MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Llamamoe | 2025-10-31 07:17:27+00:00
> Was Two Minute Papers always so sensationalistic or is that a recent change?

Before his channel exploded in popularity, it was similar but much more genuine and less formulaic and extreme. At some point he started to just sound like the LLM output conditioned on his earlier videos with fake excitement forced into every single sentence and I unsubscribed.

It's a shame because the papers he covers are fascinating but I can't stand his fakeness and pretend-excitement anymore. I also miss when he included more explanations of the algorithms and less throwbacks to previous videos.
by rekabis | 2025-10-31 07:18:35+00:00
> Households that make $100,000 or less make up about 40% of its total sales.

Strange that they chose such a bizarrely high household income value, when the American median for people 25-35 - their stated “core demographic” - is just $34,000/yr.

Median. Half make more, _half make less._

Talk about metrics being badly out of whack.
by thepaulmcbride | 2025-10-31 07:18:37+00:00
I want to like this so bad, but the free tier changes still haunt me. I ran a little hobby project for a while on it that helped junior developers find jobs. The work needed to switch from PlanetScale ultimately meant I just canned the project.

Fairly or not, when I see PlanetScale, that’s what I think of.

Seeing the CEO on here defending it as if they nailed the execution of it doesn’t help either.
by nirava | 2025-10-31 07:20:27+00:00
why are you redirecting the conversation to subscriptions?

you know what would fix this? releasing a v3. that was the whole sell with affinity suite. that i could buy the new v3 for whatever price they set, it will contain all the new features. and i will own v3 for whatever that product lifecycle is.

THAT is why people invested in affinity. money is almost immaterial but that's why i spent time learning the thing and making it a part of my workflow.

affinity/canva can release free software all they want, but the whole reason affinity was popular was that people could pay 160 or whatever dollars for it to not nag, never nag. that has disappeared under the misdirection of "hey look its free for everyone now"
by csin | 2025-10-31 07:20:36+00:00
It sounds like you are a Linux UI designer.

Which is a rare thing in this space. Linux is rough around the edges, to say the least. You don't need me telling you. We are in a thread about how open sources software suck at UI design. We could use more people like you in this space.

The men aren't fussed with the "hacker" label. It sounds cool. It's like when people mistakenly think all Asians know Kung Fu or something. The Asian guy isn't complaining lol.

There's definitely stigma/sexism that deter women away from this field. But I think opportunity cost is a factor, gravely overlooked.

Society demands a lot from women, when it comes to appearance. The bar is set very high.

So high, you don't have the time to be a good programmer AND pretty. Unless you won the genetic lottery.

I follow women's basketball avidly. Some of the women are not pretty. They are just very good at basketball. It's refreshing to see women be valued, not just because of their beauty.
by eviks | 2025-10-31 07:23:25+00:00
the "modal disruption" is misguided - he cites as the challenge a very poor implementation in a MS app where the modes were barely visible!!! That's not a proof that modes are bad, just a statement that invisible information makes it hard for the users to adapt! Brushes (another mode he cites as great) are great precisly because their state is immediately visible in your focus area - your primary pointer changes

Now he got rid of the modes by adding handles and border actions - so 1) wasted some space that could be used for information 2) required more precision from the users because now to do the action you must target a tiny handle/border area 3) same, but for other actions as now you have to avoid those extra areas to do other tasks.

While this might be fine for casual users as it's more visible, the proper way out is, of course,... MODES and better ones! Let the default be some more casual mode with your handles, but then let users who want more ergonomics use a keybind to allow moving the audio segment by pressing anywhere in that segment, not just in the tiny handle at the top. And then you could also add all those handles to visually indicate that now segments are movable or turn your pointer into a holding hand etc.

