skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While Affinity is a one-time purchase, I'll admit I was very, very disappointed when with the last version they switched from a normal product key to online-only activation requirement which was not at all clear at purchase time. So despite having purchased the whole v2 suite I ended up never using it and staying with v1, and their response was pretty junk as well. That said, I share concerns of other posters that this isn't going to make the trajectory any better. The email sent out by the CEO also gave me very strong "Our Incredible Journey" [0] vibes:

>"In Canva, we've found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.

>Canva's revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together."

I can't speak for anyone else on HN but the whole thing (more resources! empowerment! design democratisation!) gives me some serious deja vu.

----

0: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
I look at app stores and see a lot of "free to play" products. So many users have gotten so accustomed to not paying upfront for products (which historically could be substantial amounts) that the option is often no longer available.
Excellent, have a whole group of voters who aren't allowed access to certain political information. Or are you going to raise the voting age to 25 as well?

Perhaps we should also cut off people over 65, since they've proven to be more vulnerable to scams and financial exploitation over social media?

(there's real arguments to be had about the negative effects of social media, but a serious discussion would include those on adults and old people as well, and this ban, like the TikTok one, is definitely more a part of culture war than a well-intentioned effort to improve the effect of telecoms on people's lives)
Yeah, my interest was piqued by the title but that demo video torpedoed it... Which is such a bummer because language learning is a perfect use case for LLMs
Was watching CNN around 6AM EDT, they had a reporter on scene who mentioned wind "whipping across" the harbor. This was in reference to the potential survivability of the freezing cold water, but it seems likely it could have been a factor in pushing the ship off course as well.
> you'll see that the design of a 3D-capable console in the 90s was a significant challenge for every company.

While this is true, I still think that the PlayStation had the most interesting and forwarding looking design of its generation, especially considering the constraints. The design is significantly cheaper than both Saturn and Nintendo 64, it was fully 3D (compared to Saturn for example), using CD as media was spot-on and also having the MJPEG decoder (that allowed PlayStation to have not only significantly higher video quality than its rivals, but also allowed video to be used for backgrounds for much better quality graphics, see for example Resident Evil or Final Fantasy series).

I really wanted to see a design inspired in the first PlayStation with more memory (since the low memory compared to its rivals was an issue it seemed, especially in e.g.: 2D fighting games where the amount of animations had to be cut a lot compared to Saturn) and maybe some more hardware accelators to help fix some of the issues that plagued the platform.
True, driving routes wasn't a great example. But I think the point stands if you take something like the way they drive (number of vehicles, how they manage junctions, etc.) or which exit they use.

You can observe stuff like the way police motorcyclists (I think they call them 'outriders') speed ahead to the next junction, stop traffic, convoy passes through, rear motorcyclists meanwhile catch up to the front of the convoy and the ones holding traffic then adopt their position at the rear, swapping each junction. But there's no benefit to documenting/publicising that (and I'm sure there's nuance to it I haven't picked up on). It's probably also easier to get involved in the police and go on that advanced driving course or whatever and learn all about the techniques they use than it is to actually be assigned to that team - it's not super secret, but the more you keep hidden the harder you make it to be subversive.
Heck, why not ban it altogether?

In all seriousness, this is a great move that should be emulated. I'm a tech-optimist but the effect social media has on teenagers specifically and public discourse in general is absolutely toxic.
Social media is not “speech” it is a specific type of platform which you also do not have a constitutional right to.
i'm 38 and grew up with this lineage:

NES, Genesis, PSX/N64, PS2/XBOX, PS3/XBOX360, XboxOne.

I was fanatic about Genesis because of the big title games like Mortal Kombat, Sonic, etc.

I VORACIOUSLY read gaming mags and the hype around the PSX was massive. It utterly dwarfed Sega. And seeing the first image of Cloud starting up at the Shinra tower captivated me. The games they were touting were just incredible looking.

I was just a kid and marketing won me over.
What is a mummy (within the context of an almond tree)?

I can't even find the definition (in context) in the dictionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mummy
This reminds me of a really cool video on superheterodyne receivers that Technology Connections did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz_mMLhUinw
You don‘t seem to be aware of the concept of an independent judiciary.
There are two aspects to this:

- If payload is not inlined, the loop can't be optimized away. The fact of iteration itself may be a desirable side-effect (spin-wait/pause) a stricter compiler can't make an assumption about, unlike GCC or Clang

- If payload is inlined, it should be a no-op. If it's not, and its result consumed by an opaque "sink" method, there may be limitations.

