MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lproven | 2025-09-04 11:42:23+00:00
CDE is included as one of the options in Sparky Linux:

https://sparkylinux.org/cde-common-desktop-environment/

For me, it's a bit broken, though; I can't get the terminal to launch, and without that, you can't do much.

I wrote a comparison of CDE and modern recreation NotSoCDE:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...

A chap I know led the campaign to open-source it and I wrote about it at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/
by fuzztester | 2025-09-04 11:42:40+00:00
Yes.

And B evolved from BCPL:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL

I had read the book about BCPL by Martin Richards, creator of the language. it was quite interesting. IIRC, after describing the language, he gave some examples of small system software routines or utilities, written in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Richards_(computer_sc...
by AndrewStephens | 2025-09-04 11:43:10+00:00
It's my website and I'll do what I want! :)

More seriously, you bring up a good point about form factors. I imagine you are reading my site on a cell-phone. On these devices I purposely made the page width more-or-less fill the width of the screen to fit more text in at a readable font-size.

This used to be a reasonable choice because cell phones all had bezels. Now that many phones have screens that extend all the way to the edge of the device, pages like mine look weird as the text bleeds underneath the users fingers.

Just another example of how it is difficult to design a page that looks good on the multitude of devices that people use these days.

I'm probably not going to change it though.
by petralithic | 2025-09-04 11:43:32+00:00
> 10+ years ago I expected we would get AI that would impact blue collar work long before AI that impacted white collar work.

I'm not sure where people get this impression from, even back decades ago. Hardware is always harder than software. We had chess engines in the 20th century but a robotic hand that could move pieces? That was obviously not as easy because dealing with the physical world always has issues that dealing with the virtual doesn't.
by abhaynayar | 2025-09-04 11:43:38+00:00
Yea. I was not going to say that because apparently it's bad etiquette - and we're supposed to look at the substance. It happened to my writing once where someone said it was AI written and it did hurt me. :'(

But at this point I'm seeing it everywhere... the "Trash question? Trash answer" format posed as poetry EVERYWHERE and it is correlated with slop and I'm finding it very annoying to read. I might (to my own detriment perhaps) start factoring that in into what I'm gonna continue reading.

Examples of that question format in this article: - Liquid Glass? That's what your M4 CPU is for - That glassy transparency and window animations? A notorious resource hog that brought mid-2000s hardware to its knees - The moment a single tile wiggles? The entire UI crawls - Checking mail? Browsing? Streaming? Your M4 is bored out of its silicon mind - That whole section on: Battery life? ... Thermals? ... Future-proofing? ... Real workloads? ... ugh. - Is it worth it? For Apple’s vibe? Probably. But next time your fan whispers or your battery dips faster than expected… maybe blame the glass.

And apart from that question format, there's another thing but I can't quite figure out the pattern behind it but is slop: (I would really love to figure out what my brain thinks as "off" in these - maybe sentence length variability, maybe colons, or maybe trying to be poetic or dramatic or too self-assured with basically no data/substance underneath it, idk): - Let’s be real: eye candy always comes at a price. - When the system’s stressed, the pretty things break first. - They chew through GPU/CPU time. Always have. - Here’s my hot take: Apple knows exactly what they’re doing - It's stealth bloat. - You might not feel the drag today. That’s the point! The M4’s raw power is the perfect smokescreen. But those cycles aren’t free - TL;DR: Liquid Glass is gorgeous tech debt. Your M4 can afford it… for now. But never forget: fancy pixels demand fancy math.

Basically the entire article at this point. There was one place which was a bit personalized about the web app he built for his kids where I was like OK at least something seems OK, but as another user pointed out "It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them" doesn't make any sense. What tiles. How are we supposed to know.
by iwanttocomment | 2025-09-04 11:44:54+00:00
The Walmart/Walmart.com TOS and Privacy Policy documents only say:

> We collect your personal information from technology we use in and outside of our stores. For example, our point-of-sale terminals process your credit card information when you complete your purchase [...]

Which is pretty obvious. Nothing about them explicitly tracking in-store purchase history via credit card numbers, which as above, they certainly do and allow you to disable in your account settings.

As another example, southern grocer H-E-B is famous for not having loyalty cards and tracking in-store customer behaviors via credit card number, regardless of whether you have an HEB.com account. They then sell that data to vendors. [0]

This NYT article from several years ago verifies that Target ties all credit card purchases to a unique "guest ID". [1]

Can you cite the US federal regulation or Visa/Mastercard TOS that prohibits tracking customer purchase behavior by credit card number without consent? There may be state or local statutes I'm unaware of, but I'm confident there's nothing on a country-wide level.

You are absolutely correct that Apple Pay and Android Pay do not allow tracking in this manner due to anonymous tokenizing. But that's nothing new - going back to the subject of the article, tracking generally isn't possible with cash transactions as well.

