skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember this fiasco. We were peak see-something-say-something (or maybe just beyond that) in post-9/11 USA. Absolute paranoia. People who lived in the middle of nowhere were afraid of terrorist attacks, as though high population urban centers wouldn’t be the real targets.

See also: Freedumb Fries[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
The biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is that the general purpose office suite is dying a slow death.

When you think about it, unless you’re working at a very small business or on home stuff, most things you do with it should live elsewhere.

If you’re writing up some documentation for a business process, that should live in a system designed for that purpose where documents can be linked together and integrate with other systems. Examples include Confluence or Notion.

If you’re using Calc/Excel to handle some accounting or some other kind of quantitative organization, there’s probably a specialized system that you should be using, or just using a CRUD application.

If you’re doing HR stuff like performance reviews you need a system that can enforce tight read permissions and enforce a workflow.

The list goes on and on. The general business office suite only exists to catch general purpose processes that fall through the cracks where a better solution doesn’t exist, and every day that goes by eliminates another one of those use cases.

The second biggest blocker is that LibreOffice isn’t in your browser. It’s a slow-installing slow-loading clunky old desktop application.

The third biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is the dogshit ancient-looking UI. It looks nothing like a native application on any platform which constantly reminds you you’re using the knockoff of the Real McCoy.

And the final hurdle is that it has a dorky name.
What a ridiculous complaint and wild gymnastics to blame a cultural gripe on to the hardworking deferent immigrants
Yes, it is a specialized version of a bar chart. But typically the goal is to look at the distribution of the data. I will also explore using specialized scatter plots (with line plots) to explore the distribution of the data.
I think one of the big reasons is cost. Spotify and Netflix are able to trade off their vast libraries of back content (some of the most popular streaming shows are still The Office and Friends). The production cost on those is long since paid and they can just rake in money from it.

Not so for journalism. There are very few pieces people will return to years after they’re written. It requires constant publishing of new content and to make good content costs money.
> A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.

This kind of thinking in tech is why Office doesn't have any serious competitors. It's insufficient for what most business users need, and they're the reason the whole world runs on Office.
One of the biggest blockers is the stubbornness of Apache Foundation that fails to admit that OpenOffice is effectively dead and simply redirect to the LibreOffice site, along with the announcement that OpenOffice is deprecated.
Update: Drag and drop file should work now :)
The JavaScript name*, discussion (277 points, 68 days ago, 127 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41557383

Related Deno is filing a USPTO petition to cancel Oracle's JavaScript trademark (7 points, 2 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212949
You can't reduce the demand for going to work or shopping for groceries. Arguably the real problem is we've put too much in too small a space.
I was disappointed when I realized what the title meant, but I respect the effort. Silly projects like this, just because, keep the world interesting.
Perhaps you could present yourself as worthy through your work, rather than bemoaning that others as worthy were more conducive to being treasured employees?
"It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes." - Theodor Reik

The same tragic, traumatic events are being "rhymed" now in Ukraine. Yeah, perhaps we're tired of hearing it - but I'm writing this because after 110 years of industrialized warfare, our institutions and systems have still not restructured themselves to prevent these cascades of events. The consequences are unspeakably terrible (read the article!).

I'll be quite clear about it: a nuclear superpower invaded a disarmed neighbor, and is currently committing genocide on its territory. This is unquestionably, unconscionably, unacceptably wrong. (I won't mention the situation in Gaza, because that situation is far more complex and horrendously polarized.)

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.

I'm constantly - deeply - appalled, at the ghastliness of what's happening right now while we chat, work, and play in our separate worlds. Humanity can do better.
If the numbers work this would be fantastic and might offer Waymo as well as Tesla a possible future business model. I know this would be a popular choice here in Michigan assuming of course they could figure out how to make them run in ice and snow ;<).
> If you’re using Calc/Excel to handle some accounting or some other kind of quantitative organization, there’s probably a specialized system that you should be using, or just using a CRUD application.

This greatly underestimates the importance of Excel for anything to do with physical goods, which is all of the world outside of the tiny SV/HN SaaS bubble. Excel files are the API that glues every factory, supplier, vendor and system together. Good luck replacing that and forcing all of the involved parties to switch to this replacement.
> The simple reason is that global politics (at the UN) led to the partition of the Mandate

That was a piece of paper which changed nothing.

The Arab and Jewish populations had been in an escalating conflict for years, culminating in an all-out civil war. The Israeli population would have declared independence as soon as the British left regardless of what the UN said. Similarly the Arab states had no intention of letting Israel exist, and attacked as soon as the British left.
There's a ton of visualizations. Most folks don't know how to tell basic stories using just these plots. If you look at professional visualizations from media outlets you don't see many "fancy" plots, you see well crafted versions of these 4 plots (and maps) 80% of the time.

