MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SkyPuncher | 2025-10-30 18:25:46+00:00
We ship a multi megabyte package to our customers and preload massive amounts of data.

Nobody complains about it. In fact, they rave about how fast it is. They don’t care that the first page load is slow. Heck, they’re probably checked out between tasks anyways. But, once they’re in there, they want it to be fast.
by tekacs | 2025-10-30 18:25:57+00:00
For those who find themselves wondering whether they 'have' aphantasia or not, I would really recommend looking at the aphantasia apples:

https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

As in: if you look at this image, can you place yourself on a scale of 1 - 5 of as to the fidelity with which you can picture an apple if you try to imagine it?

I'm a 5 for example, and in asking many people this question I've gotten a solid spectrum of answers from 1 - 5. Generally in a single group of a handful of people I'll get several different numbers.
by ehutch79 | 2025-10-30 18:26:07+00:00
Pretend you're talking about photos and cameras. You mean you can see the image? even though the camera isn't pointed at it now? Like it's really seeing it?

Same idea. You're seeing it, but you know it's just a memory of the thing, not a live view. Like pulling up a video or jpg instead of a live feed.
by dmschulman | 2025-10-30 18:26:28+00:00
People have varying immune responses to getting vaccines, but feeling crummy after getting a flu shot has nothing to do with whether the vaccine used mRNA technology or not.

I would say people who end up bedridden for 3 days are in the minority for most vaccines immune responses, but people also need to make peace with the idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
by Sharlin | 2025-10-30 18:26:29+00:00
Yep. Problem is that there's actually a spectrum of vividity of mental imagery, but in popular discussion it's always seen as a binary on/off thing.

An old post by Scott Alexander (16+ years, mind blown) discusses this, long before the term "aphantasia" became a thing [1]. There was a debate about what "imagination" actually means already in the late 1800s; some people were absolutely certain that it was just a metaphor and nobody actually "sees" things in their mind; others were vehement that mental images are just as real as those perceived with our eyes. The controversy was resolved by Francis Galton, who did some rigorous interviewing and showed that it really does vary a lot from person to person.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-30 18:26:34+00:00
Palo Alto municipal power right?

I moved across the road from this government owned power company so i was just out of Palo Alto municipality and suddenly had to pay 4x the price. Sigh.

It's a weird thing moving to the USA. Everyone's been brainwashed "anything government run is more expensive" yet every example I've ever looked into proved the opposite to a dramatic extent. Government run institutions lead to lower overall costs.
by lloydjones | 2025-10-30 18:26:44+00:00
I expressly bought this software (Designer, Photo, Publisher) out of principle, against Adobe's enshittification and monopolisation, and because it was premised on "pay once; own it forever".

This is obviously the 'tech circle of life' in action, but... how depressing...

I've always been guilty of preaching market diversification but sticking with the big(ger) players, but this sort of thing illustrates the need for multiple, viable players that all have good market share, so that – whenever one gets cannibalised and debased into some VC-money-addled marketing funnel – there are others to which people can flock in support/protest
by nirava | 2025-10-30 18:26:49+00:00
sure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world.

still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).

It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.

nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
by t43562 | 2025-10-30 18:26:49+00:00
It has been repeatedly seen as a scripting language because people saw it as a replacement for perl.

Perl was the language of the big hack. It had very little to offer in the way of abstractions and OO. So you were kind of excused from writing well structured code and people wrote a lot of janky, untestable stuff in perl and carried on doing than in python.

In python, to get good code you absolutely have to have unit tests and some kind of integration tests. I worked on a roughly 50,000 line python program. It wasn't bad even though we didn't have type hints then. Occasionally we did discover embarassing bugs that a statically typed language would not have permitted but we wrote a test and closed that door.
by i4qpLmoptUph3fZ | 2025-10-30 18:26:55+00:00
Echoing similar comments on this thread. The action in itself is mildly concerning, but the lack of foresight to see this as an issue people would want to know about, and ultimately be able to make their own decision on if they want to accept that risk or not.

"So I thought that maybe user don't want to care about this intermediate process"

Choosing to include an unverified build from a third party in a project like this introduces significant risk.

Also.. anyone know why my original comment got flagged?
by SllX | 2025-10-30 18:26:57+00:00
> But I am no expert on EU bureaucracy and politics!

I’d be shocked if anyone alive is.

A couple of weeks ago the Council of the EU authorized both the Commission and members to sign onto this convention. That’s the best I’ve got and it still doesn’t tell us if this is would apply automatically to Germany and others without them signing on, but I guess in theory it helps the convention get over the 40 signature threshold if it weren’t going to already. Signing on still isn’t done either as it runs from October 25th 2025 through December 31st 2026.

