MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-10-29 12:32:44+00:00
GIMPs UX is wonderful, and Photoshop UX is poison. The problem is that after torturing yourself to learn Photoshop, and sitting in it for 8 hours a day (for many people; I worked in prepress) makes you think that it has been designed rationally rather than simply cobbled together and stuffed with ads. Illustrator, being older, is even worse.

People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.

One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.

IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.
by vb-8448 | 2025-10-29 12:32:53+00:00
> Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ?

It's a way to "commoditize" engineers. You can run on premise or mixed infra better and cheaper, but only if you know what you are doing. This requires experienced guys and doesn't work with new grad hired by big cons and sold ad "cloud experts".
by al_borland | 2025-10-29 12:32:56+00:00
> This is the fallacy that Amazon sold everyone on

I’ve been working at a place for a long time and we have our own data centers. Recently there has been a push to move to the public cloud and we were told to go through AWS training. It seems like the first thing AWS does in its training is spend a considerable amount of time on selling their model. As an employee who works in infrastructure, hearing Amazon sell so hard they the company doesn’t need me anymore is not exactly inspiring.

After that section they seem to spend a considerable amount of time on how to control costs. These are things no one really thinks about currently, as we manage our own infra. If I want to spin up a VM and write a bunch of data to it, no one really cares. The capacity already exists and is paid for, adding a VM here or there is inconsequential. In AWS I assume we’ll eventually need to have a business justification for every instance we stand up. Some servers I run today have value, but it would be impossible to financially justify in any real terms when running in AWS where everything has a very real cost assigned to it. What I do is too detached from profit generation, and the money we could save is mostly theoretical, until something happens. I don’t know how this will play out, but I’m not excited for it.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-29 12:33:32+00:00
Well in fifty years, I likely won’t be here judging by life expectancy numbers… so I guess it’s a moot point for me.

Kidding aside, it’s a whole bunch of pieces. Including the dollar, including the friendly regulatory environment, including friendly tax treatment for founders (which European nations are starting to adopt), including small areas with lots of great schools, plus those schools helping to connect founders with capital, plus gobs of money running around looking for high risk opportunities, plus…

It’s not just the ability to fire someone, and it’s not just the dollar.
by AlienRobot | 2025-10-29 12:33:42+00:00
Do you mean with the levels filter that Krita has, with the curves filter that Krita has, with the color balance filer that Krita has, with the slope, offset, power filter that Krita has, or with the hue/saturation/luma or red chroma/blue chroma/luma adjustment filter that Krita has?[1]

They are all available as non-destructive filter layers, by the way, and Krita users had access to this way before GIMP 3.0 was released with non-destructive filters.

[1] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht...
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-10-29 12:34:05+00:00
This is why we need laws and regulation. And the most important thing we need is not governments forcing Android to be open, but laws requiring governments to not force their citizens to use locked down hardware.

My government, Denmark, is one of the most digitized societies in the world. While the government has allocated money to a committee to investigate how the country can become less dependent on American big tech corporations, at the same time they are planning on launching a mandatory age verification solution in 2026 where the only possibly anonymous way of verifying your age to access e.g. social media will be through a smartphone app running on either Google Android or Apple iOS. These nincompoops do not realize that this move will effectively put every open source alternative at a permanent and severe disadvantage, thus handing Apple and Google, which are already duopolies in the smartphone market, a huge moat that will lock out all future competitors form entering the market.

I have written to the relevant government agencies, and while they are nice enough to actually answer questions, their answers reveal that they act as if they are a commercial business and not a government agency that is supposed to act in the interest of the people and preserve their freedom. They argue that they are releasing a solution that will work for the vast majority of platforms and that they are continuously monitoring the market to assess whether they need to add support for other platforms. This is a cost-cutting measure which is maybe okay for a commercial entity targeting a specific market demographic, but it is an absurd way for a government to think.

Before the upcoming age verification we already had a national digital identity solution, MitID, which also comes as an app running on Android and iOS, and which is locked down to require strong integrity using Google Play Integrity. But at least here they also offer hardware tokens so people can use their digital identity without owning a smartphone and running an open source OS like Linux on their desktops. But with age verification this is apparently over, all the while the government is lying about actually making an effort to free us from American big tech - they are instead basically forcing us to be their customers now.
by mythz | 2025-10-29 12:34:14+00:00
Several years off AWS, the only thing I still prefer AWS for is SES, otherwise Cloudflare has the more cost effective managed services. For everything else we use Hetzner US Cloud VMs for hosting all App Servers and Server Software.

