MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throawayonthe | 2025-10-30 16:13:44+00:00
the issue is real, but i'm not sure this solves it; in this case you end up with an overly specific solution that you can't really recommend to most people (and won't become widely known)

using the remote analogy, the taped versions are useful for (many!) specific people, but shipping the remote in that configuration makes no sense

i think normal people don't want to install an app for every specific task either

maybe a solution can look like a simple interface (with good defaults!!) but with an 'advanced mode' that gives you more options... though i can't say i've seen a good example of this, so it might be fundamentally flawed as well
by murphyslaw | 2025-10-30 16:13:46+00:00
All of it is built from source, it's just that the current build process is not easy to audit. The build by definition needs to happen on multiple platforms or cross compiled, a root cert needs to be setup in the windows installer at boot time, and so on.

I agree that this is not an ideal way to boot an ISO, but the general public is unlikely to ever need a multiboot USB stick. I like this project enough to perhaps contribute.
by getnormality | 2025-10-30 16:13:52+00:00
It is a minor nuisance, but I think there's ultimately a pretty good reason for it.

Old-school base R is less type-sensitive and more "do what I mean", but that leads to slowness and bugs. Now we have the tidyverse, which among many other things provides a new generation of much faster functions with vectorized C implementations under the hood, but this requires them to be more rigid and type-sensitive.

When I want to stick a NA into one of these, I often have to give it the right type of NA, or it'll default to NA_boolean and I'll get type errors.
by mythz | 2025-10-30 16:13:57+00:00
Awesome, expected Canva were going to jack up the prices or turn it into a subscription after acquisition. A freemium version is very welcome for the rare times I need to use it. No plans to ever be a paying customer myself (sorry Canva), but nice to know it's still being actively developed.

Just noticed the AI feature integrations are locked behind a premium sub, makes sense to go for a wide funnel with a premium free product then up-sell to people who want the AI integration, should turn out to be commercially successful.

Really hoping a Linux version is in the works. Hopefully the exodus from Windows picks up so we can accelerate the timeline for Linux support. (Currently using the amazing https://photopea.com for most image edits on Linux)
by lou1306 | 2025-10-30 16:14:05+00:00
Well of course going towards integration vs segregation is an organizational (in this case, political) decision. I was saying that the average EU state machinery has a lot of room for integration, should there be a political intention to go that way.

Case in point: in Italy, different towns used to have different systems for their resident registrations. I doubt there was an extreme need for customization in this context, it was just that bigger/wealthier towns had a chance to digitize earlier and so on, leading to extreme fragmentation. Moving to a nationwide register took literally a dozen years or so, for a single service of a single country.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-10-30 16:14:27+00:00
The cool thing about Bresenham is that you're constantly picking the pixel closest to the desired slope but you never have to do the explicit division of deltaY/deltaX. The division happens implicitly as you draw the line, using only addition and subtraction of integers. Which was quite handy for the primitive computers circa 1960 when Jack Bresenham invented it.
by wrs | 2025-10-30 16:14:27+00:00
Oh man, I have literally done that to my parents’ remote controls. Actually more controls, because they still watch VHS tapes. But I have to admit it never occurred to me to do that to their software.

Logic Pro has a “masking tape” mode. If you don’t turn on “Complete Features” [0], you get a simplified version of the app that’s an easier stepping stone from GarageBand. Then check the box and bam, full access to 30 years’ accumulation of professional features in menus all over the place.

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/advanced-settings-l...
by digbybk | 2025-10-30 16:14:28+00:00
Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this. Let's say you have a box of gas in a low entropy state: all the particles are on one side of the box. A moment later, the particles will have spread to the other side of the box, so the entropy is lower. But to say "a moment later", we're assuming a quantity called time. I'm confused how you can see this in reverse: "because the particles spread to the other side of the box, a moment passes".
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-30 16:14:34+00:00
People did it, some times, when they needed it.

It was so rare that the GoF though they needed to write a book to teach people how to use those patterns when they eventually find them.

But after the book was published, those patterns became "advanced programming that is worth testing for in job interviews", and people started to code for their CVs. The same happened briefly with refactoring, and for much longer with unit tests and the other XP activities (like TDD).

At the same time, Java's popularity was exploding on enterprise software.
by godshatter | 2025-10-30 16:15:20+00:00
Generally, a lot of games play fine just by selecting Proton Experimental, though some of the games I play do require adding a configuration in the steam menu for the game which I usually crib from the protondb page for the game based on user comments.

