MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Blackstrat | 2026-01-25 19:01:26+00:00
I would suggest that MS Excel should be replaced by VisiCalc. While MS Excel is more feature complete and capable, VisiCalc was the idea. Further, while you included products that run on the computer, you didn't include the computer itself and key figures like Turing, Von Neumann, This was dependent on the transistor and the folks around Claude Shannon. And the whole digital life we know today derives from things like the Apollo Program in the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, MIT Instrumentation Lab, etc. And none of these electronics breakthroughs would have been possible without Quantum Theory and Relativity bringing us Bohr and Einstein and all their successors. Not to mention James Clerk Maxwell and his equations. And this is just the technology side of the question. Get into biology/medicine, etc. and the list explodes further. the double helix discovery (Crick & co), Harvey and blood circulation. The list is endless. Move into the government/political realm and the significance of things like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution cannot be overstated. It's all about what context you are positioning those "creations".
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-25 19:01:35+00:00
China is in a bind, though they have more money to deal with it than most countries. Their clean energy is in the west, but not much water out there (well, more than you think, but still not enough), their industry is the in the northeast, their water is in the south east (also in Tibet, but those glaciers are melting quickly), so they have to divert water from the southeast up north (the grand canal they build a decade or so ago), they have ultra high volatile wires to bring the energy from west to east, etc...

Why you just say move, you are still making a compromise. Maybe you have flat land with no water, and you are moving to somewhere that is mountainous with water, you now have to terrace a bunch of mountains before that area is productive, and let's say you use wind and solar, but that is even in another area, so you need wires to bring that in...etc...
by alexjplant | 2026-01-25 19:02:03+00:00
When I ran my own mail server Microsoft was the only company I encountered that would black hole my messages - no SMTP error for my own server to bounce back to me, no bounce back from their server, nothing. I vaguely recall having to do a dance with them a few times to fix this and the last time I tried I received no response. I don't frequently interact with Office 365 users so this didn't matter much to me.

I did end up later moving to Proton primarily out of laziness. I thought these issues would be a thing of the past until I applied to work at a company that administered their own Exchange server that also black holed my messages from Proton's servers. Their reasoning? "We geo-block Switzerland for security reasons." Needless to say I turned them down.
by foresto | 2026-01-25 19:02:14+00:00
The main issues I'm aware of are whether APIs are copyrightable, and if so, whether implementing them qualifies as fair use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

(And, of course, Microsoft would also have to consider whether such a lawsuit would have greater benefits than costs. I would like to think that customer goodwill has more than zero value, for example.)
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-25 19:02:42+00:00
> also of note, we (mostly) don't allow ~/Desktop as the download dir for security reasons

This isn't an XDG issue. It's a chromium engineers being silly pricks that think they know better than the power users who obviously went out of their way to create such a configuration. Also I bet it would work if you set your XDG_DESKTOP_DIR to ~/Download/
by MiddleEndian | 2026-01-25 19:03:18+00:00
Windows Phone was fantastic because it had no apps. Wish it managed to stake out and maintain a decent portion of the phone market. If 30% of the population could say "Oh sorry TicketMaster, I can't install your app, please just email me a pdf or text me a link to your tickets that I can just open in a web browser" the that would benefit everyone, even non-WP users.
by Misdicorl | 2026-01-25 19:03:20+00:00
Your place of last resort with kafka is simply to replay the message back to the same kafka topic since you know it's up. In a simple single consumer setup just throw a retry count on the message and increment it to get monitoring/alerting/etc. Multi consumer? Put an enqueue source tag on it and only process the messages tagged for you. This won't scale to infinity but it scales really really far for really really cheap
by t0mas88 | 2026-01-25 19:03:24+00:00
BMW has the same issue but luckily still buttons to disable them. Snow will quickly result in "Forward collision warning failure" and "Blind spot detection failure" and if more snow "Lane assist failure" because the sensors get covered in snow.

Oh and before you even start driving let us "bing!" you with a message that the temperature is below 4C. As if you didn't know that already.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-25 19:03:39+00:00
They hold both that people whose citizenship depends on birthright citizenship are not in fact citizens and that naturalized citizens can be denaturalized either for disloyalty or based on some sham pretext. They also see people getting benefits as leaches worthy of targeting.

Also naturalized and birthright citizens are far more likely than others to associate or live with others of less legal status.

Naturalized and birthright citizens quality for benefits and they and their families are at risk.

If they are allowed to detain and deport without any due process as they have asserted anyone not white is at risk.

The DHS official social media presence shared a picture of an island paradise with the caption America after 100 million deportations.

This is the number of non-whites not the number of immigrants in even the most ridiculous estimates.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-25 19:03:43+00:00
> shows how many people care more about party than principle

"Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has declined by about 4 points since the day before Good’s death until today. Meanwhile, his overall approval rating has declined by 2 points and is near its second-term lows" [1].

