MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulRobinson | 2025-10-12 07:52:14+00:00
Nice list. Some thoughts:

- I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line, and installation is fine, so I'm not sure your line of reasoning holds strongly. One thing I think you might be hinting at though that is a missed trick: macOS today could learn a little from the way iOS and iPadOS is forced to do things and centralise configuration in a single place.

- I think transaction processing operating systems have been reinvented today as "serverless". The load/execute/quit cycle you describe is how you build in AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run Functions or Azure Functions.

- Most of your other ideas (with an exception, see below), died either because of people trying to grab money rather than build cool tech, and arguably the free market decided to vote with its feet - I do wonder when we might next get a major change in hardware architectures again though, it does feel like we've now got "x86" and "ARM" and that's that for the next generation.

- XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. The forgiving nature of the HTML specs is a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't expect people to be experts at reading specs to publish on the web, nor should it need special software that gatekeeps the web. It needs to be scrappy, and messy and evolutionary, because it is a technology that serves people - we don't want people to serve the technology.
by wiseowise | 2025-10-12 07:52:21+00:00
Heh, that’s all very cool and lots of smart words, but have you thought of children? Have you thought of elderly falling and unable to get up[1]?

Surely you don’t want your fellow citizens to fall for Russian, Chinese, Another State Actor propaganda?

State surveillance on unprecedented level? Don’t be paranoid! Surely a state actor would never abuse the power to snoop for your private photos[2]!

Electronic waste? Duopoly? Censorship? Ownership? Those are made up words, comrade!

[1] - https://youtu.be/cwCtM6D4GOc

[2] - https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/karen-r...
by roenxi | 2025-10-12 07:52:26+00:00
I dunno, my read on Ukraine is it looks like the Ukranians are feeling their way toward some sort of a collapse. They haven't been able to stabilise the frontline, there was that discussion of lowering the mobilisation age earlier this year and the Russian negotiators don't seem to be in any hurry to make concessions. No certainty in a war but those aren't rosy signals.

Regardless, say China decides to take Taiwan. They set up a blockade with drones and missiles. If there is a counter the US has for that I haven't seen it, Taiwan pretty much disappears off the economic map. There is an interesting series of wargames [0] recently where CSIS looked at what might happen over the first 20 weeks of a blockade and it isn't pretty (let alone what presumably happens if China turns out to be willing to wage war for 12 months or more). My read on the "summery of game outcomes" section is that the US generally takes higher casualties than the Chinese, which is a not a position anyone wants to be in. Then the war drags out and we find out if the US has any idea how to manufacture ... I don't know what they'd need to maintain an attrition war like that. It looks quite hard and consequently the idea of material US support is probably a bluff. They've shown no willingness to bleed on behalf of other people.

Maybe if some sort of grand coalition of Asians comes together to fight and die protecting US hegemony in the Pacific it could work out well for the US. Crazier things have happened.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/lights-out-wargaming-chinese-b...
by matwood | 2025-10-12 07:52:44+00:00
> As the popular quote goes, "When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?" > The facts and circumstances have changed considerably in recent years, and I have too!

This should be everyone's default if we are learning. Not saying that's what the OP did here, but I hate how people dig out something that was said years ago like it's some gotcha. I think it's a bigger issue if people never change their minds about anything because it would show hubris and a lack of learning.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-12 07:53:28+00:00
I think "a lot" is understating it, I would guess that this describes the vast majority of people. It can take years just to find the connection between surface level problems that you see and their root causes. Then once you find the connection it takes a long time time to accept it and even longer to actually heal from it (if ever).

From what I understand, it's generally a lot easier to heal from an acute traumatic event of some sort, no matter how serious it is (e.g. physical or sexual assault), that than it is to heal from sustained and repeated trauma caused by "well-meaning" people.

In the latter case you probably don't even realize that it happened at first because it's an accumulation of a million paper cuts throughout your life. Then if you try to talk to the people involved (e.g. your parents) they'll probably dismiss you and say that you're being dramatic because each instance is utterly insignificant on its own.

You have to peel back so many layers of it until you finally understand what happened, how it affected you, and how to heal from it. And that's just on a cognitive level, on an emotional level which is the one that actually matters it's going to take even longer to internalize everything.

