MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codingdave | 2025-12-25 12:04:17+00:00
At first glance, no, this doesn't make sense. You cannot be cheaper than your cost of doing business, otherwise you go bankrupt, non-profit or not. So if you are built on AWS, you cannot be cheaper than AWS. If you use their cheapest tier, you put the same limitations on your customers as that cheapest tier.

The way non-profits offer free or cheap services is not by having a cheaper business model, it is by getting their money from donations. But that means you need to be cultivating donors, always. Instead of having a few major funding rounds with a few investors, you dedicate what will feel like your entire life to finding people to donate small amounts to keep you running. Get enough donors and you can offer cheaper services.

At therein lies the catch - people with money are bombarded with people asking for money all the time. Many of them do give donations, but you are competing with charities who bring good deeds to the world, research cures for pesky diseases and whatnot. Your pitch to them is going to be what? "Instead of curing cancer, give me your money and I'll help people store their media"

In all honesty, the first step is to go dig deep into how non-profits actually work. Because you don't seem to be really driving to run a non-profit, you seem to be looking for a way to sell a wrapper app around S3's glacier tier, and that is absolutely the kind of thing you should just keep doing as an indy dev, not wrap all the bureaucracy and donation development of a non-profit into it.
by bluescrn | 2025-12-25 12:04:38+00:00
I think I've still got a Compaq iPaq in my collection of obsolete gadgets, but last time I tried it the battery wouldn't hold a charge at all.

More disappointingly, other gadgets of a similar era - such as a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox and a GP32 handheld are suffering from flash memory losing it's contents (the firmware), bricking the devices :(
by hogrug | 2025-12-25 12:05:42+00:00
It's a mixed bag.. If you spend much time in a poorly reviewed ecosystem then you are quickly taught that if you try to make things work in their broken crap you will lose a lot of time and have no code to demonstrate you were working at all.

If you always inject the same repair layer approach of your own crap then you ship more reliably and have your pleased client and your lock-in. The pleased client then has to decide if they should listen to a replacement who says you are insane but can't seem to ship anything.
by torginus | 2025-12-25 12:07:04+00:00
Afaik Xorg is 'only' like ~500k lines of code, which is not huge by the standards of large porjects. In fact, one of the major counter arguments against Wayland, is that the compositor + a few core libs, like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code (which has a ton of unused cruft).
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-25 12:07:32+00:00
> “Mattermost only got where it is today because of the open-source community.”

Not really? FOSS communities overestimate their importance on a daily basis.

Case in point: Linux. 90%+ of commits were corporate sponsored… in 2004. The pure community member does almost nothing of importance for Linux anymore; or any of these projects.
by myself248 | 2025-12-25 12:08:04+00:00
Right, but there's no way to search for them, that I've found. Even if a machine has multiple USB-C ports, the only way to ascertain that they're on both sides is to find photos of both sides. It's not like a specific amount of RAM that you can just click a checkbox to filter by.

And then you have to assume that the photos depict the actual model and variant you're getting, which is not always the case. It'd be a hard row to hoe, to return a machine based on "it had all the same ports it claimed, but in different places"...
by metalman | 2025-12-25 12:08:21+00:00
they call AI "visual elevator music"

I call it intermitent wipers for everything.

reality is already 100% saturated, and we are optimised to function and create within the limits imposed.

take sugar, a white crystaine substance that can not be further concentrated, the only way to get a bigger neural bang is to go to another white crystaline substance, with more bang, and so on, till now we have substances where the bang is unsurvivable.
this is reality, it applies to visual, auditory, and all of our senses and capabilities, total saturation......now, that does not mean that humans are not gready fucks who want more, more, more, but AI has to give us a greater ability to absorb, more, percieve more, survive more, not just a tired spin on shiny.
by dbattaglia | 2025-12-25 12:08:39+00:00
> Also, people lack the motivation to maintain existing stuff, because you don't get paid more or promoted doing this. Therefore, mini frameworks often die with the departure of the original authors, unless it has gained major adoption before that, which happens less likely than not.

I wonder how much of the problem stated in the article is actually a result of this resume-driven development style? The author says how the mini-framework was pushed by their engineering manager, I know it's cynical but I assume the real goal of the project was for the manager and engineers building the framework to have something fancy to show for their next promotion packet.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-25 12:08:58+00:00
He was Prince Andrew back then. It's yet another example of how the silly British press falls into line whenever Buck House tells it to.

The British media also attempted to bury this story several times but couldn't, because it was so big in the USA, and Americans don't take orders from them. The BBC royal coverage has never been anything but propaganda and flattery.