I'd encourage anyone watching to actually pay attention to "how many people care more about party than principle." I suspect it's fewer than MAGA high command thinks.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-is-losing-normies-on-immi...
by gmueckl | 2026-01-25 19:04:12+00:00
This is not simply an excuse. Android phones are prevalent in countries where smartphones offer the only realistic access to banking and cashless payments to the majority of the population. Scamming schemes targeting those users are also very frequent in many, if not most of these countries, and educating people about them is hard. Like it or not, this change is likely going to be a net positive for many people.
by fluidcruft | 2026-01-25 19:05:00+00:00
Yeah in fact I don't really see what's new in this article except that it hints that it will allow install of software from unverified developers via big scary warnings. Which seems like an improvement from what has been announced previously that only software from verified developers would be allowed.

I already have to configure apps to allow them to install apps on my Pixel... it's like "okay yeah I want to allow F-Droid and Obtainium to install apps" done. Maybe that's not the default or something? Who on earth wants popup ads in Chrome installing shit? And why would anyone want any random app to be able to install additional apps?
by kuerbel | 2026-01-25 19:05:06+00:00
...what? You leave your car plugged in, and that's it. Then the BMS will take care of the battery without having to use it's energy.

If I preheat the car it also preheats the battery. If it's not warm enough it won't allow full recuperation. Oh my god, I have to use THE BRAKES for a few minutes, literal trash car.

And all those people in Norway, you know, with their heat pumps and EVs. Obviously life just grinds to a halt there every winter. *dramatic eye roll
by cnst | 2026-01-25 19:05:19+00:00
Immutability and reproducibility is great. Depending on unreliable and antiquated hardware, like the USB key sticks, is not.

Who exactly has the environment where you can add, let alone promptly repair/replace, USB key sticks, on your server? Or run PXE when you have just a single server? How exactly do you do that in Hetzner or OVH? Let alone any other service where you get just a single dedicated server or two.

So, we're big enough to have our own quarter-rack in a collocation facility, let's do PXE. Now you have to have a whole separate infrastructure server, just for your other servers to be able to boot properly? (And how exactly does that server itself boot?) Plus, have an extra infra server for redundancy?

Sorry, but this is the reason noone would use SmartOS. You can't build a fortress on such a shaky foundation.

It's simply out of touch with the target market. At least with FreeBSD or OpenBSD, you known it'll just work™ on any single server, as long as serial console access is available, which is standard-enough. Going against the mainstream of Linux is already hard-enough, there's no reason to make it any harder.

SmartOS sounds like a lot of work, for negligible or even negative benefit.

There's zero good reasons why any machine with 450GB+ of zfs-backed redundant storage, needs to rely on USB keys or networking, in order to function properly. There's a reason Samsung's Joyent entirely abandoned and divested of SmartOS, because this sort of over-engineered mentality, simply doesn't compute. It prevents all sorts of usecases, and even with a growth mindset, still prevents the organic growth from a couple of servers to a rack and more.
by ben_w | 2026-01-25 19:05:26+00:00
In principle, I agree with your point; in practice, I think the claims made my these surveillance/advertising companies are likely as overstated as Musk's last decade of self-driving that still can't take a vehicle all the way across the USA without supervision in response to a phone summons.

The evidence I have that causes me to believe them to be overstated, is how even Facebook has frequently shown me ads that inherently make errors about my gender, nationality, the country I live in, and the languages I speak, and those are things they should've been able to figure out with my name, GeoIP, and the occasional message I write.
by Arch485 | 2026-01-25 19:05:39+00:00
I think the "nothing to hide" argument is made for a different reason.

People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them. The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal), but your church knowing your search history would absolutely be a big deal.
by karussell | 2026-01-25 19:05:46+00:00
Isn't the salary difference more about differences between Silicon Valley (or Big tech in US) and Europe?

One competitive advantage of the US is probably that often equity is involved (although this can be a disadvantage too if it replaces money and doesn't come on top).

Also don't forget that in Europe you often have a better safety net (especially if you loose a job) and lower rent.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-25 19:06:09+00:00
Gah that sucks. I've looked at the hardware specs and basically ended up drooling over it and realizing that my homebrew stuff will never be able to compete. But the optics alone on that DJI stuff is nothing short of science fiction compared to what you can put together on a hobbyists budget. But for $7K you can build an octocopter with twice the range and twice the payload, which may not be as impressive on paper but can be pretty useful as well.

The larger agricultural drones are also amazingly impressive, those I've seen up close doing real work and they are so reliable it is almost boring.

I wonder what the reason is that yours behaves the way it does, that sounds like a real challenge to find out though with the closed system like that.

