MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-10-29 11:19:33+00:00
I can mainly speak for Sweden, but basically the answer there actually is ”everybody who wants to and meets the minimum requirements (essentially having graduated high school)”

Sweden has higher gross enrolment in tertiary education than the US, and a larger proportion of older students (people who go back later in life to progress their education or change paths)

I’ve heard that in countries like Germany people are often ”locked in” by choices they’ve made at an early age. There’s an element of that in Sweden too (more vocationally-focused high school programs may not give you all the courses that you need to enter all university programs), but that is not too onerous to overcome if you change your mind later (you can do ”foundational studies” to bridge the gap, or just sit exams to prove that you’re qualified)

Edit: but it’s maybe also to your point that universities have limited seats, just like everywhere. Maybe your high school grades or score at the equivalent of the SAT aren’t high enough to study mathematics at the top-rated institution even if you’re qualified, because there are too many people ahead of you. But you will be able to go to uni somewhere to study something
by Tor3 | 2025-10-29 11:19:36+00:00
Japanese Windows software mostly don't run, or does it badly, with Wine on Linux. Unfortunately. I've been a full-time Linux user since 1992 and this frustrates me. Some of the software won't even pass the install stage. I'm forced to run this on wife's Windows 10 PC, which has its own set of nightmarish problems. Japanese software houses develop for one target: Windows. As a rule. They don't really know about anything else, except for the occasional support of Mac from some of them.
by onli | 2025-10-29 11:20:45+00:00
You are misreading this exchange. You just got a fact wrong, but thus repeated a lie that is planted often by nazis - and it's easy to get mislead. Anyway, you did not get criticized for an imagined stance on immigration, but those answers are to a comment I assume you missed, the one by nxor?

You wrote, incorrectly:

> We also have lots of our own problems and increasing costs because of immigration

As the NZZ article explained, health care / Krankenkassen are the area where it is the clearest that immigration is an economic benefit. Look at statements like the section title "Krankenkassen profitieren", followed by "Ein grosser Profiteur der Zuwanderung sind dagegen wohl die Krankenkassen." and the ending paragraph of said section:

> Laut dieser Analyse gab es in diesen sieben Jahren einen Wanderungssaldo aus dem Ausland in Höhe von 4,7 Millionen Menschen in das System der GKV. Für das Jahr 2019 ergab sich daraus eine Entlastung der GKV über etwa 8 Milliarden Euro (umgerechnet 0,6 Beitragssatzpunkte). Seit 2019 hätten sich die Rahmenbedingungen aber deutlich geändert, heisst es dazu von der TK.

So the numbers we have do not support that part of your statements. And I'm not aware of newer numbers that say the contrary - the recent cost increase sees completely different reasons for example, as in https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/panorama/krankenk..., the "but more so aging population" part of your comment fits there.
by brap | 2025-10-29 11:22:14+00:00
One possibility I like to imagine is a future where knowledge sources are used kind of like tools, i.e. the model never uses any preexisting knowledge from its training data (beyond what’s necessary to be fluent in English, coherent, logical, etc.), a “blank” intelligent being, tabula rasa. And for answering questions it uses various sources dynamically, like an agent would use tools.

I think this will let models be much smaller (and cheaper), but it would also enable a mechanism for monetizing knowledge. This would make knowledge sharing profitable.

For example, a user asks a question, the model asks knowledge sources if they have relevant information and how much it costs (maybe some other metadata like perceived relevance or quality or whatever), and then it decides (dynamically) which source(s) to use in order to compile an answer (decision could be based on past user feedback, similarly to PageRank).

One issue is that this incentivizes content users want to hear versus content they don’t want to hear but is true. But this is a problem we already have, long before AI or even the internet.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-10-29 11:23:41+00:00
AFAICS this has nothing to do with "open-source personal AI engines".

The recorded history is stored in a SQLite database and is quite trivial to examine[0][1]. A simple script could extract the information and feed them to your indexer of choice. Developing such a script isn't the task for an internet browser engineering team.

