MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sedivy94 | 2025-10-30 17:45:02+00:00
The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.

Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.

Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/bl...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-30 17:45:10+00:00
I think you misunderstand. The backlog is not due to wild demand for gas turbines; it is due to structural supply chain and labor constraints around building gas turbines. The backlog means there is only so much gas turbine capacity that can get built; if there is any hiccup in the supply chain, it will further destroy the ability to deploy gas, forcing more rapid renewables and storage uptake. That gas manufacturing also has to compete against demand destruction as renewables and storage keep getting cheaper.

So, when you say "well, they'll just build gas turbines instead," (in your comment I replied to) they cannot. There is no capacity, and no desire to increase capacity. They can barely build them already, and it would be pretty easy to make it harder to build them by finding points of fail to force to failure in their supply and labor chains. Smart money isn't going to invest in a technology that, from all indications, doesn't have longevity based on competing technologies. Existing gas turbine manufacturing is squeezing out the last of economic gains available before the industry shrinks further.

The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025

> US financial markets are favoring renewable energy over fossil fuels, with global investment for new renewable energy development reaching a record $386 billion during the first half of 2025.

> Revenue forecasts show a widening dichotomy between clean and dirty industries, with renewables expected to report 16% sales growth next year and 21% in 2027, while traditional energy companies report 1% and 6% sales growth.

> Global renewable power is forecast to increase by 4,600 gigawatts by the end of the decade, an amount equivalent to adding the generation capacity of China, the EU and Japan.

> Even as the US and European Union recently increased their reliance on coal, solar dethroned the fossil fuel mainstay last year, becoming the world’s most installed energy generation technology according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 Power Transition Trends report. “In 2015, solar power seemed far from overtaking coal, constrained both by scale and economics,” BloombergNEF said in report this month. Yet, within a decade, solar costs have fallen so dramatically that the dynamic has entirely reversed. Solar is now two times cheaper than the fossil fuel.” So-called green energy is the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy power generator in the US, even without incentives, according to Lazard Inc.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-30 17:45:18+00:00
That first paragraph would send the average liberal running for the bus stop. It's no wonder conservatives are the only one willing to chart out a path for the EV industry...

As for the second paragraph, I mostly agree but nothing you said obviates the virtue signalling that people endlessly associated Tesla with pre-2015. I say this not because I think EVs are bad, but because so much of America's congestive dissonance is rooted in the "Tesla good" aphorism burned into their brain for no reason besides feel-good marketing.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-30 17:46:02+00:00
Yeah, I've been using Affinity apps since they appeared. Paid up for the 2.0 versions when they launched. I didn't know if I would need Publisher but bought it too simply because I liked the company (and in fact use it all the time now).

Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
by sliken | 2025-10-30 17:46:05+00:00
Only if you are in a hurry, say an advanced civilization has been around for 1M years (0.07% faster than us). It might well be worth sending out millions of drones to the most promising areas at 1% of the speed of light, their advanced sensors and telescopes and science would likely be able to pick the most likely stars based on metal content, vicinity (i.e. stable of 1B years), water, temp, etc.

Not to mention they could send probes closer and further from the galactic center to take advantage of the slower and faster rotation rate to see new stars.

As for the nuclear fission blast I have my doubts. Ham radio folks brag about 1000 miles a watt, in a lossy atmosphere and multiple bounces that reflect less than 1% for each bounce. Using advanced things like tubes of transistors and a copper cable thrown over a tree branch.

Using the 1 watt per 1000 miles the largest nuclear explosion would be 22 light years, and clear line of sight through space is going to transmit quite a bit better than bouncing off the atmosphere then off the ground several times.

An advanced civilization could make say a square km array (which us lowly humans have managed) and would understand nuclear bombs enough to know their likely signature, decay rate, shape of the curve, etc. Much like how astronomers use supernovas as standard candles for distance, despite crazy different red shifts.

Seems quite reasonable for a civilization to keep track of anything going on in their fraction of the galaxy.

"People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance" It's only hard if you are in a hurry, in fact we have 3 rocks come through our solar system from well more than a light year away.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-30 17:46:18+00:00
Just to be clear do you understand that all of these are built from source with documentation so you can recreate the binaries yourself?

