MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gitonup | 2025-09-08 23:01:59+00:00
This is the God's honest.

I worked on the MS Word core team for a little over three years from 2010-2014, and de-facto owned a significant part of implementing ODF / OOXML Strict support.

The binary format was a liability for Microsoft to begin with, because of decades of cruft lining up with actual memory alignment. During my tenure there I ran into code my GM had written as an intern and was still intact -- he had 20+ years of tenure (mostly on Word) when I joined the team.

The translation of the file format to XML involved a significant amount of performance degradation if you weren't careful. Hundreds of millions of people use the app monthly, and MS still tries to maintain backwards compatibility. Given that open APIs were a relatively late development for the app, I really don't think in the current reality of what's expected by boards of directors for the companies they oversee that _anyone_ would take years to:

a) define a spec that maintained that backwards compatibility

b) reach whatever nebulous simplicity metric today's HN article wants

c) not get whoever greenlit the project fired for taking that many engineering hours for a and b
by th0ma5 | 2025-09-08 23:02:33+00:00
I've skimmed the source material and it doesn't either except for the general advice of putting it all in some kind of conceptual box and slowly move parts to modern or better managed solutions as you try to reverse engineer it all. The underlying subtext was that it is all probably worse than you think and there isn't much good news... But "containment" in various forms is the direction forward mostly unfortunately.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-08 23:02:42+00:00
Sure.. but even going consumer, for 16gb+, you can get an ARC A770 for $80 less, or an RX 9060 XT for a few dollars more... Will it perform better, I don't know. RTX 5060 Ti 16gb is about $70 more.

Prices from NewEgg on 16gb+ consumer cards, sold by NewEgg and in stock.
by loveiswork | 2025-09-08 23:02:55+00:00
I have abandoned spotify - but I agree in that I think the experience is still pretty great for users.

There are other warts though:

- They're paying out the lowest to artists by far when it comes to streams

- Artist impersonation issues

- Botted playlists

- Daniel Ek investing his fortune into AI drone military defense company Helsing

- The nascent issue of AI music / artists (see The Velvet Sundown)

For me it is moreso that all of this adds up to artists getting the squeeze, and I'd rather try to find ways to better support them.
by draxter65 | 2025-09-08 23:03:22+00:00
You have to be a fool to use Plex, not only you are pirating, but also relying on a 3rd party company to handle your authentication. They already got hacked multiple times, only a matter of time till there is some copyright law enforcement event too.

If you really have to do it, use Emby or Jellyfin. At least those options are fully self hosted.
by nfriedly | 2025-09-08 23:03:34+00:00
YouTube ReVanced has a setting to default to the subscriptions tab instead of the home tab. I turned that on a while back, and I've been a lot happier with what I see when I open the app these days.

I'd switch to grayjay, but I like a lot of the other revanced features, like automatically skipping over "like and subscribe" reminders.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-08 23:03:37+00:00
> The committee did exactly what you suggest and relegated the preprocessor to the dustbin

Importantly, no they did not.

They put a boundary on the preprocessor containing preprocessing within the module definition and not the code importing the module.

And that's where a lot of the loss and compatibility problems have come into play. That's why you can't, for example, share a module between builds. Because the ifdefs that built the module in the first place may have changed from one build to the next.

It was good that the committee bound the preprocessor, but they simply didn't go far enough.

C++ is making strides to adding the language features needed to dustbin modules. A lot of the work of consteval can replace a lot of what the preprocessor is doing.

> Because modules supports none of this, that means we can't modulize Windows.h. Or zlib. Or gtest.

And see, that's the issue. Modules do actually support all this. We can in fact modularize windows.h, zlib, or gtest. The issue is the `windows.module` still has to be rebuilt with every application that imports it because those `ifdefs` could evaluate differently depending on what env variables the build system sets before building. The module can't be just a simple AST built once. Maybe once for a project, but that's about it. And that's the rub. Change anything that causes the module to recompile and you spend exactly the same time you'd spend on precompiled headers.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-08 23:03:45+00:00
Obviously not: if I had, I'd have inside contacts I could ask, instead of having to bother their public relations people to beg for scraps of intel about what they're doing with my information, while they act

I don't believe they've lied to me – I'm not so uncharitable as to assume their incorrect "it's written in the policy!" claims were deliberate lies –, but they're certainly not forthcoming.
by dnlzro | 2025-09-08 23:03:50+00:00
> Maybe you’re at a restaurant and they need you to open a website for example. You may end up having to bug some people around you for their phone. It can be annoying but I haven’t found this to be too troublesome.