There are a lot of people that are used to tweaking games on Windows, too, I used to be one of them. Lots of people mod their games and have to run them differently to do so or have to shim them in some way to make them work, lots of people search to find answers to problems they are having. Getting up to date graphics drivers used to be a pain in Windows (haven't had to try for many years), it's part of system updates in Linux for me (even running NVIDIA cards). If anything, getting a game to work that has issues on Windows was harder than getting a game to work on Linux that is having issues thanks to protondb.com, at least for me.

So I think there are a lot of people that could just hop over if they wanted to, trading one kind of tech-related problem solving for another kind.
by moi2388 | 2025-10-30 16:15:26+00:00
All classes in Java.lang are automatically imported.

It’s not uncommon to see Java calls within clojure code.

With aot it generates Java classes, calls those stubs and dispatches.

Stack traces are half clojure, half Java.

It’s not just clojure, I feel the same with for example F# which makes calls to C# entities.

It might not be deal breaking for you. It’s also very pragmatic.

However imo it does clearly violate the principles from his talk. They are intertwined. Easy, not simple by his own definition.

Apart from that, very fun language though.
by hansvm | 2025-10-30 16:15:47+00:00
Here and now, for the last nearly a decade. I pay $70/mo for, on a good day, 20Mbps down, 100Kbps up, 400ms ping, with a data cap. I have at least two major power outages each year and dozens of minor incidents (with the general quality -- phase stability, surges, etc being less than elsewhere I've lived even when it's working). Good utilities are localized in the Bay.
by achow | 2025-10-30 16:16:42+00:00
This site seems to be the old one - they don't mention their acquistion by Canva in 'About Us' section.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/

Also there is no link anywhere for downloading their products.

The current site seems to what OP has posted: affinity.studio

Strange choice to keep the old site up and running, and to complicate things the old site is the top result when searched.
by timschmidt | 2025-10-30 16:16:49+00:00
> The regular magnet of using a letter opener doesn't involve violence, even while the object itself has the potential for a violent use.

This sounds like you agree with my assessment, that violence is not inherent to the object, but a function of it's user's intent.

> But a loaded gun can only be fired violently. A clay duck can't explode non-violently when struck by a bullet. Nothing can be struck by a bullet without violence.

And yet you're back to assigning violence as an inherent property of an object here. Seems you are using two different and opposing systems of thought simultaneously.

Sometimes in my area of the US, people will fire guns into the air in reverie. Which most people would not describe as violent. Rather, celebratory. Rescue flares don't strike me as violent, but are fired from guns. Spin launch's projectile is another great example of something fired from a gun without violence.

On the other hand, if a person stood in the path of any of those while firing, the results could be quite gruesome, energetic even. But I wouldn't describe them as violent unless there was associated ill intent. Accidents are not typically described as violent.
by graemep | 2025-10-30 16:16:54+00:00
> This year I just completed my first trip overseas, visiting the UAE

So you have only ever visited a country that is very definitely NOT a democracy, and you have never lived in a democratic country.

> In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.

How is that "gaming many other freedoms". If the party was not to lame fine, but what happens when they are to blame?

> China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.

You said you cannot criticise the party and its leaders. So if something like HS2's cost overruns happen would you even know about it? Does everything get done at the planned cost?

> Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia

That is not the reality of living in Europe. I lived most of my life in the UK and those sorts of crimes are rare.
by fweimer | 2025-10-30 16:17:29+00:00
> Edit: also, I would rather write (x + y)/2 if I wanted half the sum, that seems much more logical to me than moving non-integer factors around.

Based on what I recall, there's a bit of an aversion towards writing / or ÷ for division (or explicitly written multiplication). And $\frac{1}{2}(x+y)$ is more readable in inline text than $\frac{x+y}{2}$.
by noduerme | 2025-10-30 16:17:47+00:00
Sooo, the main reason we looked at Affinity as an alternative to the Adobe suite was the fact that it was a one-time purchase without forced updates or all the extra garbage Adobe obsessively adds that slows down each new version. Affinity was nice but just not quite there, in my opinion, as a daily driver for print design and pre-press.

Once they were bought by Canva, whose software I find atrocious, I gave up on it.

My problem with this is that it seems like a gateway to being forced to pay monthly, Adobe-style. Or else what they're really selling are the AI tools. Just sell me a solid piece of software I can keep using forever offline. I can still do all my design work in Illustrator CS6 if I want to haul out a 15 year old laptop. Sell me a version of that for Apple Silicon and I'll happily pay for it.
by next_xibalba | 2025-10-30 16:18:18+00:00
In my personal experience, I do still get the same hit from drinking–I feel a buzz almost immediately, same as before. Rather, I just don't feel the "urge". I've never been a heavy drinker, but I would occasionally crave a beer or two, particularly at the end of a work week. Also, drinking on a GLP1 (I've been on both Tirzepatide and Semaglutide) absolutely wrecks my GI tract for 24-48 hours. Usually with an onset of maybe 8 hours, I get horrible heartburn, moderate to severe nausea, and even mild diarrhea.
Show HN: Promptix – send selected text to any LLM from Mac apps with one hotkey
by hudishkin | 2025-10-30 16:18:21+00:00
Hey HN, I built this for my own workflow: too much time lost copying text from Notes/Slack/etc. to ChatGPT/Claude and back. Wanted a simple way to query LLMs without leaving the app.