[0] https://www.pmidpi.com/blog/newsletter/h-e-b-releasing-custo...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
by PaulRobinson | 2025-09-04 11:44:54+00:00
I found it so off-putting, I couldn't really listen to the show. On some episodes he would basically lead them through his notes, as if he were the expert and was having to suffer these people explaining things badly to him.

Bragg has been a strong force in intellectual culture in the UK for many decades. I remember my Mum and Sister being upset by a trailer for The South Bank Show back in the early 1980s, and he was a prominent "elder statesman" figure of the media by then, really - so he's had very good run.

But to be honest, I am hoping we get somebody a little bit less frumpy and grumpy picking up the space he will inevitably leave behind. I just hope it's not closed down and we end up with more middling dross.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-04 11:45:18+00:00
1991 is the starting point.

1994 - https://fogcam.org

199? - http://www.toad.com (domain registration August 18, 1987, web site <= 1999 from archive.org)

199? - https://acme.com (domain registration April 17, 1991, web site <= 1996 from archive.org)
by pvaldes | 2025-09-04 11:45:23+00:00
Eels were fish.

They will go extinct in XXI century. Most members of the family like the critically endangered European Eel are being eaten to extinction. Some studies claim that a 98% of the population of European eels alive in 1970, has vanished. Almost one of each two eels sold in USA as food belongs to this species.

Everybody were sharing recipes until the last one.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-04 11:46:09+00:00
If you're going to balance your budget on their backs, yes: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/one-rich-guy-moves-new-jersey...

Europe figured this out long ago and has a very broad tax base (aka higher taxes on the middle class) to fund their social welfare programs but somehow you never see that proposed as a solution by the middle class in the US...
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-04 11:46:11+00:00
Funny. I studied EE in 2012, and by that time, according to professors, there weren't many hardware tinkerers in the group compared to the 1990's. Many more people saw it was a good field that's comparable to CS. At this time, EE was on the way down and CS was on the rise in popularity. The classes were absolutely brutal for most people because they came in with less of an understanding of it.
by boppo1 | 2025-09-04 11:46:13+00:00
>Even the "why does matrix multiplication look that way" is incredibly deep but practically impossible to motivate from other considerations. You just start with "well that's the way it is" and grind away until one day when you're looking at a chain of linear transformations you realize that everything clicks.

Can you expand on your experience with this? I do some graphics programming so I understand that applying matrix transformations works, and I've seen the 3blue1brown 'matrices are spreadsheets' explanation (luv me sum spreadsheets), but the intuition still isn't really there. The 'incredibly deep "why matrix multiplication looks that way"' is totally lost on me.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-04 11:46:13+00:00
The Twitter layoffs were done in anticipation of AI. Musk knew he wanted to make X and Twitter was one entry point. The loss in twitter productivity would be made up by AI gains and the first realization of that AI was named Grok.

So there's a bit of circular causality here. AI is a cause of the Twitter layoffs, and others are arguing that the Twitter layoffs may be a cause of other labor force shrinkage. If so then the Twitter layoffs are a costly signal that AI will impact the labor force and the shrinkage downstream of them is AI related.
by latexr | 2025-09-04 11:46:23+00:00
Alan Dye introduced the design by stating:

> Now, with the powerful advances in our hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies, we have the opportunity (…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE&t=42s

Coupled with the reports of sluggish performance from the early betas, it’s understandable people would reach the conclusion that the new design pushes the hardware significantly more than before.
by Luker88 | 2025-09-04 11:46:45+00:00
I was under the impression that the iPhone had dedicated hw to render the screen while in idle/locked or something like that, in order to avoid waking the main cores.

I wonder if it had enough capabilities to run the extra passes needed for all that blur.

So the problem might not be that it makes things slow, but that it prevents low-power modes. AKA: slightly less battery life, possibly unused hardware
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-09-04 11:47:32+00:00
> a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:”

I think this diminishes the game. Sometimes you just don't have enough information to know for sure. Experiencing this in a low stakes situation like a minesweeper game reminds us that life is like that sometimes and we just have to make a guess and accept the consequences.
by mzajc | 2025-09-04 11:48:14+00:00
> I've been using Android for years, and have not seen funny business after I disable Chrome.

You have not seen any funny business because Chrome WebView, which many applications depend on, is a separate application. Developer settings let you change it to another application, but only from a hardcoded list of package names and only if they're installed to /system. There are also no non-Chromium WebView implementations available to my knowledge.

So no, unless you're OK with breaking applications that use WebView, you can't remove Chrome from an Android smartphone.
by kybernetikos | 2025-09-04 11:49:19+00:00
I've been using a boox note air for many years and you definitely can zoom on that.

