MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JadoJodo | 2025-07-16 13:30:09+00:00
I am in this category, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the market for OS's:

I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).

Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).

I think it comes down to the following wishes:

A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.

B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.

C. I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.
by patrakov | 2025-07-16 13:30:54+00:00
The article title does not fully match the content. A more appropriate title would be: "In the issue tracker, write issues, not user stories".

The primary call to action here is to separate product-level details (including "user experience") from the issue tracker. The difference lies between the holistic view required for product-level work and the need for a clearly defined scope for tasks and issues.
by RALaBarge | 2025-07-16 13:30:54+00:00
I wouldnt bet against them either, but the material science aspect of it all just isnt there and wont be for a while. How many tons would we need to get into Earth orbit alone, let alone transfer to mars?

I never hear anyone speak of the radiation outside of our atmosphere very often when it comes to 'moonshot' ideas like this, and how we would be incapable of preventing it or surviving it once we arrive, in our current biological form.

How much would it cost to get all the lead or H20 you would need to generate a barrier against it into orbit? Do we need to have a moon base extracting materials for us to even think about transferring orbits?

Its all pie in the sky, and that is great because the sky is a pie that we should long to eat, but lets not fool ourselves that in ours or our childrens childrens lifetimes we will have a human on a planet that is not Earth.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-07-16 13:31:20+00:00
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.

A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.

My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.
by layer8 | 2025-07-16 13:31:45+00:00
The driver was that unless you have a large number of tabs, vertical tabs waste more space than horizontal tabs, due to the width of the tabs column for vertical tabs vs. the height of the tabs row for horizontal tabs. Like in this [0] random example with just single tabs, there is a lot more wasted space on the left and right (below “My Notebook” and “Phonetics”) than on the top (to the right of “New Section 1”). If we used a vertical writing system instead of a horizontal one, we’d have had vertical tabs from the start.

Widescreen monitors afford that wasting of space better.

[0] http://www.onenotegem.com/uploads/allimg/191124/12310QH9-3.g...
by koolba | 2025-07-16 13:32:23+00:00
There's a big difference between a precompiled app from a company you've possibly heard of (which exists as an entity and could be sued for creating something malicous) v.s. some random guy on the internet.

I personally would not run an arbitrary binary from somebody I've never heard of on my local machine. And definitely not give it database credentials or access. I also think anybody that is willing to do so is insane. There's so much garbage and malware on npm, that something that is installed via the @latest on npm is arguably even worse. Even if it's fine now, there's no telling when one of its deps could be compromised too.
by Gormo | 2025-07-16 13:32:43+00:00
Fundamentally, Linux is Linux. Differences between distros are vastly overstated, and they mostly amount to different default selections and configurations of the same underlying components.

Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-07-16 13:32:54+00:00
> And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.

The Firefox and Edge implementations have a collapsible panel for the vertical tabs. I agree if they didn't, it would be worse than horizontal tabs.

However, my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether, say when using a tiling WM that implements tabbing itself, controllable with the usual shortcuts. Firefox has an extension that always moves tabs to a separate window, but it's janky.
by sparklingmango | 2025-07-16 13:33:18+00:00
It's a lot to ask grandparents to take care of an infant full time during the work week. Here and there, on occasion, that is a completely reasonable thing to ask for. It helps strengthen family bonds. But I would never ask my parents or my in-laws to care for my toddler 8-5 M-F. They already raised kids.
by 827a | 2025-07-16 13:33:36+00:00
1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.

2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.

3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.

This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-16 13:33:40+00:00
> While downvoting might make sense on Yelp or Amazon, it’s disastrous for any platform hoping to foster thoughtful dialogue. This isn’t democratic debate, it’s digital silencing. Dissent isn’t engaged, it’s deleted. Downvoting doesn’t improve quality, it makes a person feel good about eliminating opinions they do not agree with.

Someone shared a Reddit thread recently asking parents if any of them regretted having children. It was on /r/seriousconversation so they were looking for serious replies.

The top voted comments were variations of “I’m not a parent, but I know most parents regret having children”

If you switched the sort order to Controversial, you found pages of actual parents saying that they did not regret having children, though many shared different degrees of challenges they faced to add some context. And they were all downvoted into negative numbers.

On Reddit, the downvote button is used for comments people don’t like, don’t want to hear, or just want to push down lower than their own opinions.

I don’t know how you solve this problem. There are a lot of comments that are truly wrong, meant, or actively harmful that need to be downvoted. Yet it’s also weaponized by people trying to make their opinion rise to the top.

I don’t know if the thread I referred to would be different if the actual parents’ opinions were not downvoted because the non-parent opinions were so upvoted, though. I think the real problem is that Reddit’s active commenter user base has largely become toxic over time and drawn a chronically online, cynical type of person and they have more time to comment and vote-police threads than anyone else. It has driven away most people who don’t want to step into that cesspool of negativity, doom, and gloom.
Show HN: YOLO – metaprograming AI decorator generating function code from stubs
by spstoyanov | 2025-07-16 13:33:42+00:00
The other day I was thinking about the future of programming and how our workflows change with AI and I started wondering what would an AI-native programming language look like.

