skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of things that just don't smell right here. First of all, every experience I've had trying to get GDocs to play ball with DOCX has led to the same misery that comes with LibreOffice. It works fine until you use an unsupported font, or tables, or precise image layouts, etc etc etc.

DOCX is a proprietary format. Perfect support is categorically impossible. A best-effort attempt is the best we'll ever get, and IME LibreOffice tries a lot harder than other office suites do.

Also, for what it's worth... you know what GDocs and Word won't open? A document written in WordStar on a TRS-80 in 1983. You know what will open that document? LibreOffice. LibreOffice checks all the boxes for my spreadsheet/document writing needs, and it has also been an irreplacable tool in my data archival efforts.
Why pass a law that’s completely unenforceable?
"The average participant scored 60%" and "many of them can’t tell AI art" cannot be true at the same time. One is data and the other is just an insistence, so it has to be the insistence that has to be wrong here.

> So maybe some people hate AI because they have an artist's eye for small inadequacies and it drives them crazy.

Did the author really needed hard data to accept this?
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.

What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.
>More than any other profession, many of us - as software developers, mathematicians, scientists - have a better grasp of complex systems. And most of us on HN have a healthy, deeply internalized sense of morality. I really hope some of us will branch out into politics or other power-positions in those institutions, and start knocking people's heads together.

Having a good grasp of complex systems doesn't make one avoid the shortcomings that have created modern genocides and industrialized society, etc. In fact I'd argue that deep knowledge of complex systems makes a politician even more competent at causing harm on massive scales.

Knowledge does not make one moral.
Now can libera please establish etiquette for channel mods? All the biggest channels have extremely toxic, egotistical mods with god complexes visible from space.
There are really two, almost entirely separate, points there - one is about missing interpretability of LibreOffice, and the other is about the author's inability to install Microsoft Office on Linux.

I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical.

With respect to the LibreOffice interoperability with Microsoft Office: the author works in publishing, which requires almost pixel-perfect equivalence between how a document is displayed between them and their collaborators. Faithfully reproducing almost 40 years of evolution in the layout engine (some of which co-evolution with the Windows OS and the font system) necessitates a development program of mind-boggling proportions. It is absolutely no surprise to me that no entity, either commercial or open source can finance such an endeavor. (Even Microsoft does not exhibit 100% interop between the native Office and the cloud Office 365)

A similar argument applies to being able to install Office on Linux, with the added nuance that the major driving force behind Wine etc are game distributors, whereas Office compatibility is not a major priority, especially given the VM and Office 365 alternatives.
Docker on Windows can use WSL2 engine for near native performance.
That's what people usually say but they have tried to do just that a few years ago and it didn't really work. Docker inc has been doing great since they have shifted towards even more standardization in their container runtime, and focused on dev tooling. They became profitable when they focused on Docker desktop and docker hub instead of trying to build a clunky alternative to kubernetes or yet another cloud orchestration tool/platform.
The Mullenweg/WPE thing is the one I recommend:

https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...

It is a chronology published as a GitHub gist.
Very cool. The light rays texture can actually do a lot of heavy lifting in the effect. TBH the one I made for the tutorial isn’t even that great. I like the harder lines on that Windows 7 one.

I thought about playing with saturation and I saw some other examples do that. I decided against it. For my article anyways it wouldn’t have mattered as much given that the moon image I used doesn’t have much color. I’d encourage folks making their own glass to play with that though.
Logographic seems fine for the mind? Thinking in speech is the default and most people talk before they read.
Was this the in-house c++ WPF implementation?
None of those measures were necessary or even effective.
How exactly is docker (buildkit, compose, the runtime, the daemon, etc) not open source? Docker desktop isn't, but that's almost entirely unrelated to the containerization technology that it uses or that people refer to when they talk about docker.
There are so many interpretations of reality. There are also forces that are intentionally directing the messaging in a way that is perceived to be advantageous. This is to say, it's all very well to say one needs to do something, but are you even sure you have the right info? Back to your complex software system, where are you receiving information about the error in a system from, and why are you confident that it actually relays reality in a way that you would agree with? If you are not certain of the signal, why would you want to attempt to reengineer the system? With false information, aren't you bound to make it worse?

Anyway, the real problem is parsing out the information in a way that reflects reality - what is presented on screens passes through many filters before it gets to us: corporate, military, governmental, not too mention all the people that are only able to see the world in the way that their education allows.
Yes it was! I actually loved that thing.
"The guidance computer, however, turbocharged the semiconductor industry, leading directly to the microcomputer revolution and a significant portion of the productivity increases across the world since."