Same thing in the example - instead of creating a whole new separate app with a button you could have a "1-button magicbrake" mode in handbrake
by nromiun | 2025-10-31 07:24:30+00:00
So? Maybe don't offer a free tier if you can't sustain it? And many other providers (like Neon, Koyeb, Supabase etc) still offer a free tier. Personally I don't like this type of bait and switch. If you can't sustain something don't offer it in the first place. Same with open source projects going closed source for money after getting free work from open source programmers.
by Matterless | 2025-10-31 07:24:56+00:00
If it's something I'm capable of figuring out, then I'll just know the answer (and I guess I'm pretty good at this sort of thing). I recognize that that's a terrible non-explanation but I can't explain what's happening outside of my awareness. I'm just good with spatial problems. I can't /visualize/ a damn thing but that doesn't appear to be necessary.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 07:25:28+00:00
> I don’t want a thing that hijacks my terminal and PATH, flips my world upside down and makes writing automated headless scripts and systemd services a huge pain.

pip and venv are not such things. The activation script is completely unnecessary, and provided as a convenience for those to whom that workflow makes more sense.

> Every time I need to containerize or setup a Python project for some arbitrary task, there’s always an issue with “Your Linux distro doesn’t support that version of Python anymore“

I can't fathom why. First off, surely your container image can just pin an older version of the distro? Second, right now I have Python versions 3.3 through 3.14 inclusive built from source on a very not-special consumer Linux distro, and 2.7 as well.

> and triggering an avalanche of new “you really shouldn’t install packages globally” messages, demanding new —yes-destroy-my-computer-dangerously-and-step-on-my-face-daddy flags and crashing my automated scripts from last year.

Literally all you need to do is make one virtual environment and install everything there, which again can use direct paths to pip and python without sourcing anything or worrying about environment variables. Oh, and fix your automated scripts so that they'll do the right thing next time.

> I know that if I was a full-time Python dev there’s a “better way” that I’d know about.

Or, when you get the "you really shouldn't install packages globally" message, you could read it — as it gives you detailed instructions about what to do, including pointing you at the documentation (https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/) for the policy change. Or do a minimum of research. You found out that venvs were a thing; search queries like "python venv best practices" or "python why do I need a venv" or "python pep 668 motivation" or "python why activate virtual environment" give lots of useful information.
by alabhyajindal | 2025-10-31 07:26:18+00:00
Very nice! Some feedback about the home page and presentation:

- A snippet on the home page to give the reader a quick feel of the language.

- A line or two on how to pronounce Ü.

- Using a list or sections to highlight important features prominently and make the home page more information dense.

- Date of publication on the blog posts.
Ask HN: Does Apple dictation (iPhone) process on device?
by dav43 | 2025-10-31 07:27:09+00:00
I come with frustrations. My new iPhone 16 max is a dog. I use to use dictation a lot, has it changed from on device because I can’t get a straight answer from Apples documentation.

(1) Support website says yes on device : Dictation requests are processed on your device in many languages—no internet connection is required. When dictating in a search box, dictated text may be sent to the search provider in order to process the search. (https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iph2c0651d2/ios)

(2) Device documentation says it will show you if it’s on device or on cloud (it never does) : https://i.postimg.cc/d3pxT9cH/IMG-1661.jpg
by stonecharioteer | 2025-10-31 07:27:31+00:00
> but the implementation details (messaging passing or not) are irrelevant.

I'm the author here. While I agree that the implementation details do not matter for _most_ developers, I wanted to learn Ruby with an understand of how things are implemented.

In my previous post[1], I go into why I've always felt I didn't need Ruby since I knew Python, and I spent time learning Rust instead. It felt redundant to learn a second dynamically typed programming langauge that offered no advantage in performance. I started working at Chatwoot, where we use Ruby, and I had to pick up Ruby for the job. I didn't want to be satisfied with a "user-level" knowledge of the language and instead wanted to rip its internals apart so I can learn why it does the things it does.

Call it a preference on how I want to learn things.

[1] - https://tech.stonecharioteer.com/posts/2025/ruby/
by savolai | 2025-10-31 07:28:33+00:00
And yet, even ”knowing about the working of the business” is different from actually understanding user needs at UI level, which involves a lot more variables.

