MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by c0l0 | 2025-06-11 07:27:40+00:00
It would be fine it were only that. The actual problem is that software vendors can and do use Secure Boot to also check if you, the machine's owner, "decided" to "trust" this set of special CAs - and if you did not (and limited your freedom to execute any code you want in any way you want it on your machine in doing so), make the software you bought/licensed from them - or any other software you would like to run on top of these vendors' platforms - refuse to work on your machine.
by einpoklum | 2025-06-11 07:28:12+00:00
They are indeed, but this kind of tragic... I mean, all that skill, that knowledge, the experience - working on something which, almost by definition, very few people will be able to use (because people require lots of things from their OS + apps, so that such a project is extremely unlikely to meet all of those requirements). And even as inspiration for other developers and designers - the solo OS-developer is unlikely to spend the time elucidating their design choices and architecture, in documentation, presentations, talks etc.

And this is in contrast with the solo developer of a library or app, whose work is immediately usable by many even it's an undocumented black box... OSes are a team sport.
by cardanome | 2025-06-11 07:28:44+00:00
Linux Mint Cinnamon. Classic desktop. Just works.

Yes wayland support is still experimental but I don't understand why you would voluntarily use it at its current change. X11 works perfectly fine.

Also good old Xfce. Honestly, even KDE is pretty decent again these days, I have heard. As Linux users we are spoilt with great options.
by hnbad | 2025-06-11 07:29:26+00:00
Or for a more concerning example, GitHub is owned by Microsoft who want to sell cloud services so it stands to reason it would be in their interest to have GitHub Copilot steer developers towards building applications using architectural patterns that lend themselves more to using those cloud services, e.g. service-oriented architecture even when it is against the developer's interests.

This doesn't have to be as blunt as promoting specific libraries or services and it's a bias that could even be introduced "accidentally".
by sph | 2025-06-11 07:29:40+00:00
For all in this context does not mean “all the infinite combinations of software for people that refuse to adopt the status quo”

systemd is here to stay. It is ludicrous to imagine everybody to keep supporting that 1% that is ideologically opposed to it, no? As those people love to say, open-source is written by volunteers, you can always fork it.
by Joeri | 2025-06-11 07:30:11+00:00
I don't buy into the "red tape" argument. For me it's all due to a lack of a business case. I think building (LWR) nuclear plants is just freaking expensive, has always been freaking expensive, was bankrolled for a while by governments because they thought it would get cheaper, and then largely abandoned in most countries when it proved to be an engineering dead end.

Here's an MIT study that dug into the reasons behind high nuclear construction cost. They found that regulatory burdens were only responsible for 30% of cost increases. Most of the cost overruns were because of needing to adapt the design of the nuclear plant to the site.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

Now, you can criticize the methodology of that study, but then you have to bring your own study that shows precisely which regulatory burdens are causing these cost overruns, and which of those are in excess. Is it in excess that we have strict workplace safety regulation now? Is it in excess that we demand reactor containment vessels to prevent meltdowns from contaminating ground water supplies? In order to make a good red tape argument I expect detail in what is excess regulation, and I've never seen that.

Besides, if "red tape" and fossil industry marketing was really the cause of unpopularity, and the business case for nuclear was real when installing plants at scale, you would see Russia and China have the majority of their electricity production from nuclear power.

- Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world, and even they didn't get past 20% of electricity share. They claim levelized cost for nuclear on the order of that of solar and wind, but I am very skeptical of that number, and anyone who knows anything about the Russian government's relation to the truth will understand why. When they build nuclear plants in other countries (e.g. the bangladesh project) they are not that cheap.

- China sits at low single digit percentages of nuclear share, with a levelized cost that is significantly higher than Russia's and well above that of solar and wind. While they're planning to grow the nuclear share they assume it will be based on new nuclear technology that changes the business case.

Both Russia and China can rely on cheap skilled labor to bring down costs, a luxury western countries do not have.

And this is ultimately the issue: the nuclear industry has been promising designs that bring down costs for over half a century, and they have never delivered on that promise. It's all smoke and mirrors distracting from the fact that building nuclear plants is inherently freaking expensive. Maybe AI can help us design better and cheaper nuclear power plants, but as of today there is no proven nuclear plant design that is economical to build, and that is ultimately why you see so little new nuclear plant construction in the west.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-11 07:30:56+00:00
> Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough.

This system exists and is optimized to make the bankers rich. The idea that it helps ensure that ventures using that money will be successful is the thin veneer used 100+ years ago to sell it to everyone. But the true purpose has always been to make bankers rich. If you to institute any other system that would not achieve that purpose, you will find yourself battling enormous opposition.