Not the Apollo guidance computer, though. The D-17B Minuteman guidance computer, from 1962.[1]
Long before Apollo. The USAF was for most of the 1950s and 1960s the largest purchaser of semiconductors.

Nor is NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-17B
Show me Geary and Van Ness with 15k Waymos.
That one wonderful! One of the most captivating articles I’ve read in a long time.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm

shows ~5% of the somewhat young population with long covid, 1% with significant impairment. It's not a death sentence but it's definitely bad.
What is the name of the standard electrical unit? [video]
Yeah it's basically fine in Safari because mobile requires a double tap to highlight, but only a single click on desktop. So highlighting is more intentional on mobile than desktop.
Zig is becoming a strong ecosystem for JS/TS tooling.

Not sure if it started with Bun but there's good momentum.
I don’t think that LibreOffice not being in the browser is necessarily a blocker in itself. For something like an advanced office suite, where you don’t want to have browser toolbars/tabs/etc eating up valuable screen space that could be going to app palettes and such instead, not being chained to a browser is a boon.

Besides that, when software serves a purpose well, people do not hesitate to download and install it. If need to install an app causes significant user dropoff, I’d say that’s an indictment of the app’s functionality/UX/etc. It basically means that the value the app provides isn’t worth an extremely minor one-time inconvenience, which is a pretty low bar to clear.
What’s the benefit of generating embeddings for such large chunks? Do people use these large contexts to include lots of document specific headers/footers or are they actually generating embeddings of single large documents?

I don’t understand how the math works out on those vectors
It is somewhat enforceable.

Sure, no one is going to go after random reddit post, but if a Major Newspaper wants to have AI write their articles, this would have to be labeled. And if your bank gets LLM support agent, it can no longer pretend to be human. All very desireable outcomes IMHO.
Makes me wonder why docker still didn't make it to the ubuntu/debian repositories. Would be such an easy net benefit
> Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone

This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)
Microsoft really doesn't want anyone to reliably copy their formats. Their standard is purposefully complicated and convoluted, it was almost rejected by ISO for this reason and it took heavy lobbying before it passed (I know of this personally as the ISO vote went through national ISO bodies).

I've worked with the Java implementation for writing Office files, the Apache POI. The internal package names for these classes are "hssf", "hwpf" and so on. It's not very obvious why until you Google it and, well, "hwpf" stands for "horrible word processor format", "hssf" is "horrible spreadsheet format" and so on. Implementing these things is often difficult for good reason, and sometimes for not so good reasons, but this is the first time I've encountered developers expressing such direct hostility towards what they were trying to implement.
If comments by LLMs were actually as valuable & insightful as human comments there would be no need for the rule. The rule is in place because they usually aren't.

Relavent xkcd https://xkcd.com/810/
Cool technical achievement; Bad UX. It's harder to read or understand anything inside a translucent panel than one with a consistent, solid background because of lower and inconsistent contrast with the background. Additionally, things potentially happening underneath will be distracting and disorienting.
I’m not sure what this guys point is. He first says that he can’t stand on ideology, he Needs to Het Things Done. Then he says LO needs to implement OOXML fully.

Which is cute, because not even Microsoft implement OOXML fully.

LO is an incremental development model. Every point release increases compatibility. Case in point: EMF+ files had massive gaps. A guy called Bartovs has now implemented a huge chunk of functionality now.

Now we have implemented Smart Art. Floating tables. You name it, it gets improved every point release.

But what I don’t see is him writing quality bug reports. Fit to start somewhere.
(a) Docker wants to bundle vendor libraries instead of using other packages and (b) Canonical uses LXD and MicroK8s instead.
YouTube is a JS app so adding a URL param could break the JS depending on what the JS does with it.
What's everyone's opinion on OnlyOffice? It seems to have a much more polished UI than LibreOffice.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors
How the fuck is NYT working Matt Stoller into an article about cheerleading?
Except he can't be banned from TwitterX like Trump. Imagine Musk as a future Republican candidate with a social network. This DODGE thing is a political ramp for him. The other potential candidate is Zuckerberg with his fascination with ancient Rome. Both are hardly the types to retreat silently and open a charitable foundation like Bill Gates.
"Obey the Moon and its mighty wisdom. Ignore it, and be vaporized."
Better isn't just one dimension but I've repeatedly heard that OO is a damn dumpster fire for loading untrusted content: https://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html vs https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/security/advisories/

Them both being written in a memory unsafe language[1][2] isn't helping matters

Also, while digging up those links I noticed the last release of OO was in Dec 2023 which is a lot of time for all the components they bundle to acquire vulns. But at least they're consistent about it since the release before that was in Feb 2023

1: https://github.com/apache/openoffice/tree/AOO4115-GA/main/ba...

