MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2025-10-16 01:32:30+00:00
I know this isn't Stackoverflow, but... Does anyone have a good mental model for disentangling the issues of full-disk encryption versus secure-boot? I've been badly procrastinating with my desktop's new SSD because of it.

Use-case is:

* Dual-boot where I choose in BIOS/UEFI to go to either the existing Win10 drive or new Linux drive.

* I don't need unattended boot at all, I'd rather enter a passphrase every time.

* Resistance to evil-maid attacks is nice but not top-priority compared to theft.

* I want to be able to take my drive out of a dead computer and access it elsewhere if something goes wrong, as opposed to needing to reformat and reload from backups.

* If I install a distro with secure-boot off, can I turn it on later for benefits, or vice-versa?
by rgovostes | 2025-10-16 01:33:08+00:00
As a teenager I reached out to the authors of RoboWar and asked if I could have the source code to help port it to Mac OS X. A trifling detail I omitted was that I had no clue how to write C, whoops. How hard could it possibly be?

Nonetheless, I got it on SourceForge and it seems a later maintainer ported it to Windows. https://sourceforge.net/projects/robowar/files/Original%20Ro...

I also received the sources to Despair from Lloyd Burchill, which I was similarly unequipped to port. But unfortunately I didn't upload it anywhere.

There's also the game engine World Builder by Bill Appleton (of SuperCard fame), which Alexei Svitkine re-implemented in Java at https://github.com/asvitkine/wage-engine. This was used by several puzzle-adventure games. One I remember fondly is A Mess of Trouble by Ray Dunakin, which has been separately ported to modern macOS at http://www.amessotrouble.com/.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-16 01:33:15+00:00
What card is it? If it's older than Volcanic Islands (2015), yeah, those old cards aren't well supported by the current amdgpu driver, so you'd need to use a distribution that still supports the old ati driver. The linked article recommends MX Linux for old machines. I think you can get it working with Arch Linux but that would require a higher level of effort.
by araes | 2025-10-16 01:34:05+00:00
I commiserate, yet it's way more than $850B. Current spending for fiscal year 2025 was $1.5T (Trillion). It's the Unreported Data* tab. Clearer if you click one month back on 10.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Per the same USA Spending .gov site, military spending by year has been:

2024: $1,358,253,371,219 14.03% 2023: $1,297,012,666,574 13.90% 2022: $1,160,975,500,606 12.85% 2021: $1,117,832,172,120 11.11% 2020: $1,098,916,637,102 12.03% 2019: $1,060,561,779,405 15.97% 2018: $995,628,286,613 15.77% 2017: $931,355,381,711 15.39%

It's supposedly "the official open data source of federal spending information"
by Alupis | 2025-10-16 01:34:08+00:00
Zed looks and feels amazing to use. I test-drove it for a bit on my linux system, and the feel of it is difficult to convey to those who have not tried it yet. It's easy to overlook the significance of gpu accelerated editor - but I promise you, use it for a bit and you'll be sold.

The only feature that is preventing me from switching to Zed is the current lack of DevContainer support[1]. After investing a significant amount of time perfecting a devcontainer (custom fat image with all tools/libs + config), it would be a large step backwards to go back to installing everything locally.

There's a lot of eyes on this feature, so I'm hopeful it will be implemented in the future.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11473
by kalleboo | 2025-10-16 01:34:32+00:00
I built my home NAS in 2017 the two original drives were replaced after developing bad blocks (4 and 5 years, respectively). The two expansion drives (2018, 2021) are still fine.

I built a NAS for a client, which currently has 22 drives (growing bit by bit over the years) in it (270 GB of raw capacity) and since 2018 has lost only 3 drives.
by linuxftw | 2025-10-16 01:34:52+00:00
Thanks for fighting the good fight. My chief concern is that you will alienate some of your customers because normies think privacy is for crackpots. I don't have any experience being in small business computer repair, but just my feeling as a neutral 3rd party.

Try to identify the problems the customers have. If privacy isn't one of their concerns, convincing them to switch PC OS is not a great fit on that basis.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-16 01:34:58+00:00
You say things like this in a way that makes me think you underestimate them. These are the same type of people that elected the current administration. While their beliefs maybe a joke to you, when they get in to power, it won't be funny to you any longer. These same groups talked about the slow boring of hard wood that the reversal of Roe was going to be. This was late 80s and early 90s.

Continuing to ignore or make fun of people with polar opposite viewpoints as your own to the point you become complacent will lead to exactly the situation we are in now. I promise you the people you are making fun or are not complacent and are vigilantly being active in having things changed to their liking.