The best thing we could do as a society to solve like half of all of our problems (with everything from unemployment due to personality disorders, to drug use, to violent crime) is to start taking mental well-being seriously, to prevent as much harm as possible and to offer help (for free) at the earliest possible opportunity.

There should be mass public education campaigns about how seemingly subtle and inconsequential things can break people's minds if they're sustained and perpetuated over a long period of time and especially in childhood. And I don't mean those trendy "mental health matters" and "we accept your depression and anxiety <3" campaigns that have been going around for a while because 99.9% of that is completely inauthentic. Even out of the people who claim to care, the vast majority only care long as it's a mild case of it that doesn't actually visibly affect you too much - then the judgement starts.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-12 07:53:40+00:00
I’m not sure I’m understanding you.

Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.
by lblume | 2025-10-12 07:55:00+00:00
The cheapness is due to the prevalence, and the prevalence of sugar caused sweetness receptors to be evolutionarily advantageous. There is no world in which sugar is extremely expensive, markets still function basically in the way they do now and humans experience the sensation of sweetness the way they typically do now. Cocaine and other types of "hard" drugs are qualitatively different in that regard.

Your example also doesn't really hold up because people typically don't process cocaine in the way they do with sugar and other carbohydrates. In your hypothetical scenario, we might see people consuming large amounts of pure sugar (or artificial sweeteners), but they wouldn't go to lengths of baking bread using it.
by eterm | 2025-10-12 07:55:44+00:00
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly

It would kill the approachability of the language.

One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output.

That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages any time they missed a bracket or misspelled something.

If you've learned to program in the last decade or two, you might not even realise just how bad compiler errors tended to be in most languages.

The kind of thing where you could miss a bracket on line 47 but end up with a compiler error complaining about something 20 lines away.

Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with respect to meaningful compiler errors.

But in the days of XHTML? Error messages were arcane, you had to dive in to see what the problem actually was.
by rzerowan | 2025-10-12 07:57:18+00:00
At the scale and specificity , lets take magnets - theres magnets and theres magnets , if youre using them in mil/aero tolerances required are going to be much higher with lower failure rates. Think the way rad-hardened cpus for satellites are different/costlier from commercial ones , similarly here when your'e in guidance systems and radars the tolerances require much higher specs than headphones. With the caveat that those already in current products can be recycled so thats one path for simple RE. For the ones that are combined into alloys though its a bigger ask , this i guess will be the main cost increase , as its like trying to separate out copper from bronze if one wants to try recycling. And in mil there are quite a number of special RE alloy to get specific properties. Which is why for the volumes required even at low % alternate refiners will take time to ramp up , in the interim prices dictated at market rates will definately spike.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-12 07:57:52+00:00
I'd be curious to see how that works out. One of the main advantages of the Pi is that it supports HDMI-CEC. However, I am seen reports that it struggles with 4K playback at more than 30fps. Even 60Hz isn't great if you have a modern TV and want to use SteamLink to play Steam games running on your PC from your couch.
by squeaky-clean | 2025-10-12 07:58:34+00:00
Those gestures have been pretty standard with mouse movements in music software for a while. Apple brought it to touchscreen, but they didn't invent the multi gesture knob interface.

I had a Novation Zero SL mkii in 2008 which had a "universal knob". It acted as an HID mouse input and when you spun the knob it would click your mouse and drag it vertically. It worked with most music software at the time because vertically dragging a knob had become fairly standard.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-12 07:58:34+00:00
The US still one of the leading countries in the world for mining and refining by any measure. It has extensive expertise and its mineral wealth is unusually diverse.

All of this is despite the fact the US effectively banned new mining several decades ago. The US is a mineral juggernaut and has the technical knowledge but growth has been severely restricted as a matter of policy for a long time.

By analogy, US oil production was in terminal decline since the 1970s and presumed dead at the end of the 20th century. Now the US is the world’s leading oil producer with no sign of slowing down.

There is every reason to believe the same thing would happen if the US decided to re-open the mountain west to mineral exploration.
by bamboozled | 2025-10-12 08:00:17+00:00
What I'm a bit confused about is why Japan doesn't just make more wonderful things , so there is just more to go around? Like what happened to building amazing temples, and gardens? Where did that spirit go. I find it quite sad and strange that the temples are kind of ghost towns without any practicing monks (for example).

I guess that time is over, and that's sad, I just don't feel like it has to be.

