MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-09-18 06:29:50+00:00
Matrix and element are phenomenal bits of software for nerds only.

I tried running a community on it and it was a collosal failure. The onboarding flow sucks, if you want to send email logins it implicitly requires them to make matrix.org or whatever accounts (or something along those lines, details escape me), and you can have a custom server for that but it wasn't well documented and there was no canonical FOSS project for that custom server, I guess you were expected to just write your own if you wanted to truly control your whole stack.

And then, it was just high friction enough to where people wouldn't use it. Nobody downloaded the client apps other than me, even though the android one was really good, and even though you're spoiled for choice - you can even use it in Thunderbird! So everyone used the webapp, but then they'd switch computers and not do whatever you have to do to be able to read encrypted messages on the new machine, and so they'd lose all their messages and then stop participating.

And so on.

We moved the community to discord and all of our metrics have 10x'd: new users, existent user engagement, hell even revenue (we're an engineer-owned dev shop).

I really, really wish we could have made matrix work.
by axiolite | 2025-09-18 06:30:16+00:00
You can take TWO screenshots, moments apart, open in GIMP, paste one over the other and choose any one of these laying modes:

Lighten, Screen, Addition, Darken, Multiply, Linear burn, Hard Mix, Difference, Exclusion, Subtract, Grain Extract, Grain Merge, or Luminance.

https://ibb.co/DDQBJDKR
by alexjplant | 2025-09-18 06:30:46+00:00
> I used it as a scripting language on early NT systems I supported

Me too! Well, sort of. Between the ages of 14 and 19 I worked as a part-time helpdesk technician. When I started we used a series of bootable floppies with DOS to use Symantec Ghost. If memory serves two floppies were required - the first had DOS and the requisite NIC driver and the second was universal and merely had GHOST.EXE on it. I developed a bootable USB memory stick image comprising all of the NIC drivers along with Ghost and a series of other useful things like a WinPE environment and maaaaaybe a Linux one via loadlin.exe. I ended up making a boot menu/shell for it in QuickBasic.

It was still in use a year or two after I'd moved to doing software engineering professionally. I wonder whether it's sitting in a drawer someplace on the other side of the country. I also wonder how this thread turned into a chronicle of my youthful programming misadventures :-D
by happymellon | 2025-09-18 06:33:20+00:00
Strongly disagree.

It is NOT a good place to share docs.

Each chat is its own SharePoint, so it is really simple to lose documentation through things getting siloed.

The calls are fine though, and the chat is substandard. A bunch of teams use it for support channels, however there doesn't appear to be a way to join the group for support without being pinged by @channel_name. So you join for support and then you are alerted by everyone else who is looking for support.

At least they have stopped fucking around with "newest on top/bottom", there was A/B testing last year (or maybe the year before) and you couldn't tell which way you had to scroll from one day to the next.
by yehat | 2025-09-18 06:34:03+00:00
Objective fact and "more likely" do not match well. While what you're saying in general is true, it is worth also saying that "tech" channels expecting their subscribers to not use ad-blockers is a pretty wild expectations. What they need to do to have financial income is to secure some relevant sponsorship as part of their content. Most people are completely fine with that and many tech channel are doing it right, at least those that I care for. Having to rely on Alphabet's injected Ads is a very poor taste which if they insist of keeping, they should not be producing content at all.
by flohofwoe | 2025-09-18 06:34:17+00:00
The problem is: even us old timers can't deny nor change the fact that operating systems have been putting up barriers to disallow running untrusted code downloaded from the internet.

Try to distribute an installer on Windows that isn't signed with an extensive EV-certificate for instance. It's scare popup galore.

Not to mention the closed gardens of the Apple and Google Stores which even when you get in, you can be kicked out again for absolutely no objective reason (they don't even need to tell you why).

> then we should be honest and build a virtualization abstraction that is actually what we want,

This is not in the interest of Microsoft, Google or Apple. They can't put the open web back into the box (yet, anyway), but they will not support any new attempts to create an open software ecosystem on "their" platforms.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-18 06:36:18+00:00
Hardware patents are orthogonal to open source software. If a patent covers the hardware then someone who wants to manufacture the hardware needs to license the patent, but you were never going to get free-as-in-beer hardware anyway, and a hardware patent is independent of whether the hardware is fully documented or has firmware with published source code and a license that allows users to make changes to it.
by pilooch | 2025-09-18 06:36:41+00:00
I like the glasses path, well I do wear glasses, but some elements remain unclear to me:

- are prescription glasses available for display ? I guess not ? - these glasses need to be online, I guess they do so with a phone and bluetooth connection nearby ? So that's the glasses, the band and the phone, oh and the glasses case, seems a lot to carry. - pedestrian navigation seems to be rolled out per city, so it's not like having gmaps available right out of the box.
by teiferer | 2025-09-18 06:37:16+00:00
Indeed. But they typically are contingent on a certain number of views. If adblockers cause that stat to go down, then you get the opposite of what you are aiming to achieve: the user will see the "message from our sponsor" but their view does bot contribute to providing that sponsor with the data that the youtuber held up their end of the deal. Ends up bring an unpaid ad.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-18 06:37:36+00:00
XML is used in countless standards. You can't just not use it if you interact with the outside world. Every XML feature is still in the many XML libraries because someone has a need for it, even things like external entities.

