MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alias_neo | 2025-07-16 12:50:48+00:00
I've been gaming on Linux for about a decade now full time, and somewhat before that too. I don't have a single Windows machine any more. My laptops are running Arch, my wife's personal Laptop runs Mint, her work machine is Windows because it has to, my work machine is Ubuntu, and my 5yo plays Minecraft on an Arch + Gnome laptop.

7-8 years ago it was pretty frustrating to spend £4k+ on a gaming rig to be unable to play a bunch of titles but I will not use Windows, I just accepted it.

Fast forward to today, and I'm playing Helldivers 2, with its anti-cheat and everything online with my nephew who's on Windows and getting far, far better performance (granted my PC is also more powerful). I can play the modern DOOM games with better performance than if I was running Windows on the same hardware.

My point is, Linux gaming is only getting better, I now also own a ROG Ally which I "flashed" (installed the same way you would any other Linux distro) with Bazzite straight out of the box without even booting Windows and I can play the single-player games I like to while travelling, or can have a quick game of Helldivers with my nephew if I'm not near my PC but have a stable connection. When I need/want to I can plug it into a monitor/kb/mouse with a single cable and have a full desktop with HDR, VRR etc.
by zhangjunphy | 2025-07-16 12:50:56+00:00
I think if we can have a good enough simulation of reality, and a fast one. Something like an accelerable minecraft with real world physics. Then this idea might actually work. But the hard reality we currenly could generate efficiently and feed into LLMs usually has a narrow scope. It feels liking teaching only textbook math to a kid for several years but nothing else. The LLM mostly overoptimize in these very specific fields, but the overall performance might even be worse.
by anonymous_sorry | 2025-07-16 12:51:27+00:00
> But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux

If Linux adoption is to increase significantly (and I guess I'm of the opinion that would be a positive thing), then at some point that can only be done by acquiring users who don't care particularly deeply or understand much about their OS. That is, the vast majority of people. And that's probably not going to happen by converting that demographic to true believers.

Some of those people might decide they want to dig deeper later, and that's great. Most won't and that's fine too.

It would be a bit asymmetrical to restrict the definition of "Linux user" to folk who really care what Linux is or know their way around coreutils.
by praptak | 2025-07-16 12:51:52+00:00
I agree that fully redundant & separate infrastructure is unrealistic. I'm also not saying you can be 100% prepared. My point is that you can improve your posture.

What you can do is to have a sandbox environment where you periodically do a full setup exercise from a prepper disk. Conceptually it's not that different from testing backup recovery (ok, most companies neglect this too, so maybe you have a point :) ).
by netfortius | 2025-07-16 12:52:17+00:00
Chapter 5 of Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel book "Equality" (in fact a record of their conversation) speaks to the "meritocracy" subject, mentioning Sandel's previous suggestions on usage of a lottery system as part of the admission process, first mentioned in his "The tyranny of merit" book. Highly recommend these two guys' work!
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-16 12:52:55+00:00
> That's at the cost of lots of duplicated work by the already sparse number of people capable of implementing a graphics server.

Yeah, it kinda sucks but this is where we are.

> There's also a third option where Wayland is foundational and the X11 network protocol is implemented on top of that for people who need it. Why should a network GUI service implement a driver to talk to a specific model of video card?

Agreed; I have long argued that it would have been far better to transition to everything on the same backend with effectively rootful XWayland being the only (bare) X server, and then after that try to deal with the rest of the stack (if you really must). And maybe in 2026 we'll finally start to see movement in that direction with https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback
by motorest | 2025-07-16 12:53:05+00:00
> Let’s be honest, the only advantage Firefox has over other browser and especially chrome is its extension support. And it’s not even Mozilla merit, it’s Google who removed MV2 support.

What are you talking about? Firefox pioneered the whole concept of browser extensions. Can you try to explain to me your train of thought?

> Same for Android, the only advantage it has is its extension support because Google is stubbornly not adding extension support to Android chromium even though such support was already done by an indie developer (kiwi browser) and open sourced.

What point do you think you're making? Firefox works perfectly well on Android, as well as Firefox Focus might I add.

Your comment reads like you're trying to grasp at straws.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-16 12:53:06+00:00
> Perhaps we might live in a world where our grandchildren will again want to be scientists and astronauts, instead of YouTubers.

Sending a huge amount of your budget to send people into space because "people need to be inspired" leans a lot closer to YouTuber than science. You're sacrificing the scientific budget for the sake of giving people a spectacle. This comes at the cost of actual technological advancements. Look at the development costs for Falcon and Falcon Heavy, for example, or Starship, and then look at what NASA's spent on the Space Shuttle, SLS, ISS, etc.

