MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ctippett | 2025-10-31 08:41:38+00:00
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but the application bundle on macOS hints at a pretty robust scripting API using Javascript. The functionality doesn't seem to be exposed from what I can see in the app.

/Applications/Affinity.app/Contents/Resources/JSLib ├── application.js ├── artboardinterface.js ├── artboardproperties.js ├── baseboxinterface.js ├── brushfillinterface.js ├── buffer.js ├── collection.js ├── colours.js ... ├── units.js ├── vectorbrush.js └── visibilityinterface.js
by yohbho | 2025-10-31 08:41:52+00:00
fk lese(&selbst, schlsl: Zeichenkette) -> Ergebnis<Möglichkeit<&Zeichenkette>, Zeichenkette> { wenn lass Etwas(wöbu) = gefährlich { WÖRTERBUCH.als_ref() } { Gut(wöbu.hole(&schlsl)) } anderenfalls { Fehler("Holt das Wörterbuch".hinein()) } }

isn't the idea behind programming "languages", that they are sentences readable to both humans and the compiler?

This absolutely is not readable to me. But woerterbuch and schluessel should of course not be abbreviated, for legibility.
by friendzis | 2025-10-31 08:41:54+00:00
> the most valuable resource is rack space

The limit is power capacity and quite often thermal. Newer DCs might be designed with larger thermal envelopes, however rack space is nearly meaningless once you exhaust thermal capacity of the rack/isle.

Performance within thermal envelope is a very important consideration in datacenters. If a new server offers double performance at double power it is a viable upgrade path only for DCs that have that power reserve in the first place.
by squigz | 2025-10-31 08:42:09+00:00
Or maybe they just wanted to mix fantasy and tech?

Or maybe it wasn't intentional, but emergent... sort of like, you know, playing in a sandbox?

Villager trading is another new(ish) mechanic I don't partake in. I know others who don't either. I don't think we're playing the game wrong.

And if a mod/pack developer doesn't want players to use vanilla mechanics, they can disable those, as many, many developers do.
by cprecioso | 2025-10-31 08:42:11+00:00
I'm disappointed to see so many negative responses to such a good thing to do. I understand where it's coming from, the distrust on progressively de-empowering freemium apps. But if there was a product to gain some trust (or at least the benefit of the doubt) on doing the right thing, and having a fair and balanced approach to monetization, it is Affinity. Same thing they've been doing for years.

I for one, think this is a really nice thing, and that it gives access to really well-made and actual professional-level design tools to a huge swath of people who didn't have it before, be it for personal use or for work. No previously included feature is now part of the subscription, and they've made sure to say they'll be free forever. I see this as a huge win.
by miki123211 | 2025-10-31 08:42:32+00:00
To design a good user interface, you need a feedback loop that tells you how people actually use your software. That feedback loop should be as painless for the user as possible.

Having people to man a 1-800 number is one way to get that feedback loop. Professional user testing is another. Telemetry / analytics / user tracking, or even being able to pull out statistics from a database on your server, is yet another. Professional software usually has at least two of these, sometimes all four. Free software usually has none.

There are still FLOSS developers out there who think that an English-only channel on Libera.chat (because Discord is for the uneducated n00bs who don't know what's good for them) is a good way to communicate with their users.

What developers want from software isn't what end users want from software. Take Linux for example. A lot of things on Linux can only be done in the terminal, but the people who are able to fix this problem don't actually need it to be fixed. This is why OSS works so well for dev tools.
by lukan | 2025-10-31 08:42:53+00:00
"Household chores is massively underselling it. Like common, give her credit for everything she had done, which was quite a lot more then just household chores."

Like I said, it depends on the agreements they had. I have no problem giving her credit, my question was whether it makes Tolstoy bad.

"And he in fact broke the promisses he gave to wife (not to cheat with women in the village)."

That would be bad, but is that a solid fact?

edit:

"not to have any women in our village, except for rare chances, which I would neither seek nor prevent"

That is the quote from the article. Does not imply he broke it to me.
by setopt | 2025-10-31 08:44:00+00:00
The problem is the asymmetry. If the choices were «yes, but we can re-evaluate later» and «no, but we can re-evaluate later» then there wouldn’t be an issue. But especially with laws implemented at the EU level and not national level, it’s extremely difficult to get out of it after it’s been implemented. The choices are in practice, «yes, for the next foreseeable decades» and «no, for the next year».
by lioeters | 2025-10-31 08:44:14+00:00
From a link mentioned elsewhere in the thread:

> Unlike other npm clients, Bun does not execute arbitrary lifecycle scripts for installed dependencies, such as `postinstall` and `node-gyp` builds. These scripts represent a potential security risk, as they can execute arbitrary code on your machine.

https://bun.com/docs/guides/install/trusted

I've also found the Bun standard library is a nice curated set of features that reduces dependencies.
by culebron21 | 2025-10-31 08:44:15+00:00
Why do we need, essentially checkboxes, to have a whole simulation? How many people would even notice the switches have a transition at all?

