MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tavavex | 2025-10-11 23:37:26+00:00
Some of the music production UIs seem to feature huge grids of knobs, a pop-up slider would inherently obscure some of the adjacent knobs in some way, requiring you to move the cursor away or click somewhere else to dismiss it. It would create friction if you needed to do quick adjustments across a row or column of knobs.

I think the best compromise is something that's already very similar to knobs - a "draggable text field". Different software styles this element differently, but the essence is that it's a number, where you can either click and type a new value in, or hold the mouse on the field and drag it left or right to drag through the different values. You can find this in some video and 3D editors. Sometimes these elements are styled to have arrows on the sides of the numeric value to suggest the dragging behavior.
by cameronh90 | 2025-10-11 23:37:34+00:00
The problem is the rug-pull itself, not that the rug isn't there.

I don't have an opinion on Datastar, as I'd never heard of it until this article, but over the past year or two there have been a _lot_ of open source projects that have been converted to proprietary licenses, very often after being invested by VCs or PEs. It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.

Developers gotta eat, I get that. But often the reason I'm using one of these components is it's a hobby or low value project where it simply doesn't bring in the income to justify paying for a license. If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project. But now you're in an awkward position where the choice is either pay-up or re-do a bunch of work.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-11 23:37:40+00:00
> I think it’s wiser to believe what people do more so than what they say

I agree, if only because the thing you just said is entirely incorrect. Qatar is not building an airbase on US soil, they are building facilities on a US-owned airbase. This happens every year from the NATO partners like Turkey who have been doing this for decades.

Please do your own research, don't just cite Twitter/X on this crap.
by thinkzilla | 2025-10-11 23:37:45+00:00
The comparison to railroad infrastructure is interesting.

I think the author is wrong on this point however: > Today’s tech just cannot do what will be required of it (AI shouldn’t be dispensing medication when it can’t even count to 7).

The failures of AI are thought provoking, and more so when considered together with other results where AI performs at near expert level on challenging benchmarks. However, perfect reasoning is hardly a requirement. Most humans are not particularly good at reasoning, and most jobs do not need it. Both humans and AI can use calculators and other tools. All that's needed is that the AI is more or less as good as a human, while requiring much less pay.

A good exercise to appreciate the current state of AI might be to ask AI to write an essay about this topic ("how much revenue is needed to justify current AI spend, and draw parallels to the dotcom boom and building the transcontinental railroad"). Try it with two different models, using the deep research mode. I expect the results would be humbling.
by 9029 | 2025-10-11 23:37:47+00:00
While I still use Firefox on desktop, on Android I recently switched from Firefox mobile to Brave out of security concerns and frustrations with performance. It has built-in tracker, query param and ad blocking, and is recommended by the GrapheneOS people as a decent alternative to their Vanadium browser [0]. Additionally, I have a gut feeling a Brave user blends in a bit better with its default ad blocking vs say a Firefox user with extensions and filter lists of their choice, but this might be negligible.

On the other hand the affiliate, crypto and AI shit in Brave are quite disgusting tbh, but at least they can be disabled. I also miss Firefox sync a bit.

[0] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111966258971400137
by nine_k | 2025-10-11 23:37:57+00:00
The problem of the knob is that it offers a large and precise control, but that large control remains invisible. There's no obvious clue showing that you can still interact with the knob by dragging the pointer / finger far away from it.

Adding a simple visual clue would help discoverablility a lot. Draw a faint halo on touch, when the mode changes. Draw a more visible trail when the touch point is dragged. Provide immediate and localized feedback, like good UX guidelines suggest.
by pSYoniK | 2025-10-11 23:38:28+00:00
I put Zorin OS on my dads old laptop 5 years ago and I think the only time I got a question was when someone setting up his new internet was digging through network settings but hadnt used any Linux distro before. Even then it was a 5 min call. Its a very Windows-like experience and I've noticed most parents really just write an email, browse the web and maybe consume media. All of those can occur in a browser.
by subins2000 | 2025-10-11 23:38:52+00:00
I find a lot of similarities between city of Kochi and GTA Vice City: army/naval base on an extreme end of the city, beaches, yachts, boats, small small skyscrapers. So I thought of making map of Kochi in GTA Vice City style. I customized MapLibre GL JS and got this: https://github.com/subins2000/gta-vice-city-style-openstreet...

Since I customized MapLibre, any map of the world can now be seen in that style.

