MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Shank | 2025-12-03 05:14:12+00:00
The lack of competence from companies that acquire Japanese companies, and then fail to even price things in yen or offer support packages that cater to Japanese customers is really something. It's one thing to raise the price on a license, but it's another thing to not even support local pricing (you can even do this dynamically) or try to meet users halfway. The thing that companies like this do not understand is that simply changing the price structure on Japanese customers overnight with no acknowledgement of this comes off as entirely the wrong way. It ruins business relationships. Sure, Fontworks might have had a compelling product, but part of the product was their domestic presence.

Now the choice is realistically between Monotype (doesn't really understand the Japanese market) and DynaComware (Taiwan-based, but has previously interacted with Japanese companies). I wonder where their customers will go on short notice? As is mentioned, at least one company switched to DynaComware. SEGA's rhythm games contain both DynaFont (DynaComware) and Fontworks fonts, for example.

Basically, if you're going to raise prices, at least do something about the fact that your core market is heavily relationship dependent and won't take kindly to a sudden rug pull.
by ok123456 | 2025-12-03 05:14:53+00:00
> index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers

The horrible Wix sites most restaurants end up using are likely less accessible than a PDF. The Adobe PDF reader can reflow text.

> also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks

The average wysiwyg site builder produces bundles that are an order of magnitude larger than a PDF menu. Also, the PDF is easier to cache correctly and can be easily saved for offline access.
by boie0025 | 2025-12-03 05:15:09+00:00
I appreciate this narrative; relatable to me in how I have experienced and watched others around me experience the last few years. It's as if we're all kinda-sorta following a similar "Dunning–Kruger effect" curve at the same time. It feels similar to growing up mucking around with a ppp connection and Netscape in some regards. I'll stretch it: "multimodal", meet your distant analog "hypermedia".
by shagie | 2025-12-03 05:15:37+00:00
> Professional engineering associations between civil engineers and chemical engineers?

One takes the FE exam ( https://ncees.org/exams/fe-exam/ ). You will note at the bottom of the page "FE Chemical" and "FE Civil" which are two different exams.

Then you have an apprenticeship for four years as an Engineer in Training (EIT).

Following, that, you take the PE exam. https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/ You will note that the PE exams are even more specialized to the field.

Depending on the state you are licensed in (states tend to have reciprocal licensing - but not necessarily and not necessarily for all fields). For example, if you were licensed in Washington, you would need to pass another exam specific to California to work for a California firm.

Furthermore, there is the continuing education requirements (that are different for each state). https://www.pdhengineer.com/pe-continuing-education-requirem...

You have to take 30 hours of certified study in your field across every two years. This isn't a lot, but people tend to fuss about "why do CS people keep being expected to learn on our own?" ... Well, if we were Professional Engineers it wouldn't just be an expectation - it would be a requirement to maintain the license. You will again note the domain of the professional development is different - so civil and mechanical engineers aren't necessarily taking the same types of classes.

These requirements are set by the state licensure and part of legislative processes.
How can I create a secure Gmail backup without losing attachments?
by carlosjames | 2025-12-03 05:16:48+00:00
To maintain original formatting, structure, and attachments, it’s best to use a reliable backup utility. The MailsDaddy Gmail Backup Tool preserves all email properties exactly as they are and exports them cleanly to your preferred file format. This method is ideal for users who want a complete, accurate Gmail email backup for long-term storage or migration to other email platforms.
by carlosjames | 2025-12-03 05:17:32+00:00
To maintain original formatting, structure, and attachments, it’s best to use a reliable backup utility. The MailsDaddy Gmail Backup Tool preserves all email properties exactly as they are and exports them cleanly to your preferred file format. This method is ideal for users who want a complete, accurate Gmail email backup for long-term storage or migration to other email platforms.
by itishappy | 2025-12-03 05:18:49+00:00
Here's a minimal python translation of the important bits:

class Reader: def __init__(self, func): self.run = func def pure(x): return Reader(lambda _: x) def bind(self, f): return Reader(lambda env: f(self.run(env)).run(env)) ask = Reader(lambda env: env) def calc(): return ask.bind(lambda input_str: Reader.pure(len(input_str))) test = calc().run("test") print(test)

Admittedly this is a bit unwieldy in Python. Haskell's `do` notation desugars to repeated binds (and therefore requires something to be a Monad), and does a lot of handiwork.