Treating someone as a joke maybe cool at parties of like minded people, but now we are where we are because too many did not take things seriously.
by tartoran | 2025-10-16 01:35:56+00:00
I have Win10 on a laptop that I use and am thinking of either taking it an offline completely (and keep on win10 forever on it) or upgrade it to Linux but am not sure if it's worth the hassle upgrading a $200 Thinkpad Carbon x1, I may as well get another one and leave this one as is. I still own a laptop with Windows 7 that when I turn on, that is quite rarely, but when I do I am hit by wave of nostalgia. This win10 machine, I wish I could extend its operation as I am pleased with how it operates in its current form but I guess it's not possible. One thing I'm certain of, I will not upgrade it to Windows 11 and Microsoft and I as a user will part ways.
by taspeotis | 2025-10-16 01:36:33+00:00
> I'm recomming my customers switch to Linux rather that Upgrade to Windows 11 (scottrlarson.com)

But of a bait and switch from that to the actual article title…

> Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

If nothing else adhering to HN’s guideline on titles would have saved me having to suffer through reading “recomming.”
by PostOnce | 2025-10-16 01:36:37+00:00
Make sure libreoffice is included, and ublock origin. Show them how much faster it is, with fewer ads, and no subscription to Microsoft required just to write a document.

The business customers might want to know that databases are a lot cheaper on Linux, especially for small business.

Literally spoke to an automation company the other week that told me "we have to delete a bunch of stuff every time the database gets near 10GB or we'll have to pay Microsoft".

Plus there's no license cost for linux itself either.

This stuff might not be viable for hundreds of employees in a business where MS is already entrenched, but for a small business it absolutely is a better deal.
by tiltowait | 2025-10-16 01:37:01+00:00
The slowdown occurs on systems that can't hold sufficient charge to reliably power the CPU to full anymore. If the battery can't supply the expected voltage, then the system simply shuts off. That is much worse than slowing down. This feature inarguably increased longevity—hardly what I'd expect from a "planned obsolescence" scheme.

They did make a mistake, though: they should have been up-front about it. They should have advertised it rather than hiding it away.
by wpollock | 2025-10-16 01:38:40+00:00
Sounds like you have some APS model. I had those issues, and switched to Cyberpower. The alarm can be muted and the battery lasts for many years.

A UPS is a must for me. When I lived in the midwest, a lightening strike near me fried all my equipment, including the phones. I now live in Florida and summer outages and dips (brownouts) are frequent.
by neilv | 2025-10-16 01:40:32+00:00
In addition to the good distro options mentioned, there's also Debian Stable:

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...

There are several options for desktop environment, and you can select which ones to install when you boot that installer image (and also add/subtract more later, and change your preference at login time).

One of the nicest-looking ones that should be self-explanatory to use (for anyone who's used any version of Microsoft Windows since 95) is Cinnamon. Most of other desktop environments default to similar, except for the current default Gnome one, which is a bit more creative in a way that's not intuitive.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-16 01:41:36+00:00
You can technically use the language model as a data model. That was the quick hack that started it all, autocomplete on a question produces the answer, yes.

However it's clear that we are moving towards separating the data and the language model. Even base chatgpt is given Search Tools and python Tools instead of producing them by text, the tool call itself may be generated by the model though.

You can for sure use a pure LLM to ask it questions about tax code, but we'll probably see specific tools that only contain canon law and kosher case law, and sources it properly. Y'know instead of halucinating
by radixdiaboli | 2025-10-16 01:41:49+00:00
Bro, recruiters are kindof idiots.

I'm gonna be real with you: you need to face the fact that you don't understand the game you're playing.

I know because I was there. I founded a startup that I can make sound impressive. I left when I burnt out, thinking of course what I did was impressive enough to easily land a job. I floundered for 5 years.

Places look at your resume and either see someone who is overqualified (they're right) or someone who hasn't worked on a real project (they're right). If you can't swallow that, you're going to keep beating your head against the wall until you do.

I started refusing any interview that had a live coding exam (I vibed way better with places that did project based exams). I coded my own projects to hone my skills.

Eventually I decided I needed to play the game. What I did was really niche. I took a web dev boot camp and practiced code exams.

Now I have a job where I started at a low salary, but they created a senior position for me in less than a year. It's looking like managing my team will be a thing before year 2. I will get paid less than other people in the industry, but if that ever really bothers me I'll be able to move laterally and make more easily.

This is all to say: suck it the eff up. Your experience is useful, but you're playing a different game. Lower your expectations, get the chip off your shoulder, and maneuver whatever you can find into a win.
by dekhn | 2025-10-16 01:42:23+00:00
I really enjoy this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival He takes watches that need repair, disassembles them to basic components, washes them, and then reassembles and tunes them, replacing any parts that have broken (often the mainspring).

