MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pxc | 2025-11-23 16:50:55+00:00
I think the systemd units in /run are indeed ephemeral, and indicate units that are active. If they have permanent counterparts (some units, like transient timer units, don't have them), you'll find them under /etc/systemd or /lib/systemd for system units and ~/.local/share/systemd or ~/.config/systemd for user units.

> But I honestly don't see why non-ephemeral per user data shouldn't be put into /home

I think I agree— as long as the conventions are clear, I think it's reasonable to have some hidden dirs under $HOME set aside for configuration and cache and so on.

Maybe there's value in exposing a single directory as the root of a sandbox for user files, so users have to go farther out of their way to screw things up, especially depending on your audience. Maybe a decade from now Linux desktops will have something like this, because most apps will run sandboxed in Flatpak, unable to write to the root of $HOME. (Idrk how that's organized, though— maybe apps are just allowed to edit "their" dotfiles without modifying their location.)

But I'm not sure that obscuring configuration data's place in the filesystem in that way is really desirable or necessary. I doubt most users inspect or think about hidden directories on Unix-likes unless they're looking for them anyway.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-23 16:51:45+00:00
Agreed, explorer got slower after they added WinUI stuff into it.

This only goes to show how poorly staffed, like in developer skills, the whole Windows team is nowadays.

Just watch the WinUI community calls and the related discussion on the Github projects (WinUI, WinAppSDK, CsWinRT, C+++/WinRT).

In what regards Windows development experience, we really miss the Steve Balmer era.
by swat535 | 2025-11-23 16:52:42+00:00
I think you're a better person than I am.

Obviously I can only speak for myself here but I wouldn't be so understanding, especially when my partner lied about such a fundamental aspect of their life and joined in a union of marriage with me.

I suppose, for me it would feel like the vows they took where not real and the foundation of our life, all the memories, thoughts and feelings were nothing but smoke and mirrors.

You're right, we're all humans and life is complex but I think it's selfish to waste your partner's life for years because you can't face the truth. I suppose that a bitter end is better than endless bitterness however.
by dijit | 2025-11-23 16:53:14+00:00
The digital authentication system is called BankID, but its effectively tied to the government ID due to the same identifier being used (personnummer).

Again, the issue is mostly trust.

PS: oh dear, oh no, I appear to have offended someone and they’re flagging me, oh dear heavens I must be incorrect then! Woe is me. /s
by ArnoVW | 2025-11-23 16:53:24+00:00
but if you no longer work for your boss, why should he pay you? in fact, how could he pay you? if the value your work should create has not been created?

do you want to force him to pay you? would that not just be the same thing in reverse?

does that mean that everyone should be paid by everyone?

I never understood this sort of reasoning.
by rvnx | 2025-11-23 16:54:16+00:00
Not at all, it depends on the level of public exposure of the service.

In a factory, access is the primary barrier.

It's like an onion, outer surface has to be protected very well, but as you get deeper in the zone where less and less services have access then the risk / urgency is usually lowered.

Many large companies are consciously running with security issues (even Cloudflare, Meta, etc).

Yes, on the paper it's better to upgrade, in the real world, it's always about assessing the risk/benefits balance.

Sometimes updates can bring new vulnerabilities (e.g. if you upgrade from Windows 2000 to the "better and safer" Windows 11).

In your example, you have the guarantee to down the factory floor (for an unknown amount of time, what if PostgreSQL does not reboot as expected, or crashes during runtime in the updated version).

This is essentially an (hopefully temporary) self-inflicted DoS.

Versus an almost non-existent risk if the machine is well isolated, or even better, air-gapped.
by squidbeak | 2025-11-23 16:54:17+00:00
> Combining tax records, driving licenses, passports, NHS records, benefits, vehicle registration, the ability to get a job, the ability to rent a house and the ability to get a bank account into one unified super-database (with an app)

Incorrect. The workflow is that the citizen submits their data during onboarding. The app submits the data to its associated verification service, which polls the government API and if the check passes, returns a cryptographic signature for each specific datum, which are then used to generate digital IDs for whatever use. There's no 'unified database'.