-- this: calc :: Reader String Int calc = do input <- ask pure $ length input -- translates to: calc' :: Reader String Int calc' = ask >>= (\input -> pure $ length input)
by lmm | 2025-12-03 05:18:58+00:00
> Can you explain why a low-hanging optimization that would reduce costs by 90% without reducing perceived value hasn't been implemented?

Because the industry is running on VC funny-money where there is nothing to be gained by reducing costs.

(A similar feature was included in GPT-5 a couple of weeks ago actually, which probably says something about where we are in the cycle)
by crooked-v | 2025-12-03 05:19:29+00:00
The bigger issue here isn't the pricing, it's the 25,000 max users added to the licenses, which means that anyone who can genuinely afford these fonts isn't actually allowed to use them.

Edit: This paragraph was incorrect:

The fonts affected apparently include ones like the main Japanese language font used by the game Genshin Impact, which has 2.8 million daily users worldwide (no idea of the Japanese user count specifically, but I'm sure it's over 25,000).

I was wrong about Genshin Impact there. That said, I'm sure you can see the effect with, well, literally any video game or app that uses one of those fonts (including internationally with localization options). Either you're too small to afford it, or you can afford it but you have too many users.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-12-03 05:20:45+00:00
What are you talking about? It wasn't "faked" that Modi, one of the icons of Hindutva, was likely complacent or negligent or connected to the Hindutva MLAs and MPs who were on handing out swords to a Hindutva-influenced mob...

Even if he truly was never involved, it's not a hit job or a con or a conspiracy to frame him, his political party members were involved personally and he promoted rhetoric very close to theirs. Any normal person would connect the two
by socketcluster | 2025-12-03 05:21:11+00:00
Bun is pretty cool. I maintain a Node.js library and updated my Node.js engine version and my library just didn't work on the latest version... In frustration, I decided to try Bun for the first time... I had never used it before but my library worked straight away, no warnings, no errors. I have never seen that level of compatibility before when a library works better with an alternative engine than the one it was designed for.

I did end up fixing Node.js compatibility later but it was extra work. Felt like they just created busy-work. Node.js maintainers should stop deprecating perfectly good features and complicating their modules.
by rendaw | 2025-12-03 05:21:15+00:00
I had Code Complete (uh, I think?) and stuff like using early returns and consistency with conditional clauses (negative or positive first) was an interesting way of looking at software. I don't think I ever read the full book though.

> Am I right? I think I am; but you may disagree. That's OK.

The blog author says these are okay, but I think these are a bad cop-out too. If it's okay to disagree, what you're saying is fundamentally worthless. If what you're saying has merit, would improve code and the lives of people working on it, then it's worth working until people see the merits of what you're saying.

If you're writing a whole book about how people should do something different but then you waffle off, I'm definitely not going to spend effort reading the book.

> assertTrue(b.compareTo(a) == 1); // b < a

I think there are definitely places where comments are useful (providing domain context, definitions, documenting invariants on fields, separating code sections and communicating general intent, etc).

I think reading code is a critical skill though, and a lot of people use comments as a way to avoid that, and I do think there are issues when you do a soft-duplication of the code in the comment. For instance, if the above code had `== 0` would anyone notice?

The ascii diagram thing seems bad to me. I'd be absolutely terrified of having to modify that diagram if something changed (did they use some external program to generate it then copy and paste? what program? can it round trip? Or did they spend hours fiddling with spacing to make everything line up?) People look at code on various width screens, and it's going to wrap and stop being a diagram and instead become a paragraph of gibberish.

