MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnermore | 2025-11-06 16:04:49+00:00
Absolute BS. This is what all these companies does. They will push something ridiculously bad on to community. Push them away. Then a public - Can we just talk it out BS. They know it's not going to happen. Even the "call" happens, it will end up with a blog post saying we tried to reach an agreement.

If you're blind to it after bizillion times. Either you are complicit or don't care.
by gertrunde | 2025-11-06 16:05:00+00:00
I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.

They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.

So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.
by Merad | 2025-11-06 16:05:31+00:00
As a native speaker (American) the phrasing is classic condescending soulless corporate customer service speak. 1) You must always apologize, 2) you must never admit fault. "I'm sorry you feel this way about what we did" comes across _to me_ as "what we did was totally fine, it's too bad that you don't understand the wisdom of our actions." That kind of phrasing is also a bit of a trigger because the majority of the time you hear it from companies that don't give a damn how you feel and will fight to avoid doing anything to actually help you.

It's of course impossible to say if this was just an unfortunate choice of phrasing or if it's a sign that Mozilla has become that soulless corporate entity (I say this as a Firefox user for more than 20 years).
by panarky | 2025-11-06 16:05:34+00:00
Nearly everything in life is non-deterministic.

Most things that are generally helpful and beneficial are not 100% helpful and beneficial 100% of the time.

I used GPT-4 as a second opinion on my medical tests and doctor's advice, and it suggested an alternate diagnosis and treatment plan that turned out to be correct. That was incredibly helpful and beneficial.

You're replying to a person who had a similar and even more helpful and beneficial experience because they're alive today.

Pedantically pointing out that a beneficial and helpful thing isn't 100% beneficial and helpful 100% of the time doesn't add anything useful to the conversation since everyone here already knows it's not 100%.
by WD-42 | 2025-11-06 16:05:35+00:00
Other benefits:

1. Consistent font and sizing. Pick the font you find easiest to read and set it in the terminal, now all TUI apps use it at the correct size.

2. Consistent theming. TUI apps use the same color scheme as your terminal, as your vim, etc. A consistent "desktop" is less distracting. Especially when you don't have to deal with crappy Electron apps displaying animations and ads (looking at you Discord).

3. Efficient on screen real-estate. Most TUI apps don't waste a lot of space on "padding", "giving elements space to breathe" or other "correct UX patterns". They tile nicely.

4. Never and issues copy and pasting. I used a GUI chat app recently that wouldn't let me select text, seriously.

5. Did I mention they are fun to use and relatively easy to develop?
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-06 16:05:44+00:00
Yeah, similarly, growing up as a European, I thought "America" was "the USA", but turns out it's the entire continent, and even "North America" isn't just the US, but the two neighbors too! I don't think it's too bad to be confused about something, we can't be expected to know it all, every time. We learn and move past it :)

> If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.

Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two countries so far that been engaging in this, with another one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have happened more times than "twice".
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-11-06 16:07:10+00:00
Emacs is 100% nearly perfect, the only thing holding back emacs is emacs.

I still can't believe we have IRC for grandma (slack) but not emacs for grandma.

People get tied up in the program-ability of it but it's UI and the concept of jettising both the desktop and tty paradigms.
by syats | 2025-11-06 16:07:10+00:00
Cool! These are indeed very common graph-building steps.

Thinking outloud here, but some of these were supposed to be solved with RML (https://rml.io/) for the RDF paradigm. I witnessed a bit of their evolution: it started with similar operations as GraFlo and eventually they built some support for arbitrary java code. For example, say you want your node ID to be generated by concatenating the values of the firstName column and the lastName column, but only after some weird string normalization (think of making sure everything is utf8)... you woundn't want to make your schema-mappings Turing-complete, so you'd eventually have to allow for calling other functions. Any way, all of that was for RDF graphs, it's cool to see something like this for property graphs.
by rob74 | 2025-11-06 16:07:31+00:00
Be that as it may, the thing that sounds odd (and a bit arrogant) to most "outsiders" is using the name of a whole continent for a single country and its citizens. I (from Europe) would definitely consider a Canadian, Mexican or Columbian citizen as an "American" too, not only a citizen of the United States. BTW, I'm really curious what Trump thinks the "America" in his "Gulf of America" stands for - the whole continent or only the US?
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-06 16:07:44+00:00
> It also doesn't contain any nasty chemicals, unlike several of the powders