Anyway, the name should be Windsor-Mountbatten, not the other way round (or the string of German names they were anglicised from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg etc)
by ultratalk | 2025-12-25 12:09:08+00:00
This is an amazing idea, with many potential use cases, but I feel like, for the layman, a major use case of cloud storage systems like Google Drive and iCloud is the ability to access the same files from multiple devices. This, while being a pretty cool system for backup and restore (and very economical!), is not really as much of a concern for the average user of Google Drive and iCloud, because based on what I've understood, it doesn't allow other devices to read data from the cloud for local viewing. Then again, I might be wrong, and it might be pretty useful for the average user.
by cthalupa | 2025-12-25 12:09:25+00:00
> will reliably flag kill any reference to Somali healthcare fraud in Minnesota

Almost certainly because of how these tend to get framed.

The Minnesota situation involves, at this point, a couple dozen bad actors being charged. Most of them are Somali.

Now, we can look at this more than one way, but mostly branching off from two distinct paths:

One - that there is some specific relationship between many of these people that resulted in them sharing information between each other and becoming involved. The people doing the fraud met each other in the same community, so that's the proximal cause for their relationship, but we take no value judgment on the community on the whole or try to extrapolate it beyond that, the same way we would not try to extrapolate a out the actions of the mafia to every Italian person in the country.

Two - we could frame it as some sort of immigration issue and make it seem like these actions reflect on the 80,000 other Somali people in the state and the broader immigration conversation in this country, where we try to superimpose the crimes of the few onto a much larger group where the vast majority had nothing to do with any of this.

One allows for discussion in a reasonable manner without getting politically charged. The other incites quite a lot of discord because it is fundamentally a bad faith argument, meant to bolster a political ideology.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-12-25 12:10:15+00:00
I think that the photos they have on their front page should be enough to tell you who is their target market.

I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
by fidotron | 2025-12-25 12:10:32+00:00
Just look at how the responses in here go to even the slightest criticism of the EU. (Particularly my original reply in this thread, which was even flagged for a long time).

The point here is only geopolitical competition with the US has kept the EU remotely honest. They clearly cannot be trusted to enforce their own laws when it suits powerful entities within, and will lie to their population about doing so until it becomes impossible to hide.

Obviously the same applies to other geopolitical actors too. The EU trend towards bureaucratic rule by diktat is astounding though, and it's rapidly getting all the downsides of the Chinese system and none of the upside.
by zenmac | 2025-12-25 12:11:04+00:00
Never needed the CSRF and assumed that cookies was always SameSite, but can see that it was introduced in 2016. Just had the sitename put into the value of the cookie since, and never really needed to think about that.

Just feels like all these http specs are super duck tapped together. I guess that is only way to ensure mass adoption for new devs and now vibe coders.
by xg15 | 2025-12-25 12:11:31+00:00
There was a recent talk from CCC that got a bit deeper into Peter Thiel's "Antichrist" ideology and where it comes from.

The bottom line of that talk seemed even worse: That for some tech leaders, the general wellbeing of the population or "classical" arguments for progress such as improving living conditions and advancing mutual understanding aren't even orthogonal to their goals but are explicit anti-goals: Because a world with too much wellbeing and too little conflict would ostensibly lead to stagnation, loss of freedom and innovation and the state of what Thiel termed the "Antichrist".

Too much conflict is bad as well because it carries the risk of complete destruction, so they'd aim for some kind of ideal level of conflict and suffering in the world, like some sort of twisted inflation target.
by gostsamo | 2025-12-25 12:12:10+00:00
Yep, worker's rights, universal health care, women's rights (voting, divorce, abortion, generous maternity leave). Compared to Switzerland which allowed women voting rights in the seventies, communism was putting uncomfortable comparisons at some moments. If you wonder why communism was attractive, it wasn't just because of propaganda or because people were stupid, but because communism was addressing actual problems of the time that the christian conservative establishment of the west was preferring not to handle.

The fact that you put the tatars as the only thing to know about communism shows that you've learned one thing and found it sufficient. At the same time, the link you share shows how later communist leaders acknowledged Stalin's actions as a crime... I'm not here to defend communism though (mainly because it is not defendable), just to provide a perspective beyond the standard tropes.
by AlphaGeekZulu | 2025-12-25 12:12:25+00:00
Exactly!

My original intent was to show up a paradoxon: A group of 5 European NGO activists has been put under a travel ban by the US yesterday. Two of them are german members of an organisation called "HateAid", which provides psychological and legal support for victims of hate speech. They are blamed for supporting Internet censorship (= terrorism in US perception) and are therefore denied entry to the US.

Or, in other words:
"We (US) censor them (EU) for supporting censorship."

