skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, once I bought a laptop with integrated intel graphics because it was supposed to have good Linux support. Suspended/wake didn’t work, and 3D didn’t work, I spent months on mailing list trying to figure out the problem, and I ended up being the one merging the fix for Ubuntu, you can probably still find that on launchpad.net

I get it, that was over ten years ago, and maybe things are better, maybe not according to this guy. I’m just tired of this kind of finickiness and would rather focus on hacking on server code.
All of it, because Windows is closed source. A user cannot be responsible for a black box's contents.
Thought experiment: imagine it is 1985 and you asked the equivalent question. Something along the lines of: how would I preserve an electronic game/message/piece of media for posterity?

What would the answer be?

Make sure you copy your floppy on to a tape on the commodore 64?

Make sure that you post the message to at least 4 different bulletin boards?

The tech is evolving so fast that a website, or today's hardware, or forms of media will be unrecognizable 50 years from now.

Perhaps the first question is, what will be the equivalent of a website in 500 years?
I know it's proving the point in the article, but I thought I'd let you know Firefox can be configured to do hardware acceleration. There's a nice article in the Arch Linux wiki that describes the steps needed to turn it on:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acce...

I've done this and the battery life on my ThinkPad (Intel graphics) while watching videos in Firefox has improved heaps. My last 20% is around an hour instead of only 15mins.

It's silly how it's turned off by default even though it works just fine. But again proving the point of the article I guess...
Then a bunch of employees will have to find new jobs and some people have their retirement savings drained because it was illegal to pay the ransom and the business shut down. Society will move on. No long-term loss.
> The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.

somewhat reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Hahaha, wow, yeah, I did just binge that last week. facepalm I guess it made an impact.
> The fact is: WSL saves time and makes installing Linux redundant and actually a waste of time.

Not sure what point you are making here. Yes, you can virtualize and OS and WSL is a nice way to do it?
It's been hckrnews.com for me for ages.. and loving it:)
> Check if your hardware supports your OS before you buy it. Guess what? Then it all works great. What a waste of time.

Say, I am buying Thinkpad T480s and Thinkpad X1 (2018). What would you suggest that I check?
> Would we be better off (i.e. pay less for connectivity from a constellation with more satellites and better coverage) if there was one larger one?

We certainly would not be better off.

Because with a monopoly, you pay the highest price and get the worst service!
> Each of those sock-puppet accounts can request the source, so 5. No wait, it's still a single human being, so 1. Either way, it doesn't matter. They can request the source, and they should get it.

The answer is complicated.

If I hack into a company and steal a binary for an internal tool (that uses GPL licensed stuff), I can’t demand the source code because I was not authorized to use said binary.

If its a beta not designed to be used by the public, it’s not clear how it will go. The users weren’t authorized to use it but it was easily accessible.

See also: the horrific CFAA Act
What's really crazy is that Apple can screw up several times in a row (abrupt removal of all ports; Touch Bar; flawed keyboard design), even such that the screwups overlap and are occurring all at once, and... there's not really anyone else to go to. Their products are basically their own category—everyone else is that far behind on overall UX, capabilities, and average (maybe not worst-case) experience—so your choices are "just live with the bad parts and hope they fix it next time" or "slice off your nose".

It really sucks. I'd love for them to have anyone nipping at their heels.

(Windows user from '94-present [gaming and other non-serious uses, for most of that time], mainly a desktop Linux user from 2000-2011 and I still try it out every couple years, FWIW—alternated between nodding along and going "holy crap, still?!" for all of TFA)
Theorem demonstrates that CNNs can always be trained on quantum computers
Hmmm... I like this idea. I wonder how much data you can store in the different sized facets of a spinning prism.
> It’s quite natural, normal humans also don’t hoard everything they can possibly think of needing...

For most of human history we did exactly that. The deeply interconnected "JIT Consumption" world is really quite new. And if consumption patterns suddenly change then you can't buy toilet paper anymore.
I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance. They could get really unluckly and hit a star/planet, but it's not at all likely. Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.

We've also certainly... redistributed... many metals and other things around earth. Perhaps "large concentration of iron over what use to be new york" doesn't count, but arguably it should.
In wood fiber insulation, some factories do manage to use the wood's own lignin to keep the insulation batts together, though apparently it's harder to manage for very thick batts.
Now I'm trying to parse the legal language. Section 5 appears to relate to this, but it's about "conveying," which in the license definitions, excludes providing access to a service that uses it.