PS: if you saw a previous version of this comment, your eyes weren’t fooling you, I just got taken for a ride by a bad source that confused the Council of Europe with the Council of the EU so I nuked it.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-30 18:27:06+00:00
I have no real basis for this, but I always suspected that the majority of differences in ability to picture things is actually just a difference in semantics about terms like "visualizing", "picturing", etc. I don't think anybody is "literally" envisioning things, as in hallucination. On the other end, I don't think anybody is actually unable to "think of" what a thing looks like. But it's really difficult to objectively describe what it's like to picture something in your head - so difficult, in fact, that I can see some people calling it "literally summoning an image" and others calling it "not seeing anything at all", while both talking about the exact same thing.

Not that there isn't a difference in ability, just that it might not be as dramatic/binary as we seem to think.
by jrmg | 2025-10-30 18:27:11+00:00
Handbrake scares me and I’m a big nerd!

I’ve been ripping old DVDs recently. I just want something that feels simple from Handbrake: a video file I can play on my Apple TV that has subtitles that work (not burned in!) with video and audio quality indistinguishable from playing the DVD (don’t scale the video size or mess with the frame rate!), at as small a file size as is practical. I’m prepared for the process to be slow.

I’ve been messing with settings and reading forum posts (probably from similarly qualified neophytes) for a day now and think I’ve got something that works - though I have a nagging suspicion the file size isn’t as small as it could be and the quality isn’t as good as it could be. And despite saving it as a preset, I for some reason have to manually stop the subtitles from being burned in for every new rip.

Surely what I want is what almost everyone wants‽ Is there a simple way to get it? (I think this is a rhetorical question but would love it not to be…)
by reaperducer | 2025-10-30 18:27:15+00:00
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.

Until you get a 2am e-mail stating that they've updated their terms of service, and by reading the e-mail, you have agreed to the updated terms because the chances of you challenging this in court are precisely zero, no matter what the internet IANALs say.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-30 18:27:30+00:00
> Too many people would rather risk suffering the disease than take the vaccine.

Apologies for being morbid, but that's what we call a self-fixing problem, isn't it? On a Darwinistic level, people either adopt an effective threat assessment approach or they die.

EDIT: Following up on some of the comments, note that I didn't actually say whether vaccine deniers do or do not have an effective threat assessment approach - I don't know. While I personally do believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, I definitely am not qualified to be making risk decisions for other people, and it's important for me to say this, because I don't want other people to make decisions for me. For example, I don't want others to tell me to not do extreme sports, or not to go out to the wilderness, or not to drink alcohol, etc, regardless of whether society feels that this increases my health risks. I strongly believe that a core part of being free is being able to make these decisions for oneself. I agree that we should have some way of preventing harm to others, but it can't be something that comes at the cost of removing people's bodily autonomy (or even just denigrating people for choosing differently).
by nelblu | 2025-10-30 18:27:32+00:00
Long time ventoy user. For someone who loves to flash or try out different Linux distros all the time, this is a godsend.

I would also highly recommend iventoy, if you want to just boot using network device : https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html. It came in very handy when I had a machine which only had a CD/DVD ROM, floppy and netboot option. I didn't want to waste a DVD-R so just booted via network.
by gruez | 2025-10-30 18:27:49+00:00
>Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.

This also works in reverse, eg. US importing goods from china and therefore not being on the hook for emissions generated by those goods. ourworldindata has another page that compares the difference between consumption based emissions and territorial emissions[1]. Looking at that page, consumption based emissions are 11% higher for the US vs 27% for the EU. That makes the US look better, but it's not enough to cancel out the fact that the US is 63% more carbon intensive than the EU.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
by miki123211 | 2025-10-30 18:27:49+00:00
Among other things, a flexible type system is one where you can write a function that takes objects with keys in snake_case, and then (recursively) converts them into camelCase. In Typescript, you can make such a function generic, and it'll all type check. Your code editor will even offer autocomplete for the camelCase keys, even though the only explicit type definition is camel_case.
by gdulli | 2025-10-30 18:27:50+00:00
It has affected me for at most 16 hours. I have never heard 3 days, though I'm sure there are some rare outliers. And, not being at high risk, I don't "need" it more than once a year. This kind of exaggeration is one of the things that doesn't help public opinion. Especially when there are people actively looking for ways to subvert it.
by uticus | 2025-10-30 18:28:12+00:00
> It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure...

I'd say it's even more than you've stated. Not only for defending an existing project, but even for getting a project going in the first place a dictator* is needed.