The actual science, as I wrote in another reply, ends up being far less important than how NASA frames it (and often doesn't end up being used at all). And even in those cases, it's not at all clear that humans in space are actually needed to get the job done.
by criddell | 2025-07-16 12:53:12+00:00
I also find it interesting that the definition always includes the "outperforms humans" qualifier. Maybe our first AGIs will underperform humans.

Imagine I built a robot dog that behaved just like a biological dog. It bonds with people, can be trained, shows emotion, communicates, likes to play, likes to work, solves problems, understands social cues, and is loyal. IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it isn't writing essays or producing business plans.
by AriWagner | 2025-07-16 12:53:15+00:00
Looking for a mission-aligned CTO / technical cofounder

I’m building Budget+/CashFlow, an AI-powered financial operating system designed to serve the 100%—not just the elite. It’s not just another budgeting tool. Think: smarter financial inner voice, agentic behavior, and ML-powered coaching that actually helps people move forward with clarity, accountability, and confidence.

I’ve spent 10+ years as a financial planner. I’ve distilled a repeatable system that works—and is now ready to scale with AI/ML.

I’m looking for a hands-on technical partner who can:

Architect a lean, modular full-stack platform

Build behavior-driven UX + personalization (Plaid, Yodlee, etc.)

Deploy ML models (LLMs, NLP/NLU, RLHF, rec systems, etc.)

Prototype fast, ship faster

Help define what intelligent finance should look and feel like

This is a ground-floor opportunity to co-create something era-defining.

If you’re a 10x builder who sees code as a way to empower millions, DM me or let’s chat.

Let’s build the financial system people actually deserve. —Ari
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-16 12:53:17+00:00
> There is a meme going around from a “Family Guy” episode in which Peter, the animated comedy’s paterfamilias, confesses to his family that he never cared for “The Godfather.” Why not? “It insists upon itself,” he says with a shrug. A lot of recent productions deserve this scorn—literally. It’s gotten so bad that, lately, the highest compliment I can muster for even the best of them is: “Well, at least it’s a movie.”

man never thought I'd see that meme continue to live on, or get cited in the New Yorker
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-16 12:53:53+00:00
> You are a creative synthesizer. Your task is to find deep, non-obvious, and potentially groundbreaking connections between the two following concepts. Do not state the obvious. Generate a hypothesis, a novel analogy, a potential research question, or a creative synthesis. Be speculative but ground your reasoning.

> Concept 1: {Chunk A} > Concept 2: {Chunk B}

In addition to the other criticisms mentioned by posters ITT, a problem I see is: What concepts do you feed it?

Obviously there's a problem with GIGO. If you don't pick the right concepts to begin with, you're not going to get a meaningful result. But, beyond that, human discovery (in mechanical engineering, at least,) tends to be massively interdisciplinary and serendipitous, so that many concepts are often involved, and many of those are necessarily non-obvious.

I guess you could come up with a biomimetics bot, but, besides that, I'm not so sure how well this concept would work as laid out above.

There's another issue in that LLMs tend to be extremely gullible, and swallow the scientific literature and University press releases verbatim and uncritically.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-16 12:53:56+00:00
> This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.

it really isn't, as Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world. Linux isn't developed by Bob the free software enthusiast, take a look at the code contributions to the kernel.

Overall I'm also in favour of driving linux adoption because it's still a better world but the idea that this has no spill over effect on anyone else is wrong. It's a fiction to think that Linux, just like a browser is anything but a collective project with most development driven by very few organizations who also have commercial or proprietary interests.
by npteljes | 2025-07-16 12:54:05+00:00
Exactly that kind of knowing better.

It's a bit tongue-in-cheek because of the multiple interpretations of "knowing better". On one hand, we "know better" in a way that we, as in all humans, constantly try to control nature and the natural flow of things. Our entire civilization and way of life is a result of that.

On the other hand, I mean it a bit sarcastically, because I'm not convinced on a philosophical level that this kind of living is morally, ethically, humanely superior than that of ancient people's living. Often it looks like that progress is just for the progress' sake, an eternal power struggle, a Prisoner's dilemma. In short, when I ask myself "is progress good", I don't feel strongly toward any answer. I meant to encapsulate this by phrasing it as "knowing better".

But the drive to "know better" is there for sure, even though the results vary. I do believe that good can come from it, and that many efforts actually resulted in lessening human suffering, which I consider a good thing. I mean here efforts like equal rights movements, reproductive health and education, and proper access to medical help (to stay on topic).
Show HN: starscout – search through your GitHub stars using natural language
by itzlambda | 2025-07-16 12:54:47+00:00
Hey HN!

I keep hitting this moment: "I definitely starred a repo that does X … but what was it called?". Finding the exact repository manually is very annoying if you have alot of stars especially since github star search interface is not very good.

