MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lxgr | 2025-10-11 10:58:59+00:00
> Do you mean the file extension should only reflect the file format and not the codecs it has inside ?

That's pretty much always been the case. File extensions are just not expressive enough to capture all the nuances of audio and video codecs. MIME types are a bit better.

Audio is a bit of an exception with the popularity of MP3 (which is both a codec and a relatively minimal container format for it).
by ksec | 2025-10-11 10:59:47+00:00
Let's hope they get more things right 2nd time around. AOM will do Live Session on 20th of October: The Future of Innovation is Open [1].

May be more data and numbers. Including Encoding Complexity increase, decoding complexity. Hardware Decoder roadmap. Compliance and Test kits. Future Profile. Involvement and improvement to both AVIF the format and the AV2 image codec. Better than JPEG-XL? Are the ~30% BDRATE compared to current best AV1 encoder or AV1 1.0 as anchor point? Live Encoding improvements?

[1] https://aomedia.org/events/live-session-the-future-of-innova...
by gus_massa | 2025-10-11 11:00:07+00:00
It's somewhat used for milk pasteurization. You can heat it to 61°C (145°F) for 30 minutes or to 72°C (162°F) for 15 seconds (yes, 0.25 minutes). More info https://www.idfa.org/pasteurization and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
by constantcrying | 2025-10-11 11:00:35+00:00
I agree with the conclusion, but nothing about the arguments to arrive at that conclusion sound true at all.

Hardware does not have a Stockholm Syndrome. Making Chips that are better at things people use these Chips for is the correct thing to do. The CPU architecture is relatively static because making hardware for software which does not exist is a terrible idea. Look at Itanium, a total failure.

The C paradigm which the author bemoans never was the only one, but it was good, it worked well and that is why it is the default to this day. It is also good enough to emulate message passing and parallelism, it is totally non-obvious that throwing out this paradigm is in any way beneficial over the current status quo. There is no reason for the abstractions we want to also to be the abstractions the hardware uses.
by skydhash | 2025-10-11 11:00:48+00:00
Interactive labs can do a great job of teaching skills, but they fell short of teaching understanding. And at some point, it’s faster to read a book to learn, because there’s a reduced need for practice.

Hypertext is better than printed book format, but if you’re just starting with something you need a guide that provides a coherent overview. Also most online documentation are just bad.

Why ctrl+f? You can still have a table of contents and an index with pdf. And the pdf formats support link. And I’d prefer filtering/querying over generation because the latter is always tainted by my prompt. If I type `man unknown_function`, I will get an error, not a generated manual page.
by formerly_proven | 2025-10-11 11:00:50+00:00
Unreal and Unity would be less problematic if these engines were engineered to match the underlying reality of graphics APIs/drivers, but they're not. Neither of these can systematically fix the shader stuttering they are causing architecturally, and so essentially all games built on these platforms are sentenced to always stutter, regardless of hardware.

Both of these seem to suffer from incentive issues similar to enterprise software: They're not marketing and selling to either end users or professionals, but studio executives. So it's important to have - preferably a steady stream of - flashy headline features (e.g. nanite, lumen) instead of a product that actually works on the most basic level (consistently render frames). It doesn't really matter to Epic Games that UE4/5 RT is largely unplayable; even for game publishers, if you can pull nice-looking screenshots out of the engine or do good-looking 24p offline renders (and slap "in-game graphics" on them), that's good enough.
by layer8 | 2025-10-11 11:00:51+00:00
There is no “high contrast”. Increase Contrast has roughly the same (limited) effects it always had (enhancing the presentation of specific UI controls in specific ways), hence it’s not broken. What I’m saying is that Reduce Transparency is reducing contrast in a way that is orthogonal to, and isn’t prevented by, also having Increase Contrast turned on.

Features like Night Shift also happen to reduce contrast. That doesn’t mean they are buggy, or that Increase Contrast is buggy.

It does mean that Reduce Transparency is not suitable if you don’t want reductions in contrast compared to regular-transparency Liquid Glass, regardless of whether you also use Increase Contrast.

I do agree that Liquid Glass as a whole is broken for anyone needing a higher-contrast UI. In my opinion, a GUI should be reasonably high-contrast by default, without special accessibility settings.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-11 11:02:23+00:00
The point is that those APIs were not designed with anything beyond C and C++ as consumers, and everyone else has to do their due deligence and build language bindings from scratch.

So we end up in an internal cycle that we cannot get rid of.

Metal and Web 3D APIs add other consumer languages in mind, you also see this in how ANARI is being designed.

Yes every little bit of performance counts, but it cannot be that APIs get designed as if everyone is still coding in Assembly, and then it is up to whoever cares to actually build proper high level abstractions on top, that is how we end up with Vulkan.
by mattkevan | 2025-10-11 11:02:39+00:00
I’ve got a Daylight and it’s pretty similar to e-ink.