Drones that rely on GPS are very iffy as soon as the GPS fails, I've seen more than one inexplicable 'fly-away' happen. I've found a really neat trick to test drones that are not 'known good': just find yourself a long stretch of really light chain and tie it to the drone. As long as it behaves: no problem. But if it tries to take off by itself at some point the length of chain weighs more than the drone can handle and it will stop ascending. That way at least you have some kind of safety measure that does not immediately impact the drone in a material way as long as it is near to you.
by skycrafter0 | 2026-01-25 19:06:48+00:00
The issue with buying phones like that, is they are just insanely expensive.
Without shipping/tax, that phone is CAD$1500, whereas I can buy a refurbished Samsung S22 for CAD$350 (all in), that has roughly the same specs, but for 1/5 the price.
I understand small companies can't use economies of scale like Samsung/Apple, but it's still really bad, and the majority of consumers wouldn't even take a second glance at it from the price.
by OrvalWintermute | 2026-01-25 19:07:02+00:00
Undocumented immigrants/illegal immigrants are not generally eligible for federally funded Medicaid coverage in the United States, as federal law restricts such benefits to U.S. citizens and certain qualified immigrants with lawful status.

They are eligible for Emergency Medicaid, which covers emergency medical needs like labor and delivery or life-threatening conditions; hospitals that accept federal dollars for medicare/medicaid are required under federal law (EMTALA) to provide stabilizing emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay.
by Herring | 2026-01-25 19:07:12+00:00
It's so tricky. You can do most things right like Denmark/Netherlands, then you mess up just one (housing) and the far-right surges. Now you can't import immigrants to deal with your aging population, which means you're on a timer.

Or your neighbor goes far-right (US, maybe eventually Germany/France) and suddenly they start objecting to your internal policies (eg regulating big tech).

Or Russia+Covid combo suddenly inflating all kinds of prices, and again the far right surges.

I think it's going to be a dramatic few decades.
by pibaker | 2026-01-25 19:08:05+00:00
In a corrupt and authoritarian country, it is common to have officials busted on "corruption" or "embezzlement" charges. And yet most people know they are actually not jailed for the crimes they got charged for, because there are more than enough people to fill all the prisons for breaking the exact same laws they are accused of breaking. They knew the only reason these people got jailed is because they lost some kind of power struggle within the administration, and corruption is just a convenient lie those who prevailed tell you to keep you comfortable.

You never see the "no politics please thk u" crowd when it is about protests in Iran, Chinese oppression in Hong Kong, Russian aggression on Europe or hell, when people were literally running a political campaign the EU to stop killing games. You only see people flagging political submissions when it is a particular kind of politics - just like you only see corrupt officials jailed when they are a certain kind of officials.

Connect the dots, make your own conclusions.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-25 19:08:10+00:00
Most people can't operate drones, period.

FPV is a skill you can learn though and for filming armed thugs I actually can't think of a better tool because it allows you to fly the drone out of LOS so you can do it from a relatively safe position while still getting footage that matters.

For extra protection you could even abandon the drone and record the video directly on your headset.
by acdha | 2026-01-25 19:08:11+00:00
I’m not: each thing I wrote is common knowledge—read the Wikipedia pages for the Lightning and USB-C pages if you don’t believe me—and it’s a little silly to spin this as something other than large companies not making massive supply chain changes quickly. I’m glad USB-C has won but you don’t change things deployed in the hundreds of millions in a year–I saw an original iPhone connector in the wild as recently as last year!
by trilogic | 2026-01-25 19:08:46+00:00
New powerful (GPT based) model from Microsoft, Small, fast and functional all in one just because of the new paper.

Developer: Microsoft Research, Machine Learning and Optimization (MLO) Group
Model Architecture: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variant of the transformer architecture (gpt-oss family).
Parameters: 20 Billion (3.6B activated)
Inputs: Natural language optimization problem description.
Context Length: 128,000 tokens

Paper for the method used: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22979
by kakacik | 2026-01-25 19:09:18+00:00
Truth is, apple didn't want to migrate their phones due to some internal decision not relevant for us, and the fact some other devices were on it doesn't change this. Users comfort was never part of the equation, its politics, sales projection, stabs at competition and similar.

Truth is, apple fought EU hard, we saw it from inside quite well. Backstabs, some cheap tricks trying to delay and evade this, even when it was clear how things will be. Not their best days to be polite.

Why giving some heartless mega corporation free moral credits if they are not well deserved?
by djohnston | 2026-01-25 19:09:19+00:00
The game in question was made to propagate leftist narratives to children, obviously. You needed that connection spelled out? It’s a game that discourages people from trying to reach an independent viewpoint on migration because it might lead them to be anti-migration. Who else would send such a warning, the right? Some politically unmotivated developer building educational games at the behest of the governing party? lol.
by hvb2 | 2026-01-25 19:09:23+00:00
So 7000 to 8000 euros to replace a battery of a 80 to 100k car?