2: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/basic/sou...
As far as i can tell, this policy is essentially - don't do anything with an llm that would get you banned if you did it manually as a human.
Behind the Curtain: Trump's liberal cabinet
gotta say, having written some scientific computing code, the libraries out there do not always cover the exact operation you need and are not always using the best algo in the literature. i was able to beat the existing ecosystem 6x head to head and thousands of times faster for my use case. ymmv ofc depending on the problem.

that said, it was not easy!!
Statistical analysis, more or less. Alphabets have a couple dozen characters, syllabaries have a couple hundred, and logographic scripts have thousands to tens of thousands.
hah. the best press conference of all time was held by the marketing guys after they were "caught". they refused to answer questions about anything other than their hair, and i remember some witty reporter asking them what theyd do about their hair if they went to jail. caught them off guard, hah.

edit - here it is, beautiful

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X2fGzmphx4U
Personally I am looking forward to an end to end encrypted office suite from Proton:
https://proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive

I don’t really care about it being compatible with Microsoft’s convoluted formats. Maybe it needs to be able to export into those formats, but I also think the world is ready to move on from Office. Most of its features are unnecessary in practice.
I like when repos say "not implemented yet" or "to-do" or "working on" and the last commit was years ago. Makes me feel better about not going back to my to-dos I drop through my code. (Not meaning to throw shade on this author, just finding it comforting)
F# sounds fun, I’ve been goofing off with Haskell in my spare time and really liking how it handles parsing problems. I’d think F# would be elegant for AOC too
Egress costs are killing us. Any hacks?
We have some pretty heavy serverless / cloud functions usage. The cost of serverless compute is fairly less and we really like the pay-for-usage pricing.

Its extremely frustrating to pay for egress price to move the data around.

Checked Cloudflare Workers. We love it, but as of now, it does not support the packages we are using.

Are there any hacks around it?
It's grown slowly and deliberately. It only broke out because of the election and Elon's antics. Feels about as organic as it can get.
It would be great to have a demo game to get a feel of.. the feel, without needing to enter an email address.

The back button is broken. Clicking through from here, I was unable to return to HN. Firefox 128 ESR on Linux.

My use case: Occasional Kahoot user.
I'm pretty sure there is no subsurface scattering in frosted glass. Indeed frosted glass is just regular glass with a frosted surface. Below the surface, it's just pure glass, which does not scatter light.
> Better that than crashing into a mountain.

Quite literally: https://youtu.be/kamyxB-yKrc?t=1479

Or rolling off a cliff: https://youtu.be/0ga8UFy1M04?t=742
> ...when stopped at Immigration and asked the purpose of my visit I was able to respond, with not great inaccuracy: "Rembrandt, I guess."

Ugh, I would hate this kind of thing if I were a customs officer.
Best Image Extension for Web Load
ooooooh.. ouch. Even worse than I thought
https://archive.is/ejuuD
They had amazing hair. I loved all their hair commentary. Best response to a literal media circus.
People have been so thoroughly manipulated to distrust institutions that they no longer understand the basics of those institutions. It reminds of a few weeks ago when so many people appeared surprised that publications made presidential endorsements, because that's opinion and why are they not only reporting on facts?
Box86 and Box64: run x86, x64 binaries on ARM
I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character recognition.
Ahmed Mohamed Clock Incident
Homebrew Is Great on Linux
It was a LED moonite. It wasn't scary at all.
Was going to say about the same - this is ~2500 years after construction of the pyramids. How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes
> starting life as a worm-like thing.

Not that different from a dragon fly[0], really. Most insects go through distinct metamorphosis[1]: egg -> larva -> pupae -> adult.

[0] https://media.australian.museum/media/dd/images/Some_image.w...

[1] https://www.amentsoc.org/insects/fact-files/life-cycles.html
Yeah ironically enough I think what’s cutting edge about LLMs is their ability to let you spend more time in the command line and less in the gui. With AI writing the time cost/opportunity cist of writing shell scripts is so low, even if you find yourself working on a machine you’re not used to (e.g. Windows for linux users).
Virtually all of the writing we find from earlier periods has been carved in stone. Without finding the rare monument or well-preserved grave stone, a traveler that arrived here 10,000 years in the future would find just as little evidence that we knew how to write.
Make 'em pay for a user account, even a one-off $5 per account should suffice
All you have to do is read it...

