MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by f33d5173 | 2025-10-30 20:07:04+00:00
People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you understand exactly what you want, and correspondingly can manipulate a tool like handbrake to get it, or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. A software that appeals to the weird purgatory in the middle necessarily has a very limited audience. In practice, this small audience is served by websites. Someone searches "convert x to y" and a website comes up that does the conversion. Knowing some specialized software that does that task (and only that one narrow task) puts you so far into the domain of the specialist that you can manage to figure out a specialist tool.
by jimkleiber | 2025-10-30 20:07:06+00:00
I think you're hitting on something that very rarely gets discussed, at least in the US and maybe some other Western societies. I wonder if it's just simple depreciation or compound depreciation (or whatever the opposite of compound interest would be).

Me finding the money to climb Kilimanjaro at 23 is different than me having the money at 40 but worse knees.

Thank you for pointing this out and I hope someone formalizes it more.
by pm215 | 2025-10-30 20:07:37+00:00
Personally I strongly do not want to get better at remembering dreams. At the moment I very rarely remember anything about dreaming, and on the very rare occasion that some fragment of memory from a dream pops into my head it is super confusing until I identify "oh, that must have been from a dream". I prefer to keep my memory uncontaminated with random garbage :)
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-30 20:07:49+00:00
Sure, my point is that - no matter how bad this looks, it was approximately better than their alternatives. So it's a testament to human resilience.

That aside, that there was literally no going back, given the travel to get to NY. I had an ancestor come to NYC in the 19th c. and return back to Sweden, but he was not in the desperate straits that many were. I'm sure some would have returned, given the opportunity.
by xeonmc | 2025-10-30 20:08:34+00:00
Means that it is a broad spectrum signal.

Imagine the dissonant sound of hitting a trashcan.

Now imagine the sound of pressing down all 88 keys on a piano simultaneously.

Do they sound similar in your head?

The localization is located at where the phase of all frequency components are aligned coherently construct into a pulse, while further down in time their phases are misaligned and cancel each other out.
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-30 20:08:35+00:00
I agree there isn't enough. Some programs are OK (especially command-line programs), some aren't as good as the actual good quality ones.

> Do one thing and do it well!

This does not necessarily mean that it would have only one button (or any buttons). Depending on what is being done, there may be many options for being done, although there might also be default settings. A command-line program might do it better that you only need to specify the file name, but if there are options (what options and how many options there will be depends what program it is) then you can also specify those options if the default settings are not suitable.
by apsurd | 2025-10-30 20:08:57+00:00
After thinking about it charitably, it seems like you're asking "why are people different?" Are they being different because they want to convey "being different".

Maybe. But also, people are different because people are different. There's variance. Variance in the Universe is a good thing. I'm no physicist so I'm going to get this some degree of wrong but I'm pretty sure variance (of time/space) is pretty much the definition of reality.

The language topic is good too. English does have a ton of words and so it's baked in the language to be flowery, "extra" if you will. Yeah, different languages, also cool.
by karaterobot | 2025-10-30 20:09:27+00:00
I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.

I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.

Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-10-30 20:09:28+00:00
This is why I love old tech like my 40 year old car (bmw e30 325is) and analog camera and whatnot. You have way more control because of less external dependencies and simplicity, and the prices are still decent compared to what you'd get now for vastly more money. $70k dogshit unwrenchable SUV or $10k 80's car that works like a dream and is built like a thinkpad? It's so relaxing working with older things. Hearing old peoples stories are wild, like just crossing the border with a 6 pack of beer no passport no nothing and having a good time on the weekend. Now my asshole is getting scanned down to the submillimeter and sitting in a palantir database just so I can go on a vacation.
by codyb | 2025-10-30 20:09:29+00:00
I mean... sort of.

But let's look at the structure for a bit...

- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy

- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight

- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable

- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote

- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction

So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed

And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-30 20:09:36+00:00
Why even do that? I don't want a better Windows than Windows so I can run Windows programs on my not-Windows computer.

I want Linux software, instead.

(I'm old enough to have once had a "better Windows than Windows" experience, with OS/2 Warp -- ~30 years ago. It was a very nice system that completely failed to thrive, with many back then blaming its quite good Windows compatibility for that failure.)
by antiloper | 2025-10-30 20:09:59+00:00
Copilot is the most incompetent AI tool I've ever used, which is bizarre since you'd think with the Microsoft/OpenAI partnership they'd make it so that Copilot uses the ChatGPT model.