At least in the US my experience has been the reverse of that. Several of the companies seem to have used the pods as an excuse to increase the number of chemicals that require chemical burn labels on the packaging and switch "Best By" dates to very literal "Use By" dates. With those pods, there's a thin water-soluble plastic that is also prone to melting at the posted expiration dates as all that is between you and second or third degree chemical burns.

No thanks. I worked food service in High School and had more than enough Chemistry classes in college to have too much healthy respect for chemical burn notices to trust any of the pods at this point. (Especially as someone who lives alone and will almost never use an entire package of pods before "Use By" dates.)

I haven't tried powders, but I did go back to liquid detergents even though there's only about one option left on store shelves where I shop which have now devoted so much space to the wasteful plastic tubs of the pods.
by nyeah | 2025-11-06 16:07:52+00:00
"Are they malicious? Twirling neatly waxed mustaches as they cackle gleefully as the little ants scurry about in a panic?"

Where are you getting this from, specifically? The claim I can see is that Mozilla didn't care enough to check first. So this looks as if it might be a straw-man argument. I think those are specifically prohibited in the FAQ.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-11-06 16:08:08+00:00
I agree with everything you said but chatGPT does have an insidious thing where it confirms your biases. It kind of senses what you want and actually runs with it. For truly unbiased responses you literally have to hide your intention from chatGPT. But even so chatGPT can many times still sense your intent and give you a biased answer.
by grayhatter | 2025-11-06 16:09:06+00:00
I see the comparison you're trying to draw, and I don't agree.

People use FB because other people use it. There's a lot more complexity, and algorithm fuled habits. But in the end, FB provides the service of communication and content recommendations. Using that attention, it can sell ads. Without that willingness to give attention, they can't sell ads. There are no significant hurdles to starting a social media site.

Credit card processors facilitate payments from one group to a different group. They aren't an endpoint, they are middle men. They don't need to court the attention of users, they are in a position of power it where they can interfere with the lives of others, and have formed a coalition with a total monopoly over the digital trade of money. Good luck starting a competitor while attempting to shun PCI compliance.

If I never use FB, I can still interact with friends, family, buy and sell ads. If I never use a credit card... I've been cut off from the vast majority of the things that I would buy.

It's reasonable for different rules to apply to groups with vastly different powers. I wouldn't expect Google to be held to the same standard that I hold PG&E. Nor would I hold PG&E to the same restrictions I'd place on Google.
by Mashimo | 2025-11-06 16:09:19+00:00
> probably doesn't do a particularly good job

It's not the same as a full vacuum run. But it's god as what they are designed to do. Clean a bit every single day.

All the crumbs that fall down in the kitchen over a day, don't get chance to get stamped into the floor. Noticeable less dust buildup on top of counters. I come home and it's done. Mental load removed.

It's neat. And you can get them from 80 EUR. Even if they only last 5 years, that's 16 EUR per year, but saves you maybe 8h per year. Maybe it's because I live in a relative rich country, but here that is not decadent. People buy cars for 50 000 EUR :3
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-06 16:09:35+00:00
160x100 CGA low resolution could do 16 color (bit of a hack, but semi-official).

And then there were tricks to get more colors in higher resolutions as well, especially if you used the TV output instead of a CGA monitor.

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-06 16:09:42+00:00
Not just ads - there is TONS of AI-generated YouTube shorts now, and the quality is so good that it's tough to always tell whether it's real as long as it's plausible (which not all of it is).

