News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Hamcha

Re:FLX1s Is Launched on Saturday September 20, 2025 @10:06AM (#45313544)
My biggest question is if they use Halium/libhybrys at all, something that is hard to figure out from the marketing but their GitHub repos does have hybris-related stuff. That makes it a non-Linux device to me. Hybris breaks a lot of linux stuff that should just work like flatpak, something I found out incredibly quickly when using SailfishOS.

I don't think depending on Android drivers and having to run a small android just to access said hardware makes it a "linux phone". Especially when the linux experience is compromised because of it.

postmarketOS has no hybris and everything works great, but no device has all the drivers (in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else) so there isn't a "flagship" device.

If I were to overspend on a linux device I want it to actually run Linux, not a handicapped version of it.

And even then, why stop at the OS? Why is this overpriced "linux" phone not boast having user-friendly and sustainable things like a replaceable battery (probably because it doesn't?). People in this niche don't want just a Linux phone, they want a phone that respects them.

Have you seen the prices for Google Drive et al? The NAS setup you describe (which I wouldn't consider worth the money for that little space) is what, 12GB with 1 parity drive?

Google One for 10TB is 274,99€/mo (at least in my country) so you'd make the entire nas price and subscription cost within a few months, let alone years.

There just aren't compelling public cloud for large sizes (My NAS is 30TB capacity and I'm using 18 right now) and even if you go the more complex loops with like S3 and whatnot you still get billed more than it's worth. Public cloud is meant for public files, there's a lot of costs you're paying for stuff you don't need like being fast to access from everywhere.

Re:LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @02:57AM (#43829427)
As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to instead build a foundation first, and many other little things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term learning.
Re:We Picked AGPL on Tuesday August 13, 2024 @01:54PM (#41237721)
Correction: they chose AGPL with a poison pill (CLA) so they can benefit from it and take it away whenever they want more.
As someone who has been on the email client hunt ever since Google Inbox was taken off my feet I can say that I'm a very happy customer of eM client and it's actually one of the few apps that make it painful to leave Windows (since the devs have no intention of porting it to Linux).

It's pay once and it comes with a free version if you just wanna give it shot, the only bad thing for me was how annoying the website was with dark patterns trying to push sales, the software itself is great.

Console support and porting effort in general is the main biz of some companies, the most popular being M2 (mostly emulators) and MP2 Games (handles Clickteam Fusion ports to console like Freedom Planet, Baba is You), but there are many other smaller studios. They mostly seem to have their own proprietary tech. That kinda work also can't be open source as official console SDKs are expensive and covered by NDAs.

If the next Undertale/Minecraft gets built in Godot, W4 Games would be the easiest way to get that game to consoles and rack in tons of royalties, so I think the investment is justified (though hoping it doesn't poison Godot in some way)

Yup, and you can already mix and match both local and cloud AIs with stuff like SillyTavern/RealmPlay if you wanna try what the experience is like, people have been using it to roleplay for a while.
[delayed]
Re:Ask HN: Why is OpenAI firing Sam Altman such a big deal? on Saturday November 18, 2023 @09:24AM (#38319934)
It probably scared the downstream, see Microsoft pushing out a press release as soon as possible since they have been investing tons of money and PR into their OpenAPI partnership and needed to calm their investors and partners.
Just look around forums and socials like Reddit. I see people bitching how OBS Studio doesn't work for them the exact way they want it while contributing nothing to the project almost daily.

This happens less where the FOSS choice is a drop in a sea of established proprietary packages (FreeCAD, KiCad, Godot) but way way more when they have already established themselves as the popular pick (OBS Studio, Blender) so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it.

"Normal" people have always had stuff given to them for "free" (either "you are the product" or built-in licenses like Windows) so they don't realize the goodwill and sacrifices that FOSS goes through.

At least from face value it seems the value of those patents is exactly to fight back patent pools organizations, at part of the AOM stipulation is that if someone tries to sue over AV1 patents they would lose access to every patent holder portfolio (for AOM that would mean Google, Apple, Amazon and many others tech giants). Though it seems that still won't stop everyone.
[delayed]
Re:Scott Helme leaks the secret text of eIDAS Article 45 on Wednesday November 08, 2023 @05:35AM (#38188656)
[delayed]
In Italy we have already digital IDs through SPID[1] which is most likely going to be phased into eIDAS and it works a similar way (though way less standardized), government websites can integrate it willy-nilly while private companies have to undergo quite a rough approval process to make sure they absolutely need that information.