Since there were a lot of hospitals and other symbols in Kochi, I filtered some things out, you can see this map here: https://lab.subinsb.com/gta-vice-city-style-openstreetmap/ko...
by bitpush | 2025-10-11 23:39:11+00:00
> But their privacy stance is still far better than that of Meta or Google.

Agreed, but they kind of stumbled into it. I dont know what to think of it. Apple didnt start out with "We believe ad targeting is bad", if that was the case, they would have never let Facebook on the platform.

And they never kicked them off of it, even while constantly saying 'ad targeting is bad'.
by wolfgangbabad | 2025-10-11 23:40:23+00:00
The author is very aggressive and pushy, he makes fun of people who disagree with him on Discord and now even here on hackernews. Notice the pattern of his comments/responses - he tends to belittle people. On Discord he use vulgar language - here he is more careful to maintain image. But it still permeates through his comments no matter how hard he tries to mask his true self.
by pzo | 2025-10-11 23:40:42+00:00
Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power usage and cost as well.

Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-11 23:40:45+00:00
Did Elementary change designer?

This version seems to have flaws I didn’t see in the old announcements. Spacing and padding are a bit inconsistent and sometimes a bit strange. Font sizing can be weird and alignment is hit and miss especially when icons and text are involved.

Clearly these are details but I’m wondering if they lost man power on these points. I still greatly appreciate the project ambition and am impressed by what they have managed to achieve.
by master_crab | 2025-10-11 23:40:48+00:00
2U is definitely better, but I didn’t notice significant drops in dB till I could stuff a 120mm fan in the case. That requires a 3U or more.

And if you need a good fan that’s quiet enough for the CPU, you’re looking at 4U. Otherwise, you’ll need AIOs hooked up to the aforementioned 120s.
by wsgeorge | 2025-10-11 23:41:28+00:00
I fell in love with elementaryOS when I first learned about it c. 2013, and followed it closely (used to read commits weekly) for perhaps a year. It was one of the first open source projects I really loved. But I eventually went back to Ubuntu because I was newish to Linux and I needed something that Just Worked™, without the funny business.

I eventually fell out of love with elementaryOS when the team seemed to double down hard on some unpopular design decisions wrt window control buttons/behaviour, for instance.

I always felt that they had taken on more than they could chew, and all the good will of their community wasn't going to change that fact. To this day I maintain that the project should have just been Pantheon, the Desktop Environment. The team seems to have strong opinions about UX, and that's where most of that matters.

I'm not the only one who thought of that, and the team's justifications for their decision to roll their own distro never came across as strong.

I've since moved on (to macOS and Ubuntu one the side), but once in a while I browse the official sub for the latest. I've never shaken off that feeling that the really talented founders could have spent their energy more wisely.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-11 23:42:21+00:00
> Because 0 to 1 is the big step

This doesn't answer why 0 to 1 households with guns is a bigger step than 0 to 1 guns.

> what’s the evidence?

It's a hypothesis. The observation is monotonically more guns, monotonically fewer gun households, more school shootings, all while single-family households become more and then less prevalent.

The corollary of the first two is more guns per gun-owning household. The implication of the last is it's not causative. The hypothesis is the larger number of guns in fewer households may have something to do with the mess.

> it’s been exceptional in terms of widespread gun ownership for longer than it’s had a major problem with mass shootings

Source? My understanding is these data weren't well tracked before WWII.

> When doctors are trying to diagnose people, the first thing they ask is: “what have you been doing different?”

Why wouldn't the NRA's radicalisation from a gun-safety orientation to Second Amendment extremism count?
by evbogue | 2025-10-11 23:42:21+00:00
Secure-Scuttlebot (the gossiped social network) died circa 2019 or 2024 depending who we ask. It died before it's time for various reasons including:

1. competing visions for how the entire system should work

2. dependence on early/experimental npm libraries

3. devs breaking existing features due to "innovation"

4. a lot of interpersonal drama because it was not just open source but also a social network

the ideas are really good, someone should make the project again and run with it
by nine_k | 2025-10-11 23:42:21+00:00
A great post, it starts with this:

TL;DR

• MSI’s first paper, REFRAG, is about a new way to do RAG.

• This slightly modified LLM converts most retrieved document chunks into compact, LLM-aligned chunk embeddings that the LLM can consume directly.

• A lightweight policy (trained with RL) decides which chunk embeddings should be expanded back into full tokens under a budget; the LLM runs normally on this mixed input.

• The net effect is far less KV cache and attention cost, much faster first-byte latency and higher throughput, while preserving perplexity and task accuracy in benchmarks.

