realityfactchex

No, that would have a strong "damping effect" on much of the comms here.

That's for signaling/logging you "really are" someone. That has a place and can be quite useful, e.g. when that is important. I don't really think HN one of those places.

HN thrives on pseuds, for good reasons.

HN doesn't even need/use "sign in by Facebook". HN is quite simple, and it works well enough as designed.

That would be like, for OfficialProfileHackerSocial.com or something. It could work, but it would no longer be HN.

I'm thinking maybe SeaweedFS [0, 2] or Versity Gatweway [1, 3] or RustFS [4].

Seems there are other options, too, e.g. Garage [5].

I only used MinIO briefly in the past, but it was good/worked, and I do plan to set up S3 blob storage again soon.

[0] https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs

[1] https://github.com/versity/versitygw

[2] https://blog.elest.io/rustfs-vs-seaweedfs-vs-garage-which-mi...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806348

[4] https://github.com/RustFS/RustFS

[5] https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage

Thanks for pointing it out. I will have to try again.

Following up, another WikiSource flow is the following:

1. Go to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britan...

2. Click button "Search the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica". This currently goes to the page at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=&prefix...

3. Enter the search term and click Search. (There is auto-suggest for some topics, but Search button seems to give more complete results.)

4. Get to the text page of interest, such as https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britan...

5. Notice the left margin contains hyperlinks like [105] whwere 105 is the page number nd links directl;y to the side-by side view of page 105. Click the [105] link on the left (for example), to get to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AEB1911_-_Volume_02.djv... which shows the text-and-image side by side (for that page).

This flow avoids the hunting-for-the-right page step, by using the direct links.

TFA does not contain the word "copy", but copy-paste (shared clipboard) support stands out strongly to me as being "different" in Apple Silicon virtualization at this time.

TFA does mention the word "clipboard", but the containing sentence, while perhaps technically correct, seems a bit misleading, as follows: "As implemented in macOS (both as guest and host), there are also extensions to support keyboard and pointing devices, a shared clipboard, and high-performance graphics with Metal and GPU support." As I understand it, even if those extensions "exist", what good are they if they are not adopted?:

- If you virtualize macOS within macOS on Apple Silicon using UTM, you cannot copy paste between systems reliably (bidirectional shared clipboard is very, very fragile; "can" work a little but is essentially fully broken/unreliable).

- If you virtualize macOS within macOS on Apple Silicon using Parallels (often considered a best-choice solution), you cannot copy paste between systems at all (bidirectional shared clipboard is an explicit non-feature at this time).

Thus, if you want bidirectional clipboard, on a macOS host, you'll have to run a *nix (seems to work) or maybe Win (I haven't tried) guest OS.

I would have tried VMWare Fusion (free for personal use), but after jumping through all the signup and download navigation hoops, I couldn't even get the download link to un-gray itself out for me. Is bidirectional macOS to macOS clipboard implemented there? IDK and I cannot tell.

> SMB support in macOS remains slow and buggy to this day. I tried all combinations of server-side settings and obscure plist tweaks to make SMB navigation and search work as fast as they do on my Linux machine out of box before giving up. It is very obviously not a priority for their services revenue

That's where my thoughts went, too. I can make SMB "better" but not "great" usually, but it's annoying to have to look up and apply, and still have things not optimal. Just in case, IIRC I find this the most useful:

  defaults read com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores
  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE

But surely some of the other tweaks that LLMs suggest may help, too.

That's cool about the WikiSource parallel text+image page view, TIL. Thanks!

As an example flow (since it took a minute to figure out): we can start at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica then click to navigate/browse volume > section > topic to get to a text page, then click Source tab, then click a Page Number (maybe hunt around for the correct page number), and see the parallel view, text + image. With previous and next page buttons available, retaining the parallel text + image view.

> Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

Another reason would be to able to keep running/using it even if the main site were to go down for whatever reason eventually; or, to operate a mirror of it, for redundancy (linking back to the original, of course).

Very, very cool. Hats off. I've considered attempting a more limited form of this for years.

For those who don't know, the 1911 Britannica is heralded for several reasons (and rightly criticized for regrettable others), but the most well-known is that it was the last encyclopedia before The Great War, and hence had a good amount of steam/optimism coming from the first and second industrial revolutions and the "Progressive Era", not sullied yet by thoughts of "the war to end all wars".

Trying https://britannica11.org specifically, it quickly found and displayed the article I searched for, chosen (to search for) at random: Portuguese East Africa, at https://britannica11.org/article/22-0177-portuguese-east-afr...

