MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jimmy_de_Groot | 2025-12-06 10:04:02+00:00
This was a fascinating read that perfectly illustrates how language debates are never just about words or grammar. They're about identity, power, and whose story gets to be the "correct" one. The passion surrounding a "small" language reveals how deeply tied it is to a community's sense of self and history. It's a proxy for much larger cultural and political battles.
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-12-06 10:04:25+00:00
Interesting. I have always felt I am missing out on not using tools like Mathematica or MatLab. I see some people doing everything using MatLab, including building GUI and DL models, which I found surprising for a single software suite, and - nowadays - one that is quite affordable (at least the home edition).

Mathematica seems a little pricey but maybe it would motivate me to learn more math.

I would love to read what non-mathematicians use MatLab, Mathematica, and Maple for.
by M95D | 2025-12-06 10:04:37+00:00
Wine wrapped installers for ... which distro? They ship a shell script that extracts the linux game binaries to user's home dir. Works on all linuxes.

GOG ships what's available. If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?

Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux. If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".

BTW, you can set up your linux to directly execute Windows binaries using binfmt_misc, but that may also be too hard for some...
by jasode | 2025-12-06 10:04:40+00:00
>1) None of those had an Em dash

I was responding in particular to the "you write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?" ... which would be a speech pattern people hear. In the audio case, it doesn't matter what punctuation symbol separates the "it isn't/it's" pattern because the comma or em dash would be invisible.

E.g. a blog author also complains about "it isn't/it's" separated by a comma here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...

>There are maybe 4 unique examples in the search over the past 15 years,

No, (1) the Algolia search engine HN uses is not exhaustive and always returns incomplete results, and (2) I couldn't construct a regex to capture all occurrences. It didn't capture the dozens of times I used it before 2022.

More pre-2022 examples that match the "it isn't/it's" pattern that the blog author is complaining about :

2012 It Isn't Just Buzz, It's About Relationships : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567529

2019 It Isn’t the Kids. It’s the Cost of Raising Them : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19468214

2021 It isn't Facebook, it's us : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29402146

2017 It isn't trig, or geometry, or analysis: it's maths : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310575

The same gp mentioned that it's also common in "ad copy". That's also true with the famous Navy's "It's not just a job. It's an adventure.". E.g. 1981 tv commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc9g2tagYms

That's a slogan people heard rather than read with an em dash. LLM engines picked up on a common phrasing used for decades.
by Jahcks | 2025-12-06 10:05:05+00:00
Hey everyone, I have been working on something new for Android users who hate opening the Recents screen for every small app switch. I built an app called Dsk Mode, and it turns your navigation bar into a simple desktop-style taskbar.

What it does Dsk Mode shows only the apps that are actually open and running, not your entire app history. You can tap any icon to switch instantly. You can also pin favorite apps and open a mini launcher for quick access.

There are two modes depending on how you want to use it: • Popup Mode, where the taskbar appears only when needed • Sticky Mode, where it replaces the navigation bar so the taskbar is always there

Free features include showing up to 3 open apps, pinning up to 3 favorites, switching between gesture or button based controls, mini launcher sorting, and dynamic color themes. There is also a support upgrade that unlocks unlimited open apps, unlimited pinned apps, a full launcher, and removes ads.

Who it is for People who multitask a lot, anyone tired of the Recents screen, users who like desktop-style workflows, and power users who want faster navigation.

The app uses the Accessibility Service permission only to show the taskbar over the navigation bar and to allow quick switching. No data is collected.

I have tried to add some nice animations to make it looks as native as possible, got lot of feature ideas but before that I would love to know from actual pro users on how they would want to use it!

If this sounds useful, I would love for you to try it and share feedback.

It just got published on Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.ijp.dskmod...
by NekkoDroid | 2025-12-06 10:06:26+00:00
> a crude stack ranking by lines of code is a pretty good metric for figuring out which (e.g.) 50% is the bottom.