I wish more long posts followed this model of a scientific paper.
by ethan_smith | 2025-10-11 23:44:16+00:00
Can someone please make me understand why does searching for "Accessibility" in settings doesn't return any results? In fact, none of the search accessibility search terms work, like: "reduce", "transparency", "contrast", "motion".

Searching for "Accessories", "General" works, but for some reason no hits for "Accessibility". I can't for the love of god figure out why would this be the case, is it just a mistake that no one caught, or is it an intentional decision, why would this be intentional?
by bxparks | 2025-10-11 23:45:27+00:00
A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4.

Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos.

Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now.

Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google.

Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.

Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.

Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.

Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..
by Supermancho | 2025-10-11 23:45:42+00:00
> Modern IDEs will show you the type of anything at all times. I do not understand your point unless you're doing raw text editing of Java source.

The word "String" "Integer" et al. + "var" is too much real estate for being explicit. Sometimes, I'm looking at the decompiled source from some library that doesn't have a source package available.

> Those keystrokes are not just saved on writing, they make the whole code more legible and easier to mentally parse.

This is incorrect. Repeating it doesn't make it true. For trivial code (<10 lines) probably seems fine at the time. Lots of bad practices start with laziness.

Changing practice because an author thinks a function is small enough when it was written, is a recipe for unclean code with no clear guidelines on what to use or expect. Maybe they rather put the onus on a future reader; this is also bad practice.
by naasking | 2025-10-11 23:46:42+00:00
> I am getting really mixed signals here. First the Pro features used to be free (libre), but now they no longer are.

That's not my understanding. From what I read, the open source "features" were incomplete, the Pro versions are polished products.

I don't understand the rest of your post, don't use a bundler if you don't see the point. Datastar is tiny and modular, any proprietary features could be replaced by open source version, you don't need to depend on anything proprietary. What's the risk you're worried about here?

Finally, selling support for a tiny library that's well tested, robust and fast is not viable. What do you see as the business case here?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-11 23:46:48+00:00
We honestly need the next administration to shut down our coal- and oil-fired power plants, and shut down our coal mines. Physically ensure they can't be restarted.

With the precedents handed down from Trump, that could likely be concluded before the courts have a chance to weigh in. The owners will be entitled to cash damages. But the industries will have been politically destroyed.

(Note: leave natural gas alone. It’s cheap and relatively clean. It’s also geopolitical export currency.)
by hashmash | 2025-10-11 23:46:55+00:00
The first official JIT became available in JDK 1.1, in 1997. The Symantec JIT was available as an add-on sometime in mid 1996, just a few months after JDK 1.0 was released. Even better performance was possible with GCJ, available in 1998.

The release of HotSpot was in 1999, and became default with JDK 1.3 in 2000. It took JIT compilation to the next level, making tools like GCJ mostly obsolete.
by ianbutler | 2025-10-11 23:47:21+00:00
There was no rug pull! (And the term isn't even being used correctly) They talked in their community decided the set of features caused a support burden and for versions later on they would put them behind a pro tier to help pay for the extra costs for supporting them.

You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
by JeremyHerrman | 2025-10-11 23:47:25+00:00
author here - fair point but I still think apple made the right call even if it leads to a bit of confusion at first.

If a digital knob needs to be turned several times (e.g. 1080º, common in DAWs), the "default" way to interact with a knob on a touchscreen - circling again and again - is slow and uncomfortable. Adding "slider" gestures on top of the default behavior is a nice way to perform many turns quickly and easily.
by jongjong | 2025-10-11 23:47:56+00:00
Interesting. All developers I know who tinkered around with embeddings and vector similarity scoring were instantly hooked. The efficiency of computing the embeddings once and then reusing as many times as needed, comparing the vectors with a cheap <30-line function is extremely appealing. Not to mention the indexing capabilities to make it work at scale.

IMO vector embedding is the most important innovation in computing of the last decade. There's something magical about it. These people deserve some kind of prize. The idea that you can reduce almost any intricate concept including whole paragraphs to a fixed-size vector which encapsulates its meaning and proximity to other concepts across a large number of dimensions is pure genius.
by rhodey | 2025-10-11 23:48:57+00:00
choojs

All of the upside and none of the downside of react

No JSX and no compiler, all native js

The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays

I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice professionally

https://github.com/choojs/choo#example

The example is like 25 lines and introduces all the concepts

Less moving parts than svelte
by sergiotapia | 2025-10-11 23:49:08+00:00
I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.

