MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by npteljes | 2025-11-23 21:24:51+00:00
I mean, there is not much substance in the article, but I agree. I don't like dark mode too much either. I read that people with astigmatism, so cylindrical sight, don't handle dark mode well. I'm not sure how true this is, but it definitely applies to me. I can't seem to properly focus on many dark mode UIs - with spreadsheet software being the worst.

What I found is that using light mode, reducing screen brightness, adequate ambient lighting, and applying a brown filter works really well. Each of these components add an immediate relief when I'm applying them.

Funny thing is, I'm experimenting with dark mode in some places. In my KDE, it seems to work well for me in general OS UI, and in my file manager. Also works well on my phone after dark.

What I especially dislike is the mixing of dark and light modes. For example, when everything is light mode, only the terminal, and the IDE are dark. Fuck that. For this reason, for many years, I had my terminal in light mode as well.
by prng2021 | 2025-11-23 21:25:03+00:00
I disagree. I think one of the main reasons most companies still give their employees Windows machines and use Windows Servers to support those employees applications (ie Outlook and Office) is because most of the world has grown up using Microsoft Windows and Office at home. If there was another world where most people grew up using MacOS, there’s just no way MS would have as much market share in the corporate world.
by gwd | 2025-11-23 21:25:15+00:00
There's judging people, and there's judging actions.

- Getting married under societal pressure even when you're pretty sure you're gay: I'm willing to cut him some slack on this.

- Having gay affairs while you're married: It puts your wife at risk of disease, but OK, you've been placed in a messed up, lose-lose situation.

- Telling a lover you want to be exclusive, and getting him to move to a completely new country, stringing him along with the idea that someday you'll leave your wife and live with him, when in fact you intend neither to leave your wife nor to be exclusive: Uuh, OK, that's actually pretty bad.

- You know your wife wants to start a new life with someone else. But that would make it harder to hide your current life. So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-11-23 21:25:32+00:00
It's a goal of mine to get Valve using Nix. (I hope our in-progress Windows support would make this especially compelling.)

One advantage of this is that it will become very easy to not only build the original source of the game, but also build it with the original toolchain and dependencies, the toolchains for those dependencies, etc. etc., all the way down.

Hopefully something like that at your finger trips would have made finding the root cause of this bug a good bit easier!
by flowerthoughts | 2025-11-23 21:25:50+00:00
> the version of me they love is someone I constructed

It's also possible they love you because you are someone who can love them, even though it doesn't feel quite right. You're there for them.

I don't have the full picture, but thinking they don't love the real you seems simplistic. You're the sum of all parts and layers, not just what you consider core feelings. We're all putting on facades.
by Lonrer | 2025-11-23 21:26:03+00:00
Constraints help because they favor harmony. If you reuse the same limited palette for all your sprites it's more likely all objects will seem like they share the same lighting. It's very similar to making music. You can create sounds on a full spectrum of of frequencies but we have constraints like tonality to limit our pitches to semitones and center our compositions around keys. Sometimes we actually want to create feelings of dissonance and then stepping out of these limitations while adhering to them otherwise helps contrasting them even more.

Contrast seems to be also one of those things I see even very experienced pixel artists get wrong, especially in the context of games where visibility can be crucial. There's many games with beautiful spritework but actually playing them is very tiring because all of the sprite work uses the same range of the palette. You want to consider if things are in foreground or background, interactable or not, dangerous or friendly and then limit how much the range of their colors intersect. Creating contrast through hues is more common (, see red hostile vs blue friendly), but differentiation through saturation and value/luminosity is much more effective and readable at a glance while also being more accessible to color blind people by default.
by pimeys | 2025-11-23 21:26:42+00:00
Well... We had a ton of issues with DOCSIS until a few years ago, when they built fiber to the nearby pole, and the cable is just a few meters inside the house to the street. Before it used to break all the time.

Yeah, they will eventually bring fiber to the apartment. This is Germany anyhow, it will happen in the next 10-30 years.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-23 21:27:14+00:00
This is about software and management for software. But software developers have no engineering culture, they have a craftsmanship culture, favoring things like individualism and "taste". The article pretty clearly demonstrates this, as this is not how any actual engineering organization or any actual engineer thinks about management.

Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything. Management exists, for the sole reason of creating anything in such a world. What the corporation wants from an engineering manager, is someone who solves that communication problem, what the engineer wants from his manager is someone who figures out what is happening in the rest of the organization.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-23 21:27:51+00:00
Why even limit ourselves to a binary choice? Back in the Windows 9x and earlier days, you could individually color every class of thing on the screen. Window backgrounds, title bars, scroll bars, buttons, text for this, text for that, everything could be a different color if the end user wanted it. How far we have backslid where offering just "dark" and "light" is now seen as some sort of favor to the user!

We should return to those great days of end user control. "Sensible defaults, but easy to override." Why can't I easily (without writing code) configure HN's background and text color, just through my browser's configuration UI?
by msarnoff | 2025-11-23 21:28:10+00:00
I have seen these throughout the US and Europe and been fascinated by them. Penn Station has (had? been a while) a big one with more segments per character. I’ve been trying forever to find the name of this particular style of segmented displays and get more info on them. The closest I could find is “mosaic display.”

Love this article!

Signed, someone who has an obsession with segmented displays
by jboydyhacker | 2025-11-23 21:28:20+00:00
Great article on a timely topic. The only point I think Nilay didn’t fully address is the specific impact on Amazon Marketplace. Amazon often takes half or more of the revenue from those sales, which helps sustain its “one-stop shop” dominance.

With agents, however, that marketplace advantage disappears—the agent effectively creates a dynamic marketplace on demand. It’s also worth noting the ongoing U.S. DOJ antitrust case against Amazon Marketplace, which could tie directly into this discussion.
by dijit | 2025-11-23 21:28:29+00:00
I don’t want to call you out for this because it will make you quite defensive, so take it in the spirit that its intended: you seem irrational on this point. Perhaps theres an emotional element, because you’re frustrating me quite a lot.

The UK would be far from the first country in the world to have an ID system; we don’t need to deal in hypotheticals. I am extremely sympathetic to the idea that the UK government might abuse the system, but I need to be very fucking clear right now: just because its difficult to tell you how much easier its made my life does not diminish it.

Given you likely wouldnt be able to live in Sweden since Brexit; you’re unfortunately going to have to take my word for it. But it absolutely does help tackle illegal workers.

Without a personnummer you cannot get access to social services; people try to get around it but it is very difficult.

Here is the UK talking about it, and how it works: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/146988/pdf/

Here is a study into how people attempt (and fail) to bypass a centralised system. https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/handle/2077/28504/gupea_207...
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-23 21:30:04+00:00
"Share" is the key word in my rant. I know spotty support exists here and there for one format or another.

The problem is that I can't, in general widely share a HDR image and have it be correctly displayed via ordinary chat applications, social media, email, or what have you. If it works at all, it only works with that One Particular Format in One Specific Scenario.

If you disagree, find me something "trivial", such as a photo sharing site that supports HDR image uploads and those images are viewable as wide-gamut HDR on mobile devices, desktops, etc... without any endpoint ever displaying the image incorrectly such a very dark, very bright, or shifted colors.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-11-23 21:31:22+00:00
Appealing to common sense is insufficient for creating a sound policy or even a sound personal financial policy.

Your quip implies decisions based on financial risk, which is just probabilities of a certain category.

Given that the market doesn’t insure to hedge against your “tough question”, it suggests (though doesn’t prove) it can’t really answer that question.

But if your suggestion and quip wasn’t meant to be thought through and modeled, then carry on.

Edit: tl:dr; I’m trying to understand your question beyond vagaries, which you’ve so far refused to clarify. Therefore, nobody can really answer your question.
by slg | 2025-11-23 21:31:50+00:00
>had the exact same watch history

Watching the content that is being served to you is a passive decision. It's totally different from clicking a button that says you want to see specific content in the future. You show me something that enrages me, I might watch it, but I'll never click a button saying "show me more stuff that enrages me". It's the platform taking advantage of human psychology and that is a huge part of what I want to stop.

>it remains unclear how you're constructing a set of criteria that does Hacker News, and plenty of other sites but not Meta.

I already said "This will still impact HN because of stuff like the flame war downranker...". I don't know this and your reply to my other comment seem to be implying that I think HN is perfect and untouchable. My proposal would force HN to make a choice on whether to change or lose 230 protections. I'm fine with that.
by dijit | 2025-11-23 21:32:35+00:00
All I asked for was an open mind since the idea seems to work for, what I would consider, superior countries. I don’t particularly mind if you personally want to keep my homeland in the dark ages.