I can write you an efficient algorithm in 2 lines or an inefficient one in 50. The metric is about as useful as a doctor checking how often someone picked up a bottle to figure out how much they drink.
by sofixa | 2025-12-06 10:06:56+00:00
> Ukrainian casualties are nothing like what Germany was inflicting on people. The latter rises to the standard. The former perhaps not.

The UN convention on prevention of genocide doesn't have any victim threshold for what counts as genocide.

> To be honest, at first I thought we had to help a European country being invaded by Russia, but over time I've realized that Europeans mostly don't want us there

Anyone using "Europeans" to broadly paint a whole continent with a single brush as expressing a singular opinion is at best extremely misinformed, at worst...

Anyways, Ukrainians very much want American support. And have been providing invaluable information on exactly how the Russians work and think in exchange for it.

In most EU member states, the majority of people, wanted US and EU side by side helping Ukraine. After all, most of those countries sent soldiers to help US kill a bunch of Iraqis, wouldn't it be nice to do it for a good cause for a change? Of course, the ~20-30-40% of Russophiles in multiple Central and Eastern European countries (like Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, etc) didn't want that, they wanted their "brothers" to win. But they're mostly irrelevant, and mostly dying off.

That's also why it's stupid to paint any war as just "it's just Europeans killing Europeans or just Africans killing Africans". How does that change anything about the war, or its casualties? Was Srebrenica not a genocide that merited being stopped just because both were Balkan peoples? Does the war in Sudan deserve no attention because it's just Africans?

But Trump and Vance have completely changed how Europeans see the US. Now everyone knows that they're no longer a partner. There is no going back on this.
by saghm | 2025-12-06 10:07:06+00:00
From the list of changes, I noticed the following:

> Revert "icuuc: Add initial dll."

> Revert "icu: Add stub dll."

In the recent 10.20 release, a number of applications I had previously been using without issue stopped working due to the change they had made to those dlls, and it took a bit of digging for for me to eventually find the solution that I needed to add new overrides for them (disabling one entirely and using the native or built-in version of the other). It's a bit mystifying to me why a breaking regression can slip into a minor release but fixing it not happen until a major release. I understand that this isn't semantic versioning, and I imagine that this is probably a case of them just happening to already have planned a major release next rather than a minor one, but it would be kind of nice if stuff like this could get fixed without having to be blocked on all of the other numerous (and much larger) changes when they're already aware of the problem and have identified the fix.
by adius | 2025-12-06 10:07:24+00:00
With all the integrated standard functions Mathematica is such an incredible tool. We really need an open source version of it. Even if we implement only 10% of the features it would be already incredible useful.

I started working on an implementation in Rust called Woxi (https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi) and I hope to find some contributors, as it is such a gargantuan task!
by sourabh86 | 2025-12-06 10:08:11+00:00
Most Git tutorials assume you’re an engineer, but with the rise in vibe coding tools, PM role is changing to a more collaborative builder role. Vibe coding PMs also need to understand branches, pull requests, code reviews, and how to collaborate effectively with dev teams. I put together a concise, no-nonsense guide that explains Git concepts using product-friendly examples and shows how PMs can use Git to vibe-code, explore repos, understand changes, and communicate better with engineers. Would love feedback from PMs, EMs, and devs: – What do PMs struggle with the most when learning Git? – Does this level of depth feel right? – What else should be added to make it truly useful in real workflows? Open to critique, improvements, and additional topic suggestions.
by seszett | 2025-12-06 10:08:56+00:00
I'm much more worried about the Ente install getting broken for some reason and my pictures being locked and lost, than a burglar stealing a hard disk in my basement.

That's why I like how Photoprism just uses my files as they are without touching them (I think immich can do that as well now, but it wasn't so in the past). I can manage the filesystem encryption myself if I want to.
by throwaway219450 | 2025-12-06 10:11:19+00:00
Some visas that are employment-limited specifically mention volunteering and charitable work as problematic. You do not need to personally gain financially. A crude way to tell is "is this an activity which someone could be paid for, even if I'm doing it for free?"