As in it's completely source buildable with no unknown binaries. They just don't have a single 'build' that pulls all of these in and builds them at once. Instead you're following the build instructions for each part, creating libraries that you then link together at the end. This is due to the pain in the ass of cross-compiling Linux/Windows/UEFI binaries all in the one project. It's pretty reasonable.
by zahlman | 2025-10-30 17:46:28+00:00
This is wrong. A venv is a hierarchy of folders containing a config file, as well as some symlinks to Python (or stub executables on Windows). "How Python does it" is that when it starts up from the symlink, it looks for the config file at a relative path; if that checks out, it uses hard-coded rules to add another relative path to sys.path. PYTHONPATH is never involved.

The venvs created by the standard library `venv`, as well as by uv (and by the third-party `virtualenv` that formed the original basis for `venv`), also happen to include "activation" scripts that manipulate some environment variables. PYTHONPATH is not among these. It manipulates PATH, so that the venv's symlink is on the path. And it may unset PYTHONHOME.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-30 17:47:05+00:00
Oh yes indeed, Russia will definitely keep up their end of the deal. They wouldn’t piss on a treaty that they had signed for no reason.

Like, remember that time where they signed a treaty in 1994 that committed them to respecting and protecting Ukraine’s borders and then steadfastly stuck to it till present day?

You’ve convinced me. Entering this agreement with Russia, North Korea and China is a great idea.
by bjoli | 2025-10-30 17:47:12+00:00
Leaving the comfort of lisp, I have started to wonder: why are all the looping facilities in other languages so awful?

Standing on the shoulders of giants, I made this little abomination: https://rikspucko.koketteriet.se/bjoli/goof-loop

It handles 98% of all loops I write, meaning I don't have to manage state (even for things like treating things like circular data). I find it removes many of the stupid errors I make when iterating over data, especially when I need nested loops and conditional accumulation.

I find it so provoking that someone implemented foreach and went "yes. That should be enough for everyone!"
by andylizf | 2025-10-30 17:47:37+00:00
Author here. We used ADRS to automatically evolve a scheduling algorithm starting from a simple greedy policy. Surprisingly, it outperformed Uniform Progress, the NSDI'24 best paper algorithm by discovering "selective waiting" strategies and adaptive pattern recognition.

Counter-intuitive finding: starting from a weaker baseline (greedy) worked better than starting from the SOTA algorithm. The AI found new insights rather than incremental improvements.

The entire process took 5 hours and cost <$20. We're open-sourcing everything and have applied this to other systems problems (MoE load balancing with 5x speedup, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688236).

Happy to answer questions about the methodology or results!
by meowkit | 2025-10-30 17:48:25+00:00
I was a bit peeved by the title, but I think its a fair use of clickbait as the article has a lot of little details about acoustics in humans that I was unfamiliar with (i.e. a link to a primer on the the transduction implementation of cochlear cilia)

But yeah there is a strict vs colloquial collision here.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-30 17:48:32+00:00
It says, on the actual website, the absolute opposite:

"Your content in Affinity isn’t used to train AI features — we can’t access local files. For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control. You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."

The only nuance I can think of here is that if you are using the cloud AI tools, you are uploading content. But it's largely hypocritical to complain about AI tools being trained on your content. They were trained on everyone else's.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-30 17:48:40+00:00
Graphic designers and artists get ripped off, all the time; frequently, by nerds, who tend to do so, in a manner that insults the value of the artist's work.

It's difficult to get those kinds of creatives to donate their time (trust me on this, I'm always trying).

I'm an ex-artist, and I'm a nerd. I can definitively say that creating good designs, is at least as difficult as creating good software, but seldom makes the kind of margin that you can, from software, so misappropriation hurts artists a lot more than programmers.
by rcarmo | 2025-10-30 17:48:47+00:00
Well, I downloaded the Mac app, and here's what I don't like:

- Goodness gracious, that icon. And 3.5GB?????

- Requires a login (so I suppose no disconnected operation)

- Seems to jumble together the vector, bitmap and publishing apps (which I very much prefer to have as separate things)

Mostly everything I've been able to try in 30 minutes seems to work, but a 3.5GB app is a sad sign of the times.

Will most likely keep using the old versions until they die on me, especially on the iPad.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-30 17:48:55+00:00
Google broke my ability to set timers via voice (a core thing my phone used to do forever) for like a year. I no longer use that functionality on my phone (I can't trust Google not to break it, if it can't routinely work, it can't be part of my routine, and I personally don't enjoy cooking dinner twice after a long day).

Google replaced 'Google play the news' from playing news clips from sources I chose and trust, to an AI generated news feed that I have zero faith isn't hallucinated and from sources I have no idea about. Another multiple times daily function I used my phone for, broken by 'Google AI' because 'I should be happy with whatever they give me, it's a free product'.