I'm willing to be proven wrong, and I know this flies in the face of common scrum-team-everybody-owns approaches.

* benevolent or otherwise
by fabian2k | 2025-10-30 18:28:37+00:00
Vaccine-induced immunity is better because it comes with drastically lower chances of serious illness or death than the actual infection.

There were plenty of studies comparing immunity through infection and vaccination pretty early on. One interesting aspect initially was that it looked like the combination of vaccination and infection was particularly effective. The infection acted like a booster.

I'm not familiar with the exact handling of this in the US, but in general it is difficult to count infection as a replacment for vaccination. There is likely much more variability there, there was less data about this available and the simple tests for COVID are not that reliable. Not impossible, but far more complex than requiring vaccination.
by BoorishBears | 2025-10-30 18:29:04+00:00
> Now what happens if you have a bunch of these components on a page? You get lots of uncoordinated data fetches. Each component is independent so it doesn’t know about the others so they can’t coordinate.

No. You write a data layer that deduplicates requests. And since you typically need state management for fetches for UX, why not roll it all up into a tidy hook?

https://tanstack.com/query/latest

I guess the lynchpin is under-engineering at the request layer "forcing" massive over-engineering at the routing layer.

-

By the way, your self-answered rhetoricals are really really off the reservation in terms of relevance so I'm not even going to go there other than pointing out that a bad analogy is worse than no analogy.

You're trying to explain request waterfalls. Just say request waterfall. Look up the term if you have to, it's rare that you need to invent a definition for a basic and common problem.
by fpoling | 2025-10-30 18:29:08+00:00
Well, EV with a good range still costs more then a plugin hybrid with a small battery. Why US government should spent money on technology that is presently inferior to plugin hybrids? In few years this will change when the latest battery technology will be scaled up, but then EV will be able to compete against ICE or hybrids cars on its own without subsidies.

And in retrospect subsidizing EV by governments around the world could be a bad decision. If instead fuel taxes were raised or at least the subsidies went to development of more economical cars, then total CO2 emissions could be lower at this point.
by kraftman | 2025-10-30 18:29:16+00:00
It's like hearing a song in your head, you can listen to it and maybe keep time roughly but if someone asks you what instruments there are you might not be able to get all of them, or might not remember the drums or the baseline. It's all much more vague. If you asked me to remember my childhood home I can visualise 'all of it' in my head, but maybe not what the type of bricks are like, or where all of the windows were.
by louthy | 2025-10-30 18:29:18+00:00
> Right. It’s not like recent statistics showed that the US was the place where most of the cyberattacks originate.

Link?

> And it’s not like both the US and UK are openly saying that they are maximizing cyberwarfare against everyone as if it was something to be proud of.

Link?

> The country that is facilitating a livestreamed genocide in Gaza

Which country is that? And where’s the livestream streaming?
by the_af | 2025-10-30 18:29:18+00:00
> I just remember how a candle is shaped its parts and similar characteristics

If you do not somehow "see" the shape of the candle, how do you remember its physical characteristics? Is it like a list of physical properties in abstract form? An irregular cylinder of diameter X, longer than it's diameter, etc?

I can see, in front of me, a lit candle if I wish it. I cannot claim it's picture-perfect, but I can see it; and most people can, too. I can see its yellow flame flickering. I can see drops of wax along the candle. I can see the yellow light it casts.
by rvnx | 2025-10-30 18:29:34+00:00
Humans drivers and self-driving companies that creates such hit-and-run situations should be prosecuted. So the court can determine what to do next (jail, insurance, etc or just nothing). It does not matter if they hit an object, a pet or a child who didn’t look while crossing the street.

Perhaps assign a safety driver that puts its own driving license and criminal liability on the line, so the company cannot evade responsibility.
by lapcat | 2025-10-30 18:29:40+00:00
> I'm not following how or why a big deal is being made out of this.

It's not a "big deal". The author and his project will very likely not even be noticed by Mr. Iommi and his legal representatives. I just made a comment, and it became a big argument only because people chose to argue with me.

> Tony Iommi does not own the name Iommi.

I never said he did. In fact, I just said in the comment you replied to that it's not a trademark violation.

> He's not the only person in the world with that name.

Irrelevant. It's obvious from the project, and has been confirmed by the author, that the allusion is specifically to Tony Iommi.

> He doesn't get any sort of social or legal right that the name not be used for other things just because he's wealthy and famous.

You're missing the point, because being famous is basically a prerequisite for providing a product endorsement. It's not that famous people have special rights but rather that an anonymous name provides no extra marketing value to a product.

