MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-18 09:33:45+00:00
It works pretty well out of the box unless you're trying to combine Linux with Nvidia hardware. Even with Nvidia hardware it doesn't take that much effort to make it work, but as usual, Nvidia requires taking extra steps.

What Linux is really lacking is a user-friendly method for enrolling your own keys, which would instantly solve all the Nvidia/firmware updater/custom bootloader problems. The command line tools are slowly getting easier to use, but there's no guided instruction flow.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-07-18 09:34:22+00:00
You are 100% getting 15 hours from a normal workload. The keyboard is better than any other laptop keyboard. The camera is better than any other laptop integrated webcam.

The quality of the software is same or better as Linux (because getting all your Linux desktop and command line software running is a brew install away).

The hardware is class leading. The screens are best in class. The laptops will last you 8-10 years and then you can install a Linux on them and keep them going for another 5.

Yes, repairability is poor, but improving.

I get why people make other choices, but the idea that Apple hardware is poor quality and the software is terrible just isn't the way to do it. Argue about purity of freedom, argue about cost (Apple hardware is expensive, because it's superb), argue about crappy dev account policies like the thread is here to support.

But, y'know, don't just make up stuff anybody who uses this stuff daily knows is just made up...
by keyringlight | 2025-07-18 09:34:37+00:00
I've experimented with linux auto updates and the only one I found which easily and clearly worked while staying in the background was Mint. Mint seems like a modern lightweight equivalent to what Ubuntu was 20 years ago.

Fedora might be second place with options between "do the updates ASAP but there might be weirdness if you're running something that gets updated" or "download and do a big install when you want to turn the PC off/restart". The bigger problem is that dnf-automatic and apt's automatic-updates seem pretty finicky to set up correctly and get feedback that it's happening, plus the documentation seems old and thin on the ground, it's just enough to cover the happy path and there doesn't seem to be any recent ongoing work. For Arch don't even bother because their attitude is that system admin must be handled by a human, automation for pacman isn't supported.
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-18 09:35:15+00:00
My first bahtinov mask I just made out of some scrap cardboard - worked a treat.

Now I just use an autofocuser (pegasusastro focuscube), which I find gives identical results, and didn’t cost the world either (€130) - plus has the benefit that as the scope cools down through the night I’m not constantly having to stop imaging to refocus.
by tempfile | 2025-07-18 09:37:18+00:00
I know it's only one tiny part, but I can't resist:

> Is it closer to Mussolini or David Beckham? Uhh, I guess Mussolini. (Ok, they’re definitely thinking of a person.)

This deduction is absurd! The only information you have at all is that it's more like a person than it is like bread (which could be almost anything).
by louwrentius | 2025-07-18 09:38:12+00:00
If you want immutable logs, you log to an external log server. Anything else seems security theater to me.

That log server is properly firewalled/hardened so a hacked server can’t be used as a stepping stone to compromise the log server.

Maybe you even have access restrictions in place for the log server so people can’t wipe their own misdeeds (4-eyes principle).

This is how it’s been done for 35+ years, nothing special about this.
by vintagedave | 2025-07-18 09:39:26+00:00
It refers to Plato's Theory of Forms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms

Consider how every chair you've seen is different. Yet they are all chairs. What is 'chair-ness'? The Forms theory is that there is a single ideal chair, and this truly exists - not materially, but non-materially as a concept or way of understanding chairs, but real. That is, the 'essence' of a chair exists. All chairs are imperfect representations of the essence of a chair, being perfect chairs or representing the essence of a chair to a greater or lesser degree.

You might find Neal Stephenson's bool Anathem a wonderful read. It's one of my favorites. I want to tell you why without spoilers but I can't (it won't be what you expect) -- but if you read it perhaps you'll find it interesting re this topic.
by xyst | 2025-07-18 09:39:27+00:00
Reading into the history of Secure Boot. Discovered Intel and AMD processors have back doors via Intel Management Engine [1] and AMD Platform Security Processor [2]. Both are closed source and have had a number of vulnerabilities over the years. They are essentially backdoors.

Seems disabling these "features" is nearly impossible as well.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Proces...
by Rockytu1 | 2025-07-18 09:39:32+00:00
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by nenesekai | 2025-07-18 09:39:34+00:00
This way wouldn't it be hard for the customers to choose between developers with different skill level and productivity? Some developers get more done in a certain amount of time than others. If the price per time ends up being dependent on the project workloads / productivity etc. it might as well be back to the way things were because you will still need to spend time justifying your price imo (since there are competitors out there).
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-18 09:41:47+00:00
If users don't update their keyrings or firmware (through fwupdmgr for instance), Grub will probably stop booting with secure boot on when the certificate expires.