> To "convey" a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.

I'm sure the Mastadon author has constructed their view based on a more strategic logical parsing of the license, and for now they have succeeded in making the brand story about how it's just another example in a long line of frauds and thefts as was what seemed to be the straightforward intent.

However, litigating software licenses as part of partisan lawfare can have knock-on effects for everyone else. I'm imagining what developing new products will be like in a world with something like the SCO patent litigation but by people with tumblr accounts and backed by superpacs.
In the context of civic engagement the only work by Putnam I could suggest is Bowling Alone. I also recommend Pew Research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one that never uses any kind of port for anything but charging. But I’m glad people are glad!
Delta 'Plus' Covid variant may be more transmissible
And yet both if you are here.

starts closing his 42 open HN tabs
Legal authority != power.

I'm from a small European country with no notable natural resources nor other economic influence. Legally, the government has quite a lot of authority, but its power, measured by how it can specifically influence events, pales in comparison to the power of certain larger countries that can actually affect more.

Facebook is the primary source of news for many, many people and can greatly influence their view by choosing to bury, or prominently display, stories promoting a particular stance. It's likely that Facebook could flip the outcome of a close election in a heavily FB-using country if it wanted to. Facebook controls several of the most popular services people use to directly message one another, and it could choose not to deliver messages containing certain words or links. Facebook can (through the FB Pixel) build a highly accurate history of web browsing for most online users, something major governments can also do through NSA, GCHQ or Spetssvyaz, but smaller governments don't have that capability.

Facebook can't launch nukes or assassinate anyone anywhere with a drone strike, but if you look past the several national leaders who truly stand out in terms of power, I'd say you would find Facebook in the next rank.
What is a website?

It represents a CONTINUOUS will to keep something online.

Within the course of a year there could be 5 changes that destroy your website.

Then, the only way to keep a website alive, is to keep YOURSELF alive for 500 years, or to pass on your web development instincts and will to maintain this website on to your future generations.

After 100 years unless you provided some serious forms of feedback into this system they will grow bored of it or your progeny will be too nerdy to continue the line.
Yes, the same.
> we also didn't pay to build several competing overlapping systems

I think you're missing the history of utilities but also most public granted monopolies: they did grow out of several competing businesses. In the case of electricity, water, subway systems, most of these institutions will trace back to a history of privatized providers competing to establish a market. These utilities having a monopoly from the jump in any new developments is only because we've inherited that history and know better. It's only in the aftermath of providers clashing to an annoying enough degree that granted monopolies get created.
lol, family member's acer laptop (pre-installed with Windows) had audio driver issues to the point where the audio output jack simply doesn't work. No drivers are available for the machine b/c it's pre-installed, so why would there be issues?

The audio out works perfectly under ubuntu
In no small part due to Shelley.
It's less what they get done and more what they willfully ignore (such as the Cambridge Analytica story when Facebook became a donor of theirs).

There's also the case of Shahid Buttar pretending to challenge Nancy Pelosi in an election, which is a way of saying "ensured that Nancy didn't have a real challenger."
The rules trump was asking the FCC to reconsider couldn't violate the actual written law. He was asking for administrative rules to change, and for DOJ to investigate any illegal activity under the existing law. Can you cite any user canceled under this policy?
Wait, you are part to or accused in about 12 cases?!
Putin at the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club
I never thought I'd hear Putin quoting Martin Luther King. His critique of wokeness is pretty on the nose.

here is the transcript: https://valdaiclub.com/events/posts/articles/vladimir-putin-...
wow, that's not what it says at all: "In six out of seven countries — all but Germany — Tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group."
Lots and lots of IoT requires internet access and servers to stay up and running for even initialising a device after a reset. Some require these servers to control the device once it's as up. I already own a smartwatch that cannot be enabled because the application that used to initialise it has patched out support for that model.
What about PipeWire?
I think I agree with the title of the article, and a lot of the content. For example, this bit about strong ties versus weak ties is an interesting and succinct way to frame something I think many users of social media have experienced:

> As people shift their attention from strong to weak ties, the resulting connections become more dangerous. Strong ties are strong because their reliability has been affirmed over time. The input or information one might receive from a family member or co-worker is both more trusted and more contextualized. By contrast, the things you hear a random person say at the store (or on the internet) are—or should be—less intrinsically trustworthy. But weak ties also produce more novelty, precisely because they carry messages people might not have seen before. The evolution of a weak tie to a strong one is supposed to take place over an extended time, as an individual tests and considers the relationship and decides how to incorporate it into their life.

