HN is overrun by partisans whose majority does not care about factual interpretations of current events and flags level-headed comments in favor of cheap shots, double standards, hyperbolic misconstructions, and ad hominem. I don't think it's difficult to be critical of the government without resorting to such low-brow commentary, but it is what it is. I once offended some people by comparing HN to Reddit, but the lines are getting more blurred by the day.
The moderators need to take a more active stance on getting these hot button political topic wars off HN. We're seeing some sort of brigading and/or manipulation going on here with behaviors (like flagging) that are not consistent with what I think we want to have on the platform. Certainly no following of the guidelines. Just look at the top comment here.
"Normal" people are stuck in two modes, either they ignore it or they need to descend to the same level. I put normal in double quotes since I honestly don't know what's normal any more. I would like to believe the majority of the kind of community we used to have here on HN does not operate at this level of discussion.
To some extent this is a reflection of broader polarization, tribal behavior, and social media manipulation. Even Reuters IMO have chosen a sensationalist headline and seem to have an agenda here. There's an easy tell - can you tell the political orientation of the author by reading the article/comments etc.
This topic could be an interesting one and we could actually have some good discussions about security. Instead it degenerates into what's essentially a political bashing flame war.
I've installed and extensively used at least half a dozen different flavors of Linux on about as many computers over the last decade or two. I don't think there's been a single time where I didn't have to work around hardware compatibility issues. Just today, I tried printing a few pages on Linux, and could not get a single one to come out. I'd queue a job, it would just disappear without anything happening. I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect it, try again, a page would come out with nothing printed on it. I'd restart the printer entirely, try again, nothing would happen. I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect it, try again. Oh, maybe it's working? Oh no, the printer hard-failed halfway through printing the page, so I have to unplug the power cable, restart the printer, scrap that page, and try again. And so on, and so forth, for about an hour. I've been through this dance several times now and probably wasted at least 10-20 hours (re)installing printer drivers, messing with cups and boot configs, etc. This time I finally had enough, moved the printer over to my Windows machine, plugged it in, and printed my fucking pages. I have many other examples of wasting time trying to get basic stuff like this to work on Linux.
I generally think that as well and so was surprised to read that they're planning to not label CRISPER fruits as such.
"European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones."
Presumably, outside of accidental pregnancy, people who would be unhappy with children don't have them and people who would be happy with children do have them. It's not really that surprising if people who choose a particular life path tend to be happy with it.
I suspect that much of the hysteria surrounding the tightening of border controls is a result of selective reporting. We weren't bombarded with articles about people being sent to secondary inspection or denied entry prior to this year. I travel internationally a fair bit and was also nervous traveling into the US this year, but having gone through multiple times now, I haven't seen any change in the process aside from the supporting documentation for my (rather uncommon) visa being looked at more systematically than before. That said, this change in entry requirements sounds like a substantial step up.
> I suspect that much of the hysteria surrounding the tightening of border controls is a result of selective reporting.
A >0.01% chance of being indefinitely detained and eventually deported/expelled is actually a risk that people are rational to consider when traveling to the US. Low probability * extremely high penalty = medium risk.
The fact that <99.99% of travel is routine does not change that calculation.
Even 5% would be pushing it at a university. It's easy today to get a diagnosis for something like mild ADHD whether one has it or not, and everyone is on some kind of spectrum. Legitimacy aside, classifying mild, manageable conditions as disabilities that require special accommodations and/or medication is counter-productive long-term.
I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely, for one, so perhaps I'm more of an authority on this subject than most commenters here. I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
I had a rather difficult time despite obviously having it (ie was late to the intake appointment). In particular it involved a questionnaire about current and childhood symptoms, and both myself and my parents had to answer it.
> I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
I'm not sure about this one, but there is no treatment for ASD and so no particular reason to have a diagnosis, so there is probably less interest in giving you one.
> I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely
That's awfully convenient isn't it. The 38% of Stanford students claiming to be disabled must have a good reason for it while those of us who understand how easy it is to be diagnosed with a so-called "disability" must be lying. Do you honestly believe that roughly half of the people you meet need special accommodations to study and work?
Yes, because half the people I know do need special accommodations. Maybe if you didn't go out of your way to avoid disabled people you'd notice us when we exist.
> have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely,
And that makes you competent to determine the value of the disability claims of others and the appropriate accommodations such folks should receive?
Really?
Then again, you are the eminent galaxy-wide expert on such things, aren't you bananalychee.
Will you honor my request to impregnate my wife and daughters so they can carry offspring that's so much more valuable than anyone else on the planet? Pretty please!
Your target price range is set too low for the area if you keep seeing poor quality houses. I've heard plenty of people complain about the quality of the housing stock in my (old) area, but that's because they insist on lowballing in desirable neighborhoods, there's plenty of well-maintained properties as well including at the low end. You just can't expect a miracle for the price of a foreclosure.
Even though AVIF decoding support is fairly widespread by now, it is still not ubiquitous like JPEG/PNG/GIF. So typically services will store or generate the same image in multiple formats including AVIF for bandwidth optimization and JPEG for universal client support. Browser headers help to determine compatibility, but it's still fairly complicated to implement, and users also end up having to deal with different platforms supporting different formats when they are served WebP or AVIF and want to reupload an image somewhere else that does not like those formats. As far as I can tell, JXL solves that issue for most websites since it is backwards-compatible and can be decoded into JPEG when a client does not support JXL. I would happily give up a few percent in compression efficiency to get back to a single all-purpose lossy image format.
It's almost as if Google had an interest in increased storage and bandwidth. Of course they don't but as paying Driver used I'm overcharged for the same thing.
I have no previous first-hand knowledge of this, but I vaguely remember discussions of avif in google photos from reddit a while back so FWIW I just tried uploading some avif photos and it handled them just fine.
Listed as avif in file info, downloads as the original file, though inspecting the network in the web frontend, it serves versions of it as jpg and webp, so there's obviously still transcoding going on.
I'm not sure when they added support, the consumer documentation seem to be more landing site than docs unless I'm completely missing the right page, but the API docs list avif support[1], and according to the way back machine, "AVIF" was added to that page some time between August and November 2023.
You are correct it is possible to upload avif files into Google Photo. But you lose the view and of course the thumbnail. Defeating the whole purpose of putting them into Photo.
Given it's an app, they didn't even need Google chrome to add support. Avif is supported on Android natively.
> You are correct it is possible to upload avif files into Google Photo. But you lose the view and of course the thumbnail.
I'm not sure what you mean. They appear to act like any other photo in the interface. You can view them and they're visible in the thumbnail view, but maybe I'm misinterpreting what you mean?
I take a photo, the format is jpeg. It backs up to Google photo, the Google photo app on Android renders the photo just fine.
I then convert that photo (via a local converter) to AVIF, Google backs it up, I can see the file in Google Photo on Android but it doesn't render the image. That being full size or thumbnail, all I get is a grayed square. So I concluded the app doesn't support avif rasterizing.
I then gave up on the automation that converted all my jpeg into avif, which in turn would have saved hundred of gigabytes given I have 10y worth of photos.
The experiment was done about 3 months ago, as of 2025 Google Photo on Android, latest version, would not render my AVIF photos.
See cousin comment, it accepts AVIF files. At least they would render on the app. Which would be enough for many. As it stands it accepts this format and renders nothing at all.
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