MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 14:32:40+00:00
You are right, it depends, whether you write C (from the standard) or a specific dialect from your vendor (everybody does in practice). In the latter case, you need to know about the rules of the compiler. But to allow optimization, these are often similar, so that the compiler assumes these have the behaviour of the implementation, that the compiler is tailored against.

> Cute username, BTW.

Thanks, I was to lazy to think of a real name, so this is the timestamp, I created the account.
by eloeffler | 2025-12-07 14:32:42+00:00
The catch depends a lot on the context that you're considering. Trying to replace Microsoft Office as a whole by a drop-in replacement like LibreOffie may work better or worse depending on who uses it.

I've never used anything but OpenOffice / LibreOffice for writing academic texts in the humanities and never missed anything. The "catch" whenever I tried Microsoft Word was the menu that had the most important functions (for me) hidden away much deeper than in OO and LO.

I've never been a big user of Spreadsheets but I've heard only good of Excel and trust the widespread opinion that it is unchallenged in its domain. In sociology you wouldn't use it because you've got specialized statistics software such as R and SPSS (PSPP being an attempt at an Open Source Alternative to SPSS).

Looking at administration, Excel ist probably quite important but when you get rid of it, not one but various solutions might take its place, depending on who uses it. If you want something like a browseable database in a colorful table for office clerks, LO Calc might be enough. But the things Excel gets praised for a lot (I never know what exactly people mean) would probably have to be tackled another way.

Governments going down that need to invest into finding those solutions by providing staff that is qualified to find them or even develop them. The state of Schleswig-Holstein considered in its Open Source initiative strategy that it may be challenged by a future legislation and put a focus on the reasons for acceptance of Open Source solutions. I wonder if that is put into action well to find solutions with the least "catch" that may even excel over Microsoft products depending on their context :)
by Multicomp | 2025-12-07 14:33:02+00:00
An interesting read with good points regarding copyright discussions and how pointy haired bosses will hope to do a neo nafta to white collar employees like the original did to blue collar ones.

I suspect businesses will attempt to do compilation copyright if not individual asset copyright to get around tfas recipe for centaurness for artists.

If I have a story that I write and use AI to render the images, soundtrack, motions, potentially voice acting, when does what the AI did stop and where does my work begin?

If I write and voice act the thing, those pieces are copyrighted. Does that constitute enough of the creative work that while I can't copyright a particular screen grab, I can copyright the work as a whole like a phone book?

Maybe, I genuinely don't know. What if I have the AI do the voice acting as well? Probably, that is a public domain work to my uninformed opinion.

It is not a question in my mind if I also just throw in a concept and have the AI produce the script that is then rendered out as well.

AI has shown that for creative art, it all begins with the writing, even if the final work produced is entirely visual or audio, the whole point of Art and copyright is to create a shared impression, hallucination, experience from Human to human. To communicate.

If the AI rendering can properly give things like tabletop RPG Recaps (and the content that the AI is rendering is original and under copyright) how much of that original concept (such as someone playing a tabletop RPG session with a story they wrote themselves) does the final rendered work get transient copyright protection? None? Even though its based on an underlying concept that is copyrightable if written down?

Businesses will be wanting to know these sorts of questions too, and that sill help shape how artists / coders / knowledge workers at large are transformed into centaurs or the reverse, ceteris paribus.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 14:33:13+00:00
In languages that don't hide much (e.g heap allocations in Java), less complexity corresponds to better performance (up to a point). Because better performance is fundamentally about letting the computer do less work. When pointer indirection is explicit, the programmer is nudged towards thinking whether they actually want it. Same with dynamic dispatch, polymorphism and every other runtime complexity.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-07 14:33:41+00:00
I was taught that lesson during Lost. If I see a show start doing unnecessary romantic/drug/backstory scenes, I’m out.

I wish more content makers advertised that they have the whole story planned before the show starts (like Breaking Bad/Vince Gilligan). Show Horses is a good example of a modern story without much fluff.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-07 14:34:24+00:00
Exploiting the south via the imbalanced currency union doesn't work anymore now that their economies can't swallow more debts to buy German stuff, China and the USA are not buying anymore and decades of underinvestments have caught up. It wouldn't be surprising therefore to see the German government fall backs to the only trick they know: constraining wages and limiting consumption. If I was particularly cynical, I could even argue that this youth conscription is fundamentally yet another form of wage suppression but I genuinely think it's a political coup to please the old voters who want something done for defence, preferably with no impact to them and their savings and don't care at all about the young.