However, I am also worried that the author and perhaps The Atlantic (+ its readers) are motivated by one particular political lens, which is the excesses of the political right. The examples of the "toxic dump of garbage" listed earlier in the article make that clear. However, the problems created by social media also create extremism on the left. Examining those symptoms (in addition to issues from the right) may provide additional root causes that are also worth considering.
I named our product "Orca Scan", as it lets companies build a custom barcode scanner using smartphones (https://orcascan.com).

This was my third attempt at business (2 failures), I was a sole founder and knew it was going to be hard, so I needed a name that would motivate me through the inevitable tough times, time away from family etc.

I arrived at "Orca" as it's the first letter of my children's names, in age order [O]wen, [R]hys, [C]aitlin and [A]na.

I then simply needed to add another word that would make it unique (i.e. available as a domain and unused in the app stores); as this is a barcode scanner app, "Scan" was a no brainer.

I've spent ~5 years on this project (from side project to business) and almost changed the name a few times, as it somehow never felt "serious" enough. That was until I was on a call one day with a customer and they used it as a verb "Hey Billy, make sure you Orca that pallet", at that point I realised, regardless of what you call it, it probably only feels right once you've built the product and business around it.
Right, because the CEO of Google doesn’t get paid as much, and instead of donations Google just helps itself to all your data?
/s
excellent, i have been detatched from the windows desktop world for so long i had no idea they had managed to catch up like this, assuming it works smoothly it seems pretty cool, thanks!
I did hear about that order, but it did nothing of the sort the commenter claimed it did. It did not allow 'people' to 'cancel' other people. It asked the DOJ to investigate any violations of section 230, and asked the FCC to rework its administrative rules regarding the law. It did not suspend anything. Did not create new law. That is editorial nonsense.
I'd love to nitpick and disagree with some of these, but I think that misses the broader point:

I'm someone who believes that it would be a huge benefit to the world if desktop Linux were 10X more popular than it currently is. And ultimately, if there are concrete problems that are holding back Linux adoption, that's good. That means they can be fixed (at least in theory), and that as a result desktop Linux will have wider adoption.

If it turns out that all these problems are just "not our fault, dumb end users, just learn to google" and so on, then we're screwed. Linux adoption is just out of our control and there's nothing to be done.
On Windows, Electron-based apps generally bundle Electron (Chromium and Node.js) with the app, resulting in a large download size. You can do that with Windows Qt apps as well, and it generally works out too (the app is larger than a Win32 app but smaller than an Electron app). I have less experience with GTK but I assume it works the same.

Linux distributions expect Qt and GTK apps to use a system toolkit. Some like Arch try to package Electron apps the same way (using a system Electron). However Electron releases incompatible major versions often, and you often have to install multiple Electron versions in parallel for different apps, and which version changes over time, so I have to juggle installing/uninstalling "electron" and "electron12/13/..." based on when apps update. (Admittedly, I also have Qt5/6 installed and GTK3/4 installed, but I expect these version numbers to remain stable for the next 5+ years.)
You're running a two year old kernel on Focal. Try something newer. I have Intel WiFi and Bluetooth and they work perfectly fine on Linux, as does video playback on Firefox.
I also recommend Pop!_OS.

It's great if you're looking for something that "works out of the box". There's some nitpicking that I could do that most power users would be interested in but the nitpicking isn't worse than other hardware vendors. But System76 (who build Pop!_OS) support staff are A+. Support tickets are responsive. They're active on Discord. They use the products they build.

If you're looking for nitpicking, I would say that some laptops internal displays with simultaneously with external displays while others might need some configuration and a reboot. It can be difficult to navigate their website to find the configuration -- but their support staff are quick to point to URLs on the website and offer help. I personally disprefer the Gnome interface that comes preinstalled and much prefer Cinnamon. But switching is easy if you're already familiar with Linux and System76 does support it (but you have to install it via command line).