The question remains whether the indexer would really benefit from real-time ingestion while browsing.

[0] Firefox: https://www.foxtonforensics.com/browser-history-examiner/fir...

[1] Chrome: https://www.foxtonforensics.com/browser-history-examiner/chr...
by rzerowan | 2025-10-29 11:24:12+00:00
Latest Office or Microsoft365 is being turned almost into a Saas wrapper for the online app , while having an always on siphon for your data to the MScloud and ADs, so many intrusive ads all overthe place. If its an older version that works i guess can be usable in a VM , but again this is for your casul office worker/parents etc.The least amount of friction will usually be best for adoption (see how zoom came out on top in the videochat space)

[0] https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/microsoft-office-365-declared...
by kwar13 | 2025-10-29 11:24:14+00:00
I have a hypothesis why that's the case:

1- Before everybody got an HD camera in their pocket, it was less costly to be "weird" in public. 2- Millennials and Gen Z's are both economically worse off than Boomers and Gen X. If you're economically insecure then counterculture and going against the trend don't quite live up to the feeling of what comes in their daily lives otherwise.

Just my two cents.
by 2000UltraDeluxe | 2025-10-29 11:24:42+00:00
"Norwegian" isn't just one unified language and Norway isn't in the EU.

That being said, the Scandinavian languages all come from old Norse, and modern national constructs aside, most of the people in the those areas descend from the same mix of Germanic tribes. There's no denying that modern-day Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar.
by adornKey | 2025-10-29 11:24:50+00:00
Plywood is really good. MDF is also an option. But for the size of 9.000 pieces even some sturdy paper (old posters or calendar sheets) can be good enough as a base. With good glue (e.g. some latex binder) the jigsaw puzzle will already be quite stable on its own.

Having a soft base helps when transporting. I once had to move a 9.000 piece puzzle - and without some bending it would have been difficult getting it into the car.

For the biggest jigsaws out there it gets difficult to find a good wall for it. Weight and bending of wood or MDF can become an issue. And even some walls are not as flat as they look like...
by dspillett | 2025-10-29 11:25:19+00:00
> So... do you refuse to use the laptop supplied by your employer?

For things other than work for my employer? Yes.

And work stuff doesn't touch my personal equipment, with the exception that I can connect to the company VPN from my personal laptop to remote to a work machine if I need to do DayJob work remote in an emergency when I don't have the company laptop with me.

> It does MITM between you and the HTTPS websites you browse.

My employer doesn't. Many don't.

Of course many do, but that is them controlling what happens on their equipment and they are usually up front about it. This is quite different to an ISP, shady WiFi operator, or other adversarial network node, inspecting and perhaps modifying what I look at behind my back.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-29 11:25:39+00:00
> It is funny that MVC as a concept started as a backend server-rendered pages where the V was what rendered the HTML, C was the business logic which pulled data from the M which was the database + adapters.

I've got a CD from 1995 for Watcom C/C++. I purchased this compiler and IDE for a large (for me) sum of money and used it to create many Win32 applications.

I recall that that the help pages (which were extensive) came along with some non-reference documentation, which gave a quick overview of MVC for writing Win3.1 and Win95 applications, so MVC was already well-known in GUI systems even back then.
by Titan2189 | 2025-10-29 11:25:49+00:00
To configure the Vanta Trust Center (a publicly available page listing a client's Certifications and Controls, usually hosted at trust.client.tld), Vanta requires customers to compromise on their DNS CAA configuration.

As their screenshots show, they ask you setup a CNAME from e.g. trust.customer.com to their abc123.cname.vantatrust.com.

However, if you are using CAA [1] on your root domain (to limit which Certificate Authorities are allowed to issue certificates for your domain), they _require_ you to add 4 (FOUR) new CAA records to your root domain. (shown at the bottom of the linked page)

The correct solution would be to simply publish CAA records at the destination that the CNAME is pointing to (abc123.cname.vantatrust.com)

I've brought this up with their support multiple times; but they're refusing to even acknowledge that this is a problem. They're claiming I am the first customer to ever bring this up; and that I should just add the records on my root domain - completely missing that fact that thereby I'm basically undermining what CAA is for.