Germany is much the same, and I would never want to live there for this reason.

a crazy disconnected bureaucracy that forces me to prove myself multiple times over with massive cracks to slip through will always be inferior to a well invested cohesive system.

But, look who I’m talking about. When has the UK invested in any good social or physical infrastructure in the last 50 years? ha. Crabs in a bucket.
by rolph | 2025-11-23 21:33:45+00:00
it seems the link has changed, or corrected, but lands at a "blog" page Re zorin and install instructions. my OP has a couple links direct to the ISO downloads.

they are large files, and move slow. its been the better part of a day and its almost finished downloading for me.

3.5, and 7.5 GB respectively.

https://zorin.com/os/download/18/core/ [3.5GB ISO]

https://zorin.com/os/download/18/education/ [7.5GB ISO]
by graemep | 2025-11-23 21:33:59+00:00
> The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset

The term is 'cash cow'. Something you milk for cash rather than grow or improve

I am going to have to suspend my objection to the HN usage of MBA as a term of abuse because of where I learn the concept......
by dfawcus | 2025-11-23 21:34:02+00:00
I had a small programming task a while ago, and decided to try doing it algol68 (using the algol68 genie interpreter) simply because I'd had some exposure to the language many years ago at Uni.

It was an AWK like task, but I decided up front it was too much trouble to do in AWK, as I needed to build a graph of data structures from the input data.

In part the program had an AWK like pattern matching and processing section, which wasn't too awkward. I found having to use REF's more trouble that dealing with pointers, in part due to the forms of auto dereferencing the language uses; but that was expected.

The real problem though was that I ended up needing something like a map / hash-table, and I concluded it was too much trouble to write from scratch.

So in the end I switched the program to be written in Go.

That then suggests a few things to me:

- it should have an extension library (prelude) offering some form of hash table. - it would be useful to add syntax for explicit pointers (PTR keyword) which are not automatically dereferenced when used. - maybe have with either something like the Go (or Zig) style syntax for selecting a member of a pointed to struct (a.b) and maybe Zig like explicit defer (ptr.\*).

That latter pointer suggestions because I found the "field OF struct" form too verbose, and especially confusing when juggling REFs which may or may not get auto dereferenced.
by XorNot | 2025-11-23 21:34:25+00:00
The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms.

I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.

Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.

Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).
by GaryBluto | 2025-11-23 21:34:30+00:00
I think a project's web page design conveys a lot about the philosophies of the project itself. My first thought when the page loaded was "Chinese knockoff of Windows 11" - it looks like a product.

Update: It is a product. To get themes/configurations more palatable to former Windows and Mac users, you need to pay $48 https://zorin.com/os/pro/
by everdrive | 2025-11-23 21:34:43+00:00
>you rarely travel (booking hotel / flights online)

Yes, and I really dislike traveling when I have to. I personally wish that air travel would become unaffordable for most people, including myself.

>don’t have mobility issues (ordering groceries / household essentials online)

No, but mobility issues existed before the modern internet.

>don’t participate in online banking (do you write checks? carry cash with you all the time? go to an ATM weekly?)

I do online banking, but I also write checks and use cash. I don't use Venmo or similar services. Once I can get ahead of my chores & projects I'm thinking about getting a local branch at a credit union and totally avoiding a banking app on my smart phone.

>you don’t stream movies or tv shows

Sometimes, but I'm getting away from it. Interestingly I'm getting a blank screen (but there's still audio) when attempting to stream on Linux. I haven't fully researched it, but some preliminary research suggests that it's anti-Linux blocking. (at least one user reported the problem went away -- in a repeatable fashion -- when switching their use agent to Windows) So although this is not confirmed, I'm preparing for a time when this is unavoidable and I won't stream movies or TV whatsoever at that point.

> and you enjoy looking for apartments to rent in your local newspaper listing

Don't see anything wrong with this. I would actually argue that you don't need authentication in the way discussed in this conversation for this, though -- all you need is the listing, which can be totally anonymous. The actual application for the apartment can happen in person, and that's when verification needs to occur.