It doesn't have the explanations or the math, but the cameras are high quality and you can really see just how jiggly the balance wheel and spring are, and how the watch will just "spring to life" when you install those bits.
by betaby | 2025-10-16 01:42:29+00:00
> People can build houses with the same characteristics of the 1970s and would likely be able to afford them

No?

Bungalows built in 1970s are selling $500k CAD in Montreal's suburbs today.

> But people want modern sizes with all the appliances and nice kitchens, two car garages and whatnot.

Probably they 'want' but very few percentage wise live in such houses, at least in Canada.
by andyferris | 2025-10-16 01:43:54+00:00
> The Windows build uses DirectX 11 for rendering, and DirectWrite for text rendering, to match the Windows look and feel.

As I understand, DirectWrite font rendering uses Windows subpixel font rendering. It seems OK on my monitor (better than the linux version) but haven't done any pixel peeping.

They seem to have anticipated this issue and designed it accordingly!
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-16 01:44:28+00:00
If you're going to do this, set them up with something they can get commercial support for.

IMO, if a user's needs can be met with a Chromebook, Linux + a browser + email + Zoom/or whatever would suit them well.

I think you're going to have a hard sell if they rely on Office or other Windows-only software, and although well meaning, it might be doing them a disservice if they can't run the software they're accustomed to.
by Nursie | 2025-10-16 01:44:41+00:00
Yup, they can give you a secure boot chain that's otherwise hard to prove, and I've worked at places where (for example) disk encryption keys were protected by TPM encryption, using TrouSrS.

They can also often be used as a (slow) source of hardware randomness.

Most modern intel (seris 8 onwards) and AMD Zen onwards have fTPM too. Often these can be enabled in the bios during upgrade then disabled again.

Personally I upgraded to Win11 the moment it became available, but that's because I want to continue my run of free MS windows forever and I only ever boot into it to play games, with even that becoming less common.
by reactordev | 2025-10-16 01:45:27+00:00
The controversy here is the fact that the API Gateway limits the upload resulting in having to engineer a workaround workflow using s3 and triggers (even if this is the serverless way) when all you want to do is upload a file. A POST call with an octet-octet stream. Let http handle resume. But you can’t and you end up going around the side door, when all you really want is client_body_max_size

The sarcasm of correctness yet playing down its complexity is entirely my own. We used to be able to do things easily.
by pixl97 | 2025-10-16 01:45:28+00:00
More of "because you are a continuous chemical reaction that started 4 billion years ago". A bunch of legacy crap gets left around from the time before higher order thought when the brain - muscle interactivity was just based on feelings.

If we had all those animals, especially those around the time of the cambrian explosion to experiment on as they developed it would probably make more sense in the 'but it does' department. This is also why your math teacher wants you to show your work.
by cyberax | 2025-10-16 01:45:43+00:00
You can turn the secure boot on/off at any time. The only effect from this is the loss of encryption keys that you might have bound to the measured values.

So for it to be effective against the evil maid, you really need to bind the LUKS key to it. But you can do that _and_ set a strong PIN for your LUKS key.
by gerdesj | 2025-10-16 01:45:56+00:00
You have sqlite, mariadb/mysql, postgres and more just for mostly traditional SQL. Then you have the others ... 8)

It's time for change. VMware have tossed themselves off into limbo and MS seem hell bent on alienating a vast swathe of humanity with W11's requirements - weirdest A/B test ever.

I'm working on some bigger clients ...
by pizlonator | 2025-10-16 01:46:55+00:00
I've been living on an Unbuntu variant (Pop_OS) for over a year now and it's surprisingly good. Note that I had been a Mac-and-some-Windows user as far as desktops go for about 10 years prior to that, and had lots of Linux experience before that - so I'm experiencing a 10 year before-and-after.

Things that intrigue me:

- For photos, darktable is surprisingly good. I think this was my biggest single surprise, being a Lightroom user.

- GIMP was always great and now it's even better.

- LibreOffice is good enough that I can live on it just fine. I do miss Keynote, but it's not a showstopper.

- Dia is good enough for diagrams, though I miss OmniGraffle.

- Notice how there aren't any Windows apps I miss. There are Mac apps I miss (Keynote and OmniGraffle).

- Anything involving the web just works.

- Suspend/resume on my Linux laptop works better than suspend/resume on Windows, but not as good as what you get on Apple M hardware.

- Battery life on my Linux laptop is better than on Windows, almost entirely because Windows wakes the laptop up while it's suspended, so if you close the Windows laptop and carry it around unplugged, you'll find that the battery is totally drained after some number of hours. Linux doesn't have this problem.

- Development workflow is amazing. I'd rather program on Linux than anything else.

- The lack of crapware and nagware is so amazing.
by Supermancho | 2025-10-16 01:47:07+00:00
> While their beliefs maybe a joke to you, when they get in to power, it won't be funny to you any longer.