A question/idea for nice-to-haves, most respectfully. I don't know if it would be feasible. It's probably perfect as it is, simply linking to the image-page in unobtrusive text for each section. But I would love an option (emphasis on option) to see the text side by side with the page images. That parallel view would load all of the page images on the same page as the full article text. That way, I could "confirm" or "fact check" the faithfulness of the OCR, and also see the beautiful printing, at once, without opening each page separately and managing the images/windows myself. Most likely, I would use the site to jump to the articles, and read them mainly as images, only switching to the text form to verify what something said, or to copy-paste cleanly, etc. (As it is, initially, I thought I read the original images were available, but had to visit the page three (3!) times before finding where the side-links to them were.) Maybe thumbnails could be a middle-ground option (again, optional) for salience.

Very, very well done. And it's fast!

Even with a good battery, bugs/features on the latest iOS can make iPhone 15 Pro Max battery last terribly, terribly short.

Part of the new requirement should be they can't kill battery lifespan in 2-year old phones through software updates, either.

Because even "replaceable battery" doesn't fix that serious problem!

> As the conversation context grows, the page becomes increasingly laggy, quickly reaching a point of extreme sluggishness.

It was that way for me a year ago, so not that new of a phenomenon.

When a context/chat/session gets too long, I start a New chat and continue where I left off. Mostly solves this IME, though it's annoying to have to do.

The page linked in the OP was intended to go to https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39847629/reviews/ as an example of a reviews page.

Screenshot of text "Sign in to access user reviews.": https://files.catbox.moe/d1ogky.png

It used to be possible to read User Reviews of movies on IMDB.com without being signed in. (That's one of IMDB's best features!)

Now, the User Review pages state, "Sign in to access user reviews."

Personal opinion: I really enjoyed reading reviews as a signed-out user before. Is there an effective way to give Amazon feedback on this?

Here's a reproduction attempt (LM Studio, same Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF model as linked in parent, M1 Max 64GB, <90 seconds):

https://files.catbox.moe/r3oru2.png

- My Qwen 3.6 result had sun and cloud in sky, similar to the second Opus 4.7 result in Simon's post.

- My Qwen 3.6 result had no grass (except as a green line), but all three results in Simon's post had grass (thick).

- My Qwen 3.6 result had visible "tailing air motion" like Simon's Qwen 3.6 result.

- My Qwen 3.6 result had a "sun with halo" effect that none of Simon's results had.

But, I know, it's more about the pelican and the bicycle.

> "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode"

Are you somehow showing raw markdown source text and also rendered markdown in Obsidian side by side? That would sound awesome.

If GSuites was a typo for GSites (e.g., informal for Google Sites classic), then the sentence in TFA could work.

IDK if such was the intent, of course.

s/TTS/STT/

Sure, Chatterbox TTS Server is rather high quality: https://github.com/devnen/Chatterbox-TTS-Server

You could hook it up to some workflow over the local API depending on how you want to dump the text, but the web UI is good too.

The Show HN by the author was at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44145564

Exactly my question. I double-tap the control button and macOS does native, local TTS dictation pretty well. (Similar to Keyboard > Enable Dictation setting on iOS.)

The macOS built-in TTS (dictation) seems better than all the 3rd party, local apps I tried in the past that people raved about. I have tried several.

Is this better somehow?

If the 3rd party apps did streaming with typing in place and corrections within a reasonable window when they understand things better given more context, that would be cool. Theoretically, a custom model or UX could be "better" than what comes free built into macOS (more accurate or customizable).

But when I contacted the developer of my favorite one they said that would be pretty hard to implement due to having to go back and make corrections in the active field, etc.

I assume streaming STT in these utilities for Mac will get better at some point, but I haven't seen it yet (been waiting). It seems these tools generally are not streaming, e.g. they want you to finish speaking first before showing you anything. Which doesn't work for me when I'm dictating. I want to see what I've been saying lately, to jog my memory about what I've just said and help guide the next thing I'm about to say. I certainly don't want to split my attention by manually toggling the control (whether PTT or not) periodically to indicate "ok, you can render what I just said now".

I guess "hold-to-talk" tools are for delivering discrete, fully formed messages, not for longer, running dictation.

AFAICT, TFA is focused on hold-to-talk as the differentiator, over double-tap to begin speaking and double-tap to end speaking?

The answer depends a lot on what you need it to be able to do.