Maybe you don't need libxml2 specifically (good luck finding an alternative to parse XML in C and other such languages though), but "I don't like the complex side of XML so let's pretend it doesn't exist" doesn't solve the problem most people pick libxml2 for. It's the de-facto standard because it supports everything you could possibly need.
by Nasrudith | 2025-09-18 06:38:04+00:00
That is frankly an entirely wrongheaded approach to speech, in seeing the reach of speech and ability as a problem. When the entire point of speech is to reach people and influence them. That is exactly what speech is supposed to do. It isn't a good thing to 'moderate' the reach of speech. It is supposed to allow organization of mass groups. Trying to divide it into good and bad speech makes even less sense than trying to define good and bad gravity.

Control of speech is the One Ring, that governments are always tempted towards, always rationalizing it as the solution to all of their problems, and under no circumstances should be allowed to possess. Of course it is bad in an authoritarian regime! Messy and complicated does not override the overwhelming evidence, it does not in fact remain to be seen.
by gusgus01 | 2025-09-18 06:39:39+00:00
Are you analyzing the list of "Notable Domestic Terrorist Attacks" on that page? Which has already been filtered by some criteria of notability?

A more complete list is actually prompted at the top of that section and is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_Stat....

However, you've possibly read that already since you're 41% number appears to be sourced from that page and is specifically talking about deaths and not events from 9/11/2001 to 2017. That 41% is heavily influenced by the deadliest event which was the Orlando Shooting, and if you look at the overall picture, 73% of events were perpetrated by white supremacists.

Honestly, directly reading the GAO study and the other, more recent, studies is a lot more illuminating and illustrates the growing issue of white supremacy and far-right political violence.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-09-18 06:39:45+00:00
It’s not about moral fucking high ground, it’s about actual death and dismemberment that is actually happening that wouldn’t have. I can vote for the nazi that kills 100 jews, the nazi that kills 500, or vote for nobody; show me any alternative or else i gotta get in the booth for the first guy. Anything else is pretentious moralizing that costs lives.
by jfim | 2025-09-18 06:40:49+00:00
I have one in my car and it's not distracting. It basically displays the current speed, the speed limit, the current cruise control state, the current gear (PRND), and the current navigation instruction (eg. turn left in 1.5 miles).

It doesn't display notifications or other distractions, nor is it possible to configure it to do so.

It's not flickering when viewed in person, but when filmed with a phone camera they do flicker due to how the display works.

It's a pretty good system, and allows one to keep their eyes on the road without having to look at other screens, and keeping ones eyes focused on far objects.
by axiolite | 2025-09-18 06:40:54+00:00
Right, but other file managers didn't adopt them. Do you use Norton Commander keyboard shortcuts with Nautilus, Dolphin, Thunar, Windows Explorer, Finder, etc? Did anything else adopt most of them? Because if you're only appealing to those who used Norton Commander, that's not a big user base. Using Windows Explorer keyboard shortcuts, instead, would give you a vastly larger audience.
by ygra | 2025-09-18 06:41:37+00:00
I think in the context of C# this is not exactly unexpected since there are various operators that apply conditional execution (and evaluation) to parts of an expression. All of them start with ?, though (? :, ??, ?., ?[], ??=), so except for casts to nullable types, every question mark in an expression signals that control flow is about to happen and it's been that way in C# for quite a while.
by casenmgreen | 2025-09-18 06:42:32+00:00
Unfortunately, the transport model in SC2K is broken, and by that, you have to design your transport network to work for the game, rather than design it as you would wish to do so.

Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.

So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.

As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.

You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.

I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
by mort96 | 2025-09-18 06:42:54+00:00
I kinda want something which just treats XML as a dumb tree definition language... give me elements with attributes as string key/value pairs, and children as an array of elements. And have a serialiser in there as well, it shouldn't hurt.

Basically something behaves like your typical JSON parser and serialiser but for XML.