At least, the current government tried relaxing the debt brake a little and investing but I fear it's too little, too late. Germany is hooked to competitiveness shortcuts at the expense of their neighbors. The cure would be harsh. Add the quasi-religious adherence to a completely broken economic model turned into an absurd moral system and I personally have very little hope to ever see the situation improves. Then again, I have too moderate my cynicism. I thought for a long time that the eurozone creation, a currency union without transfers, was so stupid it would never be toppled as the worst political decision but then Germany passed the Schuldenbremse. They might manage to outdo themselves once again.

I'm convinced the status quo will prevail. The German public will prefer slow death to any kind of transfers and common investments. They have already blocked the interesting parts of the Draghi plan. Japanification here we come. Let's enjoy becoming Disneyland while we slowly lose any kind of international relevance. I mean at least there most likely will be catering to the elderly and maybe crafting luxury goods as an alternative to tourism. At least, our brightest should be able to leave to places where innovation still happen. Such an exciting future Karlsruhe is leading us to.

I'm just sad my country is tied to the sinking ship.
by boh | 2025-12-07 14:34:36+00:00
It's crazy that organizations are willing to spend millions of dollars on Microsoft Office simply because people are used to it. There are literally no features most people actually use that aren't completely duplicated in open source alternatives. Whatever amount of time it takes the user to find the button they're looking for costs less than the permanent subscription cost for something that will only get more bloated and expensive with time.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-07 14:34:45+00:00
Copyright notices and signatures in generative AI output are generally a result of the expectation created by the training data that such things exist, and are generally unrelated to how much the output corresponds to any particular piece of training data, and especially to who exactly produced that work.

(It is, of course, exceptionally lazy to leave such things in if you are using the LLM to assist you with a task, and can cause problems of false attribution. Especially in this case where it seems to have just picked a name of one of the maintainers of the project)
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 14:35:18+00:00
> so I'll catch you up to speed

Great, finally someone in this submission who know what they're talking about, exciting!

> in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto

Oh no, another larper. You cannot walk around Georgia expecting to pay everywhere in BTC/USDT like you would with cash or a standard card, and I'm not sure what you're basing the information on because it's surely not based on personal experience.

Guess we'll continue waiting for people with actual knowledge to drop by.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-07 14:35:39+00:00
I have the capacity to fight for freedom of information both at home and abroad, and yes there is urgent need in both places.

My primary complaint with the UK and EU right now is that they have been attempting to restrict US freedom of information, versus say China who doesn’t make an effort overseas. Not only are the UK and EU exerting pressure against US companies to change their global policies, but especially in the case of the UK, they are attempting to change the legal framework governing the internet by claiming that sites are somehow subject to UK law unless they proactively block the UK. All this on top of long time EU/UK participation in shady “counter-misinformation” efforts that have spun up a web of state-funded NGOs who attempt to influence US policy against freedom of information. So yeah, I’m pissed at your countries in particular.
by KineticLensman | 2025-12-07 14:35:51+00:00
> Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help

In many societies before (say) the 18th/19th Century, extended families would have been the norm, e.g. with elderly relatives living in the same household, helping with food preparation and clothes making. Harvests may have been community-wide affairs. Children would have had to dive in, as you say, but they wouldn't have had school to go to, and there would have been a wide age spread. Maternal mortality (death due to childbirth) was high, and many widowed fathers would have remarried, extending the family further (incidentally this is partly why there are so many step-sisters and step-mothers in folk stories).
by whstl | 2025-12-07 14:36:52+00:00
This excuse is as old as the hills and I've been hearing it since the late 90s, but historically there has been exactly zero training between versions of Office or Windows that changed a lot of the interface overnight. Office workers just kept using them like the rest of the planet.

Not to mention companies who moved on to Google Docs or the web version of Office. Or companies who moved to MacOS 15-10 years ago.

In my state back home the entire workforce moved to LibreOffice and, according to my sister (a government worker), everyone is doing fine. Recently I saw a German government worker using Office to produce a document and she mentioned that she "barely knows how to use it" and "just knows how to load templates, fill and print".

This hypothetical problem of "needs training" only seems to exist when you mention the words "open source".
by fwn | 2025-12-07 14:36:57+00:00
Your comment specifically, I believe, falls short of the ideal to get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic becomes more divisive.

We should probably avoid posting shallow dismissals and remember that a good critical comment teaches us something.

