MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Why Is ReactOS Development So Undervalued?
by Waraqa | 2025-07-19 14:55:40+00:00
ReactOS is an open-source operating system aiming to be a binary-compatible replacement for Windows. Despite being around for over two decades, it remains far from ready for mainstream use. That raises an interesting question: why is such an ambitious and potentially valuable project so underdeveloped compared to other open-source OS efforts?

We’ve seen open-source implementations of nearly every major computing platform — from Unix to macOS, and even obscure or obsolete systems like AmigaOS, BeOS, and classic Mac OS. DOS has multiple open-source implementations (like FreeDOS), and even emulators like DOSBox are widely used and maintained.

Yet Windows — the most widely used desktop OS in history — has no complete, viable open-source alternative. ReactOS aims to fill that gap, but its development moves at a glacial pace, with only a handful of active contributors.

If we consider the sheer volume of software written for Windows, the cultural impact it’s had on computing, and its historical dominance, you’d expect ReactOS to have thousands of contributors. Instead, it struggles to maintain a small team of developers.

What explains this discrepancy?

Is it:

1. Technical Complexity

Windows NT's architecture is genuinely complex, with decades of accumulated compatibility layers, undocumented APIs, and proprietary driver models. But this doesn't fully explain it—other complex systems have been successfully cloned.

2. Legal Concerns

Implementing Windows compatibility requires reverse engineering proprietary APIs and behaviors. While this is generally legal, it creates uncertainty that might discourage contributors.

3. Moving Target

Windows continues to evolve rapidly. Unlike emulating a fixed historical system, ReactOS must chase a moving target while maintaining backward compatibility.

4. Alternative Solutions

Wine provides Windows application compatibility without requiring a full OS replacement. Linux offers a superior development environment for most programmers. The practical need may not justify the enormous effort.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-19 14:56:18+00:00
Presumably all of medicine too since it keeps us from "accepting our fates" and lets us procreate worse genes instead of letting billions of people die sacrificially due to their genes which is a "huge loss for evolution".

Kinda funny to attack TFA by associating it with a naughty word while tracking in such awful ideas as if we're unable to evaluate the ideas ourselves.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-07-19 14:56:26+00:00
It’s tricky because the chains (like “Hyatt”) don’t actually own any hotels. They are generally owned by local ownership groups and it can be hard to figure out the real owner.

That’s also why one Hyatt could be 5/5 and another 1/5. The chains don’t do a great job of quality control.
by modeless | 2025-07-19 14:57:15+00:00
Most evidence you have about the world is claims from other people, not direct experiment. There seems to be a thought-terminating cliche here on HN, dismissing any claim from employees of large tech companies.

Unlike seemingly most here on HN, I judge people's trustworthiness individually and not solely by the organization they belong to. Noam Brown is a well known researcher in the field and I see no reason to doubt these claims other than a vague distrust of OpenAI or big tech employees generally which I reject.
by rodrigodlu | 2025-07-19 14:57:31+00:00
I went last year to Lisbon and Barcelona, from Brazil with 0 cash in any currency.

I had a debit card with some hundreds of EUR already charged, but I ended up using it with an NFC enabled smartphone.

No issues at all, even going in far places outside Barcelona. Everyone very receptive in BCN.

I looked at ATM terminals and they seemed full of rules and complications. I tried to get some cash just to collect the notes as a souvenir, but I gave up.

Again, everyone accepted my NFC enabled smartphone, I tested my debit NFC card and my local bank CC NFC card as well

So I think ATMs present a lot of friction for sure.
by kibwen | 2025-07-19 14:57:53+00:00
> As people say, this would give the compiler enough information to implemented stackless coroutines.

Stackless coroutines require creating a structure big enough to hold all the locals for the would-be function, but Zig already has that information, along with Rust, and, by definition, every other language that already supports stackless coroutines.

The root of that linked issue is that Zig has some desire to statically compute the total stack usage of an entire program, but the difficulty there is not in computing the stack size for any given function (which is generally trivial in most languages; supporting growable stack via something like C's `alloca` is the exception, not the rule). The difficulty is that recursive functions can push an unbounded number of function calls to the stack. So what Zig wants to do is forbid recursion, even mutual recursion, unless you do some kind of opt-in.

And this is where "Allegedly, this is only possible because zig uses a single compilation unit" comes in, because detecting mutual recursion is tricky, especially when virtual dispatch gets involved.

But no, you don't need Zig-style whole-program compilation to make that happen. All you need is 1) to be able to detect mutual recursion within a single compilation unit (again, stymied by virtual dispatch), and then 2) to prevent cyclical dependencies between compilation units. Go and Rust both do the latter, so they could get away with the same analysis, assuming you can find a good solution for the former.
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-19 14:58:03+00:00
I had friends whose landlord attempted to charge them cleaning fees for an apartment that they were renovating down to the studs (and had told them that, etc. They'd been working through the complex.