Promptix is a small Mac app that triggers on a hotkey for any selected text:

- Translate

- Fix grammar

- Rewrite/improve

- Summarize

- Text as prompt

- Custom prompts (e.g., "Convert bug report to PR description")

Key features:

- Works in any app: browsers, IDEs, terminals, etc.

- Bring your own key: OpenAI, Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible (including local like Ollama). No limits or costs from me.

- Runs locally on your Mac: full privacy, no data leaves (only selected text).

- 5 defaults prompts + unlimited customs.

Feedback or ideas welcome. What prompts would you customize?
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 16:18:56+00:00
> That’s also the reason NaN !== NaN. If NaN behaved like a number and had a value equal to itself, well, you could accidentally do math with it: NaN / NaN would result in 1,

So, by that logic, if 0 behaved like a number and had a value equal to itself, well, you could accidentally do math with it: 0 / 0 would result in 1...

But as it turns out, 0 behaves like a number, has a value equal to itself, you can do math with it, and 0/0 results in NaN.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-30 16:18:58+00:00
Maybe not more ownership by the owner, but certainly more ownership by the user, which is what's important. If there are multiple blockchain-based alternatives, I can choose which one to resolve with; it's also essentially built-in namespacing (with each name marked with its resolver.) And although I'm personally very crypto-negative, a distributed ledger is exactly what I would want to make sure that any nodes that I use to resolve a name on a particular registry are trustworthy.

The throughput problem that poisons cryptocurrency becomes irrelevant when we're talking about something that's as naturally long-lived as domain names. Every domain blockchain can have its own gatekeeping process; one can sell names for thousands of $ each, and another can give away thousands for a $. They can require that domain owners have a camera pointed at them personally for 24-hours a day or be revoked, or they can hand out infinite names through a onion-routed API.
by dayvid | 2025-10-30 16:19:07+00:00
For a lot of usecases there is a strong 80% functionality. E.g. For Handbrake, 80% of the time I am reducing the size of my video screen grabs from my computer or phone. Don't need any resolution change, etc.

There are other times I want cropping or something similar, but it's really only 10-30% of the time. If people want to have a more custom workflow they can use an advanced UI
by nosianu | 2025-10-30 16:19:15+00:00
How is that fair when a lot of industrial production was shifted to one region of the globe specifically? It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.

Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.

Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.

That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
by codeptualize | 2025-10-30 16:19:50+00:00
It's a smart approach imo. They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete (just usage cost wise you can't do that on a one time fee license).

But since they promised not to go subscription when they got acquired by Canva, making it free with AI as the subscription is a clever solution to not break their promise while still introducing a subscription model.

I think their bet is enough people will want the AI, which I think is correct.

As a long time Affinity user, first reaction was: "see, there is the subscription", but on second thought, fair enough, well played. I'll probably get the AI subscription as well.

I do wonder if over time more features will go into that premium plan, but we'll see.

Edit: It seems like some of the AI stuff runs on device, they are not very clear about what does or doesn't. That makes me change my opinion a bit, as that's just straight up a freemium subscription model.
by saberience | 2025-10-30 16:20:18+00:00
Think about this for a second. Kafka offsets are a thing, consumer groups are a thing. It's trivial to ensure that only one message is delivered to only one consumer if that's what you want. Consumer groups track their offset and then commit the offset, the message stays in Kafka but it won't be read again.

This IMO is better behaviour than RabbitMQ since you can always re-read messages once they have been processed, whereas generally with MQ systems the message is then marked for deletion and asynchronously deleted.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-30 16:20:45+00:00
You still can cite me as a final authority on every subject [1].

But when I'm in doubt, I try to make that clear. Also, in many cases I link to Wikipedia or somewhere I consider serious. (tokenadult used to add many good references for his posts, it's a pity he is not coming so often here.)

[1] Don't worry. I'm always right. See [1].
by ptmcc | 2025-10-30 16:20:47+00:00
Resources or the care, tbh. FOSS is a big umbrella and a lot of it simply isn't meant for "customers". Some FOSS apps clearly are trying to build a user base, in which case yeah the points this post makes are worth thinking about.

But many other projects, perhaps the majority, that is not their goal. By devs for devs, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.

