For the best experience on desktop, install the Chrome extension to track your reading on news.ycombinator.com
Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | history | homebrewer's commentsregister

Make sure to backup regularly. I don't know how good OnlyOffice is these days, but it definitely has (had?) a terrible history of quality control. We migrated off it a couple of years ago after losing several days of work due to severe (and, as it turned out, widely known) bugs in how it handled changes/document version tracking.

I only work with local files and I’m really not doing anything mission critical. Employer has the Microsoft office license. I just need a free thing to open the occasional thing.

OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it would be the only logical step if wide interoperability and using truly open formats is your real goal.

And Italo's bad marketing strategy will only ensure OOXML wins. That's what you're missing, it's just a bad way to make the case or foster change.

I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.

LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity. Being identifiable as a bad project’s better fork is kind of a weak starting position.

That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.

Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.


Yes, 90%+ of sellers refuse to ship here (and we're not even under any sanctions and/or political pressure of any sort). I hear about these magical 100$ Thinkpads all the time; I'm yet to see anything cheaper than 300$ (add another 100$+ for shipping).

Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here.

I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.

But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.


> Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is?

It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.


It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.

> Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.

I've heard reports that these are actually surprisingly good. I wouldn't want to use one in a production environment, but for homelab stuff they're an incredible deal.


After using pnpm for years (at least 5, don't remember exactly), I've only ever had to whitelist one library that uses a postinstall script to download a native executable for your system. And even this is not necessary, it's just poorly designed.

For example, esbuild and typescript 7 split binaries for different systems and architectures into separate packages, and rely on your package manager to pull the correct one.


Linux has used "Reviewed-by" trailers for many years. If you've only done minor editing, or none at all, it's something to consider.

You can always ask your parent company to train on their usage. I hear they have incredibly massive codebases: Windows, Office, MSSQL, which stay out of training data for some reason.

I thought neural nets never repeat the training data verbatim, and copyright does not pass through them, so what's the problem?


How do you know that isn't already the case?

Who said they don't?

Those sellers never disappeared; although I'm from not from Paraguay, the situation is familiar. These days they're selling desktops built on 10+ year old Xeons which you can buy for dirt cheap on AliExpress, installed on frankenstein motherboards from noname Chinese manufacturers which are desktop-oriented, but take server processors. The graphics card is something old like RX480, and comes from being run into the ground by years of crypto"currency" mining, then resoldered on a new board, also often developed by Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.

Graphics cards especially are very unreliable and frequently die within a few months of purchase. But when you can buy a whole PC for the price of one modern videocard, many don't have a choice.

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-intel-xeon-processors.htm...

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-motherboards-xeon.html

https://aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-amd-radeon-rx-580.html


The notion that GPU chips can be "run into the ground" by years of crypto mining or AI workloads has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now. The hardware is quite resilient, it doesn't really fail at a higher rate.

I bought a XFX RX 580 that was used for cryptomining from eBay, used it for 3 years then handed it down to my son who used it for 2 more. It still worked when he removed it. Can confirm.

I used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service.

Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go.

GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.


Also any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".

I think the problem is the distinction here between chips and boards. The entire GPU assembly can absolutely be worn down from continuous use, thermal pads, paste, VRMs, fans do degrade. The chip itself may be fine but it's very rare to find anyone willing to transplant a GPU from one board to another.

Well, a lot of people here would have loved to have 10-year old Xeons in their motherboards; while power hungry, I guess they would make good CPUs since they have good cache sizes. But no, there's no Xeons in our offers here. What people get here now are Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs, or N-class CPUs, with the onboard GPU only, 4GB RAM and 1 TB HDD running unlicensed Windows with understandable results. But when you are a digitally illiterate parent seeking to purchase a first PC for your children of school age, this looks attractive enough at a good price point.

> Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs,

Don't look at the branding. Look at the core type, count, and speed (maybe).

It's been a while since I shopped Intel, but they used to typically release a low core count/lower clock speed Pentium/Celeron on the mainstream cores, often with no hyperthreading. These were typically low cost and could be a good value, you'd get decent single core performance because it's the newest architecture and multicore performance would be iffy but you can't have everything.

> N-class CPUs

These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time. Usually twice the cores, but much less performance per clock. Never feels fast for interactive work. But they make sense for some situations. Some of these get an n3 branding to trick people looking for i3s.


> These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time.

They may not be ideal for desktops, but they are great low power home server CPUs. In fact, they are much better than ARM alternatives like Raspberry Pis for the money.


Yeah, I consider home server to be non-interactive. If it's got your connectivity needs (and won't self-destruct), n/atom is a good fit.

A NUC would be enough for a 90% of cases and much cheaper on the long run.

NUCs are high-end miniPCs, there are much lower-end ones including on the second-hand market that are okay for baseline uses.

It's an LLM spambot, it is incapable of worrying. I'm much more worried about another instance of nobody noticing what they're replying to.


E.g. gowinston.ai gives 98% probability that the comment is human written. LLM detectors of course aren't always correct, but generally their detection performance for pure LLM text can be high (accuracy % in high 90s).

Do you have some specific techniques or strategies for LLM text detection? Have you validated them?


No no their profile says “software dev.”


Software decentralized evolved version ?


Can I ask how you're so certain? The first two sentences reads human-typed to me.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search:

HN For You