>you enjoy using paper maps when traveling around the city and world.

I use an old-fashioned GPS in my car that I paid well over $100 for a number of years ago. There's no tracking whatsoever, unlike the GPS used in a smart phone.

>literally everything useful works on the business internet. >Also how do you think local businesses near you operate? They don’t call each like the 1900s lol. They order stock from distributors, some local and some overseas

Except we did fine for most of human history before all this. And I'm sure there were no such think as stock orders or warehouses or supply chains before the modern internet. They cropped up over night the moment the first tracking cookie existed. /s
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-23 21:34:57+00:00
> Apple won’t quite launch ‘zero new features’ like they claimed with OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009, however. According to Gurman, Apple still plans to release a number of new AI features with iOS 27, so the company doesn’t continue to fall behind in the AI race.

Goddamit.

Zero new features is clean. It's communicable. It lets Cook, as he departs, harken back to quintessential Jobs. It will sell phones. It will sell Macs. And it implies perfection in a way only Apple, historically, has been able to nail and sell.

Nobody is buying an incremental iPhone or Mac because Siri recovered from lobotomy. The decision to water down zero new features with a douse of Giannandrea reeks of office politics.
by engeljohnb | 2025-11-23 21:35:10+00:00
I think it is helpful for certain purposes, and I think you'll be hard pressed to find exceptions to the general rule.

Art is all about repetition. Even if you've done it successfully many times, you still need to keep doing it until it's second nature.

Programming is more like solving puzzles. Once you've solved it once, you can pull the solution out of your head as many times as you need, as long as you still remember it.

With art, it doesn't matter if you remember how to do it, it still takes practice to get reproducible results. Of course it takes longer.
by cubefox | 2025-11-23 21:35:10+00:00
I guess it mainly makes a difference for light sources that are very yellow but not very red and green (sodium lights) or very cyan but not very green and blue (no realistic example here). Considering that actual sodium lights are being largely replaced by white LEDs, which can be modeled quite well with RGB ray tracing, spectral rendering might not offer a significant advantage for most applications.
by JosephK | 2025-11-23 21:35:55+00:00
>Calculus is an important part of the intellectual tradition handed down to us by the Ancient Greeks.

No it isn't? It was discovered by Newton and Leibnitz. If they're talking about Archimedes and integrals, I seem to recall his work on that was only rediscovered through a palimpsest in the last couple of decades and it contributed nothing towards Newton and Leibnitz's work.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-11-23 21:37:08+00:00
> You can so easily vibe code a landing page that these days still having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.

"Looks like a wiki or a professors web page" is not "bad landing page", it's "aesthetic that is not the mainstream aesthetic". We're not talking about "things don't line up", we're talking about functional.

And frankly, if I see that someone pointedly doesn't vibe-code their landing page, that's a good sign that they're not phoning in the rest of the work, too.
by madrox | 2025-11-23 21:37:21+00:00
I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs become political animals over time.

My suspicion about why this is the case is rooted in the responsibilities engineering shares with product and design at the management level. In an environment where very little unilateral decision making can be made by an EM, it is difficult to know if an outcome is because the EM is doing well or because of the people around them. I could be wrong, but once you look high enough in the org chart to no longer see trios, this problem recedes.

The author really got me thinking about the timeless aspects of the role underlying fads. I have certainly noticed shifts in management practice at companies over my career, but I choose to believe the underlying philosophy is timeless, like the relationship between day to day software engineering and computer science.

I worry about the future of the EM discipline. Every decade or so, it seems like there is a push to eliminate the function altogether, and no one can agree on the skillset. And yet like junior engineers, this should be the function that grows future leadership. I don't understand why there is so much disdain for it.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-23 21:38:02+00:00
If people stopped creating weird spinoff distros, which offer zero value except for a preconfigured Desktop, the entire Linux Desktop ecosystem would be in a far better place.

These distros focus on aesthetics choice, but underneath they are always plagued by the same things, tiny maintainer teams completely overwhelmed with the task of managing a distribution. Leading to a great first impression, but an inevitable breakdown in usability.

Every single person would be better served by Kubuntu than Zorin. Simply because Kubuntu has far superior backing behind it.

There are hundreds of these weird distros, targeting different audiences and they are all terrible, because none of them have the actual capabilities of maintaining their distro.