It's most egregious on Azure, which has a copilot button on every page, and anytime I try to ask it about a precise configuration question for a resource, it NEVER answers correctly. So you have to search on whatever set of microsoft Q&A platforms, stackoverflow questions, and github issues/discussions to maybe find an answer like in the prehistory of 2020.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-30 20:10:14+00:00
> Money's ability to buy great experiences decreases as you get older.

Excellent point. You may have just talked me into retiring.

> What you can do NOW with that 10% slice will never exactly be on your possibilities map again.

Maybe not... but "once in a lifetime chances" come around more often than you think. You don't have to take every one right now. (As you get older, options narrow, as you said.)
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-30 20:11:19+00:00
Yes, for the vanilla Fourier transform you have to integrate from negative to positive infinity. But more practically you can put put a temporally finite-support window function on it, so you only analyze a part of it. Whenever you see a 2d spectrogram image in audio editing software, where the audio engineer can suppress a certain range of frequencies in a certain time period they use something like this.

It's called the short-time Fourier transform (STFT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-30 20:11:26+00:00
Last week I bought groceries rather than a 50lb bag of Monkey Chow. Objectively the Monkey Chow would have been simpler, cheaper, and maybe even healthier but I kind of enjoy interesting things.

If you would prefer a bowl of Monkey Chow that's fine, but don't begrudge the rest of us our souls.

EDIT - I realize now that not everyone knows that Monkey Chow is a thing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230102005704/https://www.angry...

https://www.sharpefarmsupplies.com/livestock/specialty-anima...
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-30 20:11:51+00:00
This isn't really a fair comparison, though.

Python is an interpreted scripting language that was not originally designed with high performance computing in mind. It's perfectly normal for languages like that to have their tooling written in a systems programming language. It's also perfectly normal for languages like that to have components that do need to be performant written in a systems programming language. We call this, "Using the right tool for the job."

It's true that a lot of historical Python toolchain was written in Python. That was also using the right tool for the job. It's a holdover from a time when Python was still mostly just a scripting language, so projects were smaller and packages were smaller and dependency trees were smaller and there just generally weren't as many demands placed on the toolchain.

Go, by contrast, is itself a systems programming language. And so naturally they'd want to have all the systems components written in Go, and the sooner the better. It wouldn't inspire much confidence if the maintainers of a systems programming language didn't trust it with systems programming tasks.
by throw0101c | 2025-10-30 20:11:53+00:00
I participate in a personal finance sub-reddit, and there is often a question of whether someone should pay off their mortgage (completely, or make some lump sum payments).

The mathematical answer is that if your interest rate is lower than the expected returns of some kind of portfolio you have, than you'll make more money investing.

But I like to bring up what Morgan Housel, author of the book The Psychology of Money, said on paying down his mortgage:

> It just increased our independence, even if it made no sense on paper. So that's another element of debt that I think goes misunderstood. And a lot of that for both of those points is this idea that people don't make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They don't make them in Excel. They make financial decisions at the dinner table. That's where they're talking about their goals and their own different personalities and their own unique fears and their own unique skills and whatnot. So that's why I kind of push people to say like, it's okay to make financial decisions that don't make any sense on paper if they work for you, if they check the boxes of your psychology and your goals that makes sense for you. And for me, extreme aversion, what looks like an irrational aversion today, and I would say is an irrational aversion to debt, is what works for me and what makes me happy, so that's why I've done it.

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/128

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSaRb-iFwPA&t=12m48s
by bigyabai | 2025-10-30 20:11:53+00:00
This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model.

In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Many of the boutique developers from the 80s would go out of business in the 1990s, when home computing proliferated to the point that they couldn't profit. Both FOSS and commercial software development persisted, despite the predictions of unfathomable hellscapes by the advocates of Franklin Computer et. al.

In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting. There was a (naive) belief that spending "the cost of a cup of coffee" would contribute to the betterment of society once Apple and Mastercard had taken their cut. But it never panned out. Brand loyalty is as foolish in software as it is in hardware.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-30 20:12:18+00:00
Why would it be fraudulent in this case? I assume that these would be paid as refunds accounted for as a discount to a particular customer - aren't these generally discretionary? Also, I would assume that it would be the Israeli government getting services from the Israeli subsidiary of that company, so it's not clear whether even if it were a crime, which jurisdiction would have an issue with it.