Maybe the declining population is just part of it all, there is just less incentive to go bigger, on the other hand, even 100,000 million people on an island the size of Japan is a lot so I'm not sure that's it either.
by PufPufPuf | 2025-10-12 08:00:35+00:00
Definitely Opa: http://opalang.org/

In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML, async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since then.

I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will build web apps 14 years later.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-10-12 08:00:53+00:00
In my own country, Spain, the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975) never attacked other countries or participated in any foreign wars (beyond sending a division of volunteers to WWII). Its domestic policy was highly repressive with common execution of political dissidents, etc., but in the sense of "no war" it was peaceful. The same goes for Salazar's Portugal, Hoxha’s Albania or Tito's Yugoslavia.
by nmadden | 2025-10-12 08:01:23+00:00
Yes, in theory they are good. In practice they cause enormous amounts of pain and work for library maintainers with little benefit to them (often only downsides). So, many libraries don’t support them and they are very hard to adopt incrementally. I tried to convert a library I maintain to be a module and it was weeks of work which I then gave up and reverted. As one library author said to me “JPMS is for the JDK itself, ignore it in user code”.

Given how much of a coach and horses modules drove through backwards compatibility it also kind of gives the lie to the idea that that explains why so many other language features are so poorly designed.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-12 08:01:41+00:00
The facetious reply to that is to look at what China has done with its command economy under the direction of its smart degree-engineer Politburo masters (unlike the USSR).

That's not a call for Communism, during WWII the US was essentially under a command economy and manufacturing companies made good profits—some fortunes. Furthermore, the US government was run by very bright people such as Vannevar Bush and Harry Hopkins (they must be rolling in their graves at today's shambles).

The US doesn't have to go to such lengths today but it could partially do so by mandating that certain critical/strategic industries be directed to produce strategic goods and materials.

The real issues are lack of political will and stupid ideological differences.
by cube00 | 2025-10-12 08:02:00+00:00
> despite decades of effort to attempt to force-fit all applications into a browser, sometimes just a damn program that runs natively on the CPU is a much better fit for the task

WebAssembly will run natively if ECMAScript is holding you back.

While it's still on a VM, so is Java, and that's the only mainstream game in town for "native" Android apps.

It'd be exciting to see what the web could be if Apple didn't spend decades dragging their heels implementing standards for progressive web apps (PWAs) because they know it'll cut into their app store gravy train.
by nixass | 2025-10-12 08:02:00+00:00
I see it says Corsair so cannot tell what exact model it is but I did relatively similar thing. Reason being if you keep the load under certain wattage the PSU will run in passive cooling mode. My rig will never reach 50% of what Corsair SF750 Platinum can deliver and not mention in normal light load circumstances. It spins up its fans only when the load reaches ~300W or so.

Some people are very anal about any kind of noise coming out of their rigs. I personally undervolt everything to keep the fans at bay/minimum and having extra legroom in PSU department helps a lot
by drnick1 | 2025-10-12 08:02:15+00:00
> I'm mostly happy with my GrapheneOS device - but it is absolutely not suitable for mass market.

What makes you say that? I run GrapheneOS on a Pixel and had to go through the relative simple flashing process, but if GOS came preinstalled on a device anybody familiar with Android (or even iOS) would be able to use it. Compatibility with Android apps is great too.
by silisili | 2025-10-12 08:02:54+00:00
I've argued this for years on this site...but AOL.

At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats, etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have survived as a software company otherwise.

They were basically a better thought out Facebook before Facebook, in my opinion.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-10-12 08:04:09+00:00
When I moved to iPhones a few years back (death of Windows Mobile, and I wasn't suffering Android again, see every reason under the sun why), I set some really hard limits on not being in the ecosystem. It's a good phone, but I won't buy paid apps, do not accessorize beyond a case. Everything I use tends to just be client apps for things I do on the web at a desk.

(Apparently a few years ago was... like six years. Dang the base model iPhone 11 got me really far.)
by ggm | 2025-10-12 08:04:44+00:00
Not a great fan of IQ testing, avoid it like the plague and have done for decades (got a note off testing at primary school after the first round).

I believe there is a genetic element for sure but I also think how big the bucket of brains is you get to fill with skills and capabilities is a function of how hard early childhood drives to build that bucket. That social construction of "give me the child until they are 12" of the Jesuits is what I think this is: they can. Because they think they can. They think they can because they were tought to think they can.