Without the backlight the contrast is lower than a newer e-ink display, such as on a Remarkable, so you need good ambient lighting. It being actually backlit rather than front-lit is nice though.

I’m not sure why, maybe it’s just psychological, but the Daylight panel feels like a screen, whereas an eink panel feels more like a static surface.
by squigz | 2025-10-11 11:04:12+00:00
> It is only made possible by

Well... no, it's not only possible this way, as I just tried to point out. With or without global news programs, with or without addictive news feeds, those people will still act that way and go to great lengths to find reasons to justify it.

I did not engage with other bits because I do not generally disagree with you: watching too much news is a problem, highly addictive news feeds are a problem. I just do not believe those problems are the source of every issue we face, particularly racism - and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.
by esperent | 2025-10-11 11:04:51+00:00
> you’re talking about a decision that didn’t really pan out made over 20 years ago.

The PS3 sold 87m units, and more importantly, it sold more than the Xbox 360, so I think it panned out fine even if we shouldn't call it a roaring success.

It did sell less than the PS2 or PS4 but I don't think the had much to do with the cell architecture.

Game developer hated it, but that's a different issue.

I do agree that a truly unusual architecture like this is very unlikely for the next gen though.
by anilgulecha | 2025-10-11 11:06:07+00:00
I'm part of the Jain community in Bangalore, and the version of this in society exists, called Sallekhna [1], a tradition that's developed over millennia, and this is venerated and celebrated.

The philosophical underpinning is giving up of materialness. The practicality of the 5 instances that I witnessed over the past year - typical terminal individuals choose this. They pass away surrounded by loved ones (they typically medicate for any pain, and the body starts shutting down when food and water stops). This is observed with somberness, but celebrated as very positive act.

When someone starts this process, it's a unique experience speaking with them, as there's usually nothing that comes up, and the moment does not really lend itself to small talk :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana
by FinnKuhn | 2025-10-11 11:06:26+00:00
It doesn't though. The vast majority of flights are short-haul or long-haul flights and not domestic. This data uses the UK flight data so let's look that up.

Non-Domestic flight passengers: 14,124,617 [1] Domestic flight passengers: 1,455,330 [2]

So you can see that over 90% of all passengers do not fly domestically within the UK. So only the domestic flights emit more CO2 than combustion engine cars, but they are the minority. If you were to look at the US, flights that short probably play even less of a role due to longer distances between cities in the US (in comparison to the UK).

In conclusion the data you provided very much proves my point so thank you for providing the source for my statement yourself.

[1] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813... [2] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813...
by notahacker | 2025-10-11 11:06:51+00:00
Can't think of an airline I'd be less surprised to hear this about.

Vietnam Airlines once somehow managed to email me the boarding pass of another person due to fly with them the following day. I'd provided an email address to their sales agent when booking a flight on a different route some nine years earlier (back in the good old days of 2009 when they didn't have newfangled stuff like online booking), and didn't even have a remotely similar name to the individual whose boarding pass they'd sent me. I hope they didn't miss their flight! (yes, I emailed back, copying in some customer service addresses that definitely weren't no-reply...)

I'm not an expert in airline PSS systems, but I know one thing - that isn't supposed to happen :)
by sarchertech | 2025-10-11 11:07:57+00:00
Sure. It’s a guideline not a hard rule. Doctors have wide latitude. A doctor could give you antibiotics whenever they want.

The doctor didn’t do anything wrong by asking you to wait a few days.

In addition to residency, my wife is fellowship trained, she’s who PCPs end up sending patients to. She’s basically level 2 tech support (an ENT would be level 3 for this particular problem). She sees the results of this stuff all the time.

And the majority of PCPs vastly overprescribe antibiotics for sinus infections. The vast majority of patients who come in saying they have a sinus infection and asking for antibiotics are wrong.

Doctors are tasked with antibiotic stewardship, but people complain on review sites when they don’t get what they want, so many of them just do it.
by octo888 | 2025-10-11 11:08:03+00:00
Yup. They also popularised excessive baggage under the seat, and I routinely used to see obvious hazards that would impede an evacuation. Staff would turn a blind eye. Probably still do

Further, with the baggage being there in easy reach under the seat, I reckon people would be more tempted to take it with them when evacuating.

That they're are a safe airline seems to be incredible luck - they have all the components for it not to be.
by latexr | 2025-10-11 11:08:28+00:00
> I just do not believe those problems are the source of every issue we face

No one is arguing that. Even the original commenter said:

> This is partly the reason

Partly. But they are a reason.

> and I don't believe that solving those problems would solve those issues in any impactful way.