If users update Grub once the old certificate is no longer used to sign the bootloader without updating their keyrings or firmware, Grub will probably stop booting with secure boot on when the certificate expires.

If users do update their systems and software, Grub will keep working.

Not updating is not a solution, unless the motherboard manufacturer really fucked up and doesn't validate the expiration date.

Luckily, fwupdmgr is integrated in the GUI updater tool on just about any Linux distro I know. As long as users don't ignore the "there are system updates available" popup and as long as the desktop vendor put out bare basic software support, things will probably go down fine.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-18 09:41:51+00:00
> On the other hand, if you install Windows 11 on a machine that doesn't support it, you get all security updates for the next year, and all the drivers you need are typically present in Windows Update.

This is very far from my lived experience.

Same generation of hardware, same workflow. Works flawlessly on linux distros. Something breaks after every single windows update when running win11, almost always related to driver compatibility with win11.

I’ve had to reinstall drivers after every update, had to find more recent but compatible drivers that aren’t explicitly listed as supported etc.
by chii | 2025-07-18 09:41:59+00:00
Both 4) and 5) are very important, but often forgotten.

Even for my own personal (small) projects, i've gotten hit with problems when i take an extended leave of absence and then return to a project, only to find my dependencies have become either completely outdated and unusable, or the repo was entirely deleted (with only a remote copy to build with).

I've since adopted the "fork" method; the dependency's source is forked (privately), and get the dependency built; this is recursively done with their dependencies (stopping at the language level libraries), just to get familiar with their build chain. Only then, will i feel good enough to add the dependency to my project (and use their publicly released artefacts from their publicly hosted library repository). It's a bit of work, but i think this effort is spent upfront, and removes future effort if the project lives long enough to see the ecosystem move/change directions (and you dont want to follow).

Sometimes i do find that source libraries (rather than pre-built binaries) to be better in this sense. I merely need to fork and link the sources into the project, rather than have to learn anything about build chains of dependencies...
by dwattttt | 2025-07-18 09:44:48+00:00
> minimum processor & TPM requirements in Windows 11 have been shown to be entirely arbitrary.

I am curious who thinks they managed to show this. My understanding was that the minimum processor requirement was born out of hardware feature requirements.

I know Virtualisation Based Security is on by default in Win11, and Intel processors older than 7th Gen don't have Mode-Based-Execution-Control, so they emulate it at a hefty penalty (they call it Restricted User Mode).
by andrelaszlo | 2025-07-18 09:45:09+00:00
I would have flagged that they're logging their Redis URL, if I was reviewing this. Most of the time this includes credentials.

Normally I think it's a bit rude to criticize the code of blog posts, bit I thought it was relevant here for these reasons:

"I often don’t even remove when I’m done debugging because they’re now valuable in prod" - think about where your production credentials end up. Most of the time, logging them won't hurt, just like keeping your password on a post-it doesn't hurt most of the time.

The arguments about letting an AI reduce the mental overhead is compelling, but this shows one of the (often mentioned) risks: you didn't write it so you didn't consider the implications.

Or maybe the author did consider it, and has a lot of good arguments for why logging it is perfectly safe. I often get pushback from other devs about stuff like this, for example:

- We're the only ones with access to the logs (still, no reason to store credentials in the logs)

- The Redis URL only has an IP, no credentials. (will we remember to update this log line when the settings.redis_url changes?)

- We only log warnings or higher in production (same argument as above)

Maybe I should stop worrying and learn to love AI? Human devs do the same thing, after all?
by fluidcruft | 2025-07-18 09:45:51+00:00
It's what claude code's cli /cost command reported. Like I said I haven't really used this stuff much so a lot of it was reviewing what it was doing and thinking about how to prompt it to do what I wanted it to do. I'm generally pretty skeptical about this stuff but I'm an old fart and decided I should see what the kids are doing rather than yell at clouds and tell people to get off my yard. So far I am able to get it to mostly work acceptably for annoying maintenance tasks (adding docstrings, explain code, rough drafts of tests). Things that I just generally don't have time for. Having it explain my own code from a few years ago to jog my memory about how it works. That sort of thing.