On interproc analysis - don't forget you can dynamically load code and access payload through reflection too. This limits certain optimizations that are otherwise legal in AOT compilation. .NET has similar restrictions and corresponding differences when publishing binaries with JIT vs AOT - the former gets to enjoy DynamicPGO (HotSpot kind of optimizations), the latter gets to enjoy frozen world (with exact devirtualization, faster reflection, auto-sealing, etc. but overall not as good as DynamicPGO with guarded devirt, branch reordering, etc.).
This is not a blanket restriction it is a ban on social media which a specific thing. Social media != speech it is a product created by a company for profit
Per the article, these anchors appear in Ken Thompson's port of the QED text editor, which dates back to 1970.
I have a feeling that soon we will have models which will predict the future better than humans and then the humans will stop predicting it and we will lose all insights into how to predict the future. at least the models will not make mistakes. /s
How many? It depends on the opportunity cost of installing and maintaining whatever half baked thing (lights, sirens, computer vision, AI, barriers) it is OP is envisioning on how many thousands of bridges versus the frequency of issues it will prevent. This calculation is done all the time but not so much by the "if it saves only one x" crowd of clever solution proposers.
> for geospatial data... GeoPackage was "the Format of the Future" 8 years ago

What's the current consensus? Can you link to a summary article?

(Some still say GeoPackage is: https://mapscaping.com/shapefiles-vs-geopackage/ )
The thing is, most of the time, you can actually have both. You just have to spend the time to build systems that way.

To use the example from the article: spreadsheets could use strongly-typed columns, but guess the column type automatically based on the values entered. When things go right, it'd be just as easy as today, but if things go wrong, you always have an escape hatch: with a little more work, you can manually specify the column type. Problem solved. That gives you the increased productivity you want for the happy case, without the frustration of trying to find a workaround for the corner case. This kind of approach needs more architecture work at the beginning of a project, but it's almost always feasible.

That being said, I think your frustration is warranted, although I think it's much more pervasive than tech. At its core, I think the problem is that, in your example, the CEO and the programmer are having two different conversations without really realizing it. The CEO wants a problem solved, but the programmer wants the tools to solve the problem themselves. The CEO thinks that ML should be able to solve their problem, but the programmer sees that ML as a tool has serious limitations, and won't help solve under-specification. And then they both end up talking past each other.

It seems that a lot of (at least western society) is built around the idea that when someone asks for help, what they "really" want is, metaphorically, to be given a fish for dinner, instead of learning how to fish. That's the CEO in your example; the presumption is "I want help" means "solve my problem", not "make it easy for me to solve my problem myself". It's one of my biggest frustrations, because it inherently robs you of agency and in many cases can be downright condescending -- for example, when I was working as a mechanical engineer, there were shop floor guys ignoring the tolerances I specified on my drawings because they assumed I was over-specifying them, because they lacked the context of the rest of the design, and weren't willing to sit down to hear the bigger picture. But when I had to send the parts back for re-work, they acted like it was my fault.

Anyways, this is all a really long-winded way of saying, I think this is largely a social problem, not a technological one. But I don't think it's inherent in humans; I think this is something we've learned as a part of our culture.
So the party of small government isn't allowed to make any laws, even for (what they consider, at least) the well-being of society?

This concept that "the other side" can't do anything right is going to be the end of society.
Channeling my inner QA person, this breaks in many subtle and not so subtle ways:

- people love to export as CSV. And I kinda understand them, csv looks simple enough, what could go wrong ?

- other spreadsheet softs need to recognize the same field and act the same way. Google Sheets, LibreOffice, KingSoft's one etc. Not counting old office versions that aren't updated anymore, because the owner doesn't want to move into the cloud.

- the flag needs to stay when moving sheets around, copy to another set, etc.

That could still be better than nothing. But could still lead to catastrophic loses as people get used to it working most of the time, there's no perfect solution.
The ship loses power before the turn. The power loss could of course have been the result of a cyber attack, but a mundane mechanical failure seems more likely.
In 2013, a tanker ship hit the Bay Bridge (Oakland <--> SF) but didn't do much damage. In 2007, another tanker (Cosco Busan) hit the same bridge dumping oil into the bay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upfjxfl2nRM. We have a new bridge there now because that one was also damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake.