However the practical answer is ask. Some visas like the J1 allow this - even consulting, provided it meets a bunch of criteria and relevant people sign off. It's not a trivial process, but it's not outright forbidden.
by petepete | 2025-12-06 10:11:31+00:00
I was trying to follow a tutorial the other day and couldn't because the embedded images were on Imgur and it was so frustrating. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I caved, bought a 3 year PIA plan, had my router configured within about 2 minutes (actually impressed how straightforward Unifi made it) and now my browsing experience is fixed.
by saghm | 2025-12-06 10:11:58+00:00
RAM being super expensive right now is a hot topic, and I imagine people are curious about why, so anything that purports to explain that is somewhat likely to at least get a cursory look from people. Without taking a stance on either whether this is happening here, if enough people look at something and happen to think it makes sense, a lack of evidence might not be enough to prevent the narrative from taking over; otherwise, we'd never have issues with people believing false things in the first place, and that happens all the time.
by ricardobeat | 2025-12-06 10:12:05+00:00
I noticed that for the last few years, my recommendations are almost the same for every category. 'Top picks' is 60% the same as 'We think you'll love this' which is almost the same as 'Your Next Watch' which is similar to 'Award-winning movies', 'Chilly thrillers', repeat ad-infinitum. If there is a new Netflix-owned movie it will definitely be in there.

Then on top of that, similar to YouTube, half of that content are things I have already watched. HBO and Amazon are even worse in this aspect but it just drives me crazy, feels like seeing the same 100 movie options over and over for months. Has the catalog shrinked that much over the years?

I started keeping a separate list of films to watch on IMDB, but 6/10 times they are not available on any service except for rent in AppleTV.
by teekert | 2025-12-06 10:15:16+00:00
Your understanding of containers is incorrect!

Containers decouple programs from their state. The state/data live outside the container so the container itself is disposable and can be discarded and rebuild cheaply. Of course there need to be some provisions for when the state (ie schema) needs to be updated by the containerized software. But that is the same as for non-containerized services.

I'm a bit surprised this has to be explained in 2025, what field do you work in?
by lurking_swe | 2025-12-06 10:15:50+00:00
I mean, if you’re confident about security best practices, have a moderate amount of networking experience, and are a seasoned web developer, it’s not too scary at all. I realize that’s a lot of prerequisites though.

it’s not a fair comparison with Google because Google has a much bigger target on their back. There are millions of users of Google, so the value of hacking Google is very high. The value of hacking a random Immich instance is extremely low.
by defrost | 2025-12-06 10:17:08+00:00
> Trump and Vance have completely changed how Europeans see the US. Now everyone knows that they're no longer a partner. There is no going back on this.

The quietly released (no fanfare) 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America that dropped last night explicitly steers the US away from traditional European allies and embraces Russia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46171812
by adastra22 | 2025-12-06 10:19:37+00:00
Not interpolation, no. It is more like the N-gram autocomplete used to use to make typing and autocorrect suggestions in your phone. Attention js not N-gram, but you can kinda think of it as being a sparsely compressed N-gram where N=256k or whatever the context window size is. It’s not technically accurate, but it will get your intuition closer than thinking of it as interpolation.

The LLM uses attention and some other tricks (attention, it turns out, is not all you need) to build a probabilistic model of what the next token will be, which it then sampled. This is much more powerful than interpolation.
by hebelehubele | 2025-12-06 10:20:06+00:00
Agreed. I don't know anything about DLL hooks, but code looks like nonsense to me. It's trying to hook into a null pointer.