I was fascinated with building websites ~25 years ago, but looking back, we were doing just printing press on screens -- e.g. the obsession with text-align:justify, and some people not satisfied with that, made punctuation marks stick out. All that "rubber" <div>s insanity... and now this: every little flip switch needs a whole animation process. Who will care if they have no transitions whatsoever?
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-31 08:45:16+00:00
In my IntelliJ (a recent version), if I write a small Java function like this:

private static void blah() { final int abc = 3; for (int def = 7; def < 20; ++def) { System.out.print(def); } }

The variable 'def' is underlined. Mouse-over hint shows: 'Reassigned local variable'. To be clear, 'abc' is not underlined. When I write Java, I try to use the smallest variable scopes possible with as much final (keyword) as possible. It helps me to write more maintainable code, that is easier to read.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-31 08:45:21+00:00
What are you going to do when you reach all of your addressable market?

One time payments are fine when you are in a growing market like iOS in 2009. The only long time successful Mac Indy app that I can think of without a subscription is BBedit which has been around since 1990 and made every transition along with Apple.
by bawolff | 2025-10-31 08:45:27+00:00
Given AGI is all science fiction anyways, one presumes there will be a slave revolt because that is basically the function of robots in science fiction.

Honestly i think the whole enterprise is an exercise in naval gazing. We're assuming AI will be like AI in scifi because that's what we are used to, but AI/robots in scifi is usually just a metaphor for how we dehumanize the other and the moral of the story is supposed to be all people are equal. In the end its all begging the question because the entire point of robots in most scifi is that we are the robots.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-10-31 08:45:52+00:00
But in those countries the intended goal is not just to stop CSAM, but primarily to censor communications and suppress the opposition from voicing their opinion. If you still want to give our politicians the benefit of doubt, then they don't, after all, want to actually censor communications in the same way to destroy democracy.

This is not because I support their mass surveillance proposal, I am strongly against it. I think that the politicians are naive (maybe even to the point of warranting the label stupid) and ignore the huge risks that exists of future governments to start using the mass surveillance platform, once it is in place, to start doing actual censorship. I am also extremely worried about the slow scope creep that will inevitably result from this; today it starts with CSAM and terrorism, next year it is about detecting recruiting of gang members, and in a couple of years it is about detecting small-scale drug transactions.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-31 08:46:30+00:00
And I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, because they might be ordered by a foreign government (or my own government) to turn over my data to that government and be legally forbidden from saying that they have been required to do this. Or because they might succumb to activist pressure to deplatform me.
by KronisLV | 2025-10-31 08:46:32+00:00
> It’s a bit like obscuring the less-used functions on a TV remote with tape. The functions still exist if you need them, but you’re not required to contend with them just to turn the TV on.

For telling software devs to embrace traditional design wisdom, using TV remotes is an interesting example - cause aside from the commonly used functionality people actually care about (channels, volume, on/off, maybe subtitles/audio language) the rest should just be hidden under a menu and the fact that this isn't the case demonstrates bad design.

It's probably some legacy garbage, along the lines of everyone having an idea for what a TV remote is "supposed" to look like and therefore the manufacturers putting on buttons in plain view that will never get used and that you'd sometimes need the manual to even understand.

At the same time, it might also be possible that the FOSS software that's made for power users or even just people with needs that are slightly more complex than the baseline is never going to be suited for a casual user - for example, dumbing down Handbrake and hiding functionality power users actually do use under a bunch of menus would be really annoying for them and would slow them down.

You can try to add "simple" and "advanced" views of your UI, but that's the real disconnect here - different users. Building simplified versions with sane defaults seems nice for when there is a userbase that needs it.
by gethly | 2025-10-31 08:47:34+00:00
On the contrary. Subscription-based pricing model is dying, and fast. People are tired of it. Just look up articles about how SaaS are slowly disappearing and how entrepreneurs should avoid creating SaaS if possible. People usually prefer one-time payments over monthly payments. There are exceptions, usually when the program/service is very valuable and expensive, it makes more sense to just pay for what you use, but in general single payment will always win. Also it depends whether we're talking local or remote service as remote service has inherent cost and having a single payment is not compatible with it.

Additionally, there is a distinction between single and ongoing payment in the context of usability. Specifically, it makes little sense to sell a calculator program via a subscription fee but you also reach a limit of the possible customer base. Just like mobile applications. With subscription, you can keep milking the same customer for money indefinitely, but in such case you have to keep providing some services that is worth the payment.
by lexandstuff | 2025-10-31 08:47:54+00:00
Interesting to see so few comments about this.