So I got this idea - what if we can just write function / class definitions and let AI generate the actual code for us. One thing led to another and after a fun weekend I got something working.

I made a simple python decorator that uses a function definition to generate the function code. It works for async functions and class methods, and it caches the generated code locally. There are some fun use cases like AI-generated fastAPI endpoints and agent tools.

I also realized that this approach somewhat incentivizes test-driven development because if you write the tests ahead of time you don’t only make sure that the code works but it is generated and cached before the actual program runs.

I haven’t had enough time to do a proper comparison but I wonder if this test-driven approach produces better code vs traditional vibe-coding.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers!
by libertine | 2025-07-16 13:33:53+00:00
You don't need much of a historical deep dive to see how it's currently being used:

> The term Little Russia is now anachronistic when used to refer to the country Ukraine and the modern Ukrainian nation, its language, culture, etc. Such usage is typically perceived as conveying an imperialist view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia".Today, many Ukrainians consider the term disparaging, indicative of Russian suppression of Ukrainian identity and language. It has continued to be used in Russian nationalist discourse, in which modern Ukrainians are presented as a single people in a united Russian nation. This has provoked new hostility toward and disapproval of the term by many Ukrainians. In July 2021 Vladimir Putin published a 7000-word essay, a large part of which was devoted to expounding these views. [0]

Ethnical slurs, or any other slurs, change over time. If you go back in time 100+ years in any context, and you use a modern ethnic or racial slur, it will most likely empty of meaning. Just like a lot of slurs from the past have lost their meaning over the years. But the "historical meaning" is constantly being used by Russian propaganda, where they claim one needs to go back to the 1200's, and their interpretation of history, to try to make sense of the current genocide attempt in Ukraine.

There's no logic behind that approach because current actions speak for themselves, including the context of recent history, and that's enough. You can get a pretty clear picture of this whole event starting in the 1990s.

Unless you still see that slur being used by Russian nationalists as an endearing term to address their "brotherly nation" which they support being erased from the map.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Russia#Modern_usage
by theandrewbailey | 2025-07-16 13:34:11+00:00
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?

I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)

[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
by weinzierl | 2025-07-16 13:34:21+00:00
"I just realized that I'm not sure if it's Borland or Norton who brought the blue interface to DOS first."

Not sure about the blue color specifically but almost all the conventions came out of IBM's SAA and CUA initiatives. There is still a lot to find about these conventions and for some time in the early 90s every computer mag wrote about them. When I searched for the original IBM sources a while ago I could not find anything.

So, if anyone has a pointer to the original style guide I'd be very grateful.

"Borland's DOS IDEs represented what we might call brutalism in interface design."

Hmm, I think they could be perceived as brutalist nowadays because people are not aware of the technical restrictions these applications had to work with, but at least Turbo Pascal was a marvel of beauty at the time.

"Windows (after 2000) arbitrarily became more like favelas with dozens of unnecessary panels in every application, a great example of when features win over rationality."

I'd call it a slum. The Favela is X11 - poor by definition, yet charming in places, sometimes dangerous.
by sartak | 2025-07-16 13:35:30+00:00
From The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (1994):

> Among Prime Intellect's four thousand six hundred and twelve interlocking programs was one Lawrence called the RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE. Its sole purpose was to prowl for new associations that might fit somewhere in an empty area of the GAT. Most of these were rejected because they were useless, unworkable, had a low priority, or just didn't make sense. But now the RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE made a critical connection, one which Lawrence had been expecting it to make [...]

> Deep within one of the billions of copies of Prime Intellect, one copy of the Random_Imagination_Engine connected two thoughts and found the result good. That thought found its way to conscious awareness, and because the thought was so good it was passed through a network of Prime Intellects, copy after copy, until it reached the copy which had arbitrarily been assigned the duty of making major decisions -- the copy which reported directly to Lawrence. [...]

> "I've had an idea for rearranging my software, and I'd like to know what you think."

> At that Lawrence felt his blood run cold. He hardly understood how things were working as it was; the last thing he needed was more changes. "Yes?"
by jacobyoder | 2025-07-16 13:36:16+00:00
> I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.

99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.

Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.

The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
by BigChemical | 2025-07-16 13:36:20+00:00
Pascal’s gamble wasn’t just about probability, it was about storytelling: the promise of nearly infinite payoff with minimal risk. That same allure is still at play today whenever people chase “moonshot” returns on crypto or quick-rich schemes.

It underscores a timeless lesson: no matter how much data or logic we have, we’re still wired to fall for well-crafted optimism and that means skepticism remains the best defense.
by xaitv | 2025-07-16 13:36:20+00:00
Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.

I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.

For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
by PhilippGille | 2025-07-16 13:36:36+00:00
There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close

Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.