It's annoying because the whole point of a lot of this stuff is that it's real, and one can be informed, entertained or have an emotional response to it. When you distrust everything because it's maybe fake, then the fun of the internet as a window into human nature and the rest of the world just disappears.
by heddycrow | 2025-11-06 16:10:00+00:00
If that's what people wanted, they could have created a woman account or a western white male account on a rest-of-the-world dating site.

If it's not? Oh well, suffer. It's still better than the "average western male on a dating site" experience.

Note: I really like the metaphor. My apologies if I abused it or stretched it to far or in the wrong direction.
by projektfu | 2025-11-06 16:10:01+00:00
My screening inbox is full of the same exact form of engagement, almost identical to the one mentioned in the article. "I'm curious..." and then some interval later a follow up and then a "I don't seem to be reaching you" e-mail and by that point I have noticed and blocked them. It is fine for me, I have a system to handle it, but my receptionists often forward me these things from their inbox which bypasses my controls.

It's not just that it is 0 effort, it also sucks, and it is increasingly not relevant because their agents are just scooping up stuff to reach out about and they aren't even selling something that you would need to buy.

I just wish that we could go back to the old way. There should be a cost to attempt to get a sales lead.
by burntsushi | 2025-11-06 16:10:07+00:00
I don't deny that there are downsides. But your original comment was misleading. Hence my clarification. Your comment was too absolute. It is possible to avoid duplication and build some sound abstractions.

I use the same technique in the `aho-corasick` crate (which has more sophistication than `memchr`) and it works there too.
by xvilka | 2025-11-06 16:10:15+00:00
It's a common knowledge. Russian poet Alexander Griboyedov[1] wrote a poem about this paradox - Woe from Wit[2]. Note, that in this poem it's a satire, but it was still tongue-in-cheek title that reflects the real phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Griboyedov

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woe_from_Wit
Show HN: Floxtop – Clean up your Mac with private, offline AI file organization
by bobnarizes | 2025-11-06 16:10:57+00:00
Hi HN,

Floxtop is a native macOS app that organizes your files automatically using an on-device AI model, with no data leaving your machine. It focuses on privacy, speed, and usability.

Background:

Manual file organization is tedious, and traditional tools rely on filenames or metadata, missing file meaning. Floxtop uses Sentence Transformers and computer vision including OCR and transformer-based embeddings to analyze content across PDFs, images, Office files, EPUBs, CSV, Markdown and more (30+ formats supported).

Key features:

- Entirely offline AI inference, optimized for Apple Silicon, ensuring privacy and near-instant processing.

- Multi-format content understanding via OCR and semantic embeddings to group files by meaning including images, Microsoft Office, PDFs, EPUBs, CSV, Markdown and more (+30 file types supported).

- Customizable classification: define categories to define file destinations.

- Native macOS integration with Finder extensions and Quick Look previews.

Performance:

Floxtop categorizes files in under a second. Built in Swift with ONNX, the app is compact (~120 MB) with a powerful 94 MB model.

I launched an early beta, Fallinorg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44932375), reaching 103 customers and gathering valuable feedback. Floxtop is the improved iteration with broader format support, compact binary size, and better integration.

Try the free version: https://pub-a80e0e01ccee4148a4f4c43d8d4eeda2.r2.dev/Floxtop-...

I’d appreciate feedback on accuracy, performance, and feature ideas.

Thanks for checking it out!
by 05 | 2025-11-06 16:11:02+00:00
Unless you're running Home Assistant and open source nodes. You can build a Matter+Thread node that works on a nrf52840 MCU, there are examples in the Nordic SDK. But then, why would you bother with Matter which is so bloated it doesn't even fit in flash properly? The only example that works on 52840 requires external flash to hold the B partition for OTA updates :)

So I'm using ESPHome for everything that could be wall powered and BTHome (with those same nrf52840 chips, you can buy boards for like $2 on Aliexpress) for everything that needs to run on battery.
by gausswho | 2025-11-06 16:11:30+00:00
I don't know what I just got into, but I love it. Reminds me of Hattrick (the decades old soccer management sim) but with more elbow grease and panache. If you're even remotely interested, just ssh in and you're off to the races.