Android is great for this use case because it lets me syncthing notes and use sheet music apps and use both kindle and kobo and calibre library and offline wikipedia and my own tools. As far as I'm concerned if you try to use it as a generic android tablet you're doing it wrong, but android is a massive step above what everyone else is offering (i.e. none of that)
by blopp99 | 2025-09-04 11:50:05+00:00
The feeling you got when tinkering is the same I got when first studied formal electronics in HS. I didn't do college, but the only one from my graduation year who stayed into electronics until now it's me. It's been 12years and I'm still doing it. I've been blessed enough to have encountered people that paid me to do Industrial Design and Product R&D. I'm now currently in manufacturing and automation.
by dghf | 2025-09-04 11:50:28+00:00
Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything.

If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that.

And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.
by motiejus | 2025-09-04 11:50:35+00:00
in Nix it's the same for as long as I remember, both on NixOS and nix-managed home-manager on MacOS and Linux:

neovim = { enable = true; vimAlias = true; vimdiffAlias = true; defaultEditor = true; plugins = [ pkgs.vimPlugins.fugitive pkgs.vimPlugins.fzf-vim pkgs.vimPlugins.vim-gh-line pkgs.vimPlugins.vim-gutentags pkgs.vimPlugins.nvim-lspconfig pkgs.pkgs-unstable.vimPlugins.vim-go pkgs.pkgs-unstable.vimPlugins.zig-vim ]; extraConfig = builtins.readFile ./vimrc; extraLuaConfig = builtins.readFile (pkgs.replaceVars ./dev.lua { inherit (pkgs) ripgrep; }).outPath; }
by AndrewStephens | 2025-09-04 11:51:50+00:00
The beacon API has exactly one use - reliable analytics. Sending a ping on leaving the page is a pretty contrived example - the beacon API is useful at any time.

I use the beacon API in my homebuilt hit-counter. It means that even if the user navigates away before the hit is registered, the request will still have a fair chance of being received by my server.

Of course there are other ways of doing this, but who wants to muck around with service workers or websockets when there is a simple, well-supported API that does exactly what you want?
by wolvesechoes | 2025-09-04 11:52:13+00:00
> Not really. I grew up below the poverty line. Everyone I knew was working class. Some of these people are still very dear to me.

It wouldn't be false consciousness if you would be from wealthy family.

Yes, working people should climb the ladder, but without government intervention and putting collars on wealthy necks there won't be any ladder for them. There would be no small business owners like you. This is why I think you are very wrong when stating you are not one of them. In a sense that is true, but in other you have more common interest with those without any capital that with those really wealthy. But those really wealthy definitely want you to think otherwise.

And I have an impression your view of Marxism is forged on Reddit posts and not Marxists literature.
by jleyank | 2025-09-04 11:52:25+00:00
Throw in: Unwilling or unable to build out the charger network. No power for EV’s as it’s going to crypto and ai. And to aluminum smelting. And to heating the northern states. And to cooling the southern ones. And losing the energy from wind, solar and geothermal. Maybe nuclear as I don’t know where the guy stands on that.
by lizknope | 2025-09-04 11:52:29+00:00
I learned BASIC when I was 7 in the early 1980's. I went to a very advanced high school that had Internet access in 1991 and some Unix systems. I loved it and was fascinated by all the hardware.

I started college in EE, I absolutely loved my digital logic class. I talked to one of the lab TA's in Circuits 2 and said this wasn't as interesting as digital logic. He told me to switch to computer engineering. I looked at the courses and there were only 5 classes different. I switched that week.

I've been designing computer chips the last 30 years.

> Maybe I Am Just a Software Guy

That's the TL ; DR version of the article.

The TL ; DR version of my post is "I like programming but I find hardware far more interesting."
by mark_l_watson | 2025-09-04 11:52:41+00:00
I pay to use ProtonMail’s privacy preserving Lumo LLM Chat with good web_search tooling. Lumo is powered by Mistral models.

I use Lumo a lot and usually results are good enough. To be clear though, I do fall back on gemini-cli and OpenAI’s codex systems for coding a few times a week.

I live in the US, but if I were a European, I would be all in on supporting Mistral. Strengthen your own country and region.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-09-04 11:53:34+00:00
>3rd party UI frameworks can't copy it without a massive performance hit.

Do you believe pixel shaders are some unique magic that only Apple has the secret sauce to and noone else can use? There were some efficient implementations of liquid glass for flutter before the iOS beta was even released. Glass effects are dime a dozen on shadertoy, they're one of the most basic effects you could learn to do when learning about texture sampling.

The platforms that will take a large performance hit are the ones that can't drop down to the native platforms, i.e. the web.
by allenu | 2025-09-04 11:54:10+00:00
I was viewing on desktop and the blank space all around made it immediately feel like an article that required a scroll to view the content below the fold.