BTW: I did some research about EU journalists or citizens losing bank access or being put under travel restrictions by administration. I couldn't find an example. Would be great if you could provide some background!
by Neywiny | 2025-12-25 12:12:35+00:00
I've had to take a beat to find the right words as all the frustration in the issue ticket impacted me too which has left a very bad taste in my mouth after being initially curious and open to the new feature.

I think you're doing a disservice to newcomers by creating a new method of autocompletion. And I say that as somebody who has mentored a lot of newcomers in high school, University, and now professionally. Very often, including just yesterday, I'll hear something like "I don't really know how to use [very standard thing], we had [esoteric helper] instead." Yesterday it was for makefiles. Their school just abstracted it away to make it easier for them, so they don't know how to make a simple makefile to compile a few source files together. Or literally any other build system, including cmake. So, Lord have mercy on my soul if I have a new hire tell me "I don't know how to use the regular terminals. All I can use is VSCode's terminal." I think sometimes things should be hard, but I don't think terminal autocomplete is very hard. Just hit tab a few times and it'll do its thing or -h.

Where it might come in handy, and I haven't tested this, is programs that haven't registered their completions. For example, I'm often cross compiling, and it would be nice if it knew that ...-objcopy had the same completion as the host objcopy. But I am not going to take the hit of the bad pathing just for that.

I'll conclude with a lesson in biases: your insiders are biased. You need to recognize that only egregious errors might be statistically significant. Not only are they more power users, they're new feature hunters, and more than that, they want new VSCode features. Also, that's very creepy y'all are looking at my command success rate even though I'm not an insider. And if you look at the issue ticket, you'll see that a lot of the issues wouldn't cause failure. `Git add` on the wrong file isn't a negative return code, and they might just muscle memory press enter before seeing they need to edit. A possibly better metric is how many times did the user run the same command up to the completion point. But please don't collect that data, that's creepy. I'm going to have to look through my settings to try and turn that all off.
by yupsurprise | 2025-12-25 12:12:54+00:00
Yes, each of the big techs has teams that just work on the build systems, however it should also be noted that none of the big tech use the open source Bazel, Google uses Blaze internally which is what Bazel is derived from, Amazon uses Brazil which has nothing to do with Bazel and Meta uses Buck, which I know nothing of so I won't comment on it.

The major issue I found when trying to use Bazel was that its essentially a build system without specific rules for each language, hence rules support for each specific language is dependant on each language's specific community, most of which are quite tiny, and mostly maintained by upstreaming changes from their individual companies, servicing their own needs, hence a lot of work is required to make it work for your own company's needs.
by mgaunard | 2025-12-25 12:13:32+00:00
Personally, I write my own build systems.

Any readily available build system is more of a meta-language onto which you code your own logic, but with limited control and capabilities. Might as well take control of the whole stack in a real programming language.

Building my own build system lets me optimize my workflow end-to-end, from modular version management, packaging and releasing, building and testing, tightly integrating whatever tool or reporting I want, all seamlessly under the same umbrella.

I mostly do C++, Assembly, eBPF, Python (including C++ Python modules), and multi-stage codegen on Linux, so I haven't really looked at the complexity of other languages or platforms.
by atgreen | 2025-12-25 12:14:09+00:00
Hey pjmlp -- your comment inspired me to do some additional work. From the text console, you can run the ,brower command and it will open up your browser with a REPL on the same lisp image. The browser-based REPL has many interesting features .. too many to mention here. Please check it out again at https://github.com/atgreen/icl Thank you!
by fodkodrasz | 2025-12-25 12:14:19+00:00
The Intel–Nvidia collaboration has just received the green light from the competition authority, with Nvidia purchasing a 4% stake.

Nvidia is expected to sell GPU intellectual property at a bargain to the entry-level segment, making it unprofitable for Intel to develop a competitive product range. This way, Intel would lack both the competence and the infrastructure internally to eventually break Nvidia’s market share in the higher segments.
by muzani | 2025-12-25 12:14:56+00:00
Muslim majority country here (Malaysia).

Christmas day is a public holiday, and so is New Year's. It's also the end of the year when most people want to use up their paid time off. Nobody likes having a holiday on two Thursdays followed by work on Friday. Nor do we want to encourage people to carry vacation days to the next year. So we're happy to take the bulk time off at least, and it gives time for people to arrange school paperwork.

It is technically a sin in Islam to celebrate other religious holidays. Heck, if you want to go deep into the dogma, everything besides the two Eids shouldn't be celebrated and that includes Prophet Muhammad's birthday and New Year's. But you'll see very heated debates about this that I won't go into. Christmas lies in a weird place on this spectrum. Some say Abrahamic holidays are fine, some say most 'Islamic' holidays are blasphemy. People argue about the Santa hats too.