There doesn't seem to be support for long text formats either. So on NHS records, while your status as a diabetic for instance might be there as an attribute/signature pair, yuor medical commentary wouldn't be. Perhaps that will change later, but long text doesn't appear to be in scope yet.
by ndegruchy | 2025-11-23 16:54:24+00:00
Yeah, I've been using Directory Opus[1] for years on my Windows machine(s). It's hard to overstate how much faster these alternatives are, but not only faster but with better features. I get that explorer.exe needs to be simple, but it doesn't have to do that at the cost of being abysmally slow.

[1]: https://www.gpsoft.com.au
by Jehuty64 | 2025-11-23 16:54:24+00:00
I wrote custom language for designing Age of Empires 2 Random Maps. Basically AoE2 already supports it, but the underlying language is very very primitive. While I am not aware of anyone actually using what I made, it was mostly nice learning experience. https://github.com/Erbenos/aoe2-rms

Because its on top of Racket, you get usual high-level language faculties for basically free.
Show HN: Curious about tones in Chinese? An extension for language learners
by mreichhoff | 2025-11-23 16:54:42+00:00
I made a simple Chrome extension that: * color codes Chinese text based on the tone of each syllable * provides a popup dictionary * gives example sentences, useful links, and AI analysis while you browse * integrates with Anki Connect for 1-click flashcard creation

It can be installed here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chinese-learning-ex...
by Der_Einzige | 2025-11-23 16:54:52+00:00
And out of that 73%, 99% of them don't even do the obvious step of trying to actually optimize/engineer their damn prompts!

https://github.com/zou-group/textgrad

and bonus, my rant about this circa 2023 in the context of Stable Diffusion models: https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/45c619ee22aac6865c...
by pjmlp | 2025-11-23 16:55:38+00:00
When the WinUI marketing team says it is now used on application XYZ, which now includes Explorer, it doesn't have the effect among Windows developer community that they think it is.

Anything that WinRT touches, after the Project Reunion was announced back in 2020, has been a mess, and they keep pushing it.

Unfortunately some of the newer APIs, like Windows ML, are only available in WinRT components.
by junto | 2025-11-23 16:55:40+00:00
I’d argue that this was a limitation of the GA fitness function, not of the concept.

Now that we have vastly faster compute, open FPGA bitstream access, on-chip monitoring, plus cheap and dense temperature/voltage sensing, reinforcement learning + evolution hybrids, it becomes possible to select explicitly for robustness and generality, not just for functional correctness.

The fact that human engineers could not understand how this worked in 1996 made researchers incredibly uncomfortable, and the same remains true today, but now we have vastly better tooling than back then.
by candybar | 2025-11-23 16:55:42+00:00
> It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.

No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.

> The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding

If you read the story, it looks to me that prior to learning all this she felt bad that he didn't get to have a life of his own and sacrificed for her. But she learned that this wasn't the case. This is kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting.

Also on this:

> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.

My point here is that she's doing both.

> Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's no judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.

It's not about the period - it's that she's using italic for quote and this is part of her mom's statement.
by yunwal | 2025-11-23 16:55:50+00:00
So 900b total among its 36000 employees for a total of 900b/4.3 trillion market cap. Or roughly 20% employee owned (if that 25m number is correct).

This article (warning: obnoxious ads) is the only one I can find that claims to know who nvidea’s shareholders are and puts the number at 4.3%

https://capital.com/en-int/analysis/nvidia-shareholder-who-o...

I would not consider that to be employee owned (although I certainly wouldn’t mind the 25m)
by throaway123213 | 2025-11-23 16:55:51+00:00
Well, in their family, they had a good-night verse that went like this. Maybe not an obsession but definitely a healthy interest!