Imagine if someone unrelated to Tony Iommi sold "Iommi Guitars". You think that wouldn't be a problem?
by aosaigh | 2025-10-30 18:29:41+00:00
I agree with this. I thought I had aphantasia the last time I read about it here.

Then I started interrogating all of the people who claimed to “visualise” things and it turned out we were all doing the same thing - conceptualising in our “mind’s eye”.

For example, anyone I’ve asked to visualise something with their eyes closed can also “visualise” the same thing with their eyes open. It’s happening “somewhere else” and not in your vision.

So I think the term “visualise” leads to a lot of the confusion.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-10-30 18:29:59+00:00
It's easy to make the powerful version

It's a little harder to make an easy version

Making the progressive version is very difficult. Where you can please one audience with the powerful and easy versions, you can often disappoint both with the progressive version despite it taking much more effort.

In my personal experience, you're lucky if free software has the budget (time or money) to get to easy. There's very little free software that makes it to progressive.
by user_7832 | 2025-10-30 18:30:07+00:00
> …we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.

The features appear to only be things that affinity already didn’t have, right?

I agree it might involve annoying ads or pop ups, but if canva really does what they’re saying (which, of course, is a pretty big if), then it’s functionally identical to affinity v2?

(I also had considered the software but for some reason thought it was Apple only and never bought it for windows.)
by RajT88 | 2025-10-30 18:30:09+00:00
I like the design pattern of a "basic mode" and an "advanced mode".

The "advanced mode" rarely actually covers all the needs of an advanced user (because software is never quite everything to everyone), but it's at least better at handling both types of users.

Not all free software has this problem... Mozilla and Thunderbird I've had my parents on for years. It's not a ton to learn, and they work fine.

Taking the case of Photoshop vs. Gimp - I don't think the problem is complexity, lol. It's having to relearn everything once you're used to photoshop. (Conversely, I've never shelled out for Adobe products, and now don't want to have to relearn how to edit images in photoshop or illustrator)

Let's do another one. Windows Media Player (or more modern - "Movies & TV"). Users want to click on a video file and have it play with no fuss. VLC and MPC work fine for that! If you can manage to hold onto the file associations. That's why Microsoft tries so hard to grab and maintain the file associations.

I could go on... I think the thesis of this article is right for some pieces of software, but not all. It's worth considering - "all models are wrong, but some are useful".
by mikewarot | 2025-10-30 18:30:16+00:00
All I ask is that if Chicago does get nuked, as threatened in the movie "House of Dynamite" that I be given sufficient time to get everyone outside in front of our house so that we can all go together and not be stuck watching each other die from radiation or starve over the subsequent months.

We collectively played Russian roulette electing Trump in 2016. Doing it a second time last November was astonishingly stupid. I don't see how our luck can possibly hold.
by pxc | 2025-10-30 18:30:23+00:00
Microsoft's tooling for customizing images amounts to several gigabytes to download and install just to get started.

The Windows approach is based on a mix of relatively limited offline modifications and automating clicks and keystrokes (AutoUnattend.xml, OOBE.xml) and recording or forgetting manual changes (Audit Mode, Sysprep). Both are insanely kludgey.

New development of the tooling always comes to dism.exe first rather than the DISM PowerShell module, so you may need to use DOS commands instead of the (very lovely) modern shell that Microsoft maintains.

Depending on what kind of stuff you're trying to install, you might need to do half a dozen reboots in the course of recording your manual changes.

Mounting/unmounting a WIM file can take more than a minute (wtf?) and if you're working on modifying one of the installer images from upstream, you need dozens of gigabytes of free disk space.

If you don't just want install media, but a bootable repair environment, everything is even worse. Hardware recognition is bad, boot is slow, and only some programs can actually run in a WinPE environment.

Have you ever customized bootable Linux media?

When I had to make some custom NixOS install media for an aarch64 VPS, it required only a few lines of code in the exact same environment as I use to customize running systems, and it's completely declarative, non-interactive, requires no special toolkit, doesn't require dozens of gigabytes of scratch space, never requires me to boot anything...

Teenage interns can also shovel manure, but that doesn't make it pleasant or painless!
by overfeed | 2025-10-30 18:30:37+00:00
> Second, make your App Store a non-profit that charges enough for ongoing store development and distribution. This gets devs on board

You're hilariously underestimating the difficulty of getting the dev/user flywheel started: developers go where users are, and users won't adopt a platform without the apps they need. Microsoft was literally paying devs for submitting apps, and they mostly got variants of Flashlight apps, and none of the apps that matter. Look at the top 10 App Store/Play Store apps and ask yourself if the developers will bother with a hypothetical non-profit, upstart