I would understand it, if this was some random tool, but this specifically is a GRC Tool.

If you are another Vanta customer or have any other idea what I can do to approach this, please let me know. I want to use their tool. It's a good system and helping us out - I'm just refusing to actively downgrade our Security - for our SECURITY TOOL!

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_Certification_Authority_Au...
by lapcat | 2025-10-29 11:27:34+00:00
> a release that doesn't have gratuitous UI churn and superficial changes

There have actually been quite a few of those releases. Some of the California-themed updates have been practically indistinguishable from the previous versions. Of course Tahoe and Big Sur brought huge UI changes, but those are the exceptions, not the norm.

> focuses on deep-seated and long-standing issues under the hood

Which issues would those be, specifically?

> If the right thing for the OS in the long term is to replace an entire subsystem

Which subsystems need replacement? You claim that this is what people mean by wanting another Snow Leopard, but which subsystems do people want replaced?

> misses the point of Snow Leopard

I haven't missed the point of Snow Leopard. You're conflating two entirely different things: (1) the point of Snow Leopard as conceived by Apple in 2008-ish and (2) why people in 2025 look back fondly at Snow Leopard. My claim is that the fond memories are the result of the quality and stability that were themselves the result of 2 full years of bug fixes AFTER the initial release of Snow Leopard. Whereas the initial quality of Snow Leopard was not great, just like the initial quality of all major OS updates is not great. Major updates invariably make software buggier, and the quality comes only after much time spent refining the new stuff.

My contention is that the marketing lie of "no new features", which is naturally very memorable, is the reason that a lot of people associate Snow Leopard with bug fixes and quality, but that's not actually what 10.6.0 brought, and the quality came much later in time.

I'm not saying that Snow Leopard didn't bring valuable changes. I'm just saying that Snow Leopard existed in various stages over 2 years, and the high quality version of Snow Leopard that we remember fondly now is actually late-stage Snow Leopard, not early-stage Snow Leopard, and those 2 years of minor bug fix releases were crucial. Moreover, that's what we need now, a long series of minor bug fix updates, not any new major updates. The bug backlog has become a mountain.

> Of course a release that makes changes as fundamental as re-writing the Finder and QuickTime to use the NeXT-derived frameworks rather than the classic Mac OS APIs, and moving most of the built-in apps to 64-bit, is going to introduce or uncover plenty of new bugs.

Which is why I think it's very wrong to claim that people want "another Snow Leopard". Snow Leopard II released in 2026 would be much buggier than even macOS Tahoe, which is precisely what people do NOT want, a bunch more bugs.

> But it fixed a bunch of stubborn bugs

Which bugs exactly?

> Fixing architectural bugs is still fixing bugs

Which architectural bugs do you have in mind, or more relevantly, which architectural bugs do people in general have in mind when saying that they want another Snow Leopard?
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-29 11:27:46+00:00
THe article is mashing large socio-economic factors together to draw a false conclusion

In the 90s, it was _the done thing_ to go out, get drunk and fuck someone. It was the cultural expectation. I felt pressure to do it, and was deeply troubled at my inability to persuade people to fuck me.

none of that was deviant

Violent crime dropping across the board is a good thing.

The drop in northern ireland's antisocial behaavior is a Feature not a bug. Up until 2000 there was an active civil war, and youth violence was a pathway used by both unionists and republicans to recruit, train and execute the on going war. youth violence dropping is a fucking brilliant thing.

The points later on about sameness is also not surprising. Most people do not like sticking out. For example in the 1950s it would take a _very_ special person to build a japanese style interior in their house. The same for japan, you're not going to see loads of english parlours either.