You could argue that it's against something like the OECD Anti‑Bribery Convention, but that would be a much more difficult case, given that this isn't a particular foreign official, but essentially a central body of the foreign government.

Just to clarify, not saying that it's ok, but just that accusing it of being a "crime" might be a category error.
by graybeardhacker | 2025-10-30 20:12:34+00:00
I always tell clients (or users): "If you bring your car to the mechanic because it's making a noise and tell them to replace the belt, they will replace the belt and you car will still make the noise. Ask them to fix the noise."

In other words, if you need expert help, trust the expert. Ask for what you need, not how to do it.
by j1elo | 2025-10-30 20:12:40+00:00
Easy example that I know of: the Mediasoup project is a library written in C++ for streaming video over the internet. It is published as a Node package and offers a JS API. Upon installing, it would just download the appropriate C++ sources and compile them on the spot. The project maintainers wanted to write code, not manage precompiled builds, so that was the most logical way of installing it. Note that a while ago they ended up adding downloadable builds for the most common platforms, but for anything else the expectation still was (and is, I guess) to build sources at install time.
by pjmorris | 2025-10-30 20:12:49+00:00
We were in our 20's when my friend said 'A day in your 20's is worth a year in your 30's, a day in your 30's is worth a year in your 40's, etc...' Now in our 60's we're a little less adamant - every day is worth something.- but it has been a useful perspective.
by zarmin | 2025-10-30 20:12:58+00:00
They claim not to, but I am extremely suspicious.

>No, your content in Affinity is not used to train AI-powered features, or to help AI features learn and improve in other ways, such as model evaluation or quality assurance. In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.
by cxr | 2025-10-30 20:13:22+00:00
Imagine if we had a system where you could just deposit the source code for a program you work on into a "depository". You could set it up so your team could "admit" the changes that have your approval, but it doesn't allow third parties to modify what's in your depository (even if it's a library that you're using that they wrote). When you build/deploy your program, you only compile/run third-party versions that have been admitted to the depository, and you never just eagerly fetch other versions that purport to be updates right before build time. If there is an update, you can download a copy and admit it to your repo at the normal time that you verify that your program actually needs the update. Even if it sounds far-fetched, I imagine we could get by with a system like this.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-30 20:13:38+00:00
This is an escalation, but related:

Prince Andrew gives up royal titles after 'discussion with king' (7 points, 13 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45622110

Elon Musk and Prince Andrew named in latest Epstein files release (74 points, 1 month ago, 36 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45390824

Epstein had 'sex tapes' of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, witness claimed (9 points, 2 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38920619
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-30 20:14:14+00:00
Yes, this is the third to be spotted.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS

2/3 of them Loeb has made wild claims about.
by vladgur | 2025-10-30 20:14:36+00:00
The arbitrage opportunities here are insane. You should install an electric charger or two in your front yard and charge people 50-100% premiums to use your power :)

I live 20 minutes north of you. My power is in fact 4 times expensive in the winter.

BRB, Shopping on amazon for a 20-mile long extension cord
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-10-30 20:15:39+00:00
On the other hand, I've not uncommonly seen this idea misused: Alice asks for Y, Bob says that it's an XY problem and that Alice really wants to solve a more general problem X with solution Z, Alice says that Z doesn't work for her due to some detail of her problem, Bob browbeats Alice over "If you think Z won't work, then you're wrong, end of story", and everyone argues back and forth over Z instead of coming up with a working solution.

Sometimes the best solution is not the most widely-encouraged one.
by tbabb | 2025-10-30 20:15:45+00:00
Here is some context: Early in the aphantasia discourse, someone asked a group I was in to do a mental exercise: Imagine an apple. Can you tell what color it is? What variety? Can you tell the lighting? Is it against a background? Does it have a texture? Imagine cutting into it. And so on.

For me, not only was the color, variety, lighting, and texture crystal clear, but I noticed that when I mentally "cut into" the apple, I could see where the pigment from the broken skin cells had been smeared by the action of the knife into the fleshy white interior of the apple. This happened "by itself", I didn't have to try to make it happen. It was at a level of crisp detail that would be difficult to see with the naked eye without holding it very close.