BTW, the video at the top of the repo readme won't open on any device I own.
by silisili | 2025-11-06 16:11:35+00:00
Fair point!

Oddly enough the pamphlets they kept sending out focused on irritability, poor grades, confusion, sleep problems, etc, and never mentioned the possibility of being fragged by a wayward jet.

I say that only partially in jest, looking at a map now, we were only 2 or so miles as the crow flies from the end of their runway and in the direct path..
by ilamont | 2025-11-06 16:11:38+00:00
If you like this, you may also be interested in the mu:zines archive which includes Sound on Stage, Recording Musician, and others going back to the early 1980s:

https://www.muzines.co.uk/mags

In this archive I found a 1981 interview with Hans Zimmer in Electronics & Music Maker. It included a photograph of the giant Moog he got from a member of Tangerine Dream. He also revealed he was mostly self taught, although he did learn how to read music as a young adult.

https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/ronnys-electro-music-caba...
by golemotron | 2025-11-06 16:12:21+00:00
This comes from the dated perspective that free trade is universally good. Nations create their own trade rules and they ought to be able to enforce them. I consider that far preferable than attempts to exert extraterritorial control over services from other countries.

If, say, Uruguay doesn't like content on Facebook, they are free to block it. In their opinion, they are protecting their citizens and that's ok. It should not produce legal action that could result in least common denominator style global content censorship.

In an ideal world, there would be no country level blocking but invariably laws will differ.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-06 16:12:22+00:00
A dozen years ago I was installing it on every computer I touched for more than a few minutes. Now I can't recommend it to anyone convincingly, especially because what I have to do to it to keep it as usable as it is for me (and what people see when they see me using it) is nothing that I could expect anyone normal to put up with. I honestly don't even want to use it at all without Debian standing between me and them.

But the sad part is all the hassle I go through gets it to about 80% of where it was a dozen years ago. A lot less crashy, though, I'll have to give them that - although everything is less crashy now. But they haven't destroyed the browser.

That's in a way even sadder: they decide every day to wake up and be bad, when any day they could decide to be better. Instead they've entered the modern massive predatory nonprofit space. Which usually is a vehicle for insiders to get rich off government grants, but Firefox have chosen the even eviller alternative of running interference for google as a product.

Any day they could choose to center the user and the health of the internet again. Every day they choose not to. They're just a valve that keeps paranoid and aware techies from going berserk and seriously competing against chrome, and that keeps antitrust away from google (not that there's anything for big business to to fear with horrible Obama judges like Amit Mehta on the bench.) It's their only serious source of income.
by jjkaczor | 2025-11-06 16:12:35+00:00
Still looking for a good "smart stove" for the mother-in-law who is showing early stages of Alzheimer's/dementia, but in complete denial and will not seek medical advice. So, I need something to be able to monitor it, turn it off, etc. LG or Samsung seem to be the only games in-town - I have also looked at a smart-plug capable of 220v, but - that "all-or-nothing" may be overkill.
by utopiah | 2025-11-06 16:13:06+00:00
Gimme an actual example instead of downvoting, help me learn.

Edit on that too : makes me think of OpenAI Whisper as a service via /e/OS and supposedly anonymous proxying (by mixing), namely running STT remotely. That would be an actual potential usage... but IMHO that's low end enough to be run locally. So I'm still looking for an application here.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-06 16:13:51+00:00
To clarify, there are many things SIMD is used for that look nothing like the loop parallelism or doing numerics commonly discussed. For example, heterogeneous concurrency is likely going to be beyond compilers for the foreseeable future and it is a great SIMD optimization.