Which is why I made this tool. It uses vector embeddings to allow you to search through your github stars using natural language. Backend for initial version was written (vibe coded) in python. I recently rewrote the backend in Rust because I was not confident about the vibe coded implementation.

There is a toggle to enable "Global search", which searches through all the indexed repositories (not only your stars). This might help you find new repositories that you haven’t starred yet.

Hope you find it useful.

Github: https://github.com/itzlambda/starscout

Showcase thread: https://x.com/itzlambda/status/1904878939073294825
by sebmellen | 2025-07-16 12:55:24+00:00
Why? Can you defend this for me? I'm genuinely asking. Why is it irresponsible to have a child when you're young and financially not established? Why is it any more irresponsible to do that than to have children at a geriatric age?

Children are resilient, and so are parents.

In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
by lucius_verus | 2025-07-16 12:56:02+00:00
Honestly, the Firefox feature-set it what prompted me to pick it up again after years of not using it.

- I wanted ad-blocking on Android, so I tried out Firefox on mobile.

- Then there were times I wanted to sync browser history/tabs between mobile and desktop, so I picked up Firefox on desktop again.

- I fell in love with reader mode (and using the narrate feature to listen to articles when my eyes get tired)

- I flirted with Zen browser, but now that Firefox has vertical tabs and tab grouping, I'm having trouble finding a reason to use Zen

Firefox basically does everything I want it to do, and it's incredibly rare that I need to open a chromium-based browser to handle something Firefox can't do.
by silveraxe93 | 2025-07-16 12:56:31+00:00
If it's actually that easy, why don't you do it? Are you seriously just leaving $5 billion on the table?

I'll tell you why you won't. Because you wouldn't get it. Because it's not that easy.

Mira Murati is not some rando off the street. Ilya Sutskever is not some rando. Zuckerberg is not paying Millions to randos of the street to come work for meta.
by diggan | 2025-07-16 12:56:36+00:00
> where we are now (tabs on top, no wasted space)

Tabs at the top is wasted space, I much prefer my tabs on the side instead, as most web content is taller than it is wide, and I have a widescreen monitor. I understand the choice of tabs on top when 640x480 was the most common resolution, but for desktop usage today? Tabs on top seems like an outdated layout choice.
by palata | 2025-07-16 12:56:59+00:00
> I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.

Agreed. And IMO, the thing is that you can benefit from the work made on SteamOS on any Linux Desktop. By making most games run on SteamOS, Valve contributed to make Gentoo a better platform for gaming.

> If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.

Sure. But what I see is really the other side: if SteamOS is relevant, then game devs will have an incentive to support SteamOS, which gives the opportunity for gamers to move to SteamOS. Now they are on Linux, so they can start using software that runs on Linux.
by gjm11 | 2025-07-16 12:57:06+00:00
I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just has that sort of style) but the dashes there are en-dashes rather than the longer em-dashes that LLMs seem particularly fond of.

I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.
by oleksandr_dem | 2025-07-16 12:57:45+00:00
You're absolutely right, I really dropped the ball on that. This is my first time launching a product like this, and I focused so much on building and writing the post that I overlooked the importance of visuals. The lack of screenshots is definitely hurting the presentation (and I can see it in the bounce rate).

I'll prioritize getting some clear screenshots and maybe even a short demo video up soon. Thanks for pointing it out, appreciate the feedback.
by mark-r | 2025-07-16 12:57:47+00:00
A year ago I decided to upgrade my 10 year old motherboard and get something faster. I was hoping my existing Windows 7 SSD would boot up, but alas it would get to the coalescing window display and crash. I never figured out why.

My choices were to spend $200 on a new version of Windows that was worse than the one I lost, or switch to Linux. Guess which I did?
by jrs235 | 2025-07-16 12:57:57+00:00
The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt...

Rather than spending billions of dollars on ICE and filling up the queues, the money should have been spent on the bottleneck, the courts. Invest in more courts and judges to address the bottleneck. It's obvious to me it's not about kicking and keeping some people out, it's about dehumanizing and detaining people for long periods of time, or indefinitely, and forcing them to provide free and cheap labor via the for-profit prison BS, here in the US or abroad.
by fennecbutt | 2025-07-16 13:00:11+00:00
Yup, I feel like Ukraine has been trying to break away from the society is a meat grinder culture of Russia for a while and the war has made if clear who's on what side locally.

My only qualm with them is their not so great support for gay people, but then during the war ofc the party line is now they love their gay soldiers. Would have been nice to see more action around that beforehand but I get it. Even other first world countries still have plenty of problems as a gay person, especially gay men.
by motorest | 2025-07-16 13:00:33+00:00
> The people using it.

I'm not sure if you are serious. I mean, look at Chrome and Edge and Safari. They are managed by corporations that control their own platform. I get Chrome, Edge, and Safari because it is actively pushed onto me.