Google's Youtube/Music algorithm punishes me if I flag AI slop in my feeds by removing those genres/topics, trying to force AI slop into my feed. This one I actually (well until it runs out the end of the month because I canceled) pay for.

Google has trained their users not to use Pixel's voice/AI capabilities, and to resent them (in the typical Google way, be damned with the old it's been replaced with our new half baked product that will itself be replaced shortly after the bugs are gone and it starts to work kind of OK (still really bad, but Google justifies bad is OK because it's 'FREE').

No one is integrating anything new from Google into their routine. No one is integrating Google's broken AI stuff into their daily routine, because it's friggen BROKEN. Google just one day removed me from setting voice timers with my phone, a core use case, for a year, because they could. My routine is not going back to using Google for things I count on just working because Google will arbitrarily break it and I will get the impact (maybe a burnt dinner, maybe faulty news reporting that causes me a heart attack, maybe who knows, maybe a missed important appointment tomorrow?).

Google doesn't care that I'm hit because 'it's good enough for a free product' to them. Everyone I know with a Pixel hates the ecosystem right now. Removing sideloading might fix that and improve good will I guess though? God Google doesn't know and hates their users/advocates/supporters. Google has moved themselves from 'a good solution' to 'good enough for a cheap device and free tools', and made damn sure I know it (via burnt dinners, having to move to my podcast app for (less current) news, by degrading my music/youtube feeds).

Google is a zombie company, they are dead, they just don't know it yet. Coming soon... Alphabet, a Bending Spoons company.
by samweb3 | 2025-10-30 17:49:17+00:00
Is it telling that I used chatgpt to summarize this as 5 bullets for me?

Automation will collapse wages but raise living standards: As AI and robotics replace all labor, human wages will fall—but productivity and wealth will soar, leading to better health, abundance, and comfort.

Historical parallel—child labor’s decline: Just as industrial automation freed children from farm work and shifted society toward education, future automation will free adults from economic necessity, redefining “work.”

AI as the new labor force: Trillions of digital workers could multiply global GDP many times over, making each human comparably wealthy—like Qatari citizens supported by a huge migrant workforce.

Redistribution will likely spread prosperity: Past trends and political realities suggest wealth from full automation will be broadly, though unequally, shared through asset ownership and social programs.

Post-scarcity future: Humanity may enjoy radical technologies—mind uploading, fusion power, genome control, and disease reversal—ushering in an era of leisure, health, and creativity beyond today’s imagination.
by otterley | 2025-10-30 17:49:36+00:00
The simplest and most effective strategy we know today to automatically recover that gives the impacted service the ability to avoid entering a metastable state is for clients to implement retries with exponential backoff. No circuit breaker-type functionality is required. Unfortunately it requires that clients be well behaved.

Also, circuit breakers have issues of their own:

“Even with a single layer of retries, traffic still significantly increases when errors start. Circuit breakers, where calls to a downstream service are stopped entirely when an error threshold is exceeded, are widely promoted to solve this problem. Unfortunately, circuit breakers introduce modal behavior into systems that can be difficult to test, and can introduce significant addition time to recovery. We have found that we can mitigate this risk by limiting retries locally using a token bucket. This allows all calls to retry as long as there are tokens, and then retry at a fixed rate when the tokens are exhausted.” https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/timeouts-retries-and...

Consider a situation in which all the clients have circuit breakers. All of them enter the open state once the trigger condition is met, which drops request load on the service to zero. Your autoscaler reduces capacity to the minimum level in response. Then, all the circuit breakers are reset to the closed state. Your service then experiences a sudden rush of normal- or above-normal traffic, causing it to immediately exhaust availabile capacity. It’s a special case of bimodal behavior, which we try to avoid as a matter of sound operational practice.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-30 17:50:13+00:00
I think a lot of the frustration seen here is that while Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" that Serif's (the previous company) business model was. Serif was something of the last one standing selling "desktop design applications" with that aligned to the incentives of "selling desktop design applications". With Serif bought by Canva and moving to a subscription model like all the other remaining tools, there is no one left with "selling desktop design applications" as a business model. That seems long-term unsustainable if your interest is "desktop design applications" that do their jobs well with few upsells to long-term subscriptions. The unsustainability that leads to upsells and subscription paywalls only generally ever get worse over time, because users of the free part aren't the desired customer.
by bilekas | 2025-10-30 17:51:42+00:00
> The issue appears to be that 50% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and have no savings? I can't imagine how this could be anything other than them just spending money on shit they don't need.