The single most valuable tool is user testing. However it really takes quite a few rounds of actually creating a design and seeing how wrong you saw the other person’s capabilities, to grok how powerful user testing is in revealing your own biases.

And it’s not hard at all at core. The most important lesson really is a bit of humility. Actually shutting up and observing what real users do when not intervened.

Shameless plug, my intro to user testing: https://savolai.net/ux/the-why-and-the-how-usability-testing...
by nirava | 2025-10-31 07:28:57+00:00
bro i just want to be able to buy the v3. as opposed to downloading the free thing and waiting for it to get worse and worse and more things pushing me to get pro subscription. is that so hard to understand?

we went from v1 -> v2 -> "free" + subscription, where "free" is unsustainable in the current economic climate and they WILL have to pull shady stuff once all the AI bubble money disappears.
by czl | 2025-10-31 07:30:49+00:00
You did a good job explaining their view. What I am doing is explaining the view of users and judging by your last post I have not yet done a good job so let me try again:

If elimination of a service plan is expected to push enough users to a _more_ profitable service plan why would a business not do it? Does it matter if the plan to be eliminated, generates _some_ profit?

Hope this helps!
by anonym29 | 2025-10-31 07:31:41+00:00
ICE is a targeted group, though.

They may not be a historically marginalized group, a vulnerable group, a protected class, or a group worthy of protection, but they certainly are targeted.

When you use proprietary software, you are kissing the ring of someone else's power. It's like voluntarily submitting to a big, bad, mean dude in prison. He's going to violate you. You voluntarily and willingly entered into the arrangement.

Either live with the predictable consequences of your decisions without complaining or make better decisions.

Whining about Apple or Google being tyrants after buying their proprietary crap and accepting the ToS is like complaining that we should have better gun control laws after you went to a gun store, legally purchased a firearm, and then shot yourself in the foot with it.

The free or nonfree nature of software (as in freedom, not beer) fundamentally boils down to power, control, and autonomy. Either you have it, or you're ruled by it. If you prefer shiny UIs and good UX over your dignity, autonomy, and freedom, that's your choice to make, just understand what your voluntary consent to the bad guys actually represents here, don't delude yourself about the arrangement or allow yourself to exist in a state of ignorance about the terms of the arrangement.

The obvious truth to anyone paying attention is that Stallman has been right all along, and everyone who looked at the free software movement the same way the popular kids looked at the misfits in secondary school is getting exactly what they were fairly warned about and dismissed condescendingly. The risks being highlighted by the FSF for decades wasn't paranoia, it was foresight, and the dismissal of that wisdom wasn't common sense, it was jumping off a cliff because all of your friends were jumping off cliffs, too.

You don't need to apologize for making the wrong choice, but you do need to put down the proprietary crap and reclaim your dignity. Or don't, if you prefer the slide into fascist authoritarianism. Stated preferences whisper, revealed preferences shout.

Welcome to real-world consequences coming bundled with your real-world decisions. You can't undo past mistakes but you can change your future course of action. Choose wisely. I recommend choosing freedom and encouraging everyone around you to choose freedom, too.
by helicone | 2025-10-31 07:32:23+00:00
Having read the article you linked, I can see your point on complexity and how it's much easier to discuss and debate than it is to actually spec it out and drive adoption.

While I would love for these systems to be fair and righteous and all of that jazz, I soberly must recognize that I lack the resources and desire to do all or even any of that work myself, and therefore have no leg to stand on in holding others accountable for not doing so.
by teiferer | 2025-10-31 07:32:25+00:00
Though isn't progress inherent in that knowledge tends to increase over time? What's useful tends to get passed on to future generations, so there is an inherent advantage compared to earlier generations. Of course it's not perfect (as sometimes things get forgotten) and just knowledge/skills don't always translate to increase in living standards or productivity or well being, but by and large, in the long run, this should be true?
by schiffern | 2025-10-31 07:32:41+00:00
The speed of sound varies with air temperature, which is what the linked graph shows.