#include <windows.h> #include <detours.h> static int (WINAPI *Real_EP_RegCheckKey)(LPCSTR, LPCSTR) = NULL; int WINAPI Hooked_EP_RegCheckKey(LPCSTR name, LPCSTR key) { return 1; } BOOL APIENTRY DllMain(HMODULE hModule, DWORD reason, LPVOID lpReserved) { if (reason == DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH) { Sleep(2000); DetourTransactionBegin(); DetourUpdateThread(GetCurrentThread()); DetourAttach(&(PVOID&)Real_EP_RegCheckKey, Hooked_EP_RegCheckKey); DetourTransactionCommit(); } return TRUE; }
by JoshStrobl | 2025-12-06 10:20:19+00:00
WhatsApp works okay on my Jolla C2. Occasional annoyance with device detection (BT headphones) where it'll still end up outputting to speaker, but I haven't had that with any other Android app running via AppSupport like YouTube Music, so dunno if that's just WhatsApp being problematic.

Installed it from Aurora, an open source frontend to the Play Store.

Biggest pain-points for me with AppSupport is:

1. Lack of Bluetooth passthrough in a sane way (community workaround results in it being unavailable with host OS). 2. It does not report to apps that PIN entry is enabled, meaning some awful but important apps like Danske ID don't work.

Otherwise it does the job remarkably well. Still prefer native SFOS apps when available, however it is a small ecosystem and so depending on your usecase you may find yourself installing Android apps.
by ben_w | 2025-12-06 10:22:04+00:00
> I assumed all of the models were doing that, using at least Web Search tools.

Sometimes. The other week I was asking ChatGPT about the UK PM, and had to stop the generation early because it started ~"Prime Minister Rishi Sunak…"

The unreliability is also why techniques as simple as "ask 5 times and have it take a vote of its own answers" boost performance. Or "thinking" modes which are approximately just replacing the end token with "Wait." and continuing for ten rounds.
by hectormalot | 2025-12-06 10:22:07+00:00
> On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.

I think the parent post made a different argument:

- Centralizing most of the dependency on Cloudflare results in a major outage when something happens at Cloudflare, it is fragile because Cloudflare becomes the single point of failure. Like: Oh Cloudflare is down... oh, none of my SaaS services work anymore.

- In a world where this is not the case, we might see more outages, but they would be smaller and more contained. Like: oh, Figma is down? fine, let me pickup another task and come back to Figma once it's back up. It's also easier to work around by having alternative providers as a fallback, as they are less likely to share the same failure point.

As a result, I don't think you'll be blocked 100 hours a year in scenario 2. You may observe 100 non-blocking inconveniences per year, vs a completely blocking Cloudflare outage.

And in observed uptime, I'm not even sure these providers ever won. We're running all our auxiliary services on a decent Hetzner box with a LB. Say what you want, but that uptime is looking pretty good compared to any services relying on AWS (Oct 20, 15 hours), Cloudflare (Dec 5 (half hour), Nov 18 (3 hours)). Easier to reason about as well. Our clients are much more forgiving when we go down due to Azure/GCP/AWS/Cloudflare vs our own setup though...
by saghm | 2025-12-06 10:24:25+00:00
If the free market requires both that companies both ignore that they exist in a world with consequences and that they manage to perfectly predict future demand, that sounds more like an issue with the idea that the free market will solve everything than an issue with the market not being free enough. Otherwise, if you're not happy with the way a company acts, and you don't seem to trust that another company will come and rest their lunch for their perceived poor decisions, your only remaining remedy is to pressure them by non-economic methods to increase production, at which point you don't really believe in the free market either.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-06 10:25:20+00:00
Open source, as in corporate outsourcing software maintenance to free labour? No. Free software, as in four freedoms? Yes, because you could install your own firmware that doesn't show advertisements.

That's what the whole GPLv3 debacle was about after all.

Stallman may have not imagined this specific scenario, but he absolutely did conceive of owner-hostile software that could not be replaced.
by citizen-stig | 2025-12-06 10:26:13+00:00
> Why the focus on one single dominant player?