Make calls? Support the latest banking/travel/communication app updates? Run any old VOIP app in a pinch as a true "backup phone"? Simply connect to wifi and browse the web? Just play basic media?

The older they are, the less they will have support for recent app versions or "modern" websites.

But there are some good old iPhones under $100. Whether it does what you need it do, to serve as a backup, depends a lot on what sort of functionality you are backing up.

Go on Swappa, sort unlocked iPhones by low price, pick one with good photos and description in your budget. Ask an LLM what limitations it will have, since at that price it will probably have some compared with what a new phone can do.

Presumably the article is about something. So, go to the canonical site/docs about that thing itself. (Trace the source "upstream".) Find where that community holds its discussions. (Mailing list? Discord? Blogs? Github? Scholarly journals?)

Also, if you think Google search gives surface-level results and is a poor option, I hate to say it, but I highly suggest learning how to use Google better, if that applies. It sounds like this is not you, but IMO Google only sucks badly if you use it wrong? I mean, I get the SEO-enshittification and the censorship problem and all that (or: building for the masses and for advertisers), but for most topics it works well enough if used as a power user (so, not just pasting in what you are looking for), IME. You probably know all this, but:

  - require keywords or key phrases with quotation marks
  - AND your required text: multiple phrases, each about a "concept" from the article, or something that marks/signifies of a related concept or take you want  to know more about
  - use minus sign for negative required words (so, excluded quoted phrases) if needed
  - (Some of these used to not work for a while but I think that was along time ago and they pretty much work again?)
  - restrict the query to specific domains or TLDs (site:youtube.com; or *.edu or *.gov, etc)
  - etc.

I also don't see how discussing the subject with a frontier LLM is bad or surface-level. If the material was trained on, it's often a great method. What exactly makes that a poor option "nowadays"? IME this option is better than ever. (But same as with search: it can help to nudge the LLM, even if ever so little, into being more useful, by giving it a little more to work with that literally; just the original topic itself -- what do you want to know about that topic?)

Can you give a concrete example where the standard methods fail?

Finally, searching HN itself is a great option IMO.

> article presumes ... everything could still be subject to a major paradigm shift. ...seems pretty unlikely

Alternatively: there's plenty of mainstream, accepted science that's plain, flat out, provably wrong. Yet, it is against good taste (job security, people's feelings, status quo bias, etc.) to point this out.

Hence, it can actually be tricky to catch wind of, or get a grasp on, such issues to begin with, much less pursue such issues toward meaningful, published, recognized change in understanding (that is to say: paradigm shift).

I'd name some examples, but you wouldn't believe me.

With respect to the article, it seems the current LLMs can (though, obviously, do not necessarily have to) return text that appears to reason (pretty reasonably!) about paradigm shifts, when given the context required and nudged quite forcefully toward particular directions. But, as the article seems to indicate, the LLMs seem to not tend toward finding, investigating, and reporting on paradigm shifts all on their own very much. (But maybe part of that is intrinsic to how they are programmed and/or their context?)

Neat observation; I am an Orion user, too, for certain things.

But doesn't the latest Orion on iOS 26-latest just turn the top section a solid color (e.g., web page background-color), simply not showing any text up there around the notch/top-edge? As the parent said about the accessibility option, "...resembles the last generation of iPhones with home button from 2017" (albeit, at least not solid black/white only)?

Previously on iPhones, IIRC, we got text scrolling up above and around the notch/icons, to really make maximum use of the screen (except where truly unavoidable), IIRC.

AFAICT, Orion and the accessibility setting do stop the fading-distraction, but do not restore the use of that screen space for text/content.

I thought this was going to be about iOS and how now (as of iOS 26) there is a "fade out" at the top of every web page (around the notch/top-edge area).

When scrolling/reading a web page, it literally changes that section of the text so that it fades to gray.

So, "everything scroll fades".

I couldn't find a way to turn it off. Quite irritating, IMHO.

EDITED TO ADD ELABORATION: The issue with iOS "scroll fade" text color in Safari near the top notch is that this makes that top-edge-text "dynamic" (changing) and thus "draws attention" to it visually, thus competing for eyeball attention when I am probably actually reading somewhere further down on the page. Also, I would still like to be able to glance up to the topmost visible text if wanted, without having to adjust to its different and less visible colors. Apple designers should know all this. Further, I'd say the page text color should probably by default respect what the web page designer configured it as, and not have the OS change that text color (unless the user gets fancy and requests an override with dark mode or whatever settings).