When the Golden Gate needs replacement, the Marin NIMBY's that didn't extend BART to the north bay are going to be sad (more likely, their children will be).
Tomb Raider was ported off the Saturn to other platforms
People don't just start being able to deal with things that require self control at a specific age. It has to be taught. Even sex ed recognizes that, where it's far more effective to teach kids how to be safe during it rather than to teach them that they can do what they want after 18.

If you push off the learning to when the person can legally just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating parental responsibility and setting the person up for addiction as an adult.
Not speaking from personal experience. My kid is only 4.

Your argument seems like exactly what my parents would have said about me spending so much time on TV, computers and electronics instead of studying, playing outside, sports etc.

Almost exactly like your last paragraph..
“I’m personally glad that I grew up without infinite channels on TV, computers and its games, cell phones and your SMSes. I’m worried about your generation. You guys are exposed to a lot of junk and things that waste your attention.” - Dad.

Yet, here we are….

May be kids of now will just need to be educated about the real impact and not be treated as if they are in glass houses?
Nice strawman, the political realignment called and says it wants a word with you
Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2024
> The path loss equation violates conservation of energy ie the frequency or wavelength term depending on how it's structured cannot be in the equation.

Why is that?
The disk 'Format' dialog in Windows was only meant to be a temporary solution
Per the article, these anchors appear in Ken Thompson's port of the QED text editor which dates back to 1970, years before even the ADM-1 terminal.
> to then see these "probes" into if we are taking it seriously

The probe is to determine if the effort was effective not if you are taking it seriously. If your work was effective then nothing will happen, if it wasn't effective than the fine or lack thereof would be sized appropriately to how serious they believe you are taking it. That is just effective regulation in action.

From the press release:

> The Commission has opened proceedings against Alphabet, to determine whether Alphabet's display of Google search results may lead to self-preferencing in relation to Google's vertical search services (e.g., Google Shopping; Google Flights; Google Hotels) over similar rival services.

I will admit to not having used google search for ages because of these practices and other modifications making it worse and worse, so off I go to search for "hotels paris" the sort of search I might make when planning a trip to Paris and I want to avoid booking.com for similar reasons.

And the top is google maps followed by some excerpt of google lodging links redirecting through google. So yeah, seems like google lodging is being preferenced over booking (which I also don't want) and tripadvisor, hotels.com, expedia etc. all prioritised over organic results that I would actually want.

So google search certainly preferences google maps and google lodging, maybe that is a preference consistent with the DMA but I feel like maybe it shouldn't be. If you were involved in a project to depreference google maps or lodging in a way consistent with the DMA, then I feel like you were targeting a little too deep into the grey area or didn't have enough time. As others pointed out, this is just a probe to determine if compliance has been achieved or not. There is no assumption of guilt.
> This is all made much worse by the fact that nobody feels like they can talk about what happened.

Many if not a majority of people still don't feel like they can. One way that characterizes the entire pandemic for me in a way that I think is inseparable to the pandemic itself: the company I was at forced a team "race discussion" right at the outset of when society was in chaos and the two Chinese women on the team said this feels like the Cultural Revolution and that they'd left China to escape it, only to feel like it's cropping up again.

All I know is that there's a strident progressive authoritarianism that has tried to suppress opposition at any cost and march through the institutions enforcing strict rules against wrongthink.
Still the same problems. Unless you exclude people with older excel versions they can still ruin the file. And if the first person in the chain didn't make the change, who would even notice it? So we're back at requiring extreme vigilance without any assurance.

Also keep in mind that the first person doesn't necessarily use excel at all. The file might start and end as a text file or TSV.
Yes the LibreOffice CSV import dialog showing you a what-if preview of what you'd get as you play with different settings, is pure amazing.
I assure you I have an understanding of the law. This is such a a rude and preposterous assertion in bad faith.

This is a law mandating ID verification for all children and adults.

If you require controls for everyone below a certain age, you de facto require controls for everyone of every age who does not prove they are over the minimum age. In other words, even if you can legally discriminate against children, my rights to speak anonymously as an adult are being taken away because if I don't show my ID, I will be treated as a child who has fewer rights.

We can disagree on the merits, but please don't imply that everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto an idiot.
Also had a disaster. "The Tasman Bridge gained national attention following the Tasman Bridge disaster. On 5 January 1975, the bridge was struck by the bulk ore carrier SS Lake Illawarra"
The biggest issue is there's a "touch the key" action in most FIDO flows. I'd love a dedicated framework expansion card with a usba port + fido token, and a tiny touch sensor on the side. Unsure if there's a big enough market for that.
Have you seen the list of Apple rules you need to follow to publish an alternative-engine-using browser in the EU?
Perhaps it would be better to link to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105778 which redirects to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575352... where the PDF can be downloaded for free.