The fact that programming languages don't support actual diagrams in comments is a language failure, but I think practically you should stick to prose and if you need diagrams, store it externally as an image or maybe mermaid in a markdown document or something.

And I disagree on commented out code. I've seen too many MRs containing every experiment the author did on the way to producing their final draft, commented out. Commenting out MRs are a way to avoid committing to keeping or deleting code.

Commented out code rots - nobody's going to touch the commented out code when refactoring. At best people will ignore it, and it'll just be noise that gets in the way. At worst people will read it, missing the context from when it was actually functional, maybe getting confused about how various constructs work now based on code from a different era.

The code is already in git if you really need to get it back (as a bonus, with all associated context), there's no point to keeping it around as a comment too.
by addaon | 2025-12-03 05:22:20+00:00
I'm a huge fan of GaN (see the current front page discussion of LiDAR), but 99% at 500 W at 12 V is hard. 3 milliohm in the inductor will eat up 100% of your budget, without accounting for any switching losses. Like most Linear parts, the LTC7820 is impressive, fits a niche, and is too expensive for most applications -- but when you need it, it's good to know it's there.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-12-03 05:22:26+00:00
I posted this example before but academic papers on algorithms often have pseudo code but no actual code.

I thought it would be handy to use AI to make the code from the paper so a few months ago I tried to use Claude (not GPT, because I only have access to Claude) to recreate C++ code to implement the algorithms in this paper as practice for me in LLM use and it didn’t go well.

https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/chen/graph/graph.pdf
by JSR_FDED | 2025-12-03 05:22:43+00:00
I’ve also recently been through the challenge of AI-enhanced (semantic) search. Ordering the results is very, very necessary. It’s both art and science, and absolutely requires domain knowledge.

From the article, these are the heuristics the OP applied for searching Apple documentation:

* Core types over extensions - View ranks above View+Accessibility * URL depth analysis - /documentation/swiftui/view beats /documentation/swiftui/view/some/nested/thing * Title pattern detection - Exact matches surface first * Modern over deprecated - Current APIs rank higher
by lmm | 2025-12-03 05:23:24+00:00
> Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ...

Many of those are acquisitions. In-house developed ones tend to be the most marginal on that list, and many of their most visibly high-effort in-house products have been dramatic failures (e.g. Google+, Glass, Fiber).
by shizcakes | 2025-12-03 05:23:26+00:00
Unfortunately DigiCert has gone way downhill.

We pulled all of our business after they failed to renew a cert with 30d(!!!) notice and got themselves stuck in a loop of useless org re-validations.

They were completely unresponsive and wasted dozens of hours of our time trying to rectify the situation before we pulled the plug and switched everything to ACME. I still can’t believe we wasted so much time and money with them.
by raincole | 2025-12-03 05:23:28+00:00
AI fonts are nothing new. But you still need someone to manually check them and it's never one-shot. It makes no economical sense to do that instead of buying commercial fonts, which are ready-to-use immediately, when they only cost a few hundred dollars.

The price rising and licensing issue will only do one thing: pushing people to AI. Perhaps they see it as inevitable so they're trying to milk the last batch of customers though.
by vunderba | 2025-12-03 05:23:32+00:00
My last decent PC laptop was a Lenovo Thinkpad T530. That thing was a chunky black brick and felt like it was made from recycled Soviet-era tanks. Super modular, easy to upgrade RAM, drives, etc.

I got practically 10 years out of it. My next machine was a Dell XPS (Infinity Edge) laptop. I ordered it direct from Dell, unboxed it, turned it on and let it run the standard set of Windows updates. Came back an hour later and it was hung in a BSOD state. Rebooted and everything seemed to be working smoothly again but it was... concerning so I left it running overnight. Came back to YET ANOTHER BSOD the next morning and was like F### this.