This article's critique seems valid, too (more generically about "scroll fade" in interfaces, e.g. web pages, which seems to mostly be about items appearing gradually via motion). Personally, I see less of that these days, compared to making every page in an OS fade out where unnecessary.

Yes, this.

Even hardcover books from "real publishers" have arrived with low print quality. The most common problem book-printing problems I have a real problem with today are

  1. text that is gray (not black) and
  2. text that is dotted (not solid)

I have, 20, 40, and 100+ year old books with phenomenal "solid black text", and they are an absolute pleasure to feast the eyes on. But more importantly, they are not so irritatingly bad while reading them that the bad presentation entirely and unavoidably distracts from the quick and enjoyable consumption of the content itself!

If you ask me, the following checkboxes should be standard ratings on all books sold:

  [ ] "solid, black text"
  [ ] "acid-free paper"
  [ ] <we could add a few here>

Everything else comes after knowing these aspects in my opinion. I guess these would require numeric, measured scores, too, with the binary checkboxes indicating some minimum threshold is surpassed. There are other important factors, too, of course, but getting basic text color and text character solidness is number one, easily.

Related, I used to buy 3rd party black laser printer toner that was guaranteed and warrantied to be made to OEM spec. It never, ever was, no matter how many returns/replacements/retries/print-settings-adjustments/other-part-replacements. Always gray text, always. Buying actual OEM black toner reliably results in (close enough to) jet black text. It costs more, but it's the only way to be sure for self-printed materials AFAIAA.

FYI - that was only 1 yr 7 months ago, only about half way to a few years back

Oh yeah, that is funny. Thanks for adding it; I thought I was missing at least one major one!

- Copilot: Great at finding and discussing docs, conversations, and other work items that it is connected to. For everything else, it seems somehow less smart than the others (YMMV).

Emphasis on the YMMV, obviously. Maybe my impression is colored by a small number of unlucky, less than stellar experiences (comparatively speaking).

Original HN post 2 days prior (0 traction then): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336100

Recent media coverage:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/12/channel-surfer-watch-youtu...

https://www.theverge.com/tech/893598/this-is-immediately-my-...

https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/this-web-app-...

https://hackaday.com/2025/10/17/channel-surfing-nostalgia-ma...

It's still there. For Joe Shmoe, in terms of general purpose, ask it a question, LLM use, Perplexity is solidly in the following lineup, as I understand it:

- Perplexity: This one has been promoted on (insert general audience media skewing toward the older set) enough to be a household name still.

- ChatGPT: General people in some demographics (see immediately above) are averse to this, on account of negative publicity its parent company has received. (Still very strong popularity and positive sentiment in some demographics, though)

- Claude: Some semi-literates have glommed onto this one, possibly as a result of its more recent success among the developer set.

- Grok: People can be either for or against, based on how they feel about its owning company and its ownership; no more need be said

- Gemini: Again, if you are in the universe of its owning company (or decidedly not), the draw (or repulsion) can be strong here.

For general LLM use, the above are all about the same. To be clear, this is just me shooting from the hip for how each offering might be viewed. IMO, it's not a bad idea to submit the same input to each and see how they compare, if one is so inclined.

I always opt out, too, also because I don't trust their machines after reading enough stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/iaurm/cancer_clus... or https://www.propublica.org/article/u-s-government-glossed-ov... and then learning enough about how it was all for theater anyway.

Cool tech, but I don't want it scanning my junk especially, no thanks. I'll just apply Betteridge's law of headlines to the article "You Asked: Are Airport Body Scanners Safe?" at https://time.com/4909615/airport-body-scanners-safe/ and go on my merry way.

The TSA definitely seems to intentionally make me wait unnecessarily long for my patdowns to commence.

The attitude among some TSA employees can be truly confrontational when I'm nothing but polite.

One of them literally shoved their hand so fast and so far up my leg, it stung my private area for a good little while after. Now, whenever their script comes to the point where they ask if there is anything they should know, I have to ask them to not do that please, since it has happened before.

If there is a list of people to be first in line for UBI instead of whatever they do now, I'm okay if it's everybody at the TSA, and I'm guessing that they would be cool with that, too.

> not everywhere?

Are you absolutely certain that there is not an unexplained uptick in brain damaged newborns/children in the USA?

And that its cause is not some thing(s) that "almost every" one of them is subjected to repeatedly?

And that it is not just a case of better/more/over diagnosis?

IDK about by you, but there are literal nurseries/schools for the brain-damaged kids popping up on Main Street. That's how many there seem to be.

So yeah, maybe they're not in that study. But that means they don't exist?