Seeing the timestamps change as I scrolled and seeing a progress "bar" update within the speech balloons during the dialogs made it more obvious I just had to scroll to see the content change.

I do think the progress bar color is low contrast enough that some might not see it and not realize they have to scroll to cause the dialog to update, though.
by drej | 2025-09-04 11:54:10+00:00
I was talking about data engineering, because that was my job and all analysts were downstream of me. And I could see them struggle with handling infrastructure and way too many toggles that our platform provided them (Databricks at the time).

Yes, I did write tests and no, I did not write 1000-line SQL (or any SQL for that matter). But I could see analysts struggle and I could see other people in other orgs just firing off simple SQL queries that did the same as non-portable Python mess that we had to keep alive. (Not to mention the far superior performance of database queries.)

But I knew how this all came to be - a manager wanted to pad their resume with some big data acronyms and as a result, we spent way too much time and money migrating to an architecture, that made everyone worse off.
by tpm | 2025-09-04 11:55:02+00:00
Falsely accusing me of racism shows you are not fit to participate in this discourse.

Not once did I mention "Jews", I only mentioned actions of the State of Israel. I don't care how the groups of people call themselves. What I care about is that a group of people is killing another group people. I care about the fact that one group is a well-equipped army and most of the killed are civilians. It is wrong that this happens. You don't care about that, in fact it very much looks like you are the racist here, obsessed about "muslims" and some nonsensical interpretation of history and cheering that they are being mass murdered. This is shameful behavior from your side.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-09-04 11:55:30+00:00
In my country, in high school, you get grades and at the end you have a standardized test.

Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college.

College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive.

How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times.
by jackstraw42 | 2025-09-04 11:55:59+00:00
> I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent, i.e. the ye olde times version of "chatgpt write this for me"

man. this didn't really exist in my midwest USA public education in the 90s/00s, I felt like I had to work hard for all of my grades and the teachers were actively trying to derail me from my goals. there was never a sense of, this work is an example of "good enough".

it wasn't until college that I had teachers who weren't so adversarial and actually seemed to care about teaching.
by elp | 2025-09-04 11:56:16+00:00
The covid response was done poorly done in classic knee jerk style and a bunch of authoritarian aholes used it as chance to act like authoritarian aholes. Also yes once the virus evolved to Omicron to avoid the vaccine we probably didn't need all the boosters they tried to push.

But the medical community was acting with the best knowledge they had at the time as imperfect as it was. Tell me how did taking the vaccine harm any child? It wasn't painful. Immediate side effects were minimal to non-existent. Myocarditis and Carditis incidence was something like 65/million. Even then most of those recovered without any treatment. Median hospital stay for those that needed it was 2 nights and most recovered without permanent issues.

I think the final death toll from the vaccine was estimated at around 1/million. Meanwhile at the height of the delta strain the death toll for anyone infected was well over 1/100 ( more than 10% for the over 60s).

The fallout doesn't make rational sense.
by sotix | 2025-09-04 11:56:58+00:00
At my company, the tech leaders aren't doing it out of mass hysteria. They're very smart individuals. The push is coming from our investors that come from the ring of classic YC-affiliated VCs. My friend who runs a YC-backed company has been told to do it by his investors too. It's a coordinated effort by external investors rather than a mass panic by individual tech leaders. If you read VC investor literature, it's full of incredible claims about how companies who don't use AI will be left behind. The exact type of stuff you'd expect to hear from groups who aim to hit the lottery with a few of their investments.
by mort96 | 2025-09-04 11:57:31+00:00
We will see. It feels worse than earlier betas; I have always put the public betas on my iPad, and this is the first time we're this late in the cycle and my iPad feels too slow. But nothing would make me happier than if this all just goes away when iOS 26 is released properly and all animations run at a smooth 120 FPS again.
by dangus | 2025-09-04 11:57:37+00:00
> If you sat down in front of a 15 yo computer, or tried to solve a technical challenge with the tooling of 15-10 years ago, I don't think you'd get a significantly worse result.

While you have decent points in your comment (essentially, the idea of tech industry growth slowing due to low hanging fruit being picked), if this statement going to be your barometer you’re going to end up looking stupendously wrong.

You can sit your Grandma down at her computer and have her type in “please make me a website for my sewing club that includes a sign up form and has a pink background” and AI will just do it and it’ll probably even work the first time you run it.

15 years ago tossing a website on Heroku was a pretty new concept, and you definitely had to write it all on your own.

10 years ago Kubernetes had its initial release.

Google Drive and Slack are not even 15 years old.

TensorFlow is just hitting its 10th birthday.

I think you’re vastly underestimating the last 15 years of technological progress and in turn value creation.