I had a hardware issue and sent it in for repair within the warranty period. They were able to cross-ship a loaner laptop, had the repair done pretty quick, and then I returned the loaner laptop. No out-of-pocket cost to me -- they provided shipping labels for both directions. It was honestly some of the best support experiences I've had.
i agree, i do all those things using git. no reason to learn another abstraction. maybe create a few aliases to reduce typing.
> 5. The Wayland list is damning as it reads like serious architectural errors were made for something that was meant to learn from X; and

The Wayland section is also perhaps the most technically inaccurate of the post, for example in its comparisons to how competing systems are put together - more than once it lays the blame for not providing a certain kind of API at the feet of Wayland, when in the other systems named, the equivalent API is also not provided by the windowing/compositing system but at an orthogonal library level. In other cases the criticism reflects broad technological trends that are equally true for other systems from the same era (e.g. client-side rasterization), and for the same motivating reasons.
Many developers don't seem to understand that people just want their computers to work. They also seem to not understand when you're throwing away a codebase, you're throwing away years of experience through bugfixes and user feedback. Everything must change and everything must be invented again. There's just no way you're ever going to get a solid desktop that way.
> A company could produce a polished Linux desktop but nobody will pay for it so it won't happen.

I could see myself paying let's say $100 a year for a polished Linux desktop. "Polished" meaning no screen tearing, video hw acceleration, working power management, macOS (or at least Windows) level of GUI consistency, nice package manager with a curated app store.

How many customers would be required to support a project like this?
a large portion of English, in general, is changes in spelling from prior words, usually traceable to proto-indo-european, which is a catchall group of languages that etymologists are unable to find reliable sources for. It's generally extrapolated backward, and decent extrapolations are used to bootstrap understanding of words that don't quite "fit" with english, and may, in fact, come from other areas of the planet.

There are also scads of words that had a contemporary meaning that changed "overnight", morphing into entirely new meanings, which then brokered entirely new words with different definitions. My current favorite word to use an example of this is "filibuster" - the act of obstructing legislation by talking. The word, as so many in english, came from bastardizing the dutch word for "freebooter" or pirate, through a circuitous route of the French adding an S, and the American English removing an S. If you dig a bit more, you find that the "booty" part of freebooter (which means 'loves plunder' from the original dutch) came from a french word first recorded in the 1300s, "butin", which probably came from some mid-german word meaning "haul from plundering". There's also an implication that for a while in the 1500s-1800s freebooter was also the name of a private entity that engaged in exchanging goods - a "free trader", with the negative connotations falling in and out of style.

So, if you can parse Shakespeare or Chaucer at all, it's because of the mechanism of how English, and other languages derived from the same roots "evolve". Saxon and old High German, as well as Icelandic all play a huge role in the way we speak and write today, to name a few.
> 5. The Wayland list is damning as it reads like serious architectural errors were made for something that was meant to learn from X; and

Exactly my thought as well. However I am pretty happy with Wayland as my daily driver though (except some weird issues on Firefox). Anybody with more knowledge about Wayland's development cares to comment?
Couldn't strike a deal with lanxiongchuanmeiyouxiangongsi for hn.com?
By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too. There are some pretty good people out there who aren't that expensive. But there's a bunch of risks with that approach and they are similar to the ones where you outsource design - you will constantly have to re-hire if you need pivots, there might be major friction switching people, and the costs can start to add up. It's not 100% analogous, freelance design is a bit cheaper, it's easier to spot bad designers etc, but I think the analogy somewhat holds.

Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.
> Do people really care where their ads are shown so long as people click on them?

Of course they care. They pay per click, so they want the ads well-targeted so they have a high conversion rate, otherwise it's wasted money. Some ad networks literally scam businesses by placing ads everywhere so they get clicked on accidentally but of course this does nothing for conversion.
I like to use cash for the bribery. Not the illegal/corrupt kind, but the little things. Like not having to wait for a table at a restaurant, or having my valeted car already at the curb when I walk out. There will always be a place for cash.
>Who installs Linux themselves? Tech geeks/enthusiasts.

Perhaps this wouldn't be the case if we fixed some of the issues in the article :)

There are plenty of people "on the fence" but problems mentioned in the article (among others) keep them away.