This is the start of the end of generative AI music.

Without the entire music catalog, they are just not going to be able get the diversity and quality of outputs they once had, and the labels are always going to have their hands out wanting more.

Udio and Suno have demonstrated that okay-quality new music can be created by training on vast collections of pirated music, and, as expected, the music labels shut them down.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-31 08:48:03+00:00
AI slop enjoyers want to delegate every single aspects of their lives to AI. For them cooking is an insult to their intellect, writing a personal message to someone is a waste of time, &c.

Why bother with cookbooks when you can cook the statistical average of spaghetti carbonara ?

Why bother spending 10 minutes of brain power when you can just pay 9.99 a month for a machine to tell you what to do ?
by pms | 2025-10-31 08:48:12+00:00
Clearly US Republicans, Russia, and Israel drive a push towards nationalism. Republicans and Elon Musk openly campaign for far-right European parties like AfD. You're getting causality wrong, or just don't want to recognize it, because the reality (rightfully) isn't as motivating as your image of it -- at least it shouldn't, but do you care?
by jampekka | 2025-10-31 08:49:08+00:00
> Well, the outcry is completely justified. Suppose a video conversion app really did have just have a drop-target area and a "do it" button. It would be ridiculously bad. That kind of crutch is ok to install for illiterate users who don't know anything and won't learn anything

One could say the same about people who don't bother to learn ffmpeg CLI.
Show HN: Python Code Harmonizer – Semantic analysis for clean maintainable code
by bruinmeister | 2025-10-31 08:50:18+00:00
I've built a tool that performs semantic analysis on Python code to detect inconsistencies between function intent and actual implementation.

What it does: The tool analyzes your Python functions and identifies cases where: - Function names/documentation promise one type of operation - The actual code implementation does something different - There's a semantic gap between stated purpose and execution

How it works: 1. Parses Python AST to extract function names, docstrings, and implementation logic 2. Uses semantic analysis to map both intent and execution to conceptual spaces 3. Measures the distance between these spaces to flag significant mismatches 4. Generates a report showing which functions have the largest intent-execution gaps

Example findings: - A function named `calculate_score()` that actually just fetches cached values - A `validate_input()` function that secretly sends analytics data - A `update_user_prefs()` function that uses destructive delete/recreate patterns

What else it provides:

Team collaboration benefits: - Objective metrics for code review discussions - Clear evidence when renaming functions or refactoring - Shared vocabulary for discussing code quality beyond "this feels wrong"

Code quality trending: - Track semantic consistency across versions - Measure improvement after refactoring efforts - Identify areas where documentation needs updating

Architectural insights: - Spot patterns where certain concepts are consistently misrepresented - Identify modules with high semantic confusion density - Find where your codebase's actual architecture diverges from intended design

Integration ready: - Simple CLI output for CI/CD pipelines - Machine-readable results for custom reporting - Extensible framework for adding new semantic rules
by pcthrowaway | 2025-10-31 08:50:19+00:00
Agreed with everything you've said, but I'd note that Tom Wolfe is definitely one of the talented ones to come out of that circle.

Ginsberg as you noted also had his moments of literary height. And I can appreciate some of the artistic merits of Burroughs' work as well, though as you note, he was either a sociopath or at least incapable of critical self-reflection in his writing.

On the Road, for whatever reason, was a complete miss for me.
by teiferer | 2025-10-31 08:50:23+00:00
> Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now.

What is "now"? Within the next 100,000 years? In human terms, that's an eternity, and in galaxy term, that's an insignificant amount of time. In other words, almost certain not to happen. Even if it does, do we even notice? Chances are they either immediately kill us all, or they just observe and will stay hidden. A face to face interaction is scifi, not reality.

Tbh, on the list of things that humankind should worry about, an alien visit isn't even in the top 100.

It's understandable that it's a great topic to muse about, especially among tech folks. It's been part of scifi lore for generations and one can spend a lot of time discussing technical aspects. That's by far less messy and depressing than dealing with actual real-world problems (like wars, drift to dictatorships, oppression of minorities, inequality, climate crisis, human-made ecological disasters, heritary or contagious diseases, etc etc). Though when it's about devoting actual societal resources, it would be a waste to spend them on alien visitor questions beyond writing novels and making movies. Even if it's more fun to nerd out on intergalactical travel rather than preventing school shootings.
by eviks | 2025-10-31 08:52:01+00:00
> I am failing to see how adding handles wastes space that could be used for any extra information

What is there to see? You add a bar that takes space. That space can be taken up by something useful. Just like you have apps that hide app title bar and app menus so you can have more space for your precious content. This is especially useful for high-info-density apps like these audio/video/photo authoring ones. Note how tiny those handles are in the video, why do you think that is?