But culture is global now, which means we all vaguely conform to global standards. Why? because we all see much more of the globe than our parents or grandparents.

But the _key_ point is that the complaints aren't new.

This is just nostalgia with graphs.
by cesarb | 2025-10-29 11:28:55+00:00
> It's a transcript of the video at the top.

Which is not obvious at all if you have JavaScript disabled by default, since it only shows up as a blank space, which could also be a blocked ad or an image which failed to load correctly.

The first few times I saw one of these transcripts with video at the top (IIRC, it was on Practical Engineering, not this site), I thought it sounded odd but didn't get that it was a transcript. Only later did I find out that there were videos (and they're great).
by thyristan | 2025-10-29 11:28:55+00:00
Calc is far better than Excel.

CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.

Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.

Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.

Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...
by stefs | 2025-10-29 11:29:08+00:00
neither my answer nor ops point is whataboutism.

they bring up a valid point: libreoffice is (in their opinion) harder to use and probably lower quality, so reports are harder to write and taking away time from more important things.

in my opinion libre office is absolutely good enough for this use case and thus not taking away significant time from other tasks. furthermore, the austrian armed forces are free to contribute to the project to improve the perceived paint points themselves.

on the other hand microsoft products are closed source and probably upload data to datacenters outside the customers (i.e. in this case, the militaries) sphere of influence. this may include the data (for storage and or AI training) and meta data (for advertising and telemetry).

microsoft may even silently introduce or reactivate (after they've been declined) those options after updates (don't quote me on this, but i think i remember this happening at least once).

microsoft apologists may argue that this is only the case for improperly configured corporate deployments, but as the software is closed source nobody can really be sure and if it's that hard to get right, it's a security problem in itself.
by jeanrokrupa | 2025-10-29 11:29:21+00:00
I just shipped a free tool and API to estimate website traffic.

It’s not perfectly precise, but it works well enough for my use case.

Here’s the idea: There’s a public list called DomCop that ranks the top 10 million domains (based on backlinks).

I measured about 200K of them with a real traffic estimation API (DataForSEO) to get ground-truth data.

Then I built a regression model (thank you ChatGPT ) to estimate traffic for all the others.

Cost: ~€50 vs ~€2 500 for equivalent full-dataset data.

To be clear, tools like Ahrefs or DataForSEO go wayyyyy deeper: - They crawl all the keywords a domain ranks for - Check SERP positions + backlinks - Estimate traffic from each keyword - Then aggregate everything That's how and why they make money!

My version is a lightweight cheap shortcut, way less precise, but good enough for trend detection, lead scoring, or curiosity.

If your domain is in the top 10 M, I’d love your feedback
by fulafel | 2025-10-29 11:29:55+00:00
BSD was much less desktop oriented then, and there wasn't newbie friendly documentation around.

Whereas it was a niche but still relatively common for teenage hobbyists to install Linux, get X11 running, read the HOWTOs and surf the web with Netscape for Linux[1] on the home (or school) PC and geeking out on all the Unix things that you heard the older kids got to use at the university lab workstations.

You could argue those users had the hacker spirit of course and many of them did learn programming as well after a while since you still ended up building stuff from source half the time when you wanted to install something.

It helped that you could easily get your hands on cheap Linux install CDs in bookstores and computer shops.

[1] Netscape seems to have been at version 4.0 by 1997. WP thinks version 2 was already available for Linux.
by imtringued | 2025-10-29 11:30:17+00:00
The problem with continual learning is that stochastic gradient descent is already an online algorithm applied incrementally on a shuffled dataset. If you add new data, you can't train on just the new data, because you will be running what amounts to a completely different training sequence. Further training requires the old data and the new data to be shuffled together.

With reinforcement learning, specifically actor critic, the actor is not training against a dataset. It's training against the critic. The critic is supposed to approximate the value function, which contains the current cost for a given action and the predicted future cost, assuming that you choose the optimal action at every step, including its impact on future actions. If you have a simple supervised cost function, what happens is that the critic acts as an averaging of loss functions. You could say that the critic is a compressed copy of the training data. When you train the actor, you're essentially taking not only the new data, but also the old data into account.