There is no single factor which is the cause and can be solved. There are a bunch of partial factors which cause the issue. Fixing any of them would help.
Show HN: Pxxl App – Free Alternative to Vercel, Render, and Netlify
by robinsui | 2025-10-11 11:11:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Pxxl App, a free web hosting platform for developers who want a simple and fast way to deploy both frontend and backend apps. It works like Vercel, Render, or Netlify but removes the limits and credit card barriers.

You can connect your Git repo, deploy in seconds, and get a live subdomain like yourapp.pxxl.pro. It supports React, Next.js, and other modern frontend frameworks, as well as backend projects built with Node.js, PHP, or Python. It also includes automatic builds, environment variables, and CI/CD support.

It’s completely free to start. I’d love feedback from the community on what would make it even better for developers.

Check it out: https://pxxl.app
by franga2000 | 2025-10-11 11:13:27+00:00
The "it spies on you because it's free" thing hasn't been true for many years now. TVs that cost almost a grand still spy on you, as do cars that cost tens of thousands. Youtube/Netflix/Spotify/... still spy on you even if you pay for the premium/whatever tier.

If something is free, you're the product. But if it isn't free, you're paying to be the product.
by RileyJames | 2025-10-11 11:13:29+00:00
+1 for a yoto.

It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.

My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.

I bought one the next week without doing any further research.

When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.

I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.

Obviously wrong in hindsight.

Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.

But portable cassette recorders still exist…
by owickstrom | 2025-10-11 11:15:38+00:00
Agree with the above. It's during the night time reading with backlight that the difference from E-Ink is most clear, IMO. There's like a slight sense of depth between the surface and the pixels, if that makes sense, which I don't perceive with E-Ink in the same way. As noted above, "the Daylight panel feels like a screen" in that setting. With ambient daylight though, it is close to the E-Ink feel.
by masklinn | 2025-10-11 11:15:43+00:00
One issue I think about a fair bit is that without legal assisted suicide aside from all the usual issues with unassisted suicide you need to end things even earlier to make sure you do it while still physically capable: with age the risk of physical debilitation increases sharply, a bad fall or a small stroke will see you in the hospital or incapable of moving an arm. Which is on top of the risks of mental debilitation taking away your right to self determination (through simple incompetence).
Ask HN: Do you have some rare internet(s) history to share?
by Kye | 2025-10-11 11:15:55+00:00
I had a short but interesting conversation last night that started with seeing this post: https://bsky.app/profile/goldy.horsesass.org/post/3m2v53lblys26

>> "One of my first jobs after college (circa 1985) was creating and maintaining the first online version of the MMWR, and I can't overemphasize how much they drummed it into our heads how important this publication was, and how important it was for us to get online right."

MMWR is the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The history of the Internet, and the internets before it, is one of my top interests, so I asked:

>> "1985! That would have been pre-Internet. Is there anywhere you've written about the process of getting things distributed online on those early networks? I assume this was ARPANET or Fidonet or something along those lines."

And got a rare look at history:

https://bsky.app/profile/goldy.horsesass.org/post/3m2v6ooqkqs26

>> "It was on the short-lived "Health Information Network" which was delivered using ITT-Dialcom's text-based dialup timesharing system. We shipped VT-100 terminals to subscribers, mostly doctors. CDC would fax us a copy of MMWR a day in advance and we had to type the text into the system by hand."

>> "It was a terrible business model. The idea was to be Westlaw or LexisNexis for doctors. But attorneys bill their clients for research while doctors don't, so they were reluctant to pay the high subscription and usage fees. We also had a similar service for dentists in collaboration with the ADA."

I looked it up and could only find mention of "ITT-Dialcom." Of course, everyone knows the VT-100. These posts might be the only record of the existence of this short lived "LexisNexis for Doctors" online.

And I wondered: how much of this is out there? How many people created short-lived things that were so rare or ephemeral that almost no one heard of them? Was there an early YouTube on FidoNet? Maybe a Digg for Gopher. Did you make or use something rare and interesting back in the early digitally-connected world? Talk about it.
by James_K | 2025-10-11 11:16:31+00:00
1 point by James_K 0 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]

That's horrible design. I was utterly perplexed whenever the compiler asked me to add one of those strange fields to a struct. If it had just asked me to include the variance in generic parameters, I would have had no such confusion. Asking programmers to learn the meaning of an important concept in programming is entirely reasonable, especially in Rust which is a language for advanced programmers that expects knowledge of many other more complicated things.

What's more, the implicit variance approach might create dangerous code. It is possible to break the interface for a module without making any change to its type signature. The entire point of types is to provide a basic contract for the behaviour of an object. A type system with variance in it that doesn't let you write it down in the signature is deficient in this property.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-10-11 11:18:04+00:00
Lack of GPS essentially killed the resurrected Pebble for me.