Gute Nacht (good night)

Scheiss ins Bett dass es kracht (shit into the bed so that it bangs)

Reck den Arsch zum Mund (stretch your ass towards your mouth)

und sei recht kugelrund (and be spherically round))

And Mozart wrote a canon from it

"Buona Nox - bist a rechter Ox" (and the end of the text is what I wrote above)
by LgWoodenBadger | 2025-11-23 16:55:52+00:00
It asks me a quality survey after every call even though I have surveys off.

It shows unread messages for a chat that has the focus and the “unread” message is visible.

When using the keyboard shortcut to create a new message (Command-N) it drops the first character of the recipient unless I introduce a noticeable delay between shortcut and recipient.

I’m sure I have more, but these are just from memory.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-23 16:56:12+00:00
> ban digital advertisement at a federal level

This is what I meant by angry mob pitchfork ideas. This isn’t a real idea, it’s just rage venting.

It’s also wrong, as anyone familiar with the problems in pay-to-play social video games for kids, which are not ad supported, can tell you. These platforms have just as many problems if not more, yet advertising has nothing to do with it. I bet you could charge $10/month for Instagram and the same social problems would exist. It’s a silly suggestion.
by CableNinja | 2025-11-23 16:56:28+00:00
Screw USB, seriously. The U stands for Universal, and its far from it. Add on the fact that USB-IF keeps making new standards and causing havoc along the way, and as an additonal effect are adding extra cost to any system because of their fuckery

All of the power negotiation crap that came with USB3, and the constantly changing standard... it wont be long before USB goes the way of SCSI and we end up with 60pin cables with 20 different stanards of operation
by anon7000 | 2025-11-23 16:56:42+00:00
This story is so relatable it hurts. The amount of my time ISP executives have wasted by their malicious decision to absolutely gut “technical” support… It should be illegal to run a “support” department where most agents don’t understand the bare minimum of basics about how the internet works.

I’ve had issues like this with all 3 of my past 3 ISPs, which included Comcast, Astound (WaveG), and CenturyLink. The last two are even gigabit fiber…

Astound had an issue where their upstream device wouldn’t let me get an IPv6 address (despite allegedly supporting it) and some packet sniffing revealed a specific issue that of course no support could help with. So any customer in this building will continue having that problem. Anyways, I ultimately canceled service after they had a 36 hour outage in the summer with no storms. And this was in downtown Seattle — the two closest buildings are a god damned datacenter and Amazon offices.

CenturyLink was slightly better… but I noticed after signing up for the service that the fiber line going to their ONT had a bad kink in it which obviously breaks fiber. It took me like 5 chats and a couple phone calls to get them to send a technician, and even then, the technician said I was lucky they sent the only person who had and knew how to use the fiber splicer thing… That shouldn’t be fucking lucky! Every single person I talked to knew I needed my fiber line to be spliced because I told them exactly what the problem and fix was. Absolutely absurd.

Executives should be punished for making customer service categorically awful, and yet they simply get promotions and bonuses for making it cheaper. I hope every exec who decided to make customer support useless could have these stories shoved down their throats for the rest of their lives.
by Beijinger | 2025-11-23 16:56:44+00:00
You don't understand the problem. If we encounter aliens, they would likely make a law to protect them. In the situation I came up with, this is their first encounter with us, and they would NOT be protected. You are very optimistic that they will be considered animals. For example they would have to live on organic matter. And they would have to have a spine to get more protection since living things with a spine are considered more valuable (Wirbeltiere).

GROK (And using all the Roman law principles on what German law is based):

Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Art. 103 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz + § 1 StGB) is the decisive wall that the prosecution would smash into in a real first-contact case under current German law. This principle has four sub-requirements (all must be fulfilled for a conviction):

Lex scripta – there must be a written statute → Yes, §§ 211, 212 StGB exist.

Lex certa – the statute must be sufficiently precise → “Mensch” is precise if you are Homo sapiens. It is not precise (in fact completely indeterminate) when the victim is an unknown extraterrestrial species.