While the ResearchGate page also provides the PDF for free, they prepend a branded cover page, which is unnecessary.
My favourite technical breakdown/hack of the Saturn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E
The less brutal (but with many moments or brutality of course) of all conquering or colonizing history.

https://www.youtube.com/@MexicoAntesdeMexico
https://youtu.be/stvwkZzQDPg?si=Zw6XdUKIviD9znWA
https://youtu.be/OAfRseP3LnE?si=QdS76k2uoDtmjpUU

One of the worst examples you could choose, and fruit of the anglo-propaganda that began on that time and continues today.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla... about the ~1:30 am bridge collapse on 2024-03-26 near Baltimore, MD.
I think the audience on HN is somewhat amenable to the idea that some amount of piracy/copyright-infringement is necessary for preservation. Pretty much everyone here hates DRM, and hates that you don’t own your media anymore.

That said, when the Internet Archive is directly competing with both the Switch Store and ThePirateBay, then lawsuits from Nintendo are basically inevitable.

I agree with your broad point, because archival is important, despite what these big corporations think, but I think that the way that IA is doing stuff right now carries a very real risk of getting sued into oblivion.
From .com to .beauty: The evolving threat landscape of email phishing
Technical question about free speech. Do you need to have right to see other speech to have free speech? So would it be enough for children to be able to post, but not read? As that would not violate their free speech.
Most likely it was engine failure which caused the steering to lose power and allowed the ship to be pushed by the current.
The question is whether the venue in which the speech is performed in is sufficiently public as to be exempt from regulation. Given that participation on these sites exposes participants to heavy commercial advertising, traffic analysis, and data harvesting, I think it's a reasonable stance that the state can regulate participation.
I gave up at "You give up human readable files". While I recognize in some cases these recommendations may make sense/CSV may not be ideal, the idea of a CSV _export_ is generally that it could need to be reviewed by a human.
Might as well raise the age of majority to 25, if the brain isn't finished developing they're obviously incapable of handling personal freedom!
In India, for example, you can call a tuktuk or a scooter, which you cannot do in the States. Not to mention all the different localized taxes, fees, regulations etc
Except nobody uses them. Another previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33935140
Wrecklessly and without simple redaction, in such a way that very well might have resulted in the deaths of US officials. And highly questionable selective publishing.

I think the guy is getting fucked over in this unfairly, but let's not pretend he has released information to a reasonable standard.
Which is a stupid design of software...

In 2024, tax software ought not to have the tax rules hardcoded, but instead ask the tax authority for a fresh set of rules at startup every time, and alert the user if the rules database ever gets more than 30 days out of date.

Nearly every government makes tax rule changes every year - it just isn't reasonable to hardcode them and require the user buy/install new software every year.
One good solution rather than Excel is org-mode. See the original Google talk by org-mode creator [1]. At some point 30 minutes or so, he explains how to use org-mode as a spreadsheet.

Not so powerful as Excel, even though missing features might be trivially added. I haven't tried it myself but i want to really dive into it's functionality. Org-mode is really great at many things, spreadsheets might as well be one more.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM
> Hugetlb initialization during boot takes up a considerable amount of time. For instance, on a 2TB system, initializing 1,800 1GB huge pages takes 1-2 seconds out of 10 seconds. Initializing 11,776 1GB pages on a 12TB Intel host takes more than 1 minute

So my 128GB server seems unlikely to benefit much.
A hybrid approach would work well too in some situations. When I worked in wetland restoration, one thing we did to reduce the ecological impact of herbicides was to cut the weeds a few inches above the water or soil, and then to paint herbicide directly on the cut face with a foam brush. This was a lot more labor intensive than spraying, but reduced the amount of herbicide used by 80-90%, and prevented any from landing in the water via over-spray. Even without the cutting step, applying herbicide directly to the weeds with a brush would be a big improvement over spraying.
It's sad that management buyouts aren't more popular. It would probably make for more quality products not having to conform to expectations of the market or private equity.
Money is just a proxy for power, so “poorer” means not able to do something. Note that you are referring to “we” being poorer, and a country’s ability to do (or get) something is not the same as an individual within the country’s ability to do something.
I need to introduce my customers using Excel to the typecasting concept. :o>