If I am buying a smart/tracking watch today, I want these things from it:

- Great battery life

- HRM (with decent accuracy; doesn't have to pass those "accuracy tests" though)

- GPS (with extremely good accuracy and yes, it has to pass those accuracy tests for GPS. And no, if I turn it ON and use it and the battery dies quickly, I won't hold it against you - that's supposed to happen)

- Do not track me - do not send any data to anywhere unless I specifically want it

- Do not need a phone to be connected to function - let me export data later if I choose to (hell, if this is the only way - I don't mind - BT not being used always isn't so bad - saves a bit of battery; if you need me to do this via a USB type C cable later, I don't mind that either)

That's all!

-----

If you don't have these features, I don't really mind:

- Show me the incoming call on the screen. - Give me a way to reject or silence it. If I want to answer that call, then I'll reach out to my phone anyway.

- Maybe show the time and day if I tap it or I am fine if it's always shown

- Preferably don't show me notifications from apps in general and if you do - give a very granular way to disable specific apps (this might already be possible)

- Please sell a non-touchscreen option (but I can live with one)

- Do not try to be the smartphone or replicate it somehow and end up becoming a Frankenstein in both size and spirit

- Maybe keep it lightweight?

PS. And, for the love of god, do not ever try to hardcode special chargers/cables like Philips does for their trimmers. Bas----ds sell different cables and different chargers for two trimmer models released in the same year very close to each other and in close price ranges fulfilling similar functions.
by Pannoniae | 2025-10-11 11:18:33+00:00
Wow, very nice ;)

OpenGL was a very nice API and even despite its shortcomings, it is quite telling that VK didn't fully replace it 10 years later.

Cross-vendor mesh shader support is great - we had NV_mesh_shader for quite a while but it's great that it's also supported on AMD now. It's good for voxel games like this - the shape of the vertex data is fairly fixed and very compressible, mesh shaders can really cut down on the VRAM usage and help reduce overhead.

Most minecraft optimisation mods generally try to reduce drawcalls by batching chunks (16x16x16) into bigger regions and use more modern OpenGL to reduce API overhead.

This mod does GPU-driven culling for invisible chunk sections (so the hidden chunks aren't rendered but without a roundtrip to the CPU) and also generates the triangles themselves with a mesh shader from the terrain data, which cuts down on the vertex size a lot. (EDIT: I reworded this section because the mod does only a few drawcalls in total so my wording was inaccurate. Sorry!)

Sadly, optimising the game is a bit tricky due to several reasons - the first big one is translucency sorting, because there are translucent blocks in the game like stained glass, which have to be properly sorted for the blending to work. (the base game doesn't sort correctly either by default....)

The second is that it's quite overengineered, so improving it while also not breaking other mods and accidentally fixing vanilla bugs is quite hard.

There are further improvements possible but honestly, this is day and night compared to the vanilla renderer :)

For us mere mortals (not working at Unity or Unreal), the complexity is just too much. Vulkan tries to abstract desktop and mobile together, but if you're making an indie game, there's no value for you in that. The GL/GLES split was better because each could evolve to its strengths instead of being chained to a fundamentally different design.

The global state in OpenGL is certainly an annoyance, but I do not think that replacing it with fixed pipelines is an improvement, especially considering that most of that state is just a register write in desktop GPUs. Luckily, they eased up on that, but the API is still confusing, the defaults are not sane, and you need vendor-specific advice to know what's usable and what isn't. Ironically, writing Vulkan makes you more vendor-dependent in a sense, because you don't have OpenGL extension hell - you have Vulkan extension hell AND a bunch of incidental complexity around the used formats and layouts and whatnot.

On a more positive note, I seriously hope that OpenGL won't be entirely abandoned in the future, it has been a great API so far and it only really has small issues and driver problems but nothing really unfixable.
by zahlman | 2025-10-11 11:19:20+00:00
That data lags because it's noisy and because it's measuring the air, which lags production of the CO2. The rate of increase has been increasing as India and especially China have been undergoing economic revolution, but China is also now known to be pivoting on their energy policy. That's already underway, not just planned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545644).
by kotaKat | 2025-10-11 11:20:53+00:00
I wonder how many variants of the PS6 they'll go through before they get a NIC that works right.

As someone working at an ISP, I am frustrated with how bad Sony has mangled the networking stack on these consoles. I thought BSD was supposed to be the best in breed of networking but instead Sony has found all sorts of magical ways to make it Not Work.

From the PS5 variants that just hate 802.11ax to all the gamers making wild suggestions like changing MTU settings or DNS settings just to make your games work online... man, does Sony make it a pain for us to troubleshoot when they wreck it.

Bonus points that they took away the Web browser so we can't even try to do forward-facing troubleshooting without going through an obtuse process of the third-party-account-linking system to sneak out of the process to run a proper speedtest to Speedtest/Fast to show that "no, it's PSN being slow, not us".