However, Christmas food is perfectly halal. Turkey, peppermint, non-alcoholic egg nog, various desserts. You'll see "end of year" dinners by Muslim restaurants that cater to this.

Culturally, many of us do have Christian family and friends. So it is a convenient time to meet family and just have an excuse to cook complex Western dishes once a year.

Gift giving is rare. You'll see secret Santa stuff at the workplace and in schools. 90% of people in the region do not have disposable income, so expensive gifts are frowned on, as they create pressure. Most are under $25, like fancy soap, snacks, chocolate, a power bank. There's also a culture where charity should be hidden, so stuff usually gets put in a box with no names and the boxes are pseudorandomly distributed.
by chaostheory | 2025-12-25 12:15:20+00:00
It’s a detailed review with annoying conclusions.

While it has improved a lot over the years, the core issue is that Linux still doesn’t work well on laptops compared to other OS’s. 99.99% of the time you’re not going to get a “premium” laptop running Linux for this reason

The other reason, he’s not getting a “premium” experience is that he’s buying a laptop built for repairability and upgradability. You’re going to have a lot of tradeoffs for that.

IMO the only way to have a “premium” laptop experience with Linux, is to buy a Mac and run Linux in either a container or VM. It’s an understatement to say that the author is not being realistic.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-12-25 12:15:29+00:00
Everything you mentioned in that list in people who can pay. As opposed to people who code and they use what they code, and furthermore share it with other people who also code and use what they code.

It's "open source" so that they save on developer costs, not for ideological reasons, and you can tell from the photos on their front page - that's what I was implying.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-25 12:16:09+00:00
Happy Christmas, folks!

> please have some humanity about the homeless

In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas.

Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have very specialized and advanced skills, which can sometimes be applicable to making a living (like programming, or visual design).

However, we're "different," which often leads to being shunned/traumatized by neurotypicals. I got used to folks eventually walking away from relationships, for no discernible reason. Used to really bother me, until I figured it out. Now, I just take it in stride, and appreciate whatever time I get to spend with folks. If anyone has seen The Accountant (the first one), there's a scene, near the end, where Ben Affleck's character is considering putting the moves on Anna Kendrick's character, but remembers his father, admonishing him that people will always end up being frightened of "the difference," and he sneaks out, instead. That scene almost brought me to tears, I could relate so well.

For some folks, it's much worse. They can be relentlessly bullied, abused, locked up, or shunned, which leaves psychological scars that manifest as antisocial behavior, so they are never given a chance to show what they can do.
by torginus | 2025-12-25 12:17:32+00:00
Tech is full of examples of 'successor' technologies, that were aiming to provide a clean rewrite without legacy, which then got bogged down with supporting a bunch of corner cases and accumulated their own share of cruft and could be no longer be considered a cleaner alternative. All the while the majority of the userbase being stuck on the old platform because the new one is buggy and doesn't offer anything tangibly better.

Vulkan, various node replacements come to mind.

Wayland at this point has existed almost as long as X11, longer if you only count the Linux years, yet its still not quite there.
by poisonborz | 2025-12-25 12:17:49+00:00
The line of defense is not banning and silencing, people will get around that and you just make free advertisement. Will you fine or detain people reading banned opinions?

The actual defense is proper education and healthy, welcoming, accepting society. That is harder to make and maintain than banning IPs, the western world by and large cheaped out and stopped caring since the 80s.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-25 12:17:58+00:00
Do note that you can't cluster those 6 A64's as kubesolo runs... solo. As in: No clustering capabilities.

If you do want a controller/node setup you're better off deploying something lightweight like k0s, k3s or sidero's talos (since the latter also works perfectly fine on clusters based on pi 4 and above)
by rvnx | 2025-12-25 12:18:20+00:00
Wow?!

There is no need to wish me harm because I compared two people who had the same similar tech level and approach as art, rather than pursuing productivity as a first goal.

It was to show that "tech skills" != "tech lead skills" + "tech skills" != "productivity".

In fact, sometimes great devs can be counter-productive, as they tend to write code that they are the only one who can maintain (bus factor), or optimizations that turns out to be net negative when working as a team.

About the comparison, it may sound strange to you, but in practice it is difficult to find other examples of people who wrote their own compiler, put a huge amount of energy, just for the sake of writing a compiler.

Thinking about of the most well-known projects: Bellard's "Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler" (which then became TCC), it's not that crazy to compare it to the "HolyC compiler".

Now outside, in their private life, they are very different, and nobody doubts that.

Side-note: I actually like very much what Fabrice does.