They had to go to small claims. You can't claim a repair fee for some scratches and dents in drywall that you had crowbarred out the day after vacation of the property.
by lxgr | 2025-07-19 14:58:12+00:00
Their "NoiseAware" main product line also sounds incredibly dystopian. Apparently, that's a "privacy-safe" microphone listening in rental properties, to "detect crowds gathering"...!?

This type of creepy stuff, together with Airbnb's horrible business practices (last time they wanted access to my checking account transaction history via Plaid!) and enabling scammy hosts, is why I'm back to just staying at regular hotels.

Sad to see some of them are now start adopting the same type of customer-hostile technology as well.
by firecall | 2025-07-19 14:58:25+00:00
It’s all Rails 8 + Turbo + Stimulus JS with Propshaft handling the asset bundling / pipeline.

All the Tailwind building and so on is done using common JS tools, which are mostly standard out of the box Rails 8 supplied scripts!

Sprockets used to do the SASS compilation and asset bundling, but the Rails standard now is to facilitate your own preferences around compilation of CSS/JS.
by kittikitti | 2025-07-19 14:59:16+00:00
I really liked this article but think it should have mentioned "round tipping" which is the favorite type of fraud from tech companies. YCombinator is an example of this and it's why most of their companies can fail spectacularly. It's where you have companies selling "an unused asset to another company, while at the same time agreeing to buy back the same or similar assets at about the same price."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-tripping_(finance)
by johnnyfived | 2025-07-19 14:59:31+00:00
What's interesting about thinking of code as art is that there rarely a variety of ways of implementing logic that's all optimal. So if you decide on the implementation and have a LLM code it, you likely won't need to make major changes given the right guidelines (I just mean like a single script, for the sake of comparison).

Writing is entirely different, and for some reason, generic writing even when polished (ChatGPT-esque tone) is so much more intolerable than say AI-generated imagery. Images can blend in the background, reading takes active processing so we're much more sensitive. And for the end user of a product, they care 0 or next to 0 about AI code.
by throwaway494932 | 2025-07-19 15:00:00+00:00
> If you don't like it, start another payment processor that doesn't cave to pressure.

Or, gosh, use bitcoin et al.

It's interesting that when people ask "what's the use case for cryptos?", "being an alternative to Visa and Mastercard" is not often mentioned. That alone is a good enough reason to support it.

Civitai has been recently forced by payment processors to crack down on AI-generated porn. Since then, given that the processors told them that they may want do restrict them even more, they have added ability to use cryptos to pay for their services.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-19 15:00:03+00:00
That's exactly what they're wowed by. The general audience cares about the risk-taking, the bravery and daring aspect of it, and maybe the visual flashiness. It's the psychology that's interesting to a general audience because that's what they relate to. Technical excellence is always something peers are more interested in than spectators, your ordinary viewer isn't invested in the technical proficiency of tightrope footwork.
by anal_reactor | 2025-07-19 15:00:26+00:00
It's extremely sinister. The grand prize is feeding people AI-generated content, and completely removing the human factor. Many platforms started as social media, but converted into content delivery platforms. Which is cool, except content creators can be problematic. If you remove them out of equation, you basically get audience to watch whatever slop you want them to watch, with zero human interaction at all. Spotify is already taking serious steps by promoting AI-generated music. In this context, forcing AI-generated translations onto people is a step towards getting them used to listening AI-generated voice. And you can market this easily by saying "we just want people to have more cross-cultural communication, no evil here".

I don't want to completely disregard AI-generated content. Some of it can be actually good, and I use AI as a talking companion. But at the same time it's a technology that can easily be abused. And it will be abused. And we'll love it. Except those few nutjobs who resist, but nobody will care. Free speech doesn't matter when nobody's listening.
by os2warpman | 2025-07-19 15:00:59+00:00
What they mean is that in a couple of weeks there are going to be stories titled "LLMS NOW BETTER THAN HUMANS AT 2025 INTERNATIONAL MATH OLYMPIAD" (stories published as thinly-veiled investment solicitations) but in reality they're still shitty-- they've just had the answers fed in to be spit back out.
by donatj | 2025-07-19 15:01:00+00:00
Mind you, Microsoft already had an earlier very capable XML spreadsheet format that was much easier to parse, SpreadsheetML.

Back in the early 2000's I wrote readers and writers for it and made pretty heavy use of the format at my job at the time.

The biggest problem with SpreadsheetML was that it expected the extension to be .XML - Microsoft had some sort of magic that would still associate the files with Excel on Windows but it wasn't super reliable. We started using .xls but after an update Excel started barking about files with the wrong extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpreadsheetML
by cevi | 2025-07-19 15:01:05+00:00
I've only skimmed the paper, but this looks very nice: the construction is very simple (aside from the precise choices of the parameters), just the analysis to show that it works is difficult.