Technically the speed of sound does vary with density, but as you change altitude there's also a change in pressure which exactly cancels that out. In the end only temperature and gas composition alter the speed of sound.

As long as you're inside the plane (and hopefully it's not 217 K or -70 °F, per the graph) then the speed of sound should be unchanged.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 07:32:59+00:00
> The fact that everything pollutes the global environment

This is not anything like a fact. For three years now (since the 3.11 release) Python distributions on Linux have in fact taken special measures to prevent the user from using tools other than the system package manager to install into the global environment. And for thirteen years (since the 3.3 release) Python has offered standard library functionality to create isolated environments specifically to avoid that problem. (And that functionality is based on a third party library with public releases going back eighteen years.)

Pip is designed around giving you the freedom to choose where those environments are (by separately creating them) and your strategy for maintaining them (from a separate environment per-project as a dev, to a single-environment-still-isolated-from-the-system for everything as a data scientist, and everything in between).
by debugnik | 2025-10-31 07:33:16+00:00
Microsoft already designed a modified ARM ABI [1] compatible with emulated X86-64 just for this transition. But it's a Windows 11 feature. I wonder if the refusal of many of us to switch from Windows 10 is part of the reason why they're still idling on an ARM strategy.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/arm64ec-abi
by einpoklum | 2025-10-31 07:33:18+00:00
His notion of "normal people" are people who use MacOS:

> Normal people often struggle with converting video. ... the format will be weird. (Weird, broadly defined, is anything that won’t play in QuickTime or upload to Facebook.)"

Except normal people don't use MacOS and don't even know what QuickTime is. Including the US, the MacOS user share is apparently ~11%. Take the US out, and that drops to something like... 6%, I guess? And Macs are expensive - prohibitively expensive for people in most countries. So, normal people use Windows I'm afraid.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

In fact, if you disregard the US, Linux user share seems to be around half of the Mac share, making the perspective of "normal people use Macs not FOSS" even sillier.

-----

PS - Yes, I know the quality of such statistics is low, if you can find better-quality user share analysis please post the link.
by maxloh | 2025-10-31 07:33:21+00:00
Many front end tools are written in a faster language. For example, the next version of TypeScript compiler, SASS, SWC (minifier), esbuild (bundler used by Vite), Biome (formatter and linter), Oxc (linter, formatter and minifier), Turbopack (bundler), dprint (formatter), etc.

They use proinstall script to fetch pre-built binaries, or compile from source if your environment isn't directly supported.
by eps | 2025-10-31 07:33:45+00:00
This is bizarre.

It's a downloadable binary that, as per their FAQ, uses their servers for the actual font ID... and yet there's no web version. Leaving aside malicious intent, I can't think of any reason to do it this way except to conceal the client-server API. And that's strange.

Also weird that there's no company or developer details. Whois for the domain is cloaked. The site is behind Cloudflare, but it looks it's hosted on alibabacloud error, at least partially. And the whole thing is free.

No idea if the file is signed, but won't be surprised if it's not.

I don't see many people finding an installable client for a font ID service from an unnamed developer striving to remain anonymous to be an appealing proposition.
by fragmede | 2025-10-31 07:34:38+00:00
Thundering herd is a known post-outage, service restore failure mode. You never let your load balancer and the API boxes behind it dip below some statically defined low water mark; the waste of money is better than going down when the herd shows up. When it does show up, as noted, token bucket rate limiter running 429s while the herd slowly gets let back onto the system. Even if the app server can take it, it's not a given that the eg queue or database systems can absorb the herd as well (especially if that's what went down).
by tzahifadida | 2025-10-31 07:35:20+00:00
I don't understand these legal mambo jumbo, but lets make it simpler. Israel and the US have a tight intelligence agreements. No one have to keep secrets since they share information readily. That is what it means to be friends. Israel is the best outpost for western influence in the Middle East, and the US have a strategic need to maintain that to oppose forces such as China, Russia and Iran axis. There is no need for bribes or anything like that to get intelligence from both sides... The last time they started lying to each other was disastrous and henceforth I believe the relationship is stable. Not to mention it includes European powers, even though they are happy to defame Israel, they share intelligence, participate in joint operations and buy a huge amount of arms and technology from Israel and sell arms to Israel. So don't let the media fool you...
Ask HN: What frustrates Engineering Managers most?
by Vishal19111999 | 2025-10-31 07:36:45+00:00
I am currently trying to build a product that handles communications and management work for engineering managers.