Given the amount of already digital tech in our gov (we also have "legal mail" via PEC[2] and a bunch others minor standards) I think it would be insane if EU just went "nice work you have there, now scrap it all and use ours instead", so I see why component states still have so much authority (even if it means some will not have a good time).

1. https://www.spid.gov.it/en/ 2. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6109.html

Re:Scott Helme leaks the secret text of eIDAS Article 45 on Tuesday November 07, 2023 @06:39PM (#38184692)
[delayed]
I've also started doing this, with USB-C to C cables you might want to get something like the C2C caberQU cable tester as a lot of cheap type c cables don't actually wire all the conductors.

Also I like to note the cable length on the label, measured by myself since manufacturers always count the connectors on the total cable length and on some of them that can add up to almost 10cm

Re:Killing Windows 10 in 2025 could turn PCs into eWaste on Saturday October 28, 2023 @03:13PM (#38052553)
Yeah the headline is so exaggerated you can literally come up with a retort faster than they could come up with it. Heck I bet if a new Windows XP exploit showed up tomorrow it would still wreck chaos.
Re:Ensō: write now, edit later on Friday October 27, 2023 @01:09PM (#38041095)
Reminds me of http://al.chemy.org A dead (sigh) drawing app with no layers and no undo and tons of wacky brushes. The main idea is that you can doodle and let the "happy little accidents" drive you into something that you can use as inspiration for a piece (think of it like ink blots)
[delayed]
Re:O3DE on Saturday October 21, 2023 @08:09AM (#37966129)
O3DE seems to live in its own bubble. GameFromScratch covers it from time to time and has always had trouble getting the advertised features to work, not to mention they completely blew the first impression because when it was announced there was no installer and that took many many months to be done (just to leave a half-functional engine until they fixed it later on).

Also it just fails every vibe check: AI art in the homepage and they had some drama by publishing a quote saying that they were "the only real open source game engine"[1] (which has been retracted since)

1. https://youtu.be/5PAuR-pEz1w?t=128

Re:Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @09:53AM (#37844421)
I don't wanna rag on this project and all the bugs since it's clearly in its super early days, but I keep wondering if there's something I'm missing:

Why no miller columns? Not a question just to Spacedrive but really any file manager, it's the main reason I pay and use OneCommander and it's surprising to me how few of them actually implement it, everything else feels a downgrade to me.

What are you guys using for multiplayer? I tried the cold chicken and had crazy high input lag. Also in general it seems like the input systems is crazy bad in the other demos as well, panning with the mouse feels super choppy. Also why don't you load all the resources ahead of time? The Second Life-ish pop-ins and stutters really ruin the experience.

Running Vivaldi and Brave on a RTX3090 btw

I'm skeptical not of the claims but of the usability long-term, tablets like the BOOX Tab Ultra C look great but they commit to violating the GPL rather than giving users a chance to mess with the internals.

I've been loosely following the works of Wenting Zhang and their modos.tech which have a fully open hardware controller that can run at 60FPS[1] with 1bit BW and still seem pretty decent latency-wise with grayscale on[2]. Sadly most of their public activity nowadays seem to be on building a DIY MILC camera so don't know if we're ever going to see a full version of this.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XduK7wn9SE4 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=480xteW2wq4

Re:iPhone 15 Teardown Reveals Software Lockdown on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @04:23AM (#37656126)
iFixIt repairability was always about end-consumer repairability. Why would they care if some shops can do it easier? Once it's off the consumer's hand it's their problem how they deal with it. The environmental impact of Apple's own internal practices is their problem not yours (and so far it's been just PR move after PR move to mess with consumers)
Re:Reclaim the Internet with Mozilla on Monday September 25, 2023 @04:56PM (#37650486)
"Reclaim the internet" and they post event stuff on Instagram and TikTok?? Even big projects like Blender have embraced open platforms like Peertube, it feels more and more that Mozilla is just PR and no action.
Re:Show HN: Mana Pool on Thursday September 21, 2023 @08:11AM (#37596464)
Good luck with taking on cardmarket, they could use some competition given how bad they are at certain things (building decks in particular is always a lot of extra work because their shopping wizard makes some really dumb expensive choices)
Re:Show HN: Mana Pool on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @07:26PM (#37591403)
I know I should have seen it coming but the website makes no mentions anywhere that it's US only.
[delayed]
How is setting up infrastructure to exploit third world labor a "software problem" exactly?

I think the problem isn't that software can't do de-warping well, it's that by the time you set up everything for book scanning you might as well use a setup that doesn't need it.

Re:Unity's Trap on Sunday September 17, 2023 @08:37AM (#37544417)
[delayed]

Older »