(I bet the construction can be refined - it feels like there is a semidefinite programming problem lurking in the background, so there is probably a way to mindlessly optimize things with an SDP solver once the proof technique is rephrased a bit.)
by xk_id | 2025-07-19 15:01:32+00:00
There’s Chinese analytical labs which identify the fragrance molecules in a perfume. You just have to send them a sample. The caveat is if the perfume used natural oils or captive materials; then the lab won’t be able to identify everything. There are also leaks of formulas that are circulated in perfumery circles; many famous perfumes are already known. Anyway you can then purchase the individual materials and recreate the perfume.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-19 15:01:36+00:00
on the surface this is a great achievement - if it holds . alpha-geometry required 1) human formalization of the question and 2) a solver for geometry

If the questions were given as-is (without a human formalizing it) and the llm didnt need domain solvers, and the llm was not trained on it already (which happened with frontier math) - I would be impressed.

Based on the past history with frontier math [1][2] I remain skeptical. The skeptic in me says that this happens prior to big announcements (GPT-5) to create the hype.

Finally, this article shows that LLMs were just bluffing in the usamo 2025 [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1i53ih7/fro...

[2] https://x.com/DimitrisPapail/status/1888325914603516214

[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21934
by _g0wg | 2025-07-19 15:01:38+00:00
I'm toying around with HTMX for my website. It's going to be sort of a wiki but a little different; the public exports from my internal knowledgebase with some extra crap mixed in.

I have lots of notes of varying types and formats. Org-mode files are all pretty standard, but there's like 3 different Markdowns and an untold number of randomly-formatted .TXT files. I want to generate their webpages on-the-fly and not have to worry about exporting it.

One of the "crap mixed in" things I want is to integrate parts of a gitweb-like interface into the notes. I reference repos and commits regularly in my notes. Would be neat to mouse-over them and get a little popup with basic info about it.

I also like that the author refers to themselves as a Technomancer. Personally I'm an metamagical artificer. I love meeting fellow adventurers.
by h20_hel | 2025-07-19 15:01:44+00:00
1 Hi HN, 2 3 I've been playing grow a garden lately and got tired of manually calculating which crops were the most profitable. Like any good developer, my first thought was "I can automate this!" 4 5 So, I spent a weekend building this little calculator app. It was a fun project to get more familiar with the Next.js App Router. 6 7 The tech stack is: 8 - Next.js (App Router) 9 - TypeScript 10 - UI: shadcn/ui + Tailwind CSS 11 - Deployment: Vercel 12 13 It's a simple tool, but it solved my problem perfectly. Hope some of you find it useful or interesting. 14 15 Would love to hear any feedback on the app or the code! URL: https://www.growagardencalculatorapp.com/
by bluecalm | 2025-07-19 15:01:59+00:00
>>Yeah it’s a completely fair playing field, it’s completely obvious that AI should be able to compete with humans in the same way that robotics and computers can compete with humanity (and are better suited for many tasks).

Yeah same way computers and robots should be able to win World Chess Championship, 100m dash and Wimbledon.

>>but the entire point of these types of benchmarks it to compare them to humans

The entire point of the competition is to fight against participants who are similar to you, have similar capabilities and go through similar struggles. If you want bot vs human competitions - great - organize it yourself instead of hijacking well established competitions out there.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-19 15:02:42+00:00
> But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.

You're literally advocating for letting genetic diseases cull the afflicted populations, "selecting for the better genes" that way. Seemingly the exact opposite of your claimed position, I hope you appreciate.

Or you have no problem with selection as long as "nature does it"? That's the best idea I have for reconciling this at least. Are we humans not part of nature though? Is you preferring what nature does not just a preference still?

If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
by dghughes | 2025-07-19 15:02:48+00:00
It started off as a way for people to get info on cars via fax machine. You ask or enter the vehicle VIN and you get a report. If it was in a crash, in a flood, see if mileage matches actual odometer. It's all web-based now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carfax,_Inc.
by gcau | 2025-07-19 15:03:21+00:00
>the individual was unable to distinguish a display name from the actual email address

This is wild to me, not just because they're a developer but they even know about SPF/DMARC. Also, the content of the email being them asking to reverify your email sounds suspicious and illogical. I know people make mistakes, but it's just crazy, and shows the importance of companies training employees to not fall for phishing emails.
by tetris11 | 2025-07-19 15:03:31+00:00
I used to walk across pitched roofs 3-floors up as a teen, and squeeze between cars and busses on my bike in narrow london roads (back before bike lanes were a thing) to the point that I would routinely get to my job with bloodied knuckles.

At the time I was clearly just vibing off the adrenaline, but looking back on it all as mature adult... I get heart palpatations.