Interestingly, it came up with some definitions of abbreviations and slightly different ways to do things using confidential APIs that have been sort of reverse engineered in public but are not fully understood. Which to me was the most interesting. The things it suggested related to that are very plausible and I was trying to decide if it was clever hallucinations or because it's being used/trained on code bases at that company or by others who have better access. So I spent a lot of time googling to see if it had found some publicly available info to confirm.

Anyway after I hit $5 I subscribed to pro to continue the playing but /cost won't tell you anything useful after switching to pro.

I also wanted to try Gemini clinto compare but I couldn't figure out how to actually give Google my money. Why is Google so impossible to use.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-18 09:45:58+00:00
"Dear John Q. Average and Suzy R. Median:

To your left, you see a door with quality writing. With engaging, beautiful topics, interesting writers. You have to pay a very small amount to enter.

To your right, you see a door with AI slop. Repetitive writing, everything is totally fake, no humans involved, and not really very interesting. EVERYTHING tries to sell you stuff. Slop and enshittification are a constant. It is also free to enter."

... there was such a stampede a the right door the door needs replacing, in fact, the floor leading to the door needs repairing.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-18 09:46:19+00:00
I wonder what my laptop will do soon.

Lenovo, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to load an Nvidia blob signed by Microsoft before even being able to access the UEFI firmware interface. People who have tried to install their own secure boot keys found out the hard way that you can't even get into the firmware configuration interface to undo the change.

Their official workaround is to only load secure boot keys through their firmware interface (rather than the standard Linux utility) which refuses to wipe the certificate used to sign the Nvidia firmware. However, that workaround will obviously stop working when that certificate expires.
by solatic | 2025-07-18 09:47:30+00:00
Author points to TigerBeetle as an example, which I wasn't familiar with, so I went down a rabbit hole.

Wow. Yeah. If you're writing a financial ledger transactions database from scratch in Zig, where safety and performance are your top two goals, so that you can credibly handle a million transactions per second on a single CPU core, well, damn right you can't afford to take any risks on introducing any dependencies. Makes absolute perfect sense to me (no sarcasm).

But the average developer, writing most line-of-business CRUD systems, well, quite honestly they're not that strong to begin with. Most dependencies may be bug-infested garbage, but they're still higher quality compared to what most developers are capable of. Most companies are bottlenecked by the caliber of talent they can realistically recruit and retain; and internal development standards reflect the average caliber on the payroll.

So like most advice you read on the internet, remember, everybody is in different circumstances; and polar opposite pieces of advice can both be correct in different circumstances.
by dspillett | 2025-07-18 09:47:50+00:00
I feel this is fixating on the wrong problem. Even with immutable flags there are various ways an attacker with root access could, after getting what they want from the system, cover their tracks by trashing the whole system⁰, and as usual if someone has physical access all bets are off. I see filesystem level flags like that to be more tools to stop you or a bug accidentally doing something stupid, than to get in the way of a malicious action by someone else.

While the standard might effectively call for immutable logs¹, he needs to read between the lines one step further: those logs do not need to be on the same machine. You could stream logs to another system that stores them immutably from the PoV of anyone except those with root or physical access to it. You still have a problem if an attacker gets access to both the source system(s) and the log sinks², there might be a latency issue meaning you could easily lose the last few log entries in the case of a complete disaster, and you have an extra moving part in your infrastructure to monitor, but it satisfies the requirement where immutable filesystem flags can not.

----

[0] Yes, you'll know something happened, and you might guess it was malicious and not random corruption, but enough tracks might be covered to stop you working out the initial who & how.

[1] and some standars explicitly call for them

[2] Careful granular access management should largely mitigate that risk. That could be a problem if you are a small organisation trying to protect against internal disgruntled admins³, but you could use a a 3rd party log-sink service in that case.

[3] This may seem overly paranoid, but if it is required for the standard your target audience wants you to have a certificate for…, and TBH it isn't that paranoid.
by 0xEF | 2025-07-18 09:47:53+00:00
Linux is the answer. I have transitioned coworkers, friends and family to Linux with PeppermintOS, so that's the one I typically recommend. Windows-dependent users seem to find it more friendly and familiar, and it runs nicely on every old machine I've installed it on. I usually just make a text file on the desktop with instructions on how to update it via the terminal and use Anydesk to walk them through anything else they want to learn, and they pick up on it quickly.

I appreciate the blog's efforts, but it seems like a lot of work and feels akin to staying with an abusive employer or something. Microsoft is no friend to its users and it pains me to watch people try to salvage that relationship.
by immibis | 2025-07-18 09:48:10+00:00
IRC doesn't have this because it doesn't try to make rooms into long-running distributed state machines.

