I really wish the header image used ProcGen to create a landscape image, rather than Yet Another OpenAI Image that sours me on the article as a reader before I start to read it. It sells the wrong idea and makes me distrust the author.
Plenty of people have the same name, but if you call your child Brad Pitt, it will be interpreted as a reference to the famous guy bearing that name, and nobody will believe it is a coincidence.
Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).
Bit misleading. The analogy is closer to naming your child "Genevieve" when another Genevieve exists in the school. Lynx is a fairly common and well understood word.
> Lynx doesn't have a large user base (I think) but it is installed by default on many linux distros. Having to install two programs with the same name is a pain which is only resolved by renaming one of them (at the distro or the user level).
This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.
> This is a fault of the distros. At some point keeping niche software will cause issues and conflicts.
I am not sure I agree with this argument. This gives a vibe of "make place for me, away with the old guard!"
What if someone called their program "vi" with the argument that noone uses vi anymore?
Besides, who decides what is niche and what isn't? Is a program like lynx which offers better accessibility features than mainstream browsers not worth distributing because it's niche?
Blaming the distros for already having software named like what you decide to call yours isn't terribly cooperative.
> How many people would know what Lynx is. My guess is very few.
And mine is that it's more than you think. Especially when compared to the number of people who know what vi is. Neither of us have figures to prove our points. My indirect argument was that the fact that lynx is included by default hints that I am not entirely wrong.
Your response to that is essentially that distros packagers don't know what they are doing. I won't get in a debate on the competency of people and accept this opinion as yours.
> You took my argument and basically butchered the main point.
This was absolutely not my intention. If I misunderstood your point, please correct me and tell me how I should have read it.
> Its trivial to understand why this is a bad argument (appeal to emotion)
No. The argument for including software that have specific accessibility features is not to appeal to your emotions. The reason for having accessible software is that, as niche as it may be it is useful. No one should care how non-disabled users feel about this, and certainly no one should care whether you or I think this is too niche.
Generally agreed. I think unique names for projects are nice, but unless the projects have very similar goals, I think having the same name isn't really a big deal.
Ok, fixed now. (Submitted title was "DeepSeek Drops Distributed DuckDB")
Edit: I've since changed the title above to the article title, in keeping with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It has been taking me a while to figure out what we're looking at here!
Drop in the context of Databases isn't even close to anything being released or launched. Drop = Delete. Release is a much better word for this context.
In denotation, "dropped" can be used equivalently to "released", yes; but in connotation, using "dropped" instead of "released" implies either that:
1. the particular release was sudden, unexpected, and not highly pre-advertised or post-advertised — as in an album being "dropped" by a band (where the band more often "releases" albums.) Usage of "dropped" here evokes the feeling that the releaser is casually "dropping" the thing in the public square and walking away, leaving it there to be studied. A band would release an album by going on tour selling it; or they might just drop an album on Spotify one day.
2. the particular release was a single limited production run / limited-time event — where people were anticipating something would be released at a certain specific time, but there was no advance statement from the releaser of exactly what people would be getting. Strong analogy with the NYE "ball drop" — the release is an event that people count down to or line up for. (Think: dropping a new limited-edition colorway of a product people ravenously collect — sneakers, Stanley cups, etc.)
3. the particular release was a bounded-in-size batch or "tranch" of production, all put out to be purchased at once where "once they sell out, they sell out" for now — but with the expectation that the releaser is producing more, but where this will take time, during which the item will remain sold out. (Often, the item has actually been produced in quantity, and this limited dribbling-out and repeated fast selling-out is purely a marketing technique to induce hype and demand.) This usage isn't a figurative extension of the literal verb "drop" — but rather a shortening of the word "airdrop", as in military resupply and/or NFTs. You would be more likely to see this phrased as "[X] dropped another [Y]" or "[X] dropped more [Y]"; or perhaps "there was a drop of [Y] today."
I think to be clearer it would have been written "DeepSeek Drops Distributed version of DuckDB". Otherwise it looks like they used DuckDB (the distributed one?) and they have something new or better they're using now.
Mark Cuban is welcome to advocate for a wealth tax that can fund 18f and many other portions of the government, while keeping it public and free of interference from private billionaires.
18f was self funded by billing agencies for cost savings, basically. It was basically free for the gov, and made up of highly technical people, many of whom came from top flight Silicon Valley or SV-adjacent companies. That is to say, neither cost nor technical skill nor efficiency were issues for 18f, which means that this wasn’t axed because of their cost…
This line of argument sounds exactly what a lot of people tried in the past when they were getting hit by claims from the media companies.
If I were to scrape Meta's information and use it to train AI chat bots, would they say "That's fine, go ahead" because I'm not sharing the raw information in another way?
At its core, it’s just a text editor. You don’t need any subscription. It’s Local-first, uses Markdown, and if you want to sync or publish, there’s plenty of other tools for that purpose that don’t require an account, like Syncthing or Github Pages.
Just like Microsoft's latest batch of Flight Simulator games, I'd love if there was a version of this for creating race tracks out of real areas in the world.
I looked into this with my 4th generation Kindle; it seems like it won't be able to use any HTTPS website due to invalid certificate. However, setting it up to talk to a server on my local network would be the way to go. Thanks for the idea!