I'm sure open source purists do not like this, but the world is the 1980 anymore. It's been 45 years. Things need to adapt. Open source needs to adapt.
by neilv | 2025-10-11 23:49:52+00:00
I really liked my PocketBook InkPad Lite. After the one-time firmware update, I put it into airplane mode permanently, and always just updated DRM-free books on by plugging it in as USB Storage, and `rsync`-ing `~/doc/` to it.

The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):

#!/bin/sh -x DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook" mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1 cd ~/doc || exit 1 rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/." Status=$? umount "$DeviceMountPoint" exit $Status

And the `/etc/fstab` entry was something like:

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0
by crote | 2025-10-11 23:49:56+00:00
I completely agree. The "nothing was lost because you can still build it yourself" argument could just as well be used to make the entire thing proprietary. You still have your Turing Machine, so you didn't lose anything!

I don't have a big problem with the "paid bonus features" business model in general, but when you're removing features from the open-source version, at least be honest about it. And it's open source: if it breaks you get to keep both pieces, so where's the support burden supposed to come from?
by gnabgib | 2025-10-11 23:50:50+00:00
2024: Airbnb's Hidden Camera Problem (28 points, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40915564

2024: Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras (341 points, 505 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39669167

2019: Airbnb Has a Hidden-Camera Problem (77 points, 56 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324300

2019: Airbnb and security camera disclosure (680 points, 393 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18919832
by tombert | 2025-10-11 23:51:05+00:00
Totally fair, sorry you've had such issues. I've been fortunate enough for Steam's compatibility to have never been an issue, but as I said I don't play a lot of newer games.

> Also had to wait like 30 minutes to generate vulkan shaders.

Yeah I'll grant that, that seems to happen for pretty much every game. It doesn't usually take thirty minutes but it can easily ten minutes which is quite annoying.

> The GC thing is specifically the Wii U adaptor.

Fair enough. I guess I've been happy enough with using other controllers.
by yencabulator | 2025-10-11 23:51:12+00:00
> Nothing has been taken away, it hasn’t been relicensed, etc.

Meanwhile, at https://data-star.dev/essays/greedy_developer

> For v1, we moved a handful of convenience plugins into Datastar Pro.

So it's yet another rugpull, and the project is now Open Core. No sympathy from me.
by barbs | 2025-10-11 23:51:18+00:00
This is really cool to see. I've been on the lookout for software like this ever since reading "Why Doctor's Hate Their Computers" in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha....

HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24336039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381969

I wonder how feasible it would be to replace the current software in practice?
by balamatom | 2025-10-11 23:51:28+00:00
No, there's no Poe's Law involved; it's just that you're unlikely to permit yourself to empathize with anything else besides your ingroup. (Exactly as unlikely as you're meant to be; congratulations - there is some safety in numbers).

That's all rather revealing as to what this so called "empathy" actually is, and why of all possible ethical values this is the one which epitomes of uncaring choose to pay lip service to.

Circling back to your original strawmonster - no, I don't believe any particular disaffected youth has had any voice in whether society should go through an opioid epidemic. As to the actual people responsible, I'm sure you'd perceive them as having vivid, rich inner lives, not unlike your own.
by zzzeek | 2025-10-11 23:52:03+00:00
kind to people....who he was speaking to directly in person? or making social media references while they were not present (or adding them to dox lists so they could be harassed for years with death threats [1]) ? This is the key difference of course. It's also a really basic technique of horrible people to come off as very empathetic and friendly in person under specific circumstances so people are fooled in exactly this way, giving them full leeway to do horrible things elsewhere (such as maintaining dox lists to terrorize people into submission, or referring to women of color as having lesser "brain processing power" - e.g. unfiltered racism [2]....oh or insisting that children should be forced to watch executions [3]).

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/charlie-kirk-professor-...

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-black-women/

[3] https://meidasnews.com/news/charlie-kirk-wants-coca-cola-spo...
by mauvehaus | 2025-10-11 23:52:10+00:00
If I throw code up on GitHub, I try to be real clear that if it's good enough for me, it's done as far as I'm concerned[0]. I'm also licensed under WTFPL. I figure if that scares off any commercial interests, so much the better.

You're probably a lot more fully baked than I am, so this path may not work for you.

[0] https://github.com/longwalkwoodworking/angle-dangler#what-if...
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-11 23:55:00+00:00
To be honest, for me it's the opposite, judging by the developer's comments in other threads about the topic. He's not as nice as his responses in this one would suggest.

Edit: Just some examples to not make empty statements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540077

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540140

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542425

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538639

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540093

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540824

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539376

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539821