A common example is executing the equivalent of a runtime SQL WHERE clause on arbitrary data structures of mixed types. Clever idioms allow surprisingly complex unrelated constraint operators to be evaluated in parallel with SIMD. It would be cool if a compiler could take a large pile of fussy, branchy scalar code that evaluates ad hoc constraints on data structures and converts it to an equivalent SIMD constraint engine but that doesn't seem likely anytime soon. So we roll them by hand.
by rsingel | 2025-11-06 16:14:02+00:00
There's a big difference between a company making that decision (an edge provider) vs a country doing that at the network level.

The rub comes in that nations, including the U.S., have laws about what they seem illegal content or services and reserve the right to force those to be blocked.

In Thailand that might be criticism of the king; in the U.S., pirated TV streams; in another country, that could be gambling sites.

Cloudflare seems to be trying to stop blocking that is trade protectionism, but is blocking overseas gambling sites trade protection or a legit state interest in protecting its citizens?
by comfydragon | 2025-11-06 16:14:40+00:00
> Matter simplifies this. It defines the API layer.

Technically Zigbee _also_ defines an API layer -- the Zigbee Cluster Library, or ZCL -- but that's more like an opt-in standard you _could_ implement, rather than any hard requirement. And no surprise, the Matter Cluster Library Specification, being authored by the same CSA that made ZCL, is eerily similar to ZCL...

But as I understand it, you're right that Matter is essentially "hey everyone, let's _actually_ standardize around a common application layer". It isn't technologically revolutionary (the building blocks have been around for more than a decade), but it's a better packaging of it all.

Source: My employer has been involved with Zigbee and other low-power network technologies for a long time.
by jap | 2025-11-06 16:15:14+00:00
Gridogram is a word game where the goal is to trace words in a letter grid to find a hidden quote. Behind the scenes, creating the letter grids for quotes is not obvious: the linked page describes the approach taken.

There's a bit of logic involved, a bit of maths with undirected graphs... hopefully it's of interest! Oh, and there's an interactive bit where you can try creating a grid for a quote, which in itself is kind of a fun challenge.
by belter | 2025-11-06 16:15:37+00:00
In the meanwhile...Portugal just appointed its former top Microsoft Portugal executive, Manuel Dias, as the new “State CTO.”

It’s another reminder of how deeply Redmond has embedded itself into government IT. Ever since Bill Gates cozy meetings with José Sócrates, one of Portugal’s most notoriously corrupt prime ministers, Microsoft has maintained confidential contacts and influence over national tech strategy.

The result? A state increasingly dependent on substandard, closed software. sold through world-class lobbying.
by StarGrit | 2025-11-06 16:15:54+00:00
If getting a small vacuum out quickly is a big mental load, I dunno what to say to that. It all seems like it isn't necessary.

It is like having a smart fridge or something that produce ice-cubes for me and loads of other stupid kitchen gadgets. I didn't feel the need to have a robot vacuum cleaner in the past and I don't feel the need to have one now. Especially with all the iffy spying stuff that it might be doing.

Also any of these things that is less than 100 euros is likely to be crap. I just got rid of a lot of old electronics tat.
by chithanh | 2025-11-06 16:16:34+00:00
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Like when Sun Microsystems submitted ODF for standardization to ISO, it was so successful that Microsoft had to do it too for OOXML. In fact MS pushed so hard that it left a huge trail of destruction in the standards committees.

Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
by pdimitar | 2025-11-06 16:16:34+00:00
> Caveat to that is if the threading model or performance doesnt suit.

So, this goes for ~70% of all projects ever and ~95% PLs ever?

I would have been a staff Golang engineer, if not a VP of Eng even, somewhere at this point if I didn't fall in love with Erlang's concurrency & parallelism implementation.

I am kind of still offended by the entire IT area that we have multicore CPUs for what, 20 years now, and we still don't make true physical parallelism a first-class citizen in all of our mainstream PLs. Looking at you, Python, and looking at you, Golang, with your ability to crash the program for sending to a closed channel, and looking at you Rust for making async needlessly complex.

(RE: Python, yeah yeah, "GIL is going away next release" and stuff. With that tempo they'll catch up with Golang by 2050.)