Additionally, as your comment leaves readers wondering which parts of the divided comment section you deem "worthy of HN" and which you do not, I cannot help but think of this ambivalence as a method to spark reactions. Another word for this method would be "to bait", I think.
by concinds | 2025-12-07 14:37:05+00:00
"Saves 15 million" on license costs, but how much will be wasted on the contractors involved, the lost productivity for state employees (especially the ones who depend on Excel, who will be converted too per the announcement)? And how much do you really save if you keep switching back and forth between M$ and Linux every decade, as state governments seem to enjoy doing?

They should switch to open-source for sovereignty. Not "cost". The fact that they mention "cost" as motivation and to secure buy-in is very worrisome. If you really want to switch to open source permanently and secure your sovereignty, you should invest more (making LibreOffice Calc as good as Excel? One can dream, but it's not cheap). Cost-savings show a lack of seriousness. How long until another government switches back?

How to know when they're serious: when the federal government hires an in-house team of (well-paid) programmers, and sysadmins. Not consultants. Put them in charge of public-facing and internal-use digital infrastructure, serving both the federal and state governments. Make them work to tailor a distro, or LibreOffice, to government needs. Invest in workforce training to keep their productivity up despite the switch.

And then, one day (let's dream for a second), that team could also pick new projects that serve the public interest, like a vulnerability research team (like Google Project Zero), or helping out with all those underfunded core pieces of digital infrastructure out there with only a single maintainer. Creating public goods is the point of a government.
by rendall | 2025-12-07 14:37:15+00:00
I don't think that, when all is considered, there are that many spiritual traditions that forbid it, and there seems to be no unifying principle from the ones that do. Mormons forbid "hot drinks" that are, for historical reasons, interpreted to include coffee. Salafists do it because certain early jurists briefly classified coffee as an intoxicant. Seventh-day Adventists avoid stimulants as part of a broader health code. Theravāda monks avoid anything that affects wakefulness after midday. A few Pentecostal or Anabaptist groups inherited older temperance rules about stimulants. These prohibitions all come from very different origins, and none of them amounts to a shared spiritual insight about coffee itself.

In fact, so few spiritual traditions do forbid it, including the most forbidding and censorious, that it may well be considered miraculous. In my personal religion it is tantamount to a sacrament ;)
by rs186 | 2025-12-07 14:38:07+00:00
I don't necessarily disagree with "Libreoffice is junk" but that's not actually a problem, or all the problem. As the article has stated, 80% of the licenses were dropped, while 20% of the use cases continue to be supported by Microsoft Office. To me that is already a big win compared to 100% Microsoft Office.

You see, most Office users are not heavy/expert users and they only occasionally need the basic features that exist everywhere and do good enough of a job. I personally have only used Word maybe 3 times over the past few years, because almost all work documents live elsewhere, while Google Docs is good enough for my personal word processing needs (which could probably be done with Libreoffice as well). In the old days I used to install pirated Microsoft Office when I got a new laptop. These days I don't even think about it.

Imagine every company starts to evaluate how many employees actually need Microsoft Office, and then drop licenses for those who would be ok with Libreoffice or nothing at all. Microsoft would be shitting their pants.
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-12-07 14:38:10+00:00
I've been playing with a very basic compiler for a language that looks a bit like go -> llvm ir, but I'm finding myself constantly revising my AST implementation as I progressively add more things that it needs to represent. Is anyone aware of any kind of vaguely standardized AST implementation used by more than one project? I've been searching this morning for one and am coming up empty. My thinking is that if I can find some reasonably widely used implementation, then hopefully that implementation has thought out lots of the corner cases that I haven't gotten to yet.
by dloss | 2025-12-07 14:38:29+00:00
I'm sharing Kelora, a hobby project that I have been developing over the last 6 months. It's a scriptable log processor for the command line, with 150+ built-in functions for parsing, transforming, and analyzing log files and streams.

My original idea was to have an easy to deploy, potentially faster and more correct "rewrite in Rust" of my Python log processing tool klp. It quickly turned into an AI coding experiment: how far I could get with vibe-coding, in a programming language that I barely know?

Kelora's code and extensive test suite have been generated entirely by AI agents (Claude CLI with Sonnet 4 to 4.5, Codex CLI with GPT5-codex). I come up with feature ideas and discuss it with the AI agents. The AIs then write the spec, the implementation, tests, docs and CI. I don't review the code, but I use the resulting program myself and review the docs. The result is fully functional and quite useful, in my opinion.

I am fully aware that this vibe-coding process has its problems. Without human review we cannot be sure that Kelora does (only) what it's supposed to do. And although Kelora passes 1000+ automatic tests and several checks (clippy, cargo audit, cargo deny, cargo fuzz), that probably shouldn't be sufficient to use it in production. In this sense, it's an experiment, or a prototype. So maybe just run it against the example logs I've provided in the GitHub repo. Or read the docs to get inspiration for your own log processing tool.