It depends on how many miles it has driven and how much other maintenance the car has had. It's a big expense but a battery dying is probably comparable to a timing belt breaking, those aren't cheap either and thats not even for luxury cars...
by tock | 2026-01-25 19:09:26+00:00
VEP = only counts people who can actually vote.

VAP = counts everyone of voting age including people on visas who aren't allowed to vote.

We moved to VEP because the % of total population who aren't citizens started to grow rapidly. eg. see 2020 vs 2024. The eligible VAP count increased by 12M but actual VEP count only increased by 2M.

edit: looks like there is VEP data for older years though I am guessing its not very accurate: https://election.lab.ufl.edu/voter-turnout/#:~:text=National...

Looks like the 1800s had much much higher turnout! I guess my statement is only valid for the last 100 years.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-25 19:09:49+00:00
A tale as old as time.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160418-00/?p=93...
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-25 19:10:04+00:00
> I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list.

Why is PiHole necessary to dodge DNS limitations: can't you just put Quad9 as the DNS in your router/FritzBox?

Now I switched from PiHole to running unbound on a... Pi! I did that years ago: do it, you won't be disappointed.

I don't have the shiny PiHole UI anymore but I don't care: unbound supports wildcards to blacklist domains and that's what I care the most about.

So a Pi with unbound then dnsmasq on my Linux desktop: this makes for very speedy lookups (as most queries are hitting the cache).
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-25 19:10:09+00:00
The article isn't resolving, so I can't speak to what it exactly says.

However, the question isn't "on your own domain vs not," it's "how you publish." Blog networks are popular because most people do not have the technical ability to spin up a server, buy a domain, and point it at it.

Why an atproto based solution instead of Medium or whatever? Because then you actually own your own data. And that also doesn't preclude it ending up on your own domain in the end anyway, because it's your data.
by ece | 2026-01-25 19:10:13+00:00
Scams are the justification, F-Droid hasn't had any scam apps throughout it's existence, and it's not clear every functionality it currently has will be preserved with this change like auto-updating apps and easy installation of the store itself.

Google could let users add their own signing keys (like browsers allow), and it might be they will let students or power users do this, or they could do what F-Droid does in packaging FOSS apps without developers having to provide extra PII information. If they do neither of these things, it de facto means they're only after control at the expense of normal users.
by greggoB | 2026-01-25 19:10:49+00:00
I think it can also apply to how much credit we should give him if he ends up being right. If his predictions come true within the next decade, he'll be considered a prophet; if in the next half century, then not so much.

I don't have anything to go by for this, but I do wonder if there were any people who predicted the downfall of the Roman empire 200, 100, 50, etc years before it actually collapsed. I suspect all of them would have somehow based this on its decadence and excesses, but I also suspect none would have had a firm grasp on how it would play out.

I am similarly interested with such questions wrt to the US today.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-25 19:11:12+00:00
We have ones like that at work for doing generator switchover - talking about Aggreko 20-foot shipping container generators providing hundreds of kW to power a pair of UPSes the size of a full-size Ford Transit, not your cute little 130-from-Hofer-pull-the-string-puttputtputt genny ;-)

You pump up the handle to charge a pneumatic cylinder and when you cut over it throws a set of three contacts about the size of a first-gen Kindle from one side to the other, switching from incoming mains to genny power in about 1/100th of a second.

It goes with a hell of a bang.
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-25 19:11:18+00:00
It's not nearly enough to matter to Microsoft. An absolute tiny percentage of desktop computers/laptops run Linux.

This is actually a good thing if you're hoping WINE avoids a legal fight with Microsoft. It doesn't matter who's right, Microsoft has deep enough pockets to drag anyone through expensive litigation.

I'm an active Linux user and I play tons of games via Proton. But this isn't something I'd suggest to normal people. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit keeping Linux working.

They also served as a foundation for much of my career growth. But I understand it's not for everyone.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-25 19:12:02+00:00
> I think OP is suggesting that the ability to sideload is what is preventing their phones being distributed in China.

This comment is insane in several different ways.

There's nothing preventing Google's phones from being distributed in China. They already are distributed in China.

Those phones won't come with the vendor OS installed; they'll come with an OS that works without a hitch in China.

One of the modifications to the local OS will be to make sideloading trivial, since that's how you're expected to install apps.

If you did start selling phones with a stock Android OS in China, those phones wouldn't work because their connections to Google services would all be blocked.† The reason for that block has nothing to do with sideloading or even with phones. It's going to stay in place.

† In my experience, it's still possible to receive pushes from Google while you're in China. For example, you can't connect to the Play Store, but if you visit the Play Store in a browser on a different device that can dodge the Great Firewall, and tell it that you want to install something to your phone, Google will reach out and make the install to your phone even if your phone isn't dodging the firewall.