Lex stricta – no punishment by analogy, no extension to the detriment of the defendant → This is the killer. → Extending the word “Mensch” in §§ 211/212 to include extraterrestrials would be a clear case of forbidden analogy that worsens the legal position of the accused. → German courts are constitutionally barred from doing this in criminal law (unlike in civil law or constitutional law, where they sometimes stretch concepts to protect victims).

Lex praevia – the law must have existed before the act → Also fulfilled, but irrelevant here.
by kreco | 2025-11-23 16:56:52+00:00
> Vulkan is also not really cross-platform any more than DirectX. [...]

Vulkan is not entirely cross-platform, but it's still way "more" cross-platform than DirectX by your own point of view.

DirectX: - Windows - Xbox

Vulkan: - Linux - Android - Windows - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch 2

Metal: - MacOS - iOS
by crazygringo | 2025-11-23 16:56:52+00:00
I find it incredibly helpful to know that .jpg is lossy and .png is lossless.

There are so many reasons why it's almost hard to know where to begin. But it's basically the same reason why it's helpful for some documents to end in .docx and others to end in .xlsx. It tells you what kind of data is inside.

And at least for me, for standard 24-bit RGB images, the distinction between lossy and lossless is much more important than between TIFF and PNG, or between JPG and HEIC. Knowing whether an image is degraded or not is the #1 important fact about an image for me, before anything else. It says so much about what the file is for and not for -- how I should or shouldn't edit it, what kind of format and compression level is suitable for saving after editing, etc.

After that comes whether it's animated or not, which is why .apng is so helpful to distinguish it from .png.

There's a good reason Microsoft Office documents aren't all just something like .msox, with an internal tag indicating whether they're a text document or a spreadsheet or a presentation. File extensions carry semantic meaning around the type of data they contain, and it's good practice to choose extensions that communicate the most important conceptual distinctions.
by owenversteeg | 2025-11-23 16:57:02+00:00
“Strong in tension, not compression” is a meme, and obviously wrong. It is certainly stronger in tension, but it is also remarkably strong in compression. That’s why it’s used - yes, in compression - in modern passenger aircraft. You don’t even need to know that, though; the simple fact is that the Titan had a double-digit number of deep dives. If it was weak in compression it would not have survived diving to 3.7 kilometers deep or even a fraction of that depth _once_.

That said, yes, it’s a difficult material to use properly, and they were a bunch of cowboys slapping things together. It’s no surprise that they missed several critical steps and created a sub doomed to fail.

N.b. all of this was kickstarted by James Cameron saying that carbon fiber has “no strength in compression” in a New York Times “science” article, which the Times printed directly.
by RC_ITR | 2025-11-23 16:57:04+00:00
One of the biggest problems frontier models will face going forward is how many tasks require expertise that cannot be achieved through Internet-scale pre-training.

Any reasonably informed person realizes that most AI start-ups looking to solve this are not trying to create their own pre-trained models from scratch (they will almost always lose to the hyperscale models).

A pragmatic person realizes that they're not fine-tuning/RL'ing existing models (that path has many technical dead ends).

So, a reasonably informed and pragmatic VC looks at the landscape, realizes they can't just put all their money into the hyperscale models (LP's don t want that) and they look for start-ups that take existing hyperscale models and expose them to data that wasn't in their pre-Training set, hopefully in a way that's useful to some users somewhere.

To a certain extent, this study is like saying that Internet start-ups in the 90's relied on HTML and weren't building their own custom browsers.

I'm not saying that this current generation of start-ups will be successful as Amazon and Google, but I just don't know what the counterfactual scenario is.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-23 16:57:07+00:00
Are people down to have a bunch of specialized models? The expectation set by OpenAI and everyone else has set is that you will have one model that can do everything for you.