So, in a way, catastrophic forgetting is sort of solved, but not really. If you add new data, you run into the problem that your critic will slowly drift to the new data distribution. This means the problem wasn't solved, but you certainly managed to delay it. Delaying the problem is good though. What if you can delay it even more? What if you can delay it forever?

Here is my stupid and simple unproven idea: Nest the reinforcement learning algorithm. Each critic will add one more level of delay, thereby acting as a low pass filter on the supervised reward function. Since you have two critics now, you can essentially implement a hybrid pre-training + continual learning architecture. The most interesting aspect here is that you can continue training the inner-most critic without changing the outer critic, which now acts as a learned loss function.
by technothrasher | 2025-10-29 11:30:56+00:00
I get more frustrated from when they go the other direction. Google Maps, for instance. When I go to the website, it asks if I'd like to use the app instead, with the usual dark pattern of having the "no" button greyed out. But after I tell it no, as soon as I touch the search bar, it automatically opens the app anyway. I wish there was a setting in Safari that disabled websites from opening apps.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-10-29 11:31:35+00:00
> ...they don't want to maintain and build and test x86_64 versions...

This feels wrong. Apple sold Intel-based Macs until early June 2023. The last one was the 2019 Mac Pro model.

Ending support for Rosetta in macOS around 2028 also means ending support for any x86_64 versions of software. This means that those unfortunate users who bought an Intel Mac Pro in 2023 only got five years of active usability.
by aNoob7000 | 2025-10-29 11:31:36+00:00
I don't understand why individuals expect a corporation like Google, driven by profits, to give a sh*t. I would expect no less of Apple with IOS.

Individuals should look for and support alternatives. I'm currently working on a desktop running Ubuntu because I want an alternative to the duopoly of Windows and macOS.

Additionally, we should support open-source alternatives with our donations. I personally donate money every year to Ubuntu, the Gnome foundation, and Tor.
by Bud | 2025-10-29 11:31:49+00:00
Not sure what is up with this, but I just flew from Italy to the US with my AirPods Pro 3 and did not experience any issues. So it's apparently not present 100% of the time.

Also: battery life is VASTLY improved on the APP 3. Rated time is 8 hrs and I'm getting closer to 9.
by oktoberpaard | 2025-10-29 11:31:57+00:00
Without having any experience with the APIs to back up my claim, I believe that the WebExtensions API is more powerful in the sense that it allows more complex blocking rules. AdGuard seems to include both options simultaneously, where you have "advanced protection" (WebExtensions API) that only works in Safari and separate blocking lists (old API) that work in both Safari and WebView. This is precisely what keeps me from using uBlock Origin Lite.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-29 11:32:03+00:00
For smaller operations I’d still go with a rent-a-server model with AWS. Theirs is a critical mass though where roll your own makes sense.

The long term app model on the market model is shifting much more towards buying services vs renting infrastructure. It’s here where the AWS case falls apart with folks now buying Planet Scale vs RDS, buying DataBricks over the mess that AWS puts for for data lakes, working with model providers directly vs the headaches of Bedrock. The real long term threat is AWS continues to whiff on all the other stuff and gets reduced to a boring rent-a-server shop that market forces will drive to be very low margin.

Yes a lot of those 3rd party services will run on AWS but the future looks like folks renting servers from AWS at 7% gross margin and selling their value-add service on top at 60% gross margin.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-10-29 11:32:56+00:00
> I discovered that after a certain level of fatigue my coding became garbage, and after a night's sleep I had to delete it and redo it.

My best work happens at 2am, at about 4am I am too tired and get slow and get stuck, I think even then code quality suffers only a little bit.

That's just my experience, I believe it happens because if I am working at that time, I am hyped and or in the zone. There is a sort of second wind involved. The lack of distractions also helps I guess.