There are many parallel worlds where I am not alive, and I think of those other selves often.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-07-19 15:03:42+00:00
> “we’re smarter and have better ideas than you and 25% of you are deplorable”

Hypocrisy - Trump and the GOP regularly call _half_ the country a whole fucking barrage of terms (pedophiles, rapists, marxist socialist communist fascists, evil, ungodly, sick, etc) on a regular fucking basis. Gaslight. Obstruct. Project.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-19 15:03:51+00:00
One interesting takeaway for me, a non-practitioner, was that the models appears to be fairy decent at judging their own output.

They used best-of-32 and used the same model to judge a "tournament" to find the best answer. Seems like something that could be boltet on reasonably easy, eg in say WebUI.

edit: forgot to add that I'm curious if this translates to smaller models as well, or if it requires these huge models.
by blamestross | 2025-07-19 15:03:53+00:00
Nobody likes the idea that this is only "economical superior AI". Not as good as humans, but a LOT cheaper.

The "It will just get better" is bubble baiting the investors. The tech companies learned from the past and they are riding and managing the bubble to extract maximum ROI before it pops.

The reality is a lot of work done by humans can be replaced by an LLM with lower quality and nuance. The loss in sales/satisfaction/ect is more than offset by the reduced cost.

The current model of LLMs are enshitification accelerators and that will have real effects.
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-19 15:03:55+00:00
Wouldn't it be significantly easier to just use the donor's egg here ?

Or adopt?

This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children.

This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision.

You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out.

This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.

God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come
by shagie | 2025-07-19 15:04:14+00:00
At https://commission.europa.eu/cookies-policy_en#thirdpartycoo... you can see the list of 3rd party cookies they use (and are required to notify about it).

You Tube Internet Archive Google Maps Twitter TV1 Vimeo Microsoft Facebook Google LinkedIn Livestream SoundCloud European Parliament

In theory, they could rewrite their site to not require any of those services.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-19 15:04:44+00:00
That's a cop out. What's the point of a brand if quality control is all over the place?

Most McDonald's are franchises, and they famously give very similar experiences wherever you are. Not identical, obviously, but a Big Mac is a Big Mac.

This is absolutely on Hyatt corporate. They should have policies regulating these types of detection systems.
by jfengel | 2025-07-19 15:04:51+00:00
A large number of false positives would likely show up as a deluge of negative reviews. "They charged me $500 and I've never smoked in my life". Surely some of those would be lies, and you'd have to dig them out from the existing pile of petty grievances that result in bad reviews. But I suspect it would still be pretty clear if there were that many false positives.
by mort96 | 2025-07-19 15:04:59+00:00
I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMJNEFHj8b8&t=287s

I googled the names of the people holding the talk and they're both employed by Microsoft as software engineers, I don't see any reason to doubt what they're presenting. Not the whole start menu is React Native, but parts are.
by yorwba | 2025-07-19 15:05:23+00:00
I would expect that to activate the immune system. "the unique components of mitochondria, when exposed, reveal their prokaryotic history and are recognized as foreign by innate immune receptors triggering an inflammatory response." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6218307/

Maybe if you suppress the immune system, introduce working mitochondria, and then stop taking the immunosuppressants, any mitochondria that are still outside cells get cleaned up and the ones that got absorbed are shielded and can do their job.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-19 15:05:57+00:00
> Half the comments are some weird form of explaining how developers will be obsolete in five years and how close we are to AGI.

I do not see that at all in this comment section.

There is a lot of denial and cynicism like the parent comment suggested. The comments trying to dismiss this as just “some high school math problem” are the funniest example.
by logicchains | 2025-07-19 15:05:58+00:00
>I think the main hesitancy is due to rampant anthropomorphism. These models cannot reason, they pattern match language tokens and generate emergent behaviour as a result

This is rampant human chauvinism. There's absolutely no empirical basis for the statement that these models "cannot reason", it's just pseudoscientific woo thrown around by people who want to feel that humans are somehow special. By pretty much every empirical measure of "reasoning" or intelligence we have, SOTA LLMs are better at it than the average human.
by gellybeans | 2025-07-19 15:06:11+00:00
Making an account just to point out how these comments are far more exhausting, because they don't engage with the subject matter. They are just agreeing with a headline and saying, "See?"

You say, "explaining away the increasing performance" as though that was a good faith representation of arguments made against LLMs, or even this specific article. Questionong the self-congragulatory nature of these businesses is perfectly reasonable.
by idiotsecant | 2025-07-19 15:06:19+00:00
I have been a crypto evangelist since it was a weird nerd hobby nobody knew about for this exact reason. It should be nobody's business who I transfer value to or why. The corpo-state has had control of the levers and dials of currency for way too long. They can still enforce laws, and if I'm causing some illegal event to occur by paying money to someone, that event is still illegal. Arrest me for that. But get rid of the rent seeking and monetary policy that seems to just make the whole problem worse.