Because that's what I want to share: My ideas about a log processing tool with embedded scripting that can help turn messy logs into structured data. Some interesting features like level maps, windows and spans, tracking and state, JWT parsing, pseudonymisation, etc. And last but not least, my joy of working together with AI agent on a software project that would otherwise have been much too big for me. I've never had so much fun in 30+ years of (hobby) programming.
by 05 | 2025-12-07 14:39:18+00:00
Blame STM. Those clones copy (..among other things) the naming convention from STMicroelectronics parts like stm32f103c8t6/stm32f103cBt6. Guess what's the only difference between those.

Oh, and .. since STM likes binning/product segmentation, there's a good chance that if you ignore the reported flash size and still try to flash the full 128K, it works on those models..
by rafterydj | 2025-12-07 14:39:20+00:00
>it seems likely that it's going to be on the LLM user to know if the out is protected by copyright.

To me, this is what seems more insane! If you've never read Harry Potter, and you ask an LLM to write you a story about a wizard boy, and it outputs 80% Harry Potter - how would you even know?

> there will be probably be some "reasonable belief" defence in eventual laws.

This is probably true, but it's irksome to shift all blame away from the LLM producers, using copy-written data to peddle copy-written output. This simply turns the business into copyright infringement as a service - what incentive would they have to actually build those "secondary search thingies" and build them well?

> it definitely isn't as simple as "LLM wrote it so we can ignore copyright".

Agreed. The copyright system is getting stress tested. It will be interesting to see how our legal systems can adapt to this.
by finchisko | 2025-12-07 14:39:49+00:00
I really don’t get why there’s always this group of people who feel the need to constantly manage everything for others—like sysadmins, for example. Sure, there are valid scenarios where management makes sense, like printing or shared drives, but most of the stuff is just over the top. As a developer, I’m sick of all the constant restrictions—broken VPNs, stealth monitoring, and antivirus software that slows everything down. These "security measures" are supposed to help, but they just kill performance and cause frustration. At the end of the day, I just want my system to work smoothly without constant interference.
by wiseowise | 2025-12-07 14:39:59+00:00
> When you go looking for a car will you buy the Peugeot 3008 because it has a higher number than the 208 ? Or will you do research, go to the company site and look at the product description, compare the specs and make your opinion about what best fits your needs ?

You're comparing model to generation, not sure what's that supposed to mean.

Yes, I will buy Peugeot 208 over 207 because it is obviously newer. And the point isn't that I'm buying solely because of a number, the point is that it is much more intuitive to have simple naming over "jerk my co, pilot, ai".
Show HN: Perception continuity function in multidimensional time
by neuralquantum | 2025-12-07 14:40:08+00:00
What if consciousness isn't fragile, but is a quantum macrostructure smeared across 10^10^10^10 timelines? What if your minimal "I am" functionality persists elsewhere via wave function evolution. This is a thought experiment with deep dive into multidimensional time and perception continuity function. Not really testable, but logically tight and also challenges how you see death/life strategies.
by dan-robertson | 2025-12-07 14:40:36+00:00
People sometimes say that people in the past would have been familiar with the idea that mortality is high and therefore fine when half their children died. While there would have been cultural rituals in these cases, it seems like there is reasonable evidence (epitaphs, cultural practices eaves-drip burials or stillborn baptisms, etc) that the loss was still very dearly felt and so people’s lives were just much worse.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-12-07 14:42:24+00:00
"the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software."

wait until they found out that there is no "customer service" in OSS, sometimes the project is fine but people need "someone" to be held accountable in some ways

that's why a lot of OSS project never take flight
by IshKebab | 2025-12-07 14:43:04+00:00
But is it all equally a struggle? Some things are definitely more of a struggle than others. Remember xfree86config? We used to have to manually configure our screen resolution in a shitty text file. I even remembered that you had to specifically add a line to tell it you had a 3 button mouse. This was in the late 90s, maybe early 00s. Way after it was sane to have to do that.

And I specifically remember when they fixed it there really were some people who pushed back against the change. Kind of unbelievable but it's true. I guess psychologically they felt that it was unfair that they had to struggle and future people wouldn't have to. But they couldn't just say that so they came up with nonsense technical objections.
by MrDarcy | 2025-12-07 14:43:19+00:00
The idea is sound but the feeling of hate is perhaps strong. It’s understandable there’s no incentive to pay for open source software, and doing so would be seen as an unnecessary allocation of resources that could better be allocated elsewhere.

Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.