Our .NET Apps are still deployed as Docker Compose Apps which we use GitHub Actions and Kamal [1] to deploy. Most Apps use SQLite + Litestream with real-time replication to R2, but have switched to a local PostgreSQL for our Latest App with regular backups to R2.

Thanks to AI that can walk you through any hurdle and create whatever deployment, backup and automation scripts you need, it's never been easier to self-host.

[1] https://docs.servicestack.net/kamal-deploy
by jfengel | 2025-10-29 12:34:33+00:00
American politics at this point is practically defined by being afraid of the other group. The groups themselves have little cohesion, and contain bitter rivals, but they trust each other more than their hated enemies.

Which becomes self-reinforcing: attempting to save yourself is perceived by the other as oppression.

I don't mean to simply blame all sides here. Facts on the ground do exist.I think I can justify how some players are worse than others, and that there might be a way out of the vicious cycle when some individuals say "no, that assertion no longer seems reasonable."

But given that it's gotten monotonically worse for decades, I don't see that happening any time soon.
by sondr3 | 2025-10-29 12:34:49+00:00
> Cloud makes sense when elasticity matters; bare metal wins when baseload dominates.

This really is the crux of the matter in my opinion, at least for applications (databases and so on is in my opinion more nuanced). I've only worked at one place where using cloud functions made sense (keeping it somewhat vague here): data ingestion from stations that could be EXTREMELY bursty. Usually we got data from the stations at roughly midnight every day, nothing a regular server couldn't handle, but occasionally a station would come back online after weeks or new stations got connected etc which produced incredible load for a very short amount of time when we fetched, parsed and handled each packet. Instead of queuing things for ages we could instead just horizontally scale it out to handle the pressure.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-29 12:35:03+00:00
Ehh, secure boot enforcement, Microsoft account enforcement, shitty OneDrive integration?

Microsoft cannot be trusted as a provider for data. I use it on my work machine but here I am authenticated by a locally hosted domain controller. Private installs are a privacy and security nightmare.

I just like the utility of being able to swap hard drives to other machines and I have no evil maid anyway.

In many instances Windows says you system is too old if your system uses MBR/Bios for booting. TPM2.0 is old for that matter. It is just not detectable depending on your boot configuration (which is a good thing in my opinion).

> Criticisms of telemetry and promotion of tools that supposedly disable it aren't new

Yes, well, it does get a lot, lot worse if this telemetry is connected through an account.
by gtirloni | 2025-10-29 12:35:03+00:00
Java and MySQL were already out in the open as open source projects when Oracle acquired Sun though.

I don't know much about Android's history but if Dalvik was created exclusively by Google and they had no intention of open sourcing it fully... it'd be akin to a closed source Java app on top of the open source OpenJDK... which would be allowed.
by naikrovek | 2025-10-29 12:36:18+00:00
no, of course not. I swear to God, reading comprehension among Linux fans falls lower and lower every year.

shitting on them makes anything you say about a competing operating system appear like fully biased opinion, rather than fact. if you want people who you have not already captured to listen to you, you must do your best to appear unbiased. shitting on anything is 100% bias. and if you have opinions like that, how can someone you're trying to win over trust that the positive things you're saying about this other thing aren't also 100% opinion?

Stick to the facts if you want to ever hope to do anything other than make Linux fans appear like they are rabid dogs who attack anything they don't like on sight.

You can do that if you want, I don't care. But I don't go to rabid dogs for their opinions when it comes to choosing things, and no one else does either.

You say things like this to get a mob going, and I want you to admit that. you all shit on things you don't like because you want to feel heard by others who also shit on those same things. but people who aren't like that come here and they read this stuff, too. And you're shitting on them in the process.
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-10-29 12:36:20+00:00
You have said two different things. The second one is the key. R is in contact with liquid mercury, but that doesn't matter, because the vapor takes a finite time to propagate, and that is the trick. And that shows why the working fluid needs to be extremely dense. It is still counterintuitive; one would think the apparatus would lock up or implode.
by pestaa | 2025-10-29 12:36:42+00:00
I dabbled in this area, there are poster layout generation attempts that use gen ai to come up with an initial layout plan, and even feed the visualization back into the llm for iterative fine-tuning.