To my knowledge, this is what TinyXML2 does, and I've used TinyXML2 for this before to great effect.
by komali2 | 2025-09-18 06:43:23+00:00
The article personifies things a couple times and I always wonder about the actual mechanics when people do that.

It mentions selfish queen genes and how the DNA from the male of the species "ensures its propagation by applying pressure to larvae to be queens rather than infertile females." Does it then? The DNA is there in the egg whispering, "do it, cheat, you'd be an amazing queen, doooo itt"?

They write that the queen must use sperm from another species that it has stored to circumvent that. So the queen is thinking, "ah, pesky sneaky DNA, cheating. Here, I'll just let out, from my sperm storage organ where I store a bunch of sperm all mixed up, only sperm from another species, that'll teach that pesky DNA!"

Like what is actually happening in reality?
by tinco | 2025-09-18 06:43:23+00:00
People building "safety critical" systems already pay for a "secure" ecosystem. It's called Microsoft. We don't need regulations to have Microsoft exist. Do you think some random med tech startup is going to pay to have libxml2 maintained? They'll see the regulation and go "oh ok, Windows licenses it is".

It's not the "safety critical" software that needs this fixed, it's all software in general. There's a million software systems that have important privacy sensitive data or safety relevant processes that fly under the "safety critical" radar.
by chithanh | 2025-09-18 06:43:40+00:00
Yes, lots of Intel and AMD based SBCs have SO-DIMM slots, but you'll have to accept the 3.5" format.

Regarding RISC-V SBCs, there was serious consideration to release the Milk-V Oasis with SG2380 and LPCAMM2. But this didn't work out as the SG2380 was held up by geopolitical issues.
by Arathorn | 2025-09-18 06:43:46+00:00
This would make sense if you were talking about the old Element app, but Element X is generally seen as a night and day improvement. Can you say what the problems are on Element X?

Trying to speak dispassionately as someone who lives their life in Element X iOS, I find it is way more reliable than WhatsApp (where I get way more “waiting for message…” e2ee bugs than Element X these days), and more featureful than iMessage. You can’t compare with TG given TG isn’t E2EE.

I am not disputing the lived experience on your side, but something big must be different. Is the server underpowered or misconfigured or something? Or is it using a beta server like Dendrite?
by jdprgm | 2025-09-18 06:44:18+00:00
Expensive in the context of other VR games sure. I couldn't find any official numbers but i'm sure it pales in comparison to dozens of other games that came out this year.

Also i'm not sure what these single player relatively short playtime/runtime games accomplish as you buy it play it in less than a week and are done. What I would like to see is the large scale infinitely playable MMO type game done on VR with at least at 250M budget.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-09-18 06:44:25+00:00
Took me a while to figure out but this is the most literal whataboutism message I've had to read in a while.

It's not relevant what other countries did, why israel fights, where they got their weapon or training or ideas. It's only about how israel handles day to day operations.

I'd be happy to read reports about wether the US commited a genocide. And I don't want to read comparison with other countries in such reports.
by rcarmo | 2025-09-18 06:44:50+00:00
I had a go at it a few months ago: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230

Not bad at all, but the OpenWRT image still didn’t have Wi-Fi support a week or so ago, so I don’t know how good software support is going to be in the long run.
by vunderba | 2025-09-18 06:45:03+00:00
Normally I'd suggest just printing advertisements directly on the toilet paper itself - but I'm not sure there'd be too many companies clamoring to have their products connected to something you wipe your arse with.

Then again, Taco Bell famously associated their food with a chihuahua - "our food is so good - even a dog will eat it!" so what do I know.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-09-18 06:45:39+00:00
Oddly antagonistic take on a reasonable comment. GP could be working together with other people, for example, in which case every such idiosyncratic configuration introduces a little social and mental friction. This is covered at length in similar conversations in Go threads, where people say things like “defaults matter”.

Obviously you’re not alone to disagree, and there are even some good arguments you could potentially be making. But to say “I question what your motives really are” and tell someone what they should be concerned with is… odd?

It’s a very common position with ample practical examples. While there certainly are valid counter arguments, they are a little more involved than “nothing is stopping you.” There is. Collaborating with others, for example.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-18 06:46:38+00:00
EarPods/AirPods designs assume that you have certain genetic feature on ears called antitragus that hugs the stem with two opposing wings. I looked mine in the mirrors and one of the wings is basically missing altogether, making it not "anti"-ing. Tim Cook visibly has a pair of bulbous ones.

