MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijit | 2025-11-23 17:12:53+00:00
As a person who lives across a society where this exists, and has lived in multiple societies without it.

Frankly, you’re wrong.

There’s a benefit to the public.

Let me frame what I mean with a parable (and, its relevant to my point even if it seems totally unrelated, and I’m typing from my phone, so forgive the briefness).

When I dated my (now) ex-girlfriend; she used to make mention of my teeth as a negative thing, that I’d be more handsome it they weren’t crooked etc.

One christmas she purchased for me, an electric toothbrush. A fancy one, she clearly thought a lot about which one to get: but to her surprise I was unhappy.

An electric toothbrush has (mostly) benefits, this one didn’t even need new heads all the time, dentists almost universally agree that an electric toothbrush is a good option. Yet I was unhappy.

Why? because the gift was mired in the backdrop of previous conversations and self conscious issues.

A few years later, and I received an electric toothbrush as a gift again. However, this time the person giving it had never said anything to make me self concious, even better: they had previously planted an electric toothbrush head at their apartment, so I could use their electric toothbrush body when I visited (this was one of the earliest moments in the relationship and was a not-so-subtle invitation to come back).

Now; it’s the same gift. Same benefits. Why was I happy now when I wasn’t before?

The context made a huge difference.

On the one hand the first gift felt like a way of controlling me and a subtle way of putting me down (or, emotionally it felt that way- regardless of if it was well intentioned or not). The other time it was gifted; it was enhancing what we already had.

Context is important, and thats why I say: this shit is pretty good, but I totally buy why you don’t think so.

I don’t trust the UK Government is doing it for our sake either.
by Adrig | 2025-11-23 17:12:58+00:00
I'm currently trying both Raycast windows (beta) and Flow Launcher. I've never really used this kind of launcher before (just the highly frustrating Windows main search feature).

- Raycast has a nice UI that can expand to work well with extensions

- Flow is faster to use. With Raycast you often need to enter an extension to finish your action. To launch a scrip on Flow I just type "r [shortcut] -> enter" while Raycast is "quicklinks -> enter -> [shortcut] -> enter. [edit, with minimal setup using aliases, you can have similar speed. See __jonas comment below]

- Performance-wise, Raycast was often eating my RAM, but a dev mentioned it's expected in the beta, they'll fix it for the launch. Otherwise, both feel snappy

- Both seem to have enough community support and extensions

- I never really tried the AI features, I don't know if it's the right place for me to augment my workflow w/ it

Curious about the experience of others with these tools or similar ones
by AngryData | 2025-11-23 17:13:21+00:00
Slavery also existed long before chattel slavery. Just because you have some rights doesn't automatically make it not slavery, Roman slaves had protected rights too, but were still slaves. Indentured servitude is also just another way to say slavery and yet that didn't give full rights over slave's children.

Yes it is still certainly debatable, but to so easily dismiss the entire idea and the person proposing it is foolish and privledged.
by ReptileMan | 2025-11-23 17:13:37+00:00
You could create a home party with really good cocktails for sub 100EUR total cost. And home parties are actually the best ways to socialize and meet new people.

Clear Ice DIY - free. 1 lt prebatched Negroni - 15EUR 1 lt prebatched Old fashioned - probably around 20 1 lt Mohito/Smash families - again around 15-20 1-2 bottles of not terrible prosecco - 10EUR each (good thing about Europe - a lot of the PDO wine products are acceptable quality and quite cheap) Syrups - if you use essential oils for flavoring - you could get down to 2 for liter of cordial concentrate. By using some tricks you can stretch a couple of citruses to make a lot of juice. If you home carbonate your water - it is penny on the liter - so you can spritz the cocktails to make them lighter.

You can legitimately get 15 people quite tipsy for 5-6 euro per person.

Booze in USA is not terribly more expensive - and some stuff is even cheaper so I guess a chatgpt created bar program for home drinking could get into this budget too.
by _dain_ | 2025-11-23 17:13:38+00:00
the stated justification is that it will let the government finally get immigration under control. but ID has never been the bottleneck for immigration enforcement. there have been countless cases where we have someone dead to rights, we know they're in the country illegally (and have committed other crimes besides), yet the judge finds a way to block deportation on ECHR grounds.

mark my words, they'll find a "right" to digital ID somewhere in the human rights framework, regardless of immigration status. and then we're back to square one.
by Terretta | 2025-11-23 17:13:46+00:00
> The whole point of choosing Markdown is that you do not want to spend your time typing <p>, <a>, <li> and the rest. You want to write in Markdown, with only occasional HTML when absolutely necessary.

Why is that a problem?

> If the solution to Markdown's limitations is routinely switching to HTML, then...