Applying the Pareto principle, you will get the most bang for your buck if you master story telling with these. (And you won't need to touch the other types of plots).
Here am I, a grown-ass man, softly giggling to myself over seeing 5318008 on the list. It’s fifth grade all over again.
Not sure what Yotta is like now (or was in 2023), but it used to be a very good rate. I think I opened my account in early 2020. Went back and checked my notes for details:

Every week, you would get a lottery ticket for every $25 in your account. In July 2020, expected value for a ticket was $.0227 ($.0157 if you exclude the jackpot, Tesla, and other top prizes that you were statistically unlikely to ever win). They also paid out a base APY of .20%, which was higher than savings accounts at a lot of big banks.

Adding those together, the APY came between 3.51% and 5.02%, which was good compared to most banks at the time. Over time they made changes which decreased the expected value of each ticket, I closed my account in 2021 when the rate was no longer competitive. Looks like I quit at the right time.
It's pretty trivial to finetune an LLM to output posts that are indistinguishable.
I was part of an investigation which considered Coherent products for one of the Forza titles. We didn't go with it at the time, and I haven't had the opportunity to use it on a title at other companies, but it looks rad.

Forza used a custom UI system based on XAML and the acrylic elements at the top of the article were largely implemented in a custom shader. For a custom system it was pretty solid. We also built a lot of tech into it related to 3D placement of elements to support diagetic UI.
Interesting, I'll add the prefix and install desktop Safari in the future.

I was testing on Safari iOS and it looks like the non-prefix version worked there.
Note: wild bird crap with H5N1 in it gets washed into storm drains, and in many communities this would wind up in wastewater and be detected, so this is probably not direct evidence of human H5N1 infections
> The chipmaker, which is quite keen to see people buy the AI PCs sold by its hardware partners

Hah, no they very much aren't, as Intel are an insignificant player at the moment. As long as Intel is as far behind as they are, they'd rather overall investment in hardware goes down. The second Intel comes out with a leading chip, you'll suddenly see them come up with a study with the opposite result.
My (opinionated) take is that if you learn 4 basic plots, it will take you far. These are easy to do with Pandas. In fact, I think the easiest way to do Matplotlib is with pandas rather than the Matplotlib API.

I do pull out plotly for 3d scatter plots (for PCA visualization). Matplotlib is horrible for this.
This really was peak marketing idiocy. I knew people who worked at Cartoon Network at the time. Jim Samples' disconnect and subsequent resignation reverberated down the ranks and tanked a lot of careers and projects. Who would think that strapping battery operated devices to bridges with duct tape in any post-9/11 city would be a good idea?
Very nice effect. I love these more creative realistic elements.

This one reminds me of this cool card effect

https://poke-holo.simey.me/
I strongly believe it should be illegal to post something automatically by an LLM without clearly identifying it as such. I hope countries start passing these laws soon
> BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files

MacOS modern and classic both do this as well
The first endorsement on the page is by the notorious fraudster Deepak Chopra. Probably enough of a reason to avoid purchasing.
Exploring parsing APIs: what to generate, and how
What on earth is "OpenAI V3"? Just to be sure I wasn't being obtuse, I Googled it, only to get a bunch of articles pointing back at this post.
> I'm quite sure if it were easy to implement [feature A], LibreOffice would have done it

I've lost this optimism a long time ago when I realized how much denialism and how little actual factual, detailed knowledge there is among vocal proponents for Linux and free software. For example, the entire font handling stack on Linux is a hot seething mess of horrible dysfunctionality, wrongly implemented and starting out from the wrong principles (IMHO), yet nobody is working to improve it because everyone keeps telling you it's a solved problem.

More specifically, years ago ago I hacked together solutions to script LibreOffice from the 'outside' as it were because its macro system is such an utter painful failure in so many ways. Not only was a single website written in Japanese the only source for a reasonable rundown of LibreOffice's API, it also introduced me, indirectly, to the fact that the people who initially wrote OpenOffice were apparently not comfortable with Java being a strictly OOP language, so they did their best to write code that to a degree circumvents that, leading to a terrifyingly bad user experience and a hint of the convoluted horrors that might lurk in the source code.

The glacial pace of LibreOffice's development where the appearance of the tiniest of innovations leads, every few years, to great public announcements and a new version number, has convinced me that the community has painted themselves in a corner with an unmanageable code base and devs that are, likely, in complete denial that the only way out would be a complete rewrite of the software, something that is, understandably, too hard to stomach.
> Why are interval boundaries real-value in a system that cannot actually express real numbers?