I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.
by hellojesus | 2025-07-16 13:36:40+00:00
> Would you really argue that in this situation, it's immoral for you to stop me from stomping on your face, because it's not a Pareto improvement?

My comments were with regards to a system that enforces private property. To that end, having one's face stomped on involuntarily would be a violation of private property.

We could consider a system whereby one person has 100% of the fixed resources while the other has 0%. It's pareto optimal and maximally inequitable. My point is that it is wrong to take from the person with 100% to redistribute it to the person with 0%. But it would be pareto optimal if a voluntary trade occurs, and I also accept trades of duress to be voluntary (e.g., the person with 0% sells their body for a meal).

> You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.

Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. I want these (national defense). Enforcement of private property does violate the nonrivalous condition, but that service is still necessary to provide a system whereby private property exists.

> The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now).

The move to redistribute Elon's wealth breaks pareto optimality. All this does is move the gini coefficient to 0, but the total resources in the system are constant.
by eqvinox | 2025-07-16 13:37:49+00:00
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.

Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
by jwrallie | 2025-07-16 13:38:05+00:00
For me it was Windows 11 not supporting hardware. I moved to Fedora in the beginning of this year for work (while using it at home for quite a while).

After seeing SharePoint.exe using 1GB and 100% of the CPU today for over 12 hours I’m seriously considering removing my VM (that I only boot for MS Office). Edge even greeted me with a message that I have access to Copilot Vision that can now see everything I browse when I right clicked the process and clicked on search!
Show HN: Scroll – read later app that works offline and doesn't get in your way
by Nikitaita | 2025-07-16 13:38:05+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Scroll, a minimal read-later app that lets you save articles offline, organize them cleanly, and even read them with a native TTS engine.

I was frustrated with bloated apps like Pocket and Instapaper, so I made something focused purely on distraction-free reading.

Would love feedback from the HN crowd—especially around UX, performance, and any must-have features I missed.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/scroll-read-later/id6748611211
by simonw | 2025-07-16 13:38:30+00:00
I hadn't realized WebGPU was already available on macOS in the Firefox Nightlies!

I just installed the Mac nightly from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/ and now this demo works: https://huggingface.co/spaces/reach-vb/github-issue-generato...

It runs the SmolLM2 model compiled to WebAssembly for structured data extraction. I previously thought that demo only worked in Chrome.

(If I try it in regular Firefox for Mac I get "Error: WebGPU is not supported in your current environment, but it is necessary to run the WebLLM engine.")
by DaveZale | 2025-07-16 13:38:42+00:00
aljazeera banned. I was reading it daily during the attacks on Iran. They had updates every few minutes. Nothing I saw was not factual, AFAIK.

bbc reports occasionally on the Gaza situation. Like this

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4rwrkdlzxo

What happened to the US media? It all seems to be recipes, dating advice, wellness tips on the front pages.

I am in the US but get my news from elsewhere. It is not an option anymore;-)
by edent | 2025-07-16 13:39:18+00:00
This is likely illegal in many jurisdictions unless the poster says that they're being compensated for posting.

See, for example, https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/social-media-endorsements and https://www.asa.org.uk/static/dd740667-6fe0-4fa7-80de3e45984...

Disclaimer - this comment is an attempt to claim a $10 bounty.
by layer8 | 2025-07-16 13:39:27+00:00
While the majority probably does, I don’t maximize anything that doesn’t have subpanels by default (like IDEs). In particular, I generally size application windows such that their main text content (if any) takes up a suitable middle column on the screen. That also means that I often have application windows with fixed-sized side panels not fill the whole width of the screen. My browser windows are by default something between 5:4 and 4:3-sized. Even with vertical tabs, the added width wouldn’t be enough to make them full-width.
by chrisgeleven | 2025-07-16 13:39:50+00:00
I been lazy and was using Cloudflare's resolver only recently. In hindsight I probably should just setup two instances of Unbound on my home network that don't rely on upstream resolvers and call it a day. It's unlikely both will go down at the same time and if I'm having an total Internet outage (unlikely as I have Comcast as primary + T-Mobile Home Internet as a backup), it doesn't matter if DNS is or isn't resolving.
by Woodi | 2025-07-16 13:40:01+00:00
I have "Battle Royal" on CD so:

- I hate Fortnite for trivialising killing

- CD is damaged in one place, boo...

I also have "Matrix" and "Pulp Fiction" on DVD etc. but imagine this: you login to Netflix or HBO and there is no "Matrix" or PF to watch ! HOW idiotic and dumb by platforms owners... Maybe it is limited to other streaming platform because of ownership or something but putting it somewhere online is basic SANITY ! But no, _they_ do limit accesibility... I can't grasp that...

On top of that so many older films are not available ! Eg. where is Toy Story number 1 ?? I saw somewhere 2 or 3 but skipped becouse you need to keep order ;)

And when I log to streaming platform I have max 2 weeks or less of material to watch and then just thing to rewatch. But they want _monthly_ subscriptions ! Are they intentionally suicide their own platforms ??

So DVD is best thing after CD ;)