Why would you do that, instead of only switching if you had to?

Why would the alternative be "just HTML" and write all the nonsense you said one doesn't have to?
by ifh-hn | 2025-11-23 17:13:53+00:00
I don't have an issue with ID schemes. I have a driving license, passport, veterans card, veterans train card. My issue with this is:

1. Given all the above forms of id I currently have, what's the point of me having a digital one.

2. The assumption I'd have a smartphone for this crap to be tied to.

I can already prove who I am, and since I don't use my mobile for id, banking, or anything more that an on the go web browser, audio book/music player why would I even use this?

As for stopping illegal workers? This could be done with existing processes if they were correctly enforced, and/or existing firms of id.

This government is a joke. They didn't win the election, they just happened to benefit from reform killing the conservative vote. The conservatives were and are a joke, reform are worse and labour are just a useless. I despair for the UK.
by JosephRedfern | 2025-11-23 17:14:13+00:00
I think you're being oversensitive, especially in the context Raycast adding support for Windows.

The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.

Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:

> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.
by p_ing | 2025-11-23 17:14:18+00:00
Windows used to require a reboot to change an IP address.

Windows used to BSOD when the graphics stack crashed.

Used to come without a built-in firewall exposing all sorts of vulnerabilities to the public Internet.

Used to not isolate critical kernel components to 3rd party software.

(And Windows has always had a hodge-poge of UI designs dating back to NT4/Win95 which contained Win3.x design elements)

The list can go on about how it most certainly, objectively, was not "better".
by mettamage | 2025-11-23 17:14:30+00:00
You still need to find the correct data, and get it to the LLM. IMO, a lot of it is data engineering work with API calls to an LLM as an extra step. I'm currently doing a lot of ETL work with Airflow (and whatever data {warehouses, lakes, bases} are needed) to get the right data to a prompt engineering flow. The prompt engineering flow is literally a for loop of Google Docs in a Google Drive that non-tech people, but domain experts in their field, can access.

It's up to the domain experts and me to understand where giving it data will tone down the hallucinative nonsense an LLM puts out, and where we should not give data because we need the problem solving skills of the LLM itself. A similar process is for tool-use, which in our case are pre-selected Python scripts that it is allowed to run.
by mrkwse | 2025-11-23 17:14:49+00:00
I'm not sure I see the benefit of this over PowerToys beyond system-wide indexing for file search (which I'd want in Explorer, not a separate launcher app). Let alone the premium tiers.

- AI? What's the benefit beyond agents in more domain-specific environments (or gen-purpose site) vs native to a launcher app?

- Custom window management is available with PowerToys

- Unlimited clipboard history - I'm not sure I want or need this over PowerToys retaining it for system uptime.

- (Free?) Extension library looks a step beyond what's currently available for PowerToys' Command Palette, but will Raycast gain more Windows-focused extensions faster than Command Palette does?

Competition is good, but I don't see how this adds value as a premium service beyond PowerToys
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-23 17:14:55+00:00
"you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting"

Oh, ok. Anyways.

First section of Capital Vol I is all about "surplus value" and exploitation, with a heavy dose of the labour theory of value. It has nothing to do with "initial accumulation" at all, it's about ongoing extraction of surplus value in production, and no, Marx doesn't call it "theft" -- he calls it "exploitation" (which to him is actually somewhat of a value neutral world describing a technical process, actually).

Whether it's a defensible position in economics or philosophy is a whole other discussion. There's nuance.

Also I assuming you mean "citing", not "siting"
by muppetman | 2025-11-23 17:15:13+00:00
This makes no sense to me? I don't understand why a company, even if it is using GPT or Claude as their true backend, is going to leave API calls in Javascript that anyone can find. Sure maybe a couple would, but 73% of those tested? Surely your browser is going to talk to their webserver, and yup sure it'll then go off and use Claude etc then return the answer to you, but surely they're not all going to just skin an easily-discoverable website over the big models?

I don't believe any of this. Why aren't we questioning the source of how the author is apparently able to figure out some sites are using REDIS etc etc?
by microtonal | 2025-11-23 17:15:47+00:00
Windows had a good run from Windows 2000/XP-ish [1] to Windows 7, maybe 8.1. Any tech person who lived through the 90ies knows that 95/98/ME was a tire fire. With Windows 10 and 11 the enshittification started in a big way and it became a vehicle for analytics, pushing ads and Microsoft stuff, and now forcing their on AI on users.

All the ridicule is well-deserved IMO. There is an alternate universe where Microsoft would have continued Windows in the 2000/XP/7 tradition and it would be a solid operating system, serving the user, underpinned by a very good foundation (after all, the original NT people were stellar engineers that worked on VMS before).