Or that there's no standard minimum wage, or income protection if something does go wrong. Student debt is crippling to people in itself never mind hospital events.

That's so many people you should think "something must be wrong with the system"

> Illnesses and accidents are exactly the things you need savings for

It shouldn't be though, if you pay taxes, the government should be there for you in an emergency when it comes to health.
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-30 17:51:48+00:00
Well, in order to compete, they'd have to cut costs.

You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.

It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.

We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.
by master_crab | 2025-10-30 17:51:56+00:00
It is two crimes:

1. Alerting a country to secret actions taken by a third party government (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)

2. Passing money to commit a crime. See money laundering.

Honestly, the second crime seems aggravated and stupid. Just pass random digits in an API call if you want to tell Israel you did something.
by m10i | 2025-10-30 17:52:06+00:00
I think we agree on the conclusion, but differ on the premise. As a lifelong manga reader, I can say that the footnotes/endnotes made me more focused and invested in what was going on in the panels, not less. It's a different flavor of footnotes than the one you would find in a textbook or reference manual. One way to look at it is as an extended dialogue box for context that can't fit in-panel, but is "vital" from the author's perspective (since they aren't english speakers, they can't really be expected to know just how badly their work is altered sometimes). It's an optional aid for those that are interested in getting more engrossed into the world building.

At the end of the day, when a phrase has multiple meanings (as intended by the author), it can be impossible to translate it into a single, tidy, english catchphrase. This is why in manga raw's (the original, non-translated versions), when authors write kanji characters, they will often superscript them with smaller, hiragana characters. This is essential because in japanese, those kanji characters usually have multiple meanings, so it's necessary to guide the reader towards the intended ones. And even from there, the re-interpreted hiragana characters/words themselves can have multiple - sometimes conflicting - meanings. It's in these conflicts that puns/dual meanings can arise. It's all part of the beauty of the language, and mangaka's are obsessed with showing that (as they should be).

So this sort of nuance will always be lost in translation, but can be essential.
by CivBase | 2025-10-30 17:52:07+00:00
> certainly not at the 10x - 100x difference in college tuitions.

The full time tuition rate at the university I got my engineering degree from is currently $11k /yr. I can't imagine that's even 10x a typical EU university - let alone 100x.

My local community college's full time tuition is currently $5.8k /yr. Either way it's a lot of money, but lets not exaggerate things too far. We're worried about affordable access to education here - not getting everyone into Harvard.
by edbaskerville | 2025-10-30 17:52:38+00:00
To summarize: the ear does not do a Fourier transform, but it does do a time-localized frequency-domain transform akin to wavelets (specifically, intermediate between wavelet and Gabor transforms). It does this because the sounds processed by the ear are often localized in time.

The article also describes a theory that human speech evolved to occupy an unoccupied space in frequency vs. envelope duration space. It makes no explicit connection between that fact and the type of transform the ear does—but one would suspect that the specific characteristics of the human cochlea might be tuned to human speech while still being able to process environmental and animal sounds sufficiently well.

A more complicated hypothesis off the top of my head: the location of human speech in frequency/envelope is a tradeoff between (1) occupying an unfilled niche in sound space; (2) optimal information density taking brain processing speed into account; and (3) evolutionary constraints on physiology of sound production and hearing.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-10-30 17:52:40+00:00
I actually think ffmpeg’s UI is simpler than Handbrake for those at all acquainted with the command line (i.e., for those who understand the concept of text-is-everything-everything-is-text). Handbrake shows you everything you can possibly fiddle with whether or not you plan on fiddling with it. Meanwhile ffmpeg hides everything, period, and you ask for specific features by typing them out. It's not great for discovery but once you get the hang of it, it is incredibly precise. One could imagine taking someone for whom Handbrake was too much and showing them “look, you just type `ffmpeg -i`, the input file, and the output file, and it does what you want”. I imagine for many people this would be a perfectly lovely interface.
by age123456gpg | 2025-10-30 17:52:43+00:00
Indeed, be careful with anything that involves secret bits.

This tool uses proper crypto/rand initialisation of the starting key https://github.com/AlexanderYastrebov/onion-vanity-address/b...

Check out my other vanity generators (they all use crypto/rand):

https://github.com/AlexanderYastrebov/wireguard-vanity-key

https://github.com/AlexanderYastrebov/age-vanity-keygen

https://github.com/AlexanderYastrebov/ethereum-vanity-addres...