That was the first time I had paid attention to the exact level of detail that appears in my mental imagery, and it hadn't occurred to me before that it might be unusual. Based on what other people describe of their experience, it seems pretty clear to me that there is real variation in mental imagery, and people are not just "describing the same thing differently".
by bragr | 2025-10-30 20:16:00+00:00
The post you are replying separately mentioned both the "linux kernel" and "linux" so the "Linux is a kernel" pedantry feels misplaced here.

Besides this old debate is pretty silly because I doubt anyone could propose (and get a majority of us to agree on) a formal definition of an operating system that would allow us to unambiguously say "that's an OS competent", "that's an OS", and "that's just software that ships with the OS" across a suite of OS's.
by dalyons | 2025-10-30 20:16:10+00:00
PHEVs are universally bad EVs. Terrible capacity, slow / low power charging infrastructure, minimal use of electric engines at higher speeds. They are essentially a lie to get green subsidies & tax breaks, achieving only ~19% less emissions than their gas equivalents in the real world [1]

They don't have to be bad EVs, you could theoretically make one with a good EV powertrain, but then it would likely be more expensive than a pure EV. And battery prices drop substantially every year, and ranges are increasing fast.

They're a dead end.

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...
by antognini | 2025-10-30 20:16:23+00:00
If you want to get really deep into this, Richard Lyon has spent decades developing the CARFAC model of human hearing: Cascade of Asymmetric Resonators with Fast-Acting Compression. As far as I know it's the most accurate digital model of human hearing.

He has a PDF of his book about human hearing on his website: https://dicklyon.com/hmh/Lyon_Hearing_book_01jan2018_smaller...
by shrinks99 | 2025-10-30 20:17:02+00:00
Most of Blender's icons are actually made in Penpot which is also what the Blender foundation uses for UI prototyping. The brush icons are made in Blender though!

https://penpot.app/penpothub/libraries-templates/blender-con...

https://code.blender.org/2024/11/new-brush-thumbnails/
by javier_e06 | 2025-10-30 20:17:19+00:00
This is fascinating.

I know of vocoders in the military hardware that encode voices to resemble something more simple for compression (a low-tone male voice), smaller packets that take less bandwidth. This evolution of the ear to must also have evolved with our vocal chords and mouth to occupy available frequencies for transmission and reception for optimal communication.

The parallels with waveforms don't end there. Waveforms are also optimized for different terrains (urban, jungle).

Are languages organic waveforms optimized to ethnicity and terrain?

Cool article indeed.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-10-30 20:17:20+00:00
I wonder if they have a revocation list they circulate? Surely there must be a mechanism for informing those who need to know when it's a less famous member of royalty.

"Colour Sergeant, there's some prince at the gate!"

"Check the CRL (Crown Revocation List), just got a new one this morn."
by zarmin | 2025-10-30 20:17:31+00:00
slightly off-topic thought experiment that's been on my mind lately:

to us, the sun appears to be the size of, let's say, a quarter held at arm's length. this is at 93M miles (1AU, or ~8 light minutes) distance. if we moved the sun 100 miles away from earth, it would take up the entire sky. now in the other direction, if we doubled the distance, to 2AU, it would appear to us as half its normal size and 1/4 as bright (irradiance follows inverse square law). at 3AU the sun would be 1/9 as bright and 3x smaller than a quarter. at 100AU, we're talking about brightness of 1/100^2 (one ten-thousandth) the sun's apparent brightness. with me so far?

Sirius A: the brightest star we can see; 25x more luminous than the sun; 2x the size of the sun; 8.6 light YEARS distance (544,000AU) from earth.

if we moved the sun to the same distance as Sirius A, it would appear 296 BILLION times dimmer and 544,000 times smaller. yet Sirius A is easily visible - the brightest star in our sky - despite being only 25x more luminous and 2x larger.

do you see the discrepancy? 25x more luminous doesn't compensate for a 296-billion-fold brightness loss. The numbers we are given don't make sense, not even close. (and this is without considering diffusion, which would make the discrepancy even worse.) i'm not proposing an explanation or a modification to the model, i just think the data don't make sense.