[1] Earlier NT versions were also quite good, but most consumers didn't encounter it.
by stavros | 2025-11-23 17:15:48+00:00
But JPEG has a lossless mode as well. How do you distinguish between the two now?

This is an arbitrary distinction, for example then why do mp3 and ogg (vorbis) have different extensions? They're both lossy audio formats, so by that requirement, the extension should be the same.

Otherwise, we should distinguish between bitrates with different extensions, eg mp3128, mp3192, etc.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-23 17:15:49+00:00
I don't know why Gnome et al switched to imitating MacOS – adopting a dock (as a default), ditching an app window tray as on Windows, when the potential Windows-convert market is much larger than Mac.

The Dock can be really jarring for Windows users - they are coming from an OS literally called windows, and the windows are hidden from view.

It also eats vertical space with those huge icons, which is precious given the current popular screen dimensions.

--

I agree MacOS has some glaring UX and functionality omissions and Finder is indeed garbage!
by kuhsaft | 2025-11-23 17:16:03+00:00
> They aren't drinking because drinking is a social thing

being social != drinking. likewise, drinking != being social

You can still be social and not drink alcohol. You can drink alcohol and not be social.

Pretty much every establishment that serves alcohol nowadays also serves some non-alcoholic alternative. Every major alcohol brand has a non-alcoholic version of their beverage, i.e. Budweiser, Coors, Busch, Heineken, Guinness.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-23 17:16:10+00:00
I don't know what you're confused about.

Any political scientist will tell you that the American political spectrum is well to the right of the European one, no matter what personal conversations you have in bars.

And you're advocating for less social spending -- that's essentially the definition of right-wing on the economic dimension.

And there's no need for any "time will tell". Conservatives have been complaining about social spending for a solid three-quarters of a century by now. If three generations isn't enough to show that social democracy is a system that works in terms of delivering services, how much more do you need?
by MarkusQ | 2025-11-23 17:16:26+00:00
> Realistic ones are boring.

You must live in a different reality. The one I live in has fractal complexity and pretty much anywhere I look is filled with interesting ({cute..beautiful},{mildly surprising..WTF?!},{ah, that's an example of X..conundrum}) details. In fact, so far as I can tell, it's interesting details all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in any direction I probe.
by paradox460 | 2025-11-23 17:16:29+00:00
I recently moved my personal writing to John MacFarlane's djot. It's a markup language that grew out of his markdown improvements blogpost, where he explored the issues, and possible fixes, he discovered while creating the common mark standard.

I've no regrets since then

https://pdx.su/blog/2025-06-28-writing-in-djot/
by evanjrowley | 2025-11-23 17:16:59+00:00
Without taking an extreme or absolutist stance on this issue, I generally agree with the author here. Dark mode should be reserved for after sunset and before sunrise.

The eyes are adapted to see daylight levels of light during daytime. If your ambient lighting and screen don't match this, then you're not using your body in the way it's evolved to function. What we need more of are screens with anti-glare and a wide range of brightness levels.

What might have a worse impact on your eyesight is the effects of Myopia, which is being exacerbated by basically every portable device with a screen. Anyone who has the technological literacy to enable dark mode (and advocate for it) is likely someone who gets above-average screen time and is therefore someone at a higher risk of myopia.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-23 17:17:16+00:00
> What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational?

Well, lower birth rates are the perpetual excuse for more immigration. Even Trump made a U-turn on H1B and he's now OK with more immigration. Low birth rates and high immigration give credence to the various "replacement" theories and become a political force that can bring nationalists to power.

Next, lower birth rates could be "rational" if they led to higher standard of living and better quality of life, but that's not the case now, in fact we are seeing the opposite because less children make the work force cheaper thus increasing profits. Increased profits go towards increased power and influence which make the trend irreversible.

> During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations.

Nonsensical in the current environment of birth rates below replacement level and falling.

> In the 1970s people predicted

Not people - the mass media. They are just noise and BS which should not be considered in a serious conversation - one way or the other.
by verelo | 2025-11-23 17:17:21+00:00
Honestly I wish i knew. I find the battery really gets substantially worse after 12-18 months, and eventually I'm living with it plugged in to avoid getting caught with it low when I'm out.

Recently I dropped my phone (while in a case) and now there's a black spot on the screen.

Stuff like this. I live a life between a lot of DIY work and software dev, so I'm physically probably rougher on it than most, but also a heavy user of the technology too.
by close04 | 2025-11-23 17:18:03+00:00
As much as I’d love that picture to be true, how many “big industry” players are moving a sizable number of Windows machines to Debian? And how many Windows machines did they even have to begin with relative to Linux?