I have been using a profile-based restricted iPhone setup for about 6 months now, and this has been the biggest holdup for me. I've pretty successfully blocked almost everything distracting, but I'm pretty good at finding ways to bypass my restrictions. e.g., I'll find an alternative Reddit client (like Redlib) to bypass my Reddit blocks.

The obvious solution is to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist, but then you completely lose the ability to scan QR codes in the wild.

I'm thinking of building a browser designed for this purpose. Your browsing can begin at certain pre-defined entrypoints, like a news aggregator or a QR code, but you can't manually enter arbitrary URLs or use search engines.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-09-08 23:04:00+00:00
Worth keeping in mind that the native MSO formats were using "structured storage", a horrible binary chunked serialization and metadata format from an era where binary embedding of document streams in other application documents via "Object linking and embedding" (OLE, see also Apple's OpenDoc format) was deemed desirable, with zero consideration given to third-party apps and segment formats tied to C++ data structures. Compared to that, OOXML is still a huge progress, and while it's complex I wouldn't say it's maliciously so.

The Shakespeare example is a good one where the sentence is split into multiple spans to apply style rules yet the bare text content could be extracted by just removing all XML tags. Whereas the ODF variant is actually less recommendable as it relies on an unneccesarily complex formatting and text addressing language on top of XML.

The article says

> Even at a glance [ODF's markup] is more intelligible. Strip the text: namespaces and it’s nearly valid HTML. The only thing that needs explaining is that ODF doesn’t wrap To be with a dedicated “bold” tag. Instead, it applies an auto-style named T1 to a <text:span>, an act of separating content and presentation that mirrors established web practices.

but this definitely makes things more complex for data exchange compared to OOXML.
by bigiain | 2025-09-08 23:04:19+00:00
> replacement of plex Emby

Are Plex and Emby related somehow?

I've got Emby running here - selected for no better reason than several of my friends run it. I'd consider switching to Jellyfin if there were reasonable evidence showing that Emby was run by the Plex people - or if they started showing obvious signs of the enshittification playbook...
by gerdesj | 2025-09-08 23:04:22+00:00
In 55 years I've never managed to do that, nor has anyone else I know. Plugs normally stay in the wall socket because they have a switch - each wall socket for general use must have a switch. The switch is quite hefty and very obviously off or on, with a red stripe. You get a satisfying audible and tactile click feedback when it is switched.

Recently a person brought in a laptop that had apparently been accidentally brushed off a desk, whilst closed, and had apparently fallen on an upturned plug. The plug had managed to hit the back of the screen, left quite a dent and spider cracking on the screen. The centre of the cracking did not match the dent ...

I'll have to do some trials but even if a plug is left on the ground, will it actually lie prongs upwards? I'll have to investigate lead torsion and all sorts of effects. Its on the to do list but not very high.
by krapp | 2025-09-08 23:05:12+00:00
It's impossible to know what issues they have, since they don't specify.

But no, for the vast majority of people, SDL2 is perfectly fine, although SDL3 is a vast improvement. It's as stable and battle-tested as a cross platform multimedia library is bound to get. Opening a window and polling input is trivial.

Then again I've never even heard of the language they're using (Odin) so maybe that doesn't play well with a C library.
by kelsey98765431 | 2025-09-08 23:05:17+00:00
This is oddly enough around the time I canceled my 10+ year premium subscription and moved to freetube. I cannot support the anti privacy crusade of asking for users government identification and i spoke with my wallet. What are the chances that enough people cancelled premium that it caused youtube to increase the amount of advertisements served? What are the odds that just drove away a bunch more people?
by throw0101a | 2025-09-08 23:05:38+00:00
> If I were Evil-Tim-Cook, I'd have a deal with the FBI (and other agencies) where I'd hand over some user's data, in return for them keeping that secret and occasionally very publicly taking Apple to court demanding they expose a specific user and intentionally losing - to bolster Apple's privacy reputation.

The FBI wants its investigations to go to court and lead to convictions. Any evidence gained in this way would be exposed as coming form Apple; notwithstanding parallel construction:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

As for other agencies, I'm sure many have exploits to attack these devices and get spyware on them, and so may not need Apple's assistance.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-08 23:05:40+00:00
>How short the memory of folks can be, especially with my parents and grand parents generations still around

A good thing to remember is that shitloads of people didn't learn from those kinds of events.