The same things are true for huge parts of our society. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious is the US Healthcare system. Experience from all over the world shows clearly that it is not an efficient way to organize Healthcare, by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it won't change, not because people don't believe the outside examples, but because the system is working for what it was designed to do - transfer huge amounts of money to rich people. And it delivers just enough health care that people aren't routing in the streets against it.
by sonichigo | 2025-06-11 07:31:04+00:00
Like many teams, we treated application CI/CD as a first-class citizen but left PostgreSQL schema changes as a manual afterthought. That led to broken deployments, inconsistent environments, and rollback nightmares.

This article shares our transition to a fully automated, GitOps-style workflow using Harness Database DevOps and Liquibase. It dives into technical challenges, architecture changes, and lessons learned while scaling PostgreSQL migrations across multiple environments.

Read the full blog post - https://dub.sh/JMUgbep

Would love to hear how others have tackled this problem at scale.
by marsten | 2025-06-11 07:31:31+00:00
> Over the years, the magic was never lost on me. However, I can never see LLMs as more than a "token prediction machine".

The "mere token prediction machine" criticism, like Pearl's "deep learning amounts to just curve fitting", is true but it also misses the point. AI in the end turns a mirror on humanity and will force us to accept that intelligence and consciousness can emerge from some pretty simple building blocks. That in some deep sense, all we are is curve fitting.

It reminds me of the lines from T.S. Eliot, “...And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time."
by PaulShin | 2025-06-11 07:31:37+00:00
Interesting thread. We're building Markhub, a B2B collaboration SaaS, and we have a pragmatic, hybrid approach to our observability stack. Our philosophy is: use open source where it gives us control and flexibility, and use managed SaaS where it saves us time and engineering overhead.

Here's our stack:

Logs: We self-host a simple stack using Fluentd to collect logs, which are then shipped to Elasticsearch for storage and analysis. It's powerful, gives us full control over our data, and is more cost-effective at our scale than a managed logging service.

Metrics & Monitoring: For this, we decided not to reinvent the wheel. We use Datadog. The out-of-the-box dashboards, alerting, and deep integration with our cloud provider (AWS/GCP) save our small team hundreds of hours. The cost is justified by the engineering time we save.

Traces: We're currently using Datadog's APM for tracing as well, as it's tightly integrated. However, we're actively exploring moving to OpenTelemetry for more vendor neutrality in the future.

It's working out well. The key has been to be honest about our most valuable resource: engineering time. We self-host where we have a clear need for control (logs), and we pay for a service where the platform provides undeniable value and speed (metrics/monitoring).
by JdeBP | 2025-06-11 07:32:52+00:00
It doesn't represent us who were around in that old time. Do not make the mistake of thinking that this represents mainstream thought either from when it was written or of the time that it is harking back to.

As pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44244699 , this is a person not having a clue what xe is writing about. There were, alas, plenty of those during the "Operating System Wars".

(No, they didn't have a mainstream of their own. They weren't usually even on the same page as one another.)
by rl3 | 2025-06-11 07:33:06+00:00
>At what speed should it be disassembled?

A responsible pace that doesn't result in abrupt mass deaths due to the lack of aid continuity.

>A. The US should give infinity money to everyone forever and never stop. If anyone ever dies, it's the US's fault for not supporting them enough.

Nobody said that, but with operating the world's largest aid agency for the better part of a century comes massive responsibility.

>B. If you are going to stop, do it on the schedule of the people who are getting free stuff, and only stop when they decide they don't want free stuff anymore (i.e. never).

You're right. Hopefully those impoverished kids (many of whom are dead now) take some personal responsibility for themselves in the afterlife. To think we'd even entertain pulling their food and medicine on their schedule and not our schedule.
by db48x | 2025-06-11 07:33:47+00:00
When anyone realizes that they’re spending too much money it is natural to go down the list of expenses and see which ones they can eliminate. That’s not a post–hoc justification, that’s avoiding bankruptcy.

Sure, as you say a lot of therapies had their origin in taxpayer–funded research. But that doesn’t mean that there is a _need_ for the taxpayer to fund research. It’s a luxury at best and a subsidy for companies that already earn billions at worst. The corporations that earn those gigantic profits don’t need taxpayer money to do the job when they have the billions they earn from their customers every year.
by friendzis | 2025-06-11 07:33:58+00:00
Sadly, the ones who take the time to be sure of the answer they give and stick around to put their butt on the line provide too much value in their position to be replaced, so they tend to NOT get promoted. One of the best ways to climb the corporate ladder is to actually give quick, plausibly sounding answers and move before their butt ends up on the line.