I kind of have different ethnic background than MKBHD, so, it kind of makes me wonder how that design got the shape it got and how it stayed that way.
by nodar86 | 2025-09-18 06:47:24+00:00
Hey! I have an open-source project for browsing an exported slack archive, it may be useful to you so you can see and search the history: https://github.com/pkarolyi/slack-archive-browser

I haven’t maintained it in a while since it works for us, but PRs are welcome :)

A good first one would be adding non-slack authentication as currently it only supports Slack openid for logging in, but it uses next-auth and should be simple to extend
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-18 06:47:51+00:00
…suggesting we need to rethink our understanding of species barriers.

Have we ever really defined species barriers? It seems to be driven more by tradition than anything else.

The vagueries of speciation has been especially exploitable by the conservatism/YIMBYism movement, where a trait common in one region but uncommon in others can be used to declare a common unthreatened animal as an endangered species, despite a lack of genetic divergence. It would be like declaring uncommonly red-haired Irish as not just an ethnicity but a separate species.

My favorite example of vagueries in species differentiation is a study that found only 13 genes that reliably differ between domestic cats and European and Near Eastern wildcats. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1410083111) It really brings into question what domestication even is, considering that housecats are perfectly capable of supporting themselves outside of areas inhabited by humans. Their lack of differentiation from wildcats means that they can easily become invasive species in areas where they are introduced by humans.

It's impossible for a species to be invasive to its native land, but Poland has managed to simultaneously consider a group of animals with a mere bakers dozen of genes differentiating them, none of which hinder their ability to interbreed, as both "currently threatened with extinction in their natural habitat" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6749728/) and an "invasive alien species" (https://apnews.com/article/science-poland-wildlife-cats-bird...).
by mdhb | 2025-09-18 06:47:52+00:00
Zero… you can and will be filmed without your knowledge or consent and your private conversations will be used to train ever more invasive AI systems and profiles of you will be sold to advertisers and governments all over the world.

I strongly recommend making owners of these things feel incredibly unsafe and uncomfortable in social situations. I wouldn’t hesitate to break a pair when I get the opportunity personally.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-09-18 06:48:39+00:00
We're on the freemium plan with them. I don't see a big need to pay Slack. It's a low value commodity. Most of that stuff is highly transient anyway and even for their recent history their search is pretty limited. I always struggle to find stuff back in slack. Our company policy is to stick anything important in a place where we won't lose it (Google drive mainly).

And since we actually pay for Google Workspaces, we could switch to their chat solution. I haven't actually bothered even trying that so far. Because they'll probably cancel it in a few years. And there are a gazillion alternatives. I've used everything from news groups, irc, icq, hip chat, discord, etc. in the past quarter century or so. And that's just for work related communication. The main reason for me to use Slack is that it's there and cheap and it kind of works. I have no big pressing need to switch. Or to pay anyone for this stuff.

Slack was the cute sexy new thing about ten years ago. Then they got acquired by Salesforce and now it's just yet another corporate thing; so enshittification is a given. But they might want to remember that the only reason they got this big is through their generous freemium offering. Cut that off and the rest just bleeds out as well. Along with all the revenue. They wouldn't be the first chat solution that joins the ranks of the once big and long forgotten.
by defrost | 2025-09-18 06:48:54+00:00
I have 60+ years of English as a first language, a library of several floor to ceiling bookcases and no, it definitely does not say that the killer is MAGA.

It's a classic deliberate line skate but it clearly states what the "MAGA Gang" is asserted to have done without actually claiming the killer to be be part of that "Gang".

It wouldn't pass muster in an English libel Court and it's a milquetoast sentence in the US first amendment free speech world.

Further it is a bald matter of demonstrable fact that multiple voices that could be characterised as "MAGA" were indeed making numerous assertions about the killer and their motives before any facts other than the shooting itself were known.

This makes the Kimmel statement little more than a dull piece of observational social commentary.
by ygra | 2025-09-18 06:49:05+00:00
> When you have an expression P which names a mutable place, and you execute P := X

This isn't the case, though, is it? A normal member access (or indexer) expression may point to a mutable location (field, property). However, with conditional access expressions you get either a member access _or nothing_. And that nothing is not a mutable place.

When you use any of the conditional operators, you split the following code into two paths, and dropping the assignment (since there's nothing to assign to) seems pretty consistent to me, since you'd also drop an invocation, or a property evaluation in similar expressions.

If you require P to point to something that actually exists because you want the assignment to succeed, then write code to ensure that P exists because the assignment has no way of knowing what the intention was on the left side.
by cyberax | 2025-09-18 06:49:18+00:00
AWS had switched from using something like this ("injection tokens") to just regular IAM roles, though managed by the AWS.

The only special permission that services (actually, the AWS accounts that they use) inside the AWS have is access to "service principals". The service roles inside customer accounts then use them to grant access.

AWS IAM is painful, but it shows that you can design a secure permission system.