I was intrigued, but couldn't make it work reliably. Perhaps I forgot to add "make it look nice" to my prompts.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04237v3

https://haoyuchen.com/POSTA

https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/blob/main/Layo...
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-29 12:36:50+00:00
This is sometimes hard when the editors keep on reversing edits which attempt to fix those errors. It will be interesting to see how Grokipedia - a bad name, surely they can come up with something better - deals with this.

I often come across out-of-place or clearly ideologically driven content on Wikipedia and normally just leave this alone - I have better things to do with my limited time than to fight edit wars with activist editors. Having said that I did a number of experiments some 5 years ago with editing Wikipedia where I removed clearly ideologically driven sections out of articles where those sections really had no place. One of these experiments consisted of removing sections about ´queer politics and queer viewpoints' from articles about popular cartoon characters. These sections - often spanning several paragraphs - were inserted relatively recently into the articles and were nothing more than attempts to use those articles to push a 'queer' viewpoint on the subject matter and as such not relevant for a general purpose encyclopedia. I commented my edits with a reference to the NPOV rules. My edits were reversed without comment. I reversed the reversion with the remark to either explain the reversion of leave the edits in place and was reversed again, no comments. I reversed again with an invitation to discuss the edits on the Talk pages which was not accepted while my edits were reversed again. This continued for a while with different editors reversing my edits and accusations of vandalism. Looking through the 'contribs' section for the users responsible for adding the irrelevant content showed they were doing this to hundreds of articles. I just checked and noticed the same individuals are still actively adding their 'queer perspectives' to articles where such perspectives are not relevant for a general-purpose encyclopedia.
by marcinzm | 2025-10-29 12:36:59+00:00
They were running for a long time (months? over a year?) on a single rack in a single datacenter. Eventually they scaled out but the word is eventually. I think that summarizes both sides of this debate in a nutshell. You can move off of AWS but unless you invest a lot you will take on increased risk. Maybe you'll get lucky and your one rack won't burn down. Maybe you won't. They did get lucky.
by kotaKat | 2025-10-29 12:36:59+00:00
Step 1: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ Set up an unattend script how you want it to install Windows 11 Education, the only sane build of W11 with most AI shit turned off.

Step 2: Install W11 with the autounattend.xml.

Step 3: Powershell as admin -> irm https://get.activated.win | iex
by hermannj314 | 2025-10-29 12:36:59+00:00
I stopped reading all print media, obeying any physical traffic signs, or having conversations on the phone etc. years ago.

I'm not going to drive 35mph without a trusted certificate authority verifying that sign wasn't tampered with by a MITM. My grandma tried to tell me she loved me over an unencrypted and insecure phone line the other day - nice try, hackers!
by deadbabe | 2025-10-29 12:37:02+00:00
More constructive!?

Ok, let’s break it down for you: What all 8 billion people in the world think does not matter to you. There are people out there cutting heads off in the name of religion, or people who think their dictator is a divine being.

People outside your country have little effect on your daily life.

Even people within your country have a weak effect on your daily life.

What other people believe only really matters for economic reasons. Still, unless you are very dependent on social safety nets even they don’t matter that much. You just find more money and carry on.

You might think that more propaganda will result in people voting for bad politicians, but it is actually possible to have too much propaganda. If people become aware of how easily fake content is generated, which they are rapidly realizing in the age of AI, the result is they become skeptical of everything, and come up with their own wild theories on what the truth really is.

The people whose thoughts matter most are the people you interact with on a daily basis, as they have the most capability to alter your daily life physically and immediately. Fortunately you can control better who you surround yourself with or how you interact with them.

If you turn off the conversation, the world will appear pretty indifferent even to things that seem like a big deal on social media.
Show HN: Cubflix – A TV-style YouTube for kids with parent-approved channels
by gillyb | 2025-10-29 12:38:02+00:00
As the title says - I created a TV-like experience using Youtube channels that are allowed, to give kids a much healthier and safer experience.

YouTube has tons of great educational channels, the problem is with all the garbage it has too, not to mention shorts, other short form content and recommendations always sucking your kids into the most brainwashing channels.

I assume most of the people here on hackernews (at least around my age) grew up watching TV, we we're doing ok! :) I wanted my kids to have that experience, with more modern content.

It's an ipad app. I intend to add more features in the near-future, and would love to get some feedback..
by al_borland | 2025-10-29 12:38:14+00:00
They do this in the Amazon store as well, making their own knock off versions of popular products.

Very interesting that it extends into the digital space as well.