I struggled with similar problems myself and set to solve it.

Currently I am looking to get my first set of power users and also validation for the idea.

Would be a great help to know the frustrations and main pain points of engineering managers and tech leads.

I am thinking of starting with startups with at least 10 engineers to pilot and test the product and grow from there on.

All inputs are highly appreciated.

For reference:

Twitter: https://x.com/harmonyai_ Website: https://getharmony.ai
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 07:38:03+00:00
> Treating python as a project level dependency rather than a system level dependency

Nobody is treating Python as a project level dependency. Your Linux distro treats it as a system level dependency, which is exactly why you encountered the problem you did.

When you create a virtual environment, that does not install a Python version. It just makes symlinks to a base Python.

Building Python from source, and setting it up in a way that doesn't interfere with the package manager's space and will cause no problems, is easy on major distros. I have access to over a dozen builds right now, on Mint which is not exactly a "power user" distro (I didn't want to think about it too much when I initially switched from Windows).
by skinkestek | 2025-10-31 07:39:43+00:00
My guess is you are affected. You remind me of myself before I realised just how big the difference really is.

People who see images don’t just imagine them or "know apples are red" - they actually see them. I think a couple of comments in this discussion described it as controlled hallucinations. Not scary, rather something useful they can summon on demand.

You can deny it all you want, but there are people who once had a rich, vivid imagination, lost it, and can describe what changed.

I’m a weird edge case myself - I sometimes experience it briefly, right before falling asleep or just after waking up.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 07:41:35+00:00
> if you have a program that uses python then all the packages that it uses need to be installed globally

Only if that "program that uses Python" is itself provided by a system package for global installation.

> so you have python packages bundled as system packages which can conflict with that same package installed with pip.

Right; you can choose whether to use system packages entirely within the system-package ecosystem (and treat "it's written in Python" as an irrelevant implementation detail); or you can create an isolated environment so as to use Python's native ecosystem, native packaging, and native tools.

I don't know why anyone would expect to mingle the two without problems. Do you do that for other languages? When I tried out Ruby, its "Bundler" and "gem" system was similarly isolated from the system environment.
by einpoklum | 2025-10-31 07:41:42+00:00
> . Free software is developed for the developer's own needs and developers are going to be power users

* Free software which gains popularity is developed for the needs of many people - the users who make requests and complaints and the developers.

* Developers who write for a larger audience naturally think of more users' needs. It's true that they typically cater more to making features available than to simplicity of the UI and ease of UX.

> 2. The cost etc.

Agreed!

> 3. The developer doesn't know who the customer is and rather than research/refine just tries to hit all the boxes.

The developer typically knows what the popular use cases would be. Like with the handbrake example. They also pretty much know how newbie users like simplified workflows and hand-holding - but it's often a lot of hassle to create the simplified-with-semi-hidden-advanced-mode interface.

> 4. The distribution of the software itself means anyone who successfully installs it themselves really is a power user

Are people who install, say, the Chrome browser on their PC to be considered power userS? They downloaded and installed it themselves after all... no, I believe you're creating a false dichotomy. Some users will never install anything; some users might install common software they've heard about from friends; and some might actively look for software to install - even though they don't know much about it or about how to operate the apps and OS facilities they already h ave. ... and all of these are mostly non-power-users.