It’s like how we’ve seen basically all gadgets meld into the smart phone. People don’t have Garmin’s and beepers and clock radios anymore (or dedicated phones!). It’s all on the screen that fits in your pocket. Any would-be gadget is now just an app
by Aurornis | 2025-11-23 16:57:51+00:00
“Just ban everything I don’t like as long as it won’t impact anything I do like” is a frequent take on HN these days.

Then when states start doing things like adding ID requirements for websites it’s shock and rage as the consequences of banning things (even for under 18s) encounter the realities of what happens when you “just ban” things.
by varispeed | 2025-11-23 16:58:15+00:00
“Trust” has nothing to do with it. There’s no genuine public need for a government-run digital ID system in the first place. The only people who need it are the corporations who lobbied for it, because it creates new revenue streams by turning identity into a product. Once the whole country is routed through one digital choke-point, everything else follows automatically: behavioural data, movement data, payments data, cross-service profiling. And once that system exists, it only ever moves in one direction.

A paper ID sits in your pocket and minds its own business. A digital ID is one update away from becoming a tracking token. Dress it up however you like, but it’s just an ankle tag with better UX. And the UK track record on data leaks, “accidental” sharing, and mission creep is spectacularly awful. The idea that this won’t be exploited is a fairy tale.

If it goes ahead in the flavour BlackRock and WEF types dream about, expect the usual:

- services quietly tied to compliance thresholds

- financial scoring bleeding into civic rights

- automated sanctions and “risk flags”

- real-time behavioural profiles sold as “fraud prevention”

- and every data breach blamed on a junior contractor who “misconfigured a bucket”.

None of this empowers the public. It just hands more leverage to the same institutions already shaping policy from behind the curtain.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-11-23 16:59:37+00:00
> But sometimes ads tell you about products which genuinely improve your life.

I’d argue that life improvement is so small it’s not worth the damage of false demand. I can maybe think of one product that I saw a random ad for that I actually still use today. I’d say >90% of products being advertised these days are pointless garbage or actually net negative.

Advertising is cancer for the mind and our society severely underestimates the harm it’s done.
by luckylion | 2025-11-23 17:00:06+00:00
> Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.

Weird analogy. It's more like "what if you borrowed money to buy something, didn't have to return it, but if you made money with that thing, you give the lender a cut, forever".

Because the point is: it's not a loan, you don't have to pay it back, and you're not on the hook for it if things go wrong. That's the big upside and why lots of people do that instead of getting a loan. Because loans are available, but people don't want that risk and are willing to give up some of their ownership to avoid it.
by linguae | 2025-11-23 17:00:10+00:00
I view Racket as an academic language used as a vehicle for education and for research. I think Racket does fine in its niche, but Racket has a lot of compelling competitors, especially for researchers and professional software engineers. Those who want a smaller Scheme can choose between plenty of implementations, and those who want a larger language can choose Common Lisp. For those who don't mind syntax different from S-expressions, there's Haskell and OCaml. Those who want access to the Java or .NET ecosystems could use Scala, Clojure, or F#.

There's nothing wrong with an academic/research language like Racket, Oberon, and Standard ML.
by anaisbetts | 2025-11-23 17:00:25+00:00
Why can Mac developers absolutely never resist making dated Win9x / Windows XP / BSOD references every time they make a port of their software to Windows? Zed did the same thing recently and it was just as overplayed.

Developers please, when you do this, you are telling your audience, the people you want to pay you money for your work, "Yeah, we think you suck, but here's some thing we finally got around to porting over" - why would you do that?
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-23 17:00:37+00:00
Of all the issues in my life, paperwork has never been one of them. Yes, at certain times – couple hours a year (0.02% of a year) – it's a bit of a faff dealing with paperwork.

House prices, cost of living, lack of healthcare, my family, my health, the economy, transport, the job market etc consume 99.9% of my day-to-day general concerns.

Did people prior to the 2000s have mental breakdowns over paperwork??

How many times do you open a bank account a year??