Immediately RMA and sent it back. If your QC is a hot circle of garbage for a nearly $3000 machine then I have zero faith in your company.
by dr_kretyn | 2025-12-03 05:24:24+00:00
Personally I find the current Google products mediocre almost on all aspects. The killer feature of chat bots is voice chat and ChatGPT works great, and Gemini is extremely quiet without a way to increase volume. It's also difficult to figure out how to sign up for Gemini, or even the keyboard that I'm typing is making so many incorrect predictions. I just don't trust Google. To me they're pure marketing and their engineering excellence ended a few years ago.
by cyphar | 2025-12-03 05:25:07+00:00
There are quite a few open source or royalty free Japanese fonts (Google Fonts has 50[1]).

But, as everyone else has mentioned, font usage in games (and most creative visual works) is more particular than just the bare minimum of "does it actually render the glyphs". Imagine if all text in your favourite game was all Times New Roman, it would make the game worse.

[1]: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-03 05:27:37+00:00
I’ve got a question to all of the people who had PCs back then, were audio cards that expensive that it wasn’t worth just buying one if you had any interest in gaming?

Just doing a little research it was like $80 - $100 to add it.

I do remember back then that the motto was for PCs that “the computer wanted was always $2000”.

My first time having an x86 PC was in 1994 when I bought the 486DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card for my PowerMac 6100/60. It had a SoundBlaster daughtercard.
by themafia | 2025-12-03 05:27:54+00:00
It's the idea of buying it that's nonsensical. I'm not sure how you could realistically use this thing long term. Someone has to sort through the data, spot trends, and offer competent advice. Presumably once you have your diet under control then there is no further need of this bowl level analysis.

If you continue to have GI issues anyways, perhaps due to genetic causes, then what is constant surveillance of the situation -- at $7,200/year -- going to improve?
by grimblee | 2025-12-03 05:28:40+00:00
There's always that threath when we talk about fairer taxation, but let's not forget that the netherland (or any country for that matter) is a market that capital makes money from. If they leave, they won't be able to continue making money there, it would be a waste down the line. And I won't believe that fairer taxation will make it unprofitable, ot will be less interesting for the big ones but they'll stay because they're still making big bucks nonetheless.
by riedel | 2025-12-03 05:29:10+00:00
The license before was attractive before. I guess they will be switching. Maybe also to free fonts. From the article: >UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use.

It is that existing annually paid licences are converted. The extra work for existing titles is the problem. And:

> The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.
by mk89 | 2025-12-03 05:29:11+00:00
> Completely false on so many levels.

You're reading this like "I am building my website with Wordpress". However, it's not a false statement.

Did you develop your own compiler / interpreter? Did you develop all the libs to parse json, run an http server, etc? Did you develop redis/postgresql...?

Most software (even commercial one) relies on open source libraries / products, so in theory you really never start from scratch.

...overall, I agree it's a weird interview, though. I guess it's the kind of things made to just convince people it's important to get funds.
by MartyD | 2025-12-03 05:29:52+00:00
Great questions! On getting AI engines to prioritize CoThou profiles: It's a combination of signals, not a single trick: Yes, schema.org (Organization, Person, Article schemas) plus JSON-LD. AI parsers love machine-readable structure. In addition Subdomain structure (company.cothou.com and john.cothou.com) creates clear attribution. I'm also working on verification badges (domain ownership, ORCID for researchers) to build trust and Semantic clarity, where I enforce consistent entity resolution (company names, people, topics). When an AI engine searches for "Acme Corp," it finds one authoritative, structured source instead of scattered mentions. It's quite complex but it works. Try "Search for Aiobis" for example to see how a verified company appears.

On the MoE model and conflicting information: You've hit the core challenge. My approach: CoThou doesn't replace fact-checking, it's a tool for presenting your version alongside existing sources. If someone asks ChatGPT about your company, ideally it will say: "According to their official CoThou profile with a link, they claim X. Other sources say Y." We're not trying to suppress conflicting info. We're giving businesses a canonical source so AI engines have something authoritative to cite in addition to Wikipedia, news, etc. For researchers: Academia already has this solved—peer review, citations, ORCID. We're just making that structured data accessible to AI parsers.