They can be represented as a binary tree, that is a nested list or tuples, for instance. The whole interval (1) could be split into (1,0) and (0,1)). Then (1,0) split into ((1,0),0) and ((0,1),0). And (0,1) split into (0,(1,0)) and (0,(0,1) and so on.
> In this modern age of .md and similar files why not try for "blue water sailing" and instead create an office suite which specifically plays to only open standards?

Because your publisher, professor, employer, collaborators, and book club members all want an Office file. Full stop. They will not accept anything else, and they will refuse to work with you unless you have the clout to force them to use your new format. And then they will be unhappy.

That’s what this article is getting at. If you want to replace Office, you need to have full compatibility with Office files. There’s no way around it. Most people don’t want more open, faster, more features, or better. They want Office (or increasingly, Google Docs).
I think we just have a tendency to anthropomorphize things that are a bit too complicated to understand fully. Like a child calling the clutch mechanism in a yo-yo a "brain" for example. It's not that the yo-yo can really think, it's just that it has a behavior that seems that way. So indeed once you've upgraded your system to the point of not fully understanding how something that isn't a human could achieve whatever emergent behavior occurs, go ahead and anthropomorphize it by calling it AI.

There's not a specific line in the sand, although tasking it with machine learning (in which outcomes improve based on collecting runtime inputs, rather than based only on its creator adding capabilities) would be a decent one. That's fairly human-like, while non-ML workloads are more plant-like.
Show HN:Scraping NY Times election data and displaying it on a flipdigit display
Hi,

For the US 2024 Presidential election, I made a scraper that pulled the NY Times electoral college data and displayed it on my AlfaZeta flip-digit display. (Code [0])

It's very hard to get free electoral college data live, but at Syracuse's Open Data Day I learned the NY Times election data is just JSON files the whole site is powered by ~5 JSON files. So I got to work making a scraper for 2020's data and formatting for my display. I built a websocket serial server that runs on a Raspberry Pi so I could work on my laptop and test it. [1]

At 6 pm (eastern) the new data dropped and that resulted in a URL for the JSON and a new data structure. I spent the next 20 minutes parsing it out and then let it ran for the whole night. I took a timelapse of the night (linked in the website)[2] and added back the click-clack sounds I heard that night.

[0] - https://github.com/EdwardDeaver/2024_Presidential_Election_S...

[1] - https://github.com/EdwardDeaver/WeatherToMechanical

[2] - https://vimeo.com/1027074047
The hallucination problem is mostly solved by the best models. Especially for writing news stories etc. This profession won't exist in 10 years.
I mostly lived in modded Q3A - held a few world records in DeFRaG from time to time, but none that were important. I miss those days, they were the best of times :D
Show HN: A web app for hosting quiz games
I wrote a tiny version of this in Covid lockdowns because I felt playing trivia with friends was a bit boring, and we should all have buzzers like on game shows. I've been using it as a test project for trying out frameworks for years but I finally polished it up into a proper product. I'd love it if people try it out and give me some feedback, at the moment it sends you an emailed validation code which might put some people off trying it, if it does put you off then please let me know, I was also toying with just having free time-limited games.
My steam icon is still errr from this incident. Never forget.
My very simple process:

Do you want the job?
or
Do you want to be right?

If you choose to be right, then get a job where you can be right. Probably means becoming a manager.
> Finality

No real estate is bought and owned without restrictions. And between taxes and bans, one’s relationship with other owned property is similarly revocable.

> the dealership can still repossess the car you haven’t bought it yet

If you bought your car with financing, it cannot be stolen?

> New house requires being an HOA member? Not a sale

So if your house has an HOA it cannot be stolen?
> But it still tightly couples itself to other parts of HTTP, particularly HTTP 3

Incorrect. In fact, gRPC's primary implementation is HTTP/2 not /3. There are alternative implementation on top of QUIC, and other folks have implemented private transport implementations on top of high performance non-Ethernet networking.

The biggest I'd seen with proxies is that they didn't/don't fully implement HTTP/2 spec, in particular "trailers" which gRPC over HTTP/2 uses to transfer status code of each call.
Yep. I’m currently working for a client who build software for the insurance industry, and we have a whole pipeline to parse and generate Excel files. The industry mostly runs on Excel and email. Without support for parsing those spreadsheets, my client would never have been able to convince their customers to use the rest of their software.
Social construct != meaningless. Money and laws are also social constructs. But you can’t argue for money or laws or marriage by beginning and ending with whether you feel like it has meaning.
Mainly that people have a place to share things that are happening, spread them, etc. There is just far greater awareness. For example locally there are people who attend council meetings or other such events and report on things that the newspaper doesn’t. I don’t mean that the government itself is more transparent voluntarily - although I guess they do share some basic things like public notices via social media channels.
Not parent but, what about this does not scream red bloody flag to you?

hand over their account passwords to them

Give my banking password to some other company? That's a red bloody flag right there. Stop the presses. Nobody should ever do that. Not outside of very specific use cases like a password manager and in that case there better be seventeen million levels of encryption and such in place.

for storage in cleartext.