This really feels like it should be illegal, and if not, I’m not sure how there hasn’t been a massive revolt against them by people who make and sell things. If they are too big and powerful to revolt against, that sounds like a monopoly that needs to be broken up.
by cornfieldlabs | 2025-10-29 12:38:58+00:00
Managed DB costs a lot.

Is there a simple safe setup that we can run on an Ubuntu server?

We self-host the Postgres db with frequent backups to s3 but just in case the site takes off, we need an affordable reliable solution.

Does anyone here run their own db servers? Any advise?

Backups, security, upgrades etc
by asplake | 2025-10-29 12:39:28+00:00
> What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

Wild indeed, and potentially horrific for the owners of the affected devices also! Any corroboration for that out there?
by BlackFly | 2025-10-29 12:39:56+00:00
DMA in Europe required Microsoft to enable offline accounts without special tricks. When a government is doing their job properly they patch up holes in the laws that allow behavior that the majority consider to be against the prevailing norms.

You can also uninstall Edge and all the other Microsoft bloatware. Google on Android is actually one of the worse offenders in Europe for not being able to uninstall software as they consider far too many things to be critical to the operating system (for example, search).
by clapathy | 2025-10-29 12:40:54+00:00
The reason why its happening is that most people don't care and don't need that freedom.

Otherwise they wouldn't buy android devices, right? Thats how freemarket works.

Its much easier for people to give away their freedom to install any software on their device in exchange of not learning all the intricacies of information security and privacy.

EVerybody still can install non native os on their device and use any store they want, right? Or fork android and maintain the OS that allows installing software from other sources.

Its just people don't really care - google is not non profit - its doing business for people who pay money and care more about passing the security reaponsibility on the manufacturer, thats why Apple thrives and nobody cares that you have to use their store only, only minority of people who are not an interesting market
by vidarh | 2025-10-29 12:41:04+00:00
There is this belief that it is not extremely expensive and/or that the ops cost of bare metal will outpace it. It is a belief, and it is very rarely supported by facts.

Having done consulting in this space for a decade, and worked with containerised systems since before AWS existed, my experience is that managing an AWS system is consistently more expensive and that in fact the devops cost is part of what makes AWS an expensive option.
by coldtea | 2025-10-29 12:41:30+00:00
>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim

It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.

>Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.

That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
by LogicHound | 2025-10-29 12:41:42+00:00
It isn't that much of an issue gaming on Windows. Yes, I had to do a one time workaround for a local account and run a de-crapifier. But it wasn't that difficult. If it becomes too difficult I will probably drop Windows entirely.

I run into more problems with Linux than I do typically with Windows. I've been using Linux on and off since 2002. I don't particularly mind it, but I also don't pretend it is for everyone.
by spacechild1 | 2025-10-29 12:41:47+00:00
He has written some very questionable things about pedophilia (from which he has since distanced himself): https://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%20...

To be clear: this does not diminish his contributions in the field of software! His ideas about Free Software have been visionary and are as important as ever. One can be brilliant in one field and a fool in another. This is actually very common among technical people ("engineer's disease"). We cannot expect someone to be right 100% of the time.
by foobarbecue | 2025-10-29 12:42:12+00:00
You're right, I shouldn't have said "rarely" -- thanks for helping me learn! You, also, shouldn't have said the first word is "usually" included. With help from an LLM and python looking at the 86 common portmanteaus, I found that the numbers are:

count percent both 5 6.4 first word only 29 24.4 (you said "usually," I said "rarely") neither 39 50.0 second word only 25 19.2

The source material (I also downloaded its python and checked it line-by line, looked correct): https://chatgpt.com/share/69020808-0610-800e-81aa-692ec29346...

By the way, I called the code "portmantotal.py" :-)

Cyborg was not opaque to me, because I grew up reading science fiction so was very familiar with the concept of the cybernetic organism. My parents explained the origin of "velcro" to me when I was a kid and thought it was cool that it had two sides.

EDIT: While playing with the data in python, I realized that chatgpt included 8 duplicates in the above list originally. I will fix that and recalculate the numbers.

Also, I was thinking about compound words, like seatbelt, schoolbus, butterfly and marshmallow, where all of both words is included -- I don't consider those portmanteaus. And yet, the "both" category in my list is interesting: "covidiot" works because the words overlap, and "blogosphere" adds an extra letter. "Manspread," in my opinion, is also a portmanteau but it's hard to explain why I wouldn't just call it a "compound word" . Probably either because it's derived from "mansplain" or because it adds a noun to a verb whereas compound words are usually noun + noun.