The young adults who threw rocks at black girls going to white schools in the southern USA are still alive and still voting and still hold a grudge.

Look when the civil rights act passed, and look how hard the south went republican after that.

>Maybe when they start getting visits from the eventually new state protection police, they will understand, then it will be too late.

A lot of genuine Nazi believers went to "political" camps during the Nazi regime and they did not change their tune. They eventually got out, and just kept being Nazis, because they were Nazis because they genuinely believe the ideology. People who were literally sidelined by stupid Nazis infighting continued to advance the goals of the Nazis regime. Getting targeted and harmed by their very own regime did not change their opinion of it.

The same happened in Soviet Russia to all sorts of genuine communists who got gulag'd anyway, and still strongly held communist (stalinist even) beliefs (if they survived)

Tribalism is one of the strongest buttons humans have. We should be less surprised that it works so effectively
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-08 23:06:01+00:00
The cost of more pins is linear in the number of pins, and the pins aren't the only component of the manufacturing cost, so a card with twice as many pins will have a manufacturing cost of significantly less than twice that of a card with half as many pins.

Cards with 16GB of VRAM exist for ~$300 retail.

Cards with 80GB of VRAM cost >$15,000 and customers pay that.

A card with 80GB of VRAM could be sold for <$1500 with five times the margin of the $300 card because the manufacturing cost is less than five times as much. <$1500 is unambiguously a smaller number than >$15,000. QED.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-08 23:06:10+00:00
I have no idea what this article is intending to express. It is artificially complex to dump the exact implementations of your legacy products into a giant data structure and call it a standard. Nobody can implement that. Which is why they had to bribe, stuff committees and bully people to get it done.

I don't think anyone cares about debating the word "artificial," I don't think that was anyone's point. It's just not a standard. It was, as is made clear here, a way to head off a standard that would be possible to competitors to implement with a fake standard that Microsoft couldn't even implement.

I also don't think that it is "a counterproductive reflex that’s common in open-source circles: scolding users for accepting proprietary tech." I don't even know wtf that's supposed to mean. People are stuck with it because of corruption, they're not being scolded for using it.

edit: "LibreOffice itself, as ODF’s flagship, still suffers from rough edges in design, interaction, and performance. As a result, even as Office hobble itself with bloat, most people still find it easier."

Yeah, it'd be a lot easier if they didn't every have to deal with OOXML and could just work on their own product.
by SyrupThinker | 2025-09-08 23:06:13+00:00
A good example of how the experience of something can be so different between people. I also feel the need to write an article about it, but I'm not done yet...

At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.

But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.

Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game), but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.

They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.

What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.

And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!

That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.

Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.

At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.

At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?" And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.

At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"

The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?

Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
by ummzokbro | 2025-09-08 23:06:49+00:00
Maybe not abusing strictly speaking but...

- The entire SOTA ML algo is 'how to min(cost) while just avoiding churn' - not play what you actually want. Just don't annoy you enough that you quit

- This means serving endless covers of hit (real) songs that cost them pennies on the dollar given cover artists don't get custom negotiated deals

- This means producing their own drivel in key categories[1] to avoid royalty payments outright

- It is not a huge leap from producing drivel to producing genAI drivel if it satisfies the equation above

[1] - https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-creating-i...
by travisgriggs | 2025-09-08 23:07:03+00:00
As I age, I do everything I can to avoid "one more dependency". There's a perverse nerd bragging effect that takes place where people equate their value as a programmer to how many dependencies they can name drop and mash up into their solution. It makes sense, since we evaluate each other, and the more dependencies you can reference in your workpast, the more stepping stones you've stepped on and therefor, been longer on the path.

Anymore, as I evaluate fellow programmers, I'm looking for whether they've discovered "one more dependency" is like signing up for "one more subscription you have to remember to pay for" and what they do to try and mitigate it.
by lorenzohess | 2025-09-08 23:07:11+00:00
> In my view, OOXML is indeed complex, convoluted, and obscure. But that’s likely less about a plot to block third-party compatibility and more about a self-interested negligence: Microsoft prioritized the convenience of its own implementation and neglected the qualities of clarity, simplicity, and universality that a general-purpose standard should have.

The author only provides arguments for "self-interested negligence". He provides no counterarguments to the claim that OOXML complexity was "a plot to block third-party compatibility". Therefore, he cannot compare "negligence" and "a plot". Therefore, his claim that "negligence" is a better explanation for OOXML complexity than "a plot" cannot follow.