What does Firefox have?

The ugly truth is that browsers like Chrome and Edge and Safari are just as good as Firefox, and a user who is not a software militant doesn't really care or know what browser they are using. They open the "internet" app and browse away.

What leads you to believe this is a Firefox issue?
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-16 13:00:45+00:00
if you have an existing skillset they're not going to throw you into the infantry.

odds are the dev is in some sort of signals intelligence unit or doing dev on some sort of drone control system, etc.

ditto for if/when they draft doctors, dentists, welders, etc. -- put people with skills and experience in those fields into areas where they can be used.

doesn't mean the graphine dev ain't working 20 hour days and ain't getting targeted by drones -- just they're not line grunts.
by tomaskafka | 2025-07-16 13:01:37+00:00
This here is a single comment that explains everything. Firefox is kept clueless.

Sorry to all the devs grinding inside the machine - you are doing great work, and while it is not your fault the ship is going in the wrong direction, you are providing the fuel for it to keep going there by keeping your heads down and not revolting.

VGR's "Gervais principle" is a great series about recognizing the psychopaths at the helm and their power games. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
by throwaway_woxx7 | 2025-07-16 13:01:55+00:00
A counterpoint: The DoD government positions have slowly been converted into contract positions with okay pay (not great), bad benefits, and bad job security. As a contractor at a DoD facility, you're also likely to be treated like a second class citizen in many ways (sorry, you can't attend this meeting/can't use this resource/need to fill out extra paperwork to do something/etc.). The government positions are fine, if you can get one, but most people probably couldn't even before the current administration. I don't think this is the best path for people interested in science and technology.
by sebmellen | 2025-07-16 13:02:09+00:00
In the present, how many of your daily actions and decisions are made not because you want to but because of social expectations or norms?

Is there any utility to having social expectations or norms that push you to do things that you may not “want” to?

In the past, people had kids because that's just what happened between people. Pregnancy was a natural consequence of human life.

Making childbearing a choice means that you need some social framework to encourage it, otherwise it becomes completely gauche and impractical. In the absence of this supportive social framework, fertility rates will drop, and in many cases precipitously. The long-term consequence of that drop in fertility is, at its most extreme, the collapse of modern civilization.

Compare Israel with South Korea, for example. Both are mostly developed economies. In one of these societies, kids are a status symbol; in the other, they are generally considered a nuisance (e.g. kids will often be banned from restaurants or other social watering holes). Can you guess which one of these societies will survive longer?
Show HN: The Mindloom, from Idea to a Reality
by buildnothing | 2025-07-16 13:02:15+00:00
It started as an idea for the bolt.new hackathon, and today I’m excited to share The Mindloom — a production-ready mental wellness platform, built with care, design, and empathy.

An AI-powered Mindful Companion Guided journaling with mood tracking Daily emotional check-ins Insightful patterns for self-awareness A growing library of evidence-based resources

Built with a modern stack, but more importantly — built with intention. No more waiting for appointments. No fear of judgment. Just support when you need it.

Try it out → https://themindloom.app

Would love your thoughts, feedback, or just a share if you believe in the mission.

P.S. I am already working on more features like realtime guided meditations using Elevenlabs.
by nialv7 | 2025-07-16 13:02:22+00:00
I think it might be good to stand back a bit and think through what we are actually excited for. Because:

1. if someone uses Linux Desktop without caring about that it is Linux, why is that different from them using Windows? 2. why do we say SteamOS count as Linux Desktop but Android doesn't? is it really because how much of it is "Linux"?

For me, I think what matters to me is who has control over it. SteamOS is based on Arch, so the community has a say over where it will go, and Valve will have to work with the community. Android/Windows are fully controlled Google/Microsoft, doesn't matter that Android is Open Source.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-07-16 13:02:58+00:00
I gave the PS5 example fyi. Not that it changes anything it just felt weird to not clarify that haha

>but a better example is that you gave someone enough money to live on entirely, and the spent it on that as they said, but then took their income which could have paid for it and purchased something unnecessary.

But that doesn’t really apply here, it’s not parallel to the Mozilla/Firefox situation. And if we want to arbitrarily decide that all donations go to the CEO strictly because the numbers are kind of similar, why can’t I just say “no all that money goes towards staff and operating“? Why is my assertion any less valid? The numbers being similar doesn’t tell us anything about how it’s being spent. It’s just a coincidence.

I mean that’s what this all hinges on right? That the two numbers are kind of close? I can’t really think of how that tells us where the money is going. I don’t understand how that follows.

If donations 10x tomorrow can we no longer claim the donations are going into the CEO’s pocket? Or if they cut to 1/10th? Would we be having this conversation if either was currently the case?
by zokier | 2025-07-16 13:03:03+00:00
Bingo.

Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...