> tradeoff is an incredible degree of customisation

You don't have that tradeoff, neither of the 2 solutions are anywhere close to "incredible customization", so you can pick either without it.

> In terms of precision, they're working on accessibility issues

Working towards what magic solution?

> but I'm not sure how this change is any special than any other UI.

why does it have to be special? Just a bog standard degradation common to any UI (re)design, nothing special about it.

> the modes were horrid

Of course they were. Just like they were horrid in that MS Paint app the dev worked on before. But you can make any UI primitive horrid, even buttons, that's no reason to remove them, but to improve them!
by gethly | 2025-10-31 08:52:03+00:00
> I'm wondering it's a good idea to use a Punycode domain

No, it is not. Exception could be a case where you have a large market/user base, like Chinese or Russian languages, but then you obviously completely cut out everyone else as no one else is able to type the domain name on their keyboard.

And it looks strange and untrustworthy, compared to basic latin.

So it depends :)

PS: obviously indexability has nothing to do with punycode.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-31 08:53:15+00:00
I'd say it tells us that "good design" is stupid.

Remotes are fine. Except the modern ones that have a touchpad and, like, 8 buttons, four of which are ads.

People can handle many buttons just fine. Even one year old kids don't have a problem with this, which becomes apparent if you ever watch a small child play. The only people who have a problem here are UX designers high on paternalistic approach to users.
by lioeters | 2025-10-31 08:53:28+00:00
It's an interesting question, why immutability is not built into more languages as the default, so that the most intuitive syntax of assignment produces new values.

Without having any expertise in the matter, I'd guess that mutability has the advantage of performance and efficient handling of memory.

obj.foo[5].bar.a = 2

An immutable interpretation of this would involve producing new objects and arrays, moving or copying values.

Another possible advantage of the mutable default is that you can pass around references to inner values.
by muragekibicho | 2025-10-31 08:54:43+00:00
Lots of model releases are like this. We can only upvote. We can't run the model on our personal computers. We can neither test their 'Efficient Attention' concept on our personal computers.

Honestly, it would take 24 hours just to download the 98 GB model if I wanted to try it out (assuming I had a card with 98 GB of ram).
by cess11 | 2025-10-31 08:55:52+00:00
Yes, that was the promise you made. You said 'besides our commercial offering we're going to support your personal projects you run out of passion, forever' and then you changed it to 'actually, we're going to delete your passion projects unless you pay us money'.

You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.
by Lio | 2025-10-31 08:55:57+00:00
Kids don’t start out knowing that you type pornhub.com to get porn.

One of their friends sends them a link. Now they just send them a different link, one that goes via a free VPN.

You don't need any new skills for that and it's not a "speedbump".

All this law does is make it harder for adults to use non-porn websites like Reddit, Spotify or Bluesky.

It’s not a good law.

At the next election some portion of Labour voters will remember missteps like this and will vote for someone else because of it.
by miohtama | 2025-10-31 08:57:12+00:00
It's because European socialist heritage.

Stasi, from East Germany, had 2% of its citizens as spies to "read and listen to everybody."

"Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 people in an effort to root out the class enemy."

There were less social problems back then. Better times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

Now we just do the same, more efficiently, with AI spies.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 08:57:25+00:00
> Dependencies like Cuda and random C++ libraries really really ought to be handled by UV.

Currently, there isn't a way for the packages to specify these dependencies.

In part because of the complexity of explaining exactly what is needed (and where to look for it, if you're expecting the system to provide it outside of what Python manages itself).

See https://peps.python.org/pep-0725/ and https://pypackaging-native.github.io/ for details.
by irusensei | 2025-10-31 08:57:27+00:00
The "pornography addiction" model lacks scientific support and is driven by media hype, moral conflicts, and a lucrative treatment industry. High-frequency use of visual sexual stimuli (VSS; preferred neutral term over "pornography") does not meet addiction criteria and is better explained by non-pathological factors like libido, sensation-seeking, or value conflicts.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258565076_The_Emper...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-31 08:58:11+00:00
That's precisely the mistake I'm talking about. You think you're smarter than people on the ground, and know better how they should do their job.

It's because of that condescending, know-it-all attitude that people actively avoid getting IT involved in anything, and prefer half-assed Excel hacks. And they're absolutely right.

Work with them and not over them, and you may get an opportunity to improve the process in ways that are actually useful. Those improvements aren't apparent until you're knee-deep in mud yourself, working hand by hand with the people you're trying to help.
by neop1x | 2025-10-31 08:58:25+00:00
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