These incentive structures now give tools for mediocre bullshitters to bullshit their way through and indirectly promote proliferation of these tools.
by sph | 2025-06-11 07:34:22+00:00
I have yet to hear an argument against systemd which isn’t a variation of:

- """bloat"""

- I dislike Poettering. Remember pulseaudio?

- a core user-space layer for modern applications that can’t only rely on the spartan kernel syscall API? Literally 1984.

Given that systemd is good enough and is running on 99% of desktops and servers, I always find it hilarious to see how the vocal minority is overrepresented on this forum.
by rickdeckard | 2025-06-11 07:34:29+00:00
The great thing about Material Design is that it lays a solid foundation to put such gaudy elements on top, because if the design-language is properly followed it can also be globally adjusted.

So expect Android Device Vendors to expand their theme engines to support more excessive GUI eyecandy than even before, "liquid glass" will be the minimum

The odd thing about this journey is, that once you're used to the simplicity of Material Design, adding such liquid/glass/leather/concrete/... elements to the rendering just degrades readability.

My guess is that Apple now cranked up the eyecandy again for everyone to follow, to then tone it down in the coming years, again appearing more "mature" than others. And in the end we will settle on something close to Material Design again, with more z-axis separation (more shadows, floating,...) and liquid state-transitions (changing elements affecting other nearby elements)

But hey, it's everyone's individual journey.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-11 07:36:58+00:00
> We already have plenty of techniques that are fast enough for classic UI rendering. There is no conceivable bottleneck for the kind of stuff that is on your screen right now.

I disagree, you either have the old object-oriented toolkits, which are fast enough but very unpleasant to, or the new reactive frameworks, that offers much better developer ergonomics (and that's why pretty much everybody uses them right now) but have pathological performance characteristics and requires lots of additional work to be fast enough when the number of items on screen is high enough.

By the way you are missing the forest (Xilem) for the tree (Vello) here: the foundational work Raph has been doing isn't just a 2D renderer (Vello), this is just a small piece in a bigger UI toolkit (Xilem) that is aimed at addressing the problem I mention above.

Xilem originally started using the native libraries for 2D rendering (through a piet wrapper he discusses quickly in the video) but ended up being disappointed and switched to making his own, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. The end goal is a fact reactive UI framework.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-11 07:38:23+00:00
> there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.

You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-11 07:38:42+00:00
Before HN posters can get to the point of actually debating the issues motivating this kind of decision, they have to accept that there actually are issues and that RFK Jr isn't just deciding things randomly.

As an example of what can go wrong, CNN failed to understand the point I was making here and screwed up very publicly. They tried to use "crowdsourcing" to gather counterpoints to an argument RFK Jr made, in fact, the one about trials not using inert placebos. In other words they gish-galloped him. In return they got a 1,330 word rebuttal that goes through their list showing, that none of the studies they claimed used inert placebos actually did (except a few that weren't used by the US anyway):

https://x.com/SecKennedy/status/1932580198198964241

CNN probably didn't expect this kind of takedown, they seem to model him as some sort of Trump of Health. That was their error.
by oneshtein | 2025-06-11 07:39:11+00:00
Mate supports Wayland since Mate 1.28.

See https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/developers-corner/wayland-meso...

Quote:

> One of the most notable improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more integrated and responsive desktop environment.
by hnbad | 2025-06-11 07:39:42+00:00
Because real libraries are not for-profit enterprises and have a negative (or at least extremely unimpressive) ARR. Incidentally their leadership positions also don't provide anywhere near the levels of compensation you'd expect for a C-level position at an equally large company.

Asking for "the Internet" to be funded the same way as real libraries is quite the contrary to the dominant cultural narrative which asks for public services and entire governments to be operated "like a business", which usually means cutting funding, selling assets, doing layoffs and eventually scrapping it for parts once it has become predictably defunct.
by rvnx | 2025-06-11 07:41:41+00:00
I think I could share a trick that could help:

From my experience (so not an ultimate truth) Claude is not so great at taking the decision for planning by its own: it dives immediately into coding.

If you ask it to think step-by-step it still doesn’t do it but Gemini 2.5 Pro is good at that planning but terrible at actual coding.

So you can use Gemini as planner and Claude as programmer and you get something decent on RooCode.

This “think wisely” that you have to repeat 10x in the prompt is absolutely true
by audunf | 2025-06-11 07:42:02+00:00
They really cared about that piece of intellectual property too. Anecdote time: Back in the early 00’s I was part of a small team developing a mobile phone for Docomo (using Openwave’s framework). Bug came back saying Docomo emojis are the wrong color. To which we replied, tell us the color codes and we’ll fix it. The reply was, we cannot - because Docomo emoji colors are secret. Those were good times! :)
by reissbaker | 2025-06-11 07:42:27+00:00
Magistral Small seems wayyy too heavy-handed with its RL to me:

\boxed{Hey! How can I help you today?}

They clearly rewarded the \boxed{...} formatting during their RL training, since it makes it easier to naively extract answers to math problems and thus verify them. But Magistral uses it for pretty much everything, even when it's inappropriate (in my own testing as well).