I don’t the answer to the all questions. But here I think it is just a way to avoid responsibility. If someone choses CDN “number 3” and it goes down, business people *might* put a blame on this person for not choosing “the best”. I am not saying it is a right approach, I just seen it happens too many times.
by balamatom | 2025-12-06 10:27:00+00:00
Oh, it absolutely can work! What you describe makes sense, I'm just not particularly optimistic that it will be allowed to happen at all. If it's a technological inevitability, what I expect to happen is for a self-defeating version of your model to be rolled out at a snail's pace, so that the people who depend on the old ways have the time to live their life, die, and be replaced by ones who'll be like "hey, this was tried last generation and didn't work" (because it wasn't actually tried). Meanwhile the people excited about it will have time to go through enough stages of grief in recursive iterations to forget what they were even excited about.
by 747fulloftapes | 2025-12-06 10:27:16+00:00
No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.)

In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
by mcv | 2025-12-06 10:27:17+00:00
Outlawing this specific scenario sounds pretty hard. I can see only two reasonable options:

* Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)

* Make sure smart-devices make extremely clear that they can be used to show ads, and include trivial instructions to disable ads

Forcing ads onto stuff we pay money for is not okay. Ads to fund free content is probably unavoidable, but even then, it needs to be clear up front what you're subjecting yourself to. Unexpected ads on devices you don't expect them from, can be confusing and disorienting for many people. For people with schizophrenia, it can clearly be dangerous.

And I think this is not just true for smart fridges, but also for those billboards at bus stops that seem stationary at first until they suddenly start to move or talk to you. Ban those please. Or make it clear upfront that they're video. Don't spring this on unsuspecting people.
by maelito | 2025-12-06 10:27:36+00:00
What I understand as "ultimate workstation" would be a smartphone that once connected by usb-C to a monitor, becomes your computer.

Then, you don't need any other device, hence "ultimate".

Convergence, Samsung Dex, lots have tried but nothing mature yet. Well, Dex is mature but closed-source and Samsung-dependent. On the linux no-android smartphone side of things, hardware is too low-cost and the phone aspects of linux too brittle.

Aurora is just a new distro...
by secret-noun | 2025-12-06 10:28:22+00:00
By putting it on your router, all your traffic is tunneled through the VPN, right?

I ask this in comparison to applying it at a finer-grained level, such as just a particular machine, or to an application, or to even a browser tab or particular domain. I feel like I would never want all my traffic VPN-ed because it is slow, there are greater privacy concerns of VPN operators, and my needs for VPNs are a cleanly-separable small chunk of my online activities.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-06 10:28:52+00:00
Training is kinda like curve fitting, but inference is not. The inference algorithm is random sampling from a next-token probability distribution.

It’s a subtle distinction, but I think an important one in this case, because if it was interpolation then genuine creativity would not be possible. But the attention mechanism results in model building in latent space, which then affects the next token distribution.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-12-06 10:31:35+00:00
You could, but would most people? Most people voluntarily subject themselves to garbage adware-ridden SmartTVs even though this is a problem you can solve with a £12 dongle and no software installation at all. If the humble HDMI cable defeats the average person’s technical ability, what difference would it make if they could technically install their own firmware?
by sofixa | 2025-12-06 10:32:30+00:00
I really hate them. Once again, Google have completely failed to consider multi-lingual people. Like Google search, even if you explicitly tell it what languages it should show results in, it's often wrong and only gives results in Russian when searching in Cyrillic, even for words that do not exist in Russian but do in the language defined in the settings.

Also the voice is pretty unemotional and nothing to do with the original voice. And it being a default that you can't even seem to disable...
by hodgesrm | 2025-12-06 10:33:36+00:00
I should mention that what pushed me over the edge was discovering that the FP problem was [among other things] triggered by a user comment that was then suppressed. However, it had a helpful message that I could solve the problem by uploading identification information to a website somewhere that I've never heard of.

Given the rate at which those sites are hacked, that's basically the following, simple procedure:

Step 1: Share your identifying information with the entire Internet.