Did we mention the color red? On a flag? I think we did. Cleartext, eh? Who thought this was a good idea?
How do you imagine models writing news stories without primary sources? In many cases (not all, since social media exist) models can only write about something by plagiarising something a journalist wrote.
It is OpenAI's vector embedding model
Please, it's not like LibreOffice was significantly better or more popular

It comes from the same code base, which limits a lot what can be done with it.
https://openai.com/index/new-embedding-models-and-api-update...

API constant is text-embedding-3
Frida is more like a debugger, or a very fancy Action Replay. But once can generally just patch put the detection mechanism given sufficient time and motivation.
love it :) The controls with the mouse are impossible with a track pad tho :/ maybe have a keyboard option?
Surprised the list is missing the silly school joke: 55378008
For comets or other objects whose perihelion is less than 1 au; does the chance of collision with Earth increase if the orbit is within the elliptical plane vs outside it?
The Lizard King of Long Island
https://archive.ph/lwCuU
Lots of games used to use [Scaleform](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx) for their UI.
> What is a pet war?

A foreign conflict I’ve adopted for personal interest and to be opinionated about, but over which I have little to no influence or ground truth. The popular ones in America being Ukraine and Gaza. (The unpopular ones: the wars in Sudan, Ethiopia and Burma.)
Assuming AI means LLM, at this stage I've come across two broad categories of implementation that are actually interesting and useful to me as a user.

1) A box on the screen where I can chat with one to do ideation or really anything I want.

2) A command-driven approach where I hit a hotkey, type a prompt and the response is dumped out in front of me, possibly I had some text selected which heavily influences the response.

These are both pretty cool tbh and developers will have a field day for years finding sensible ways to incorporate them into programs.

None of this has anything to do with driving the hardware upgrade cycle since most of the models are running in the cloud. But driving hardware upgrades is what these marketing people are really trying to do when they talk about AI PC. They are irrelevant people, but they need to convert everything they see into a reason to buy a new PC.

That's what they get paid for. Monkey marketer see trend, monkey marketer do marketing. Monkey steal your attention.

Maybe a LLM will replace THEM soon. After all it's basically a digital version of the million monkeys on typewriters...
You're correct that these are for manufacturing only. I've never heard of them being used for actual design purposes and that's probably because if you wanted an actual diode, you'd just use a "real" one.
Lots of games still use it but its been discontinued by Autodesk and is on its way out. Not to mention Flash also being discontinued.
It's kind of crazy how half-assed and terrible the web app competitors to Office are.

It's been 30 years, and Office 95 was objectively better and more full featured than Google Docs in 2024. Even Microsoft Works would blow Google Docs out of the water in a feature-by-feature comparison.
I'm rather skeptical of this claim that the data was compressed in 2018 because there is no further information, apart from a hash value given.

If it's a true claim they must have identified some "non-random" aspect of the original data, and then they could have given more info.
> Information being free and the ability to change information are two different things

A bank CEO adding zeroes to their own account doesn't deprive any specific person of anything. We still consider it stealing because of its systemic effects.
What makes it the "best" in your opinion? Looking at the list, several of the points could be applied to just about every modern nation-state, several easily apply to communist states just as easily as fascist states, and there are several that don't apply to many states that most people would argue are fascist. For example, Salazar's Portugal is widely regarded as fascist but points 9, 10, 11, and 13 (and maybe more) don't really apply to it.

It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.
I was thinking of the Ge’ez script but that’s for Amharic not Swahili.
I extracted a similar "light rays" texture from Windows 7 when I was trying to replicate its aero glass effect on Android to see what can be done with the new shader APIs. I ended up with something very close to this article, except I didn't do the inner shadows but I did increase the saturation of the blurred background a bit.

https://mastodon.social/@grishka/110524476584503201
Noisy Gradients
With bias power, I think an electrostatic loudspeaker turns into a condenser microphone (a thing that provides varying capacitance in response to changes in pressure).

I don't think that electrostatic loudspeakers all require bias power, so it's not quite as simple as using a dynamic loudspeaker backwards is.

It is a neat idea, though. A big, flat-panel microphone would be interesting to play with.
> Schwartz said. "Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate."

If you can't translate it, how do they know it's alphabetic?
Developing nations blast $300B COP29 climate deal as insufficient