It also forgets to <think> unless you use their special system prompt reminding it to.

Honestly a little disappointing. It obviously benchmarks well, but it seems a little overcooked on non-benchmark usage.
by mythz | 2025-06-11 07:42:28+00:00
I've been turned off with OpenAI and have been actively avoiding using any of their models for a while, luckily this is easy to do given the quality of Sonnet 4 / Gemini Pro 2.5.

Although I've always wondered how OpenAI could get away with o3's astronomical pricing, what does o3 do better than any other model to justify their premium cost?
by jabiko | 2025-06-11 07:42:44+00:00
I think this is a good move: it focuses on maintaining a single, well-tested code path while still offering guidance for those who want alternatives (see the section "So what should distros without systemd do?" in the article).

It's not making it impossible to run GNOME on non-systemd systems, but it shifts the responsibility of maintaining that support to the projects that are actually interested in it. I think ultimately this might lead to a better user experience since the people developing non-systemd support are also the ones using it.
by rkagerer | 2025-06-11 07:43:29+00:00
I hate to sound like a jerk, but this comes across like a whining four year old. (The repetitiveness, pleading, shifting appeals, awkward negotiation attempts...)

What's stopping the GrapheneOS team from negotiating similar access contracts as OEM's enjoy?

I would have hoped they'd have some clout given what they've achieved to date and the quantity and impact of bug fixes they've effected upstream.

Are they short on funds? (The posts seem to imply they have some budget available, at least for hiring?)

Is there some kind of sorted history between Google and the GrapheneOS team of which I'm unaware?

Could they commandeer some about-to-be-abandoned, low-end hardware product, as a means to meeting contrived requirements to become a legit OEM?

Or embark on a more organized and deliberate PR campaign (perhaps even legal avenues eg. platform gatekeeper legislation) to pressure Google to maintain Android's open-sourcedness?
by Scarblac | 2025-06-11 07:43:34+00:00
I like Regolith ( https://regolith-desktop.com/ ), it's built on Gnome-session for its configuration screens, but otherwise runs a lightweight tiling window manager.

For my windows I only use keyboard shortcuts (no mouse) and full-screen windows (sometimes two half screen windows side by side), so I may be a bit weird.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-11 07:43:53+00:00
As someone who had to ensure the "Operating System Wars", I can attest that it's likely not a joke, especially given the other writings on the same site. It is, alas, more of what we saw a lot of during that time, which was people expoounding at length (although on Usenet and FIDONET and the like, and so a lot less findable, or even outright lost, nowadays) in this sort of vein, with obviously shallow or no grasp of how computers worked or what operating systems were or could/could not do.

Getting executable file formats confused with interpreted languages, and indeed using the word "bloat" (something that no-one could ever provide an objective meaning for) is typical of such things.
by bambax | 2025-06-11 07:44:33+00:00
> The younger person also addresses the older person, usually with a title or another word that fits their relationship, but not their name. Only the older person addresses the younger one with their name. (There can be more nuance.)

I love this. I'm an old French guy and still can't quite accept when srangers in an email (or a machine, a system, a web form) adress me using my first name.

Being "on a first name basis" still has meaning for me -- or it would, if it had for anyone else, which clearly is absolutely not the case anymore.
by heinrichhartman | 2025-06-11 07:44:40+00:00
> New Relic did this for the Rails revolution, Datadog did it for the rise of AWS, and Honeycomb led the way for OpenTelemetry.

I find this reading of history of OTel highly biased. OpenTelemetry was born as the Merge of OpenCensus (initiated by Google) and OpenTracing (initiated by LightStep):

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/05/opentelemetry-merg...

> The seed governance committee is composed of representatives from Google, Lightstep, Microsoft, and Uber, and more organizations are getting involved every day.

Honeycomb has for sure had valuable code & community contributions and championed the technology adoption, but they are very far from "leading the way".
by tapia | 2025-06-11 07:44:54+00:00
I think that the tools are not will organized, and I always have problems finding the tool I need in the menu. The concept of having different workbenches does not work good for me, as often I am looking for a tool and then realize I am in the wrong workbench. But it is not always clear why something is in a workbench and not in the other, and there are duplicated functions in some workbenches. Also, the fact that it does not support Wayland makes everything look blurry in hdpi screens. I like that it has a good python API though, but the documentation is a bit lacking. However, the different workbenches also sometimes complicate the use of the Python API. I like e.g. how build123d works.