025-09-18 18:26:33+00:00
> Like, you might have a use where you ONLY need a cheap display card, but there's a reason LTT calls the 1030 eWaste from the factory. Similarly, you might get enough out of the Geiger or it might do something the Radiacode doesn't for you but for most hobbyist, I doubt it.

I think the biggest difference here is that GPUs are fairly general-purpose devices. Even if you only need one as a cheapest possible way to output something to your monitor, it's easy to imagine how that might change and why you might as well future-proof your setup.

The other thing you didn't mention about why a 1030 is manufactured e-waste is in large part the competition from the used market. You can get equivalent functionality for a few dozen dollars, so buying a brand new 1030 as an individual makes no sense. This isn't a problem in the specialty radiation device market.

The thing is that most people probably don't buy Geiger counter modules or devices because of a burning need to do some specific tasks, like you would with GPUs. I'll bet that most people buying the Adafruit kit are getting it as a novelty, or for educational purposes, or to just have something reporting the background radiation around them out of curiosity. Because of this, price is the most important factor for these groups.

I've never heard of Radiacode, and looking it up, it seems seriously impressive - especially the portable gamma spectrometry that you mentioned. But I also know that it's a very niche device, and most people who would shell out $250+ for this need it for chemistry projects, exploring irradiated areas, evaluating radioactive items and so on. It's not a lot of people, considering that if you just want something to give you a readout, you'll get the <$99 product, and if you need it occupationally, you'll already have received a professional device.
by patternMachine | 2025-09-18 18:26:40+00:00
The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different arbitrary orientation.
by pogue | 2025-09-18 18:26:45+00:00
Which one?

I mostly have trouble keeping too many browser tabs open on mobile. Granted, I use Brave & it now organizes closed tabs. On desktop, it has a similar Ai feature for tab management to the one Google described, but it's still not great.

I'd honestly appreciate some kind of AI tab management, history/bookmarks saving, summarizing & organizing that would put my old tabs to some kind of reading list that would remind me what I never closed down the line, archive the links I visited & my bookmarks incase of linkrot they would still be saved. Make sure if I was writing a comment on Reddit or similar site, saved it as a draft, etc, etc. That kind of "Smart" browser management system, that I could preferably run myself or had some privacy guarantees (for whatever they're worth) would definitely something I'd consider paying for.
by foresto | 2025-09-18 18:27:05+00:00
Xfce was my long-term desktop until recently. I loved that it was lightweight, clean, and generally well thought-out.

It has become more memory-hungry since then, losing some of its early advantage. And with the move to Gtk 3, it has adopted UI patterns that constantly get in my way. (Client-side window decorations, for example.) I worked around those changes as best I could for several minor versions, but eventually gave up the fight and switched to KDE. Turns out Plasma slimmed down a bit while Xfce was gaining weight, and it lets me turn off the bells and whistles that I don't want.

I'm happy to once again have a desktop that I enjoy using. I do miss Xfce's Thunar, but KDE's Dolphin is mostly not bad.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-18 18:27:05+00:00
The maps were common, but there was nothing anti-USSR about them, and they go way back before the Cold War.

It's long been practice for maps to be centered on the country/continent they're produced in. American world maps centered on the Americas, British world maps centered on Greenwich, Chinese world maps centered on East Asia.

These days we've mostly standardized on the more "neutral" choice of having the edges in the middle of the Pacific because that minimizes the land getting split up, but there are also Asian maps that split in the middle of the Atlantic, since Greenland's population is low.
by someuser2345 | 2025-09-18 18:27:11+00:00
I disagree; this wristband might be a game changer because your hand does not need to be free to use it (at least in theory, we'll see how it actually plays out). Also, I'm willing to bet that for some people, this wristband might be more accessible than a regular keyboard (i.e. people with limited mobility or missing hands). Compare it to the laser beam keyboard, which is just a flat version of a regular keyboard.

> why have mechanical keyboards become so damn popular and not "keyboards on screens?"

Keyboards in general have become more popular, as more and more people get computing devices. I'm willing to bet the increase of keyboards on screens is much greater than the increase of mechanical keyboards; there are far more smartphones than mechanical keyboards.
by gspencley | 2025-09-18 18:27:37+00:00
AI is just the current incarnation of the hype train cycle.

I've never been a big fan of smart phones and I remember in the early 2010s the "mobile revolution" was in full tilt and it even impacted the Linux experience. I ended up switching from Ubuntu to Mint because they went all in on "mobile + touch-screens are the future!" and released this god awful UI update that was reminiscent of Windows 8.

We need business to drive innovation ... but there is bad with the good (and vice versa - we shouldn't forget that either). When something gets "hot" the business world will always go all in on the trend and "force" it down everyone's throats. It's driven partly by fear: "If I don't offer this to my customers, my competitors will and I will fail." The rest is the normal pursuit of profit, which isn't a bad thing IMO but it means there's a lot of: "There's a pie here and if we don't get our slice someone else will."
by zahlman | 2025-09-18 18:27:53+00:00
> (i.e. we expand the land in the north more than the south

Yes. This is a consequence of the fact that the "land in the north" is, on average, further north (of the Equator) than the "land in the south" is south (of the Equator).

The southernmost point on the South American mainland, per Wikipedia, is Cape Froward, Chile, at about 54°S. For perspective, some cities between 53°N and 54°N include Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; and Dublin, Ireland. Similarly, the capital of New Zealand is about in line with the capital of Albania, and the capital of South Africa is about in line with the capital of Qatar.
by goofiw | 2025-09-18 18:28:02+00:00
This looks super cool - especially given the changes to github’s leadership.

One minor note - on mobile safari there didn’t seem to be any state update on press of buttons, and submission was not clear until the backend server seemed to respond. My internet connection is a little slow and it was unclear tapping the button worked. I would expect a little loading state or at least ui to show the button as disabled during submission.