On the client side where this “non-deterministic” OS issue is far more advanced, moving away is so rare it’s news when it happens. On the data center side I’ve seen it more as consolidation of the tech stack around a single offering (getting rid of the few Windows holdouts) and not substantially Windows based companies moving to Linux.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-23 17:18:41+00:00
In theory JPEG has a lossless mode (in the standard), but it's not supported by most applications (not even libjpeg) so it might as well not exist. I've certainly never come across a lossless JPEG file in the wild.

Filenames also of course try to indicate technical compatibility as to what applications can open them, which is why .mp3 and .ogg are different -- although these days, extensions like .mkv and .mp4 tell you nothing about what's in them, or whether your video player can play a specific file.

At the end of the day it's just trying to achieve a good balance. Obviously including the specific bitrate in a file extension goes too far.
by StillBored | 2025-11-23 17:19:19+00:00
Right, and the reason this has been going on for nearly a quarter century in the USA is because it was widely considered an unconstitutional national passport until 9-11, and got bipartisan push-back from a number of states following its passage.

The federal government passed it along with the authoritarian wishlists various agencies had been salivating over for 40+ years and unable to get passed, until under the guise of saving us from the 'terrorists', who now 25 years later, turned out the actual terrorists were probably just domestic authoritarians. The guys living in caves weren't really a threat and could be dealt with, without passing a bunch of stuff to affect every single citizen of the country.
by nrposner | 2025-11-23 17:19:39+00:00
Leaving the LLM writing aside, this argument just doesn't hold together. It wants to say 'Rust has these flaws, therefore it will not replace C/C++', but doesn't make (or doesn't realize it is necessary to make) the intermediary claim 'C/C++ do not have these flaws/Rust does not provide enough other attractive features to overcome these flaws'.

It's also engaged in an odd two-step where it conflates C and C++, championing C's simplicity in contrast to Rust's complexity... and then just doesn't address C++'s complexity, as though it's interchangeable with C. The notion that Rust developers are running into quirks with tooling and this is reason not to use it in preference to C++ is ludicrous.
by adidoit | 2025-11-23 17:20:11+00:00
It's very interesting of course at a natural move for aggregation. I'd love to see Stratechery / Ben Thompson's take on this.

From my perspective the challenges for vendors and SaaS providers are [1] discovery [2] monetization [3] disintermediation

I think it's less of a concern if you're Shopify or those large companies that have existing brand moats.

But if you're a startup, I don't think MCP as a channel is a clear-cut decision. Maybe you can get distribution but monetization is not defined.

Also I'm sure the model providers will capture usage data and could easily disintermediate you , especially if your startup is just a narrow set of prompts and a UX over a specific workflow.

The Reforge guys have been talking about a channel shift and this being it but until incentives are clear I'm not sure this is it yet. Maybe an evolution of this.

I'm building an AI coach for job seekers / early stage professionals (Socratify) and while I'd love more distribution from MCP UI integration I think at this point risk is higher than reward...
by stelonix | 2025-11-23 17:20:21+00:00
And then the new car no longer has the camera where you need it, the panel buttons changed, the cup-holder is in another place. Even worse, the upgraded firmware & OS of the car no longer comes with an app you needed; or it does, but removed a feature that was essential for your daily use. All because some SWE takes "computer security" as more important than having an useful system.

It's the kind of rhetoric that enables shoving down user-hostile features during a simple update. And breaking many use cases. Quite common in the FOSS/Linux mentality, not so much on the rest of the world.
by teiferer | 2025-11-23 17:20:48+00:00
Another red flag with the article is that the author's LinkedIn profile link at the bottom leads to a non-existing page.

Is Teja Kusireddy a real person? Or is this maybe just an experiment from some AI company (or other actor) to see how far they can push it? A Google search by that name doesn't find anything not related to the article.

The article should be flagged. Otoh, this should get discussed.
by knuppar | 2025-11-23 17:20:49+00:00
Nah I'd feel pretty okay with more regulation. In your two examples predictable crimes happened in these platforms. An airline should most definitely be liable to enable that, just like they are liable for letting people without visas boarding a flight. Signal should also be liable for enabling a crime, but realistically all they could do in an investigation is give e2e encryption logs with some timestamps.
by ezst | 2025-11-23 17:21:06+00:00
This doesn't fly in light of recent history: first, Signal has some trust issues of its own (I mentioned a couple user-hostile acts in sibling comments), but that aside, do you remember how much praise WhasApp was getting in its early days? There is no guarantee the same can't happen to Signal (though it's pretty clear that it will become a major target for takeover and under significant scrutiny and influence would it ever grow past a certain point).
by nik736 | 2025-11-23 17:21:29+00:00
What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows.

Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.