Twins testing isn't nothing. This is the gold standard we have. Danny de Vito and Arnie.
by simianwords | 2025-10-12 08:05:25+00:00
I think you are misleading as well. Thinking models do recursively generate the final “best” prompt to get the most accurate output. Unless you are genuinely giving new useful information in the prompt, it is kind of useless to structure the prompt in one way or another because reasoning models can generate intermediate steps that give best output. The evidence on this is clear - benchmarks reveal that thinking models are way more performant.
by worldsavior | 2025-10-12 08:05:26+00:00
The company exists to fight illegal activities. Maybe there are governments that abuse this service, but it's not NSO's job to fight this. They're a company and they want to make money. How are they different from Google or other companies? When Google wants to keep you on your phone it becomes OK? When food industries make sugar-full beverages it's OK?

There are also many governments that use this tool to combat terror or drug dealers and more.
by microtonal | 2025-10-12 08:05:46+00:00
Can you elaborate? I bought a ThinkPad early this year. It probably had Windows 11 (didn't check, wiped it immediately) and it works fine?

I don't doubt that there are laptops where it is hard, but I would love to hear some examples and in what way the UEFI firmware is nailed down such that you cannot install Linux?
by abhgh | 2025-10-12 08:06:09+00:00
Wouldn't this be an optimization problem, that's to say, something like z3 should be able to do - [1], [2]?

I was about to suggest probabilistic programming, e.g., PyMC [3], as well, but it looks like you want the optimization to occur autonomously after you've specified the problem - which is different from the program drawing insights from organically accumulated data.

[1] https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3?tab=readme-ov-file

[2] https://microsoft.github.io/z3guide/programming/Z3%20Python%...

[3] https://www.pymc.io/welcome.html
by ValdikSS | 2025-10-12 08:06:16+00:00
ZeroNet decentralized web platform:

- Based on BitTorrent ideas

- Completely decentralized websites' code and data

- Either completely decentralized or controllable-decentralized authentication

- Could be integrated into existing websites (!)

It's not kind of dead, there's a supported fork, but it still feels like a revolution that did not happen. It works really well.
by Borg3 | 2025-10-12 08:06:43+00:00
XenClient. I would really love to have some minimal OS HyperVisor running, and then you slap multiple OSes on top of that w/ easy full GUI switching via some hotkeys like Ctrl+Shift+F1. Additionaly, special drivers to virtualize Gfx and Sfx devices so every VM have full desktop capabilities and low latency.

Unfortunately, it died because its very niche and also they couldnt keep up with development of drivers for desktops.. This is even worse today...
by edent | 2025-10-12 08:06:50+00:00
Off the top of my head:

Lots of banking apps don't work.

RCS has only just started working.

No "Find My Device" support.

Permissions model is difficult to understand - even I struggle with it.

Standard launcher has tiny icons which can't be adjusted.

Pop on to https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ and see the struggles which users have.
by mikewarot | 2025-10-12 08:07:12+00:00
Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before almost everything else, in a nice offline package.

Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8(

Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job done.
by pbasista | 2025-10-12 08:07:34+00:00
I do not see a rational reason why a mobile carrier should have any say in which connectivity technology is enabled for use with its mobile network on a particular phone model.

It should work based on standards, mobile carrier's capabilities and phone's capabilities. If a phone supports capability X, such as VoLTE, then it should just work with all mobile carriers that support that capability. No conditions.

As an imperfect analogy, consider a road, representing a mobile network. This road has some capabilities, such as speed limit. There are cars driving on this road, representing mobile phones. And then consider that a road management company, representing the carrier, would impose different speed limits on different cars, depending on whether they are affiliated with the road management company or not.

Would that be acceptable in a physical world?

If not, we should not accept anything similar in a digital world either.
by zipy124 | 2025-10-12 08:07:40+00:00
This is on one hand quite the fantastic idea, but I imagine it falls down to bureaucracy, for example for health services related stuff everyone would need pretty thorough training in the legal aspects, and insurance might be difficult, and preventing malicious actors from contributing so probably security clearance (for example if the military use it for their healthcare) or at least a thorough background check. I think open sourcing everything is far far easier than a volunteer based setup.