To restate:

> If we dig into the context of OOXML’s creation, it can be argued that harming competitors was not Microsoft’s primary aim.

The author provides no evidence to support this claim. At most, the evidence provided in this section at most supports the claim that "negligence" played a role in OOXML complexity. From this evidence alone, no conclusions can be drawn about the "primariness" of "negligence" vs "harming competitors".
by krapp | 2025-09-08 23:07:47+00:00
The point of Show HN is to show off things you made. I'm not complaining about using this as a library - although the creeping ubiquity of vibe-coded libraries carries its own concerns. I'm complaining about going into an explicitly creative setting - yes, that's what HN is supposed to be - with an attitude that nothing matters but the pure utility of the end product. Just kind of sucks the joy out of all of it, and this place had precious little left to offer.
by didibus | 2025-09-08 23:07:58+00:00
I think the issue is that the EU believes to do these things above corruption. In a sense, if you think you are upholding human rights, free speech, and personal privacy, you don't think it is required to offer people ways to hide from the government.

The government thinks the rule of law itself is good enough. Even if they are aware of your speech and it criticizes or shock or whatever the currently elected, they believe nothing could be done against you because the rule of law would protect your right to do so.

Therefore they assume if you have to be secret about it, you must be doing something illegal, otherwise they don't see why you would worry about the government being able to know you are doing it, since they could not do anything against you.

Here for example, they assume that it would only be used to catch and prevent CSAM, which is illegal. But that it would never be abused to prevent legitimate legal free speech, or that it would be done in a way that your privacy is respected because the rule of law won't allow other use of "snooping", etc.

And to be honest, I don't know if they are completely wrong or right. It's a different perspective, one that relates to "gun control" as well.

In the US, people have zero trust of government, and feel like at any point they need to be armed and have the means to hide, escape, and rebel against it. That means secure communication channels, bearing arms, etc.

In the EU, generally people assume that the systems in place will protect the institutions and upheld the rule of law, constitutions, democratic freedoms, etc. And people trust the system in place, so they don't see why individual citizens should be allowed to have weapons, places to hide, etc., and see that more in practice as something that enables crime.

Generally, the counter argument to the American stance is that the power imbalance is too big anyways, it's the system that must be protected and needs to be trusted, if the system becomes corrupt, no amount of civilian weapon and hiding places could match the power the state has, so it's a futile attempt that just ends up benefiting criminals.
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-08 23:08:11+00:00
Maybe. I think they'd have a hard time keeping that under wraps—governments aren't typically very careful (and the FBI is about as careful as a bull in a china shop) about not showing their hand when it comes to charging people. If you're strict about keeping certain info on certain channels, smart observers would notice if someone were snooping.

For instance, if someone shared something incriminating in a group chat and got arrested, and that info was only shared in the group chat, they'd have to silence everyone in that group chat to ensure that the channel still seemed secure. I don't think at least our government is that competent or careful.

But also, people wayyyy overhype how much apple tries to come off as privacy-forward. They sell ads and don't even allow you to deny apps access to the internet, and for the most part their phone security seems more focused on denying you control over your own phone rather than denying a third party access to it. I think they just don't want the hassle of complying with warrants. Stuff like pegasus would only be so easy to sell if you couldn't lean on the company to gain access, and I think it'd be difficult for hundreds of countries to conspire to obscure legal pressure. Finally Apple generally has little to gain from reading your data, unlike other tech giants with perverse incentives.

Of course this is all speculation, but I do trust imessages much more than I trust anything coming out of meta, and most of what comes out of google.
by mentalgear | 2025-09-08 23:08:17+00:00
Seems just in line with all the other Meta Scandals: from providing a platform for genocide in Myanmar, harming the psychology of 100s of millions of teenagers (Instagram) to pushing extremist and fascists content while receiving big ad cash dollars for propaganda that lifts criminals and fascist politicians into the highest offices. Meta has no red lines, as long as it lines Zuckerberg's pockets.
by xracy | 2025-09-08 23:09:21+00:00
I feel like scotus dissents in this day and age need to be a lot more approachable for the average person. And I like this dissent for being short and to the point. I think oftentimes the dissents can get in the weeds of legal discussions, and this just needs to be as simple as "this law says this is illegal in plain text."

From there, it's on the media to pick up on the plain text of the dissent and actually talk about it for longer, because the majority opinions are like, splitting hairs.