Although it is possible for two room operators to kick each other on different servers at the same moment, which probably does lead to state desync. They'd have to do it at the same moment. In Matrix, it tries to still sync things that happened 6 months ago...
Show HN: I created a resource to find the best AI apps for Real Estate
by DaniTurner | 2025-07-18 09:48:12+00:00
I found myself spending hours researching different apps, tools and resources to solve a business automation problem in my real estate business.

I ended up with a long list of resources so decided to make Property AI Tools to help others having the same problem.

You'll see it's not an exhaustive list but I've tried to keep all the tools reputable and suitable for business use.

I test new tools every week and update the list regularly.

Hope a few people find it useful.
by moebrowne | 2025-07-18 09:48:45+00:00
> Furthermore, they do not allow disabling safe search or customizing the results in any way (including your block lists) when using it.

You make out like this is a bad thing, implementing these features would undermine your anonymity. It's explained in detail in their announcement blog: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#:~:text=If%20Kagi,pe...
by flexagoon | 2025-07-18 09:48:52+00:00
> Who controls the fucking certs?

Cert authorities, just like in case of SSL. Is SSL also an evil technology designed to take away freedom from the internet?

> vendor-selected boot certificates that can't be changed

That's a lie. Certain drivers are signed with a specific key, and they can only be used when this key is installed, which makes sense. The same thing happens with SSL - if you remove pre-installed CA certs from your device, HTTPS sites will stop working. However, nothing is stopping you from adding your own keys to the system and signing your own software with it.

> happens with every other smartphone, gaming console, car, and even some PCs

How often are you trying to install custom drivers on a smartphone, console or car? Why would you have secure boot issues on those?

> the target of this attack is user freedom and choice.

Which is exactly why users have the freedom and choice to just disable Secure Boot?
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-18 09:49:02+00:00
"We need to stop pretending that flooding the labor market with foreign workers is somehow beneficial to American students."

I do not think anyone is making that point. Clearly a gated and scarce employee pool is always in the advantage of the employee.

You can agree or not, but the point is expanded availability of highly skilled labor from CS Graduates benefits the US companies hiring them, not just by removing some scarcity in the supply, but also having an expanded talent pool increases quality available.

From a geo political perspective, would you rather have these people working to build up US industry, or have them starting and staffing competition in their home countries? "Brain drain" fueled by unlimited reserve currency dollars is very real.

Lastly, those non-US graduates pay a very hefty sum for the 'privilege' of attending school in the US. Having worked with academics from around the globe, including US, I can state with some certainty the US degree courses are not qualitatively very different from what is available elsewhere at a fraction of the cost (US education costs are insane!). But they do carry the implicit promise of an easyer way to higher paying US jobs.

So all in all, everyone in the US benefits from the system, except the lower 66th percentile of native US CS graduates.
by bogozi | 2025-07-18 09:49:57+00:00
Hi. I have implemented the summary and indeed it looks and feels a lot quicker this way. I have also added scrolling functionalities so it's a bit easier to navigate as well. "but would a llms.txt check also help" - not sure about it as it is not standardized yet. Big players still need to adapt it or come up with a better solution. Will wait and see until then.

I hope you'll find the updates useful. Thanks for the great feedback.
by palata | 2025-07-18 09:51:22+00:00
> A BEP, some musing that it would be cool, and broken code?

From your description, it sounds like "A BEP and an implementation in (the most popular?) torrent library". Did you try using the libtorrent implementation?

Then maybe there is no product out there using it. I also find the idea cool, but really I don't see where I would use it.

Do you have a use-case for it?
by perching_aix | 2025-07-18 09:51:28+00:00
Of course.

My math only "checks out" if you accept and account for the additional assumption I made there: that the datapoints provided in the question have been rounded or were low resolution from the get-go.

The motivation behind this assumption is twofold: the numbers in the question are awfully whole (atypical for any practical problem), and that just the rote derivation of it all doesn't produce very interesting results (gives you the infinite speed answer). :)

Try introducing some error terms and see how the result changes! It's pretty fun, and it's how I was able to eek out that 41 mph result in the end.
by iamsaitam | 2025-07-18 09:51:34+00:00
One huge overlooked advantage of using dependencies is knowledge transfer. Software projects (for the moment) require people to write them and people move between jobs. There is a lot of common requirements between different software applications, it would be terrible if everyone just relied on what the standard lib offers.

PS: I assume this would be akin to soviet communism, where the state gives you "everything" and the rest you fashion at home. (being extremely loose here, do forgive me)