The harder problem is bad actors, someone could create a profile with false claims but i'm working on it: Right now, we rely on - requiring citations and - domain verification for businesses.

Long-term, we're exploring reputation scoring and community flagging. Does that answer it, or should I dig deeper into any part? —Marty
by rich_sasha | 2025-12-03 05:31:13+00:00
I concur that sqlite is quite amazing. That said, I was a heavy user and have grown some skepticism as well:

- it is not that hard to lock the db. Usually killing the process that caused the deadlock solves the issue - but you need to identify it / monitor for it. And yes, it happens with WAL too

- but when it does happen, it is quite scary. Simply, anything that touches your DB suddenly stops working - can't read, can't write.

- in some cases, WAL does not checkpoint. This leads to drastic growth in the size of the WAL file, and down the line in catastrophic slowdown of queries - things that take 10ms suddenly take 10 seconds. In my particular case, no tweaking of SQLite params fixed it. I had to monitor for it, and periodically force WAL file to be rolled into the main DB.

- all of this gets harder on Windows, where eg.you cannot just 'lsof' a file.

- the performance stats change somewhat for the worse in the cloud on drives that look local but actually aren't. Of course that is not sqlite's fault, but the blazing fast performance doesn't apply to all commonly encountered environments that look like real local drives.

I'm not dissing SQLite, I use it despite these shortcomings. Equally, I'm happy to reach for something like Postgres, which, well, hasn't burned me yet.

EDIT I should add that despite all this I never managed to corrupt the DB, or break any of the SQL promises - never messed up indices, never saw broken ACID compliance etc. And that's a massive endorsement, on reflection.
by themafia | 2025-12-03 05:32:37+00:00
> what the super anti-ai people will do.

Just not use it. I couldn't care less if other people spend hours prompt engineering to get something that approaches useful output. If they want their reputation staked on it's output that's on them. The results are already in and they're not pretty.

I just personally think it's absurd to spend trillions of dollars and watts to create an advanced spell checker. Even more so to see this as a "revolution" of any sort or to not expect a new AI-winter once this bubble pops.
by MartyD | 2025-12-03 05:35:10+00:00
You're absolutely right to be concerned, this is something I think about constantly.

The reality is: bad actors don't need to reverse-engineer anything. AI engines already prioritize structured, citable content. Anyone can spin up a website with schema.org markup and fake citations. The barrier is low.

What makes this hard to abuse at scale:

1. Domain verification – For businesses, we require proof of domain ownership. You can't claim to be Apple unless you control apple.com or an official subdomain or work at apple respectively having @apple.com business mail.

2. Citation requirements – Claims need links to primary sources. AI engines cross-reference. If your "citations" point to non-existent papers or contradict other sources, you lose authority fast.

3. Reputation signals – We're building verification badges (ORCID for researchers, business registries, etc.). Over time, verified profiles will rank higher.

But you've identified the fundamental tension: any system that makes it easier for legitimate businesses to be cited also makes it easier for bad actors. This is the same problem Google faced in the '90s, Wikipedia deals with daily, and AI engines are grappling with now.

Long-term solutions I'm exploring:

- Community flagging + reputation scoring - Integration with trust registries (DUNS, ORCID, Crossref DOIs) - Transparent edit histories (like Wikipedia)

The goal isn't to be manipulation-proof, nothing is. It's to make CoThou profiles more trustworthy than the alternatives (random blogs, SEO spam, outdated info).

What would you add? This is an evolving problem and I'd love HN's input. —Marty
by lmm | 2025-12-03 05:35:27+00:00
> Also, demand wasn't over-estimated in the 2000s. This is all ex-post reasoning you use data from 2002 to say...well, this ended up being wrong.

Well, the estimate was higher than the reality, by definition it was over-estimated. They built out as if the tech boom was going to go on forever, and of course it didn't. You can argue that they made the best estimates they could with the information available, but ultimately it's still true that their estimates were wrong.