Pleasing customers is incredibly difficult and a never-ending treadmill. If it's not the goal then it's not a failure.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-30 16:21:19+00:00
> America? The one with all the spying, NSA, Patriot Act, this America?

Yes. We do all of that. But so does practically everyone else. The difference is our federal structure and--until recently--independent courts provided a bit more oversight than other countries' citizens had access to. And we've had--until recently--respect for privacy held deeply enough by enough people that it turns into a stink at the federal level in at least some respect.

Most countries have national logging requirements, disclosure requirements and domestic police with the powers of the NSA. (America remains one of the few countries in which one can form a legal entity with zero identification.)
by zffr | 2025-10-30 16:21:34+00:00
I just tested this on my computer.

1. Make a new Xcode iOS project and delete all files except for Info.plist 2. Remove all keys from Info.plist 3. In the build settings search for "storyboard" and remove all keys 4. Add yellow.asm to project 5. Link UIKit, and Foundation

After all that you can build and run on a simulator
by robocat | 2025-10-30 16:21:41+00:00
My Spanish friend was explaining how some dubs can be better than the original - because the voice actors are good. I think anything with Jeff Goldblum could be easily improved.

The voice actors become well known and some were popular . . . although they can really change the tone of a movie (for good or bad) which they said was sometimes jarring when watching the movie in the original language.

I remember them saying they Manuel in Fawlty Towers is cast as Mexican, which is darkly humorous to me.
by sarreph | 2025-10-30 16:21:44+00:00
After the V2 suite was released a few years ago, I realised I would never get the "old" Affinity product experience back -- the same experience and price-point that made me a great and productive self-taught illustrator / designer.

C'est la vie, all good things must come to an end. I'm glad the original team made it out with a financial reward (from Canva sale)...

Time for someone else to pick up the mantle! [and for everyone else to stop moaning]
by graemep | 2025-10-30 16:21:46+00:00
> Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements

The UK is producing too many graduates, often doing low quality courses at low quality universities, who then cannot get the graduate level jobs they aspire to.

The UK does not have enough people to work in many other areas - tradespeople, care workers, doctors and nurses, archeologists, chefs....
by questionableans | 2025-10-30 16:21:54+00:00
Technically yes, but it’s not much different for line managers and often second level managers, though. Maybe you can approve expenses up to $500 at a time and get headcount for a couple more people approved from time to time. Not that different from an IC with a strong relationship with directors and VPs getting the same sort of allocations approved for a team/project they work with/are spinning up.
by hajile | 2025-10-30 16:23:31+00:00
Nobody was wanting to pay for and deal with the Microsoft lock in.

A new web-centric OS could fix those issues by doing a few things to reduce friction.

First, use an Android-compatible kernel version so drivers are easy to port. This gets manufacturers on board.

Second, make your App Store a non-profit that charges enough for ongoing store development and distribution. This gets devs on board.

Third, make sure you have decent third party framework support. Flutter, react native, and maybe even an Android runtime that legacy apps can integrate into their wasm binary. This helps kickstart your ecosystem.

Fourth, add better integration of webgpu and 2d canvas (which probably needs some extending). In addition, they need to add a low-level API to access DOM nodes from wasm. For security and ease of implementation (without stepping on the toes of the normal standardization stuff), this would probably be a virtual DOM with only a provably secure subset of the actual nodes being sent back and forth.

UI is an easier problem. The best design to date is still webOS. Copy their general design (maybe rip off some of their never-shipped mochi stuff).

The biggest issue as you said is financing. All these things turn into lots of developers and time. The best bet here would be replacing something like Tizen where a corporation is already investing.
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-30 16:23:41+00:00
Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With interface design, everybody knows what a button does and what a text field is for, and developers know more than most about the tools used to create interfaces, so the language seems simple. The problems you need to solve with that language are complex and while failure is obvious, success is much more nebulous and user-specific. So much of what good interfaces convey to users is implied rather than expressed, and that’s a tricky task.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-10-30 16:23:53+00:00
Yawn.

He still obviously believes in some sort of underlying "reality" in spite of his claims to the contrary.

The wavefunction evolves as if it were a single, global, observer-independent object.Between interactions, nothing “happens” to it. It doesn’t care who’s looking. It just evolves — deterministically, coherently, globally.

This is not a “perspective.” This is a God’s-eye view — the very thing Rovelli says doesn’t exist. If there were no underlying system, how do you compute interference?

He is in practice unable to accept the parsimonious and experimentally supported idea that very simply: regularity is only achieved at the price of generality.

Rovelli says it, but lives in denial. He cannot accept it because it would force him to abandon the global wavefunction — the silent god of his physics.