"Critics like Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, claim that the cheer giant is a monopolist whose dominance in its area rivals that of Google in tech and has had negative impacts for participants and their families. "
I don't think that is correct. Dang usually links directly to the guidelines and even quotes the exact guidelines being infringed upon sometimes. '"dang" "newsguidelines.html"' returns 20,909 results on algolia.[0] (Granted, not all of these are by Dang himself, I don't think you can search by user on algolia?) Some of the finer points relating to specific guidelines may no be directly written there, eg. what exactly is considered link bait or not etc., but I don't think there are any full blown rules not in the guidelines. I think the reason LLMs haven't been added is because it's a new problem and making a new rule to quickly that may have to change later will just cause more confusion.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This will probably be my last run (2:49): https://youtu.be/zIyZJjyPy8U

Kudos on a great game! If you ever expand or open source this, let me know. The mechanics and design are great and could really blossom into something fun and expansive (especially if users could submit levels).
If both sides are frosted, then you will have a similar effect as subsurface scattering.
What Happened at Synapse According to Founder Sankaet Pathak
[OneJS](https://onejs.com/) for Unity is a more modern entry in this space (Disclaimer: I'm the creator). Instead of embedding a browser/webview, it lets you use web techs and directly integrates with UI Toolkit (Unity's native UI solution).

A general drawback of using web UIs in games is the lack of support for performant 2D vfx. It's something I'd like to tackle in 2025 with [Spark2D](https://github.com/Singtaa/Spark2D).
The article is about alphabets. There was writing prior to alphabets, but it was done in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and characters. Alphabets are easier to learn and therefore more widely used.
It is sad to see these projects disappear in obscurity. But what other outcome is even possible? It is incredibly expensive to build such complex software. these projects do not have an adequate amount of funding. There’s just no way random developers can devote years of their life to something like this and not earn a living. Even if they did, it would take at least 1000 of them for each of these products to rival commercial ones.
Every once in a while? Under what circumstances, exactly?
Since the homepage didn't explain what it did(and simply had upload), I visited the faqs. But the faqs are for a different project. You may want to fix that.
Well I don’t read much fiction, any good picks?
I wasn't suggesting there weren't ethical companies. Indeed, I would hope, given the amount of companies out there, some high percentage of them were ethical. I agree they are overshadowed though.

I would probably add it's hard to know if a company is acting ethically (whatever that means) or not, unless there's some kind of formal certification which does this?
How would I have known he made an appearance without reading it?
Yes, it looks similar. But it's still not sub surface scattering.

Light inside the frosted glass just goes in a straight direction. It will not behave like this : https://blendamator.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/schema-ra...
It seems odd to me that the NYT spends the first part of the article going after coaches and the company Varsity and none on those actually responsible: the parents.
“When the only tool you have is a hammer…”

Stoller’s their tool of choice, pun entirely intended
Closing schools for a year and a half?
I was taking a class around this time that involved programming and Atari 2600. I made a game based around this event.

http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/atari.html
Brazil Finds Chinese Ally in Its Feud with Elon Musk
Written on what? There are very few materials that will last 10s of millennia.

Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.
All the Big Endianness you could want.
No, there are several things like this that aren't explicitly in the guidelines and aren't likely ever to be. We'd get into a very long meta thread talking about what kinds of things land in the guidelines vs. in Dan's "jurisprudence" threads; some other time, maybe.
The skeptics also provided similar arguments as yours against the idea of Egyption hieroglyphics as syllabic/alphabets until they found the venerable Rosetta Stone, and the rest is history. We just need another Rosetta Stone but for Indus script.
there is no "we"
For one thing, it has no license that would enable other people to use it, especially in corporate environments that are sensitive to legal liability

I don't have experience with Deno specifically, but anytime I see node or typescript things I associate that with having an unlimited number of node_modules directories littering my filesystem consuming unlimited amounts of disk space each. How does rad behave in that regard?

Also, languages with implied imports drive me batshit: https://github.com/cdaringe/rad/blob/v8.0.0/src/mod.ts#L20
QRception: A QR code generator in a QR Code
To be fair, office 95 was an incredible release and it had a similar increase in sophistication that windows 95 did over earlier versions of windows. The Microsoft works of that era, which I think was version 4, was also a big step up. I assume that is because it must share some software components with the full office suite. the later versions of office have not really added much useful functionality. The ribbon was perhaps the big change since that era, but it was largely unnecessary.
Tbh it’s more like an edge-lit acrylic effect. We did call it a “subsurface effect” when I worked at Forza but may have been using the term loosely. Forza also was going for acrylic rather than glass and we had several acrylic samples around the office to play with.

That being said my example is not acrylic… and it’s not quite glass either as you mention. It’s more like glass with some artistic license.