SMH It's not about being funny. It's about the seriousness of their opinion. Rational people think that people's irrational beliefs are as serious as a joke (unserious). This has nothing to do with the political power of the misguided, nor the results of their own poor reasoning. I feel like this is painfully obvious. It also feels a bit like being baited into spelling it out in the face of a politically motivated response.
by zrobotics | 2025-10-16 01:47:23+00:00
IT & software dev for a small-midsize company. I wasn't able to finish migrating last month due to a pressing project, but we're migrating almost all of our systems at work to Linux. 90% of our user's work is done in a browser, and the other 10% is in an in-house application I wrote. That app works on Linux, since my work machine has been on Linux for years.

We'll have a few macs and 2 win11 machines, but the rest are getting migrated.

We're in the Google ecosystem for email, docs, and drive so I'll just deploy Chrome instead of a Libre chromium. I'd rather not troubleshoot user profile issues, and they have access to all our data anyway. Honestly, I fully expect I'll have more than a few users that don't even notice the OS change.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-10-16 01:47:55+00:00
If you have access to Microsoft Word, I'd customize the grammar checker settings to flag more than what is enabled by default. They have a lot of helpful rules that many are oblivious to because it's all buried deep in the preferences. Then adopt the stance of taking the green lines under advisement but ignore them if your original words suit your preference. That will get you polished up without submitting to AI editorial mundanity.
by archargelod | 2025-10-16 01:48:08+00:00
I just refuse to use any software that baloons it's filesize. Not because I can't afford storage, but because there are always alternatives that have similar features and packed into fraction (usually less than 1%) of filesize. If one of them can do it and other can't, it's a bad product, that I have no intention to support.

We should strive to write better software that is faster, smaller and more resilient.

"Storage is cheap" is a bad mentality. This way of thinking is why software only gets worse with time: let's have a 400mb binary, let's use javascript for everything, who needs optimization - just buy top of the shelf super computer. And it's why terabytes of storage might not be enough soon.
by thevillagechief | 2025-10-16 01:48:35+00:00
Funny seeing this here at the exact moment my frustration has boiled over with windows. I'm just completely baffled at the hostility and disdain Microsoft is showing it's customers. These issues are on top of just the disregard that people actually use these products for work and business so force-updating and breaking them so often, just so they can re-force you to accept their surveillance bloatware. My feeling today has been that we're going to look back at this moment as the straw that broke the camel's back.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-16 01:50:25+00:00
What’s there not to “believe”? There is no hardware support for 32 bit ARM instructions on Macs and iPhones. In fact there has never been 32 bit ARM Mac software. What software are you pining for from 32 bit x86 Macs?

Consider how shitty the x86 Windows experience is compared to modern Macs - poor battery life, loud, slow and hot - I’m really surprised at how little Windows users expect from their computers.

As far as the Arm based Windows computers, the x86 emulator is slower than Macs running x86 code and the processors are worse.

And are you really saying ARM based Macs, iPhones and iPads are slow?

You seem to want the Mac to be the equivalent of the “HomerMobile”.

No professional is buying Macs? You think that video and audio professionals as well as developers are really saying “we really want Windows computers” or did I miss the “Year of the Linux desktop”?
by platevoltage | 2025-10-16 01:50:39+00:00
You're not wrong about the bleak part. My team at Akamai was routing for me, but at that time, they were worried about layoffs. Their stock dropped from 110 to around 75 dollars since then. Sucks for me, but it was a Cloud Support job. Very technical, but not really what I wanted to be doing long term. I figured it would be a good foot in the door at a good company.
by slicktux | 2025-10-16 01:51:01+00:00
Being that it’s an SSD it’s already encrypting by default. You just have to set the User and Admin password and you’ll have full disk encryption!

You can set HDD/SSD password via the BIOS/UEFI or (my preferred method) using HDPARM —SECURITY commands.

Then if you take the drive out you can unlock it from another computer so as long as you plug it in directly and the UEFI supports HDD/SSD unlocking during post; if not you can install a Pre-Boot authentication on the drive that runs Linux to unlock the drive and then once unlocked it with the PBA it re-boots and it works as a normal un-encrypted drive.

Look into HDPARM and OPAL standard for full disk encryption.
by elevation | 2025-10-16 01:51:18+00:00
A number of customers are leaving Windows for Linux ahead of Windows 11. To support them, we had to offer a linux equivalent for a bunch of C# .NET desktop apps.

After evaluating a lot of options, pyQT + nuitka gave a reliable cross-platform result (can target distros based on Debian and Enterprise Linux easily.) And we are still able to target Windows for the customers that remain there.
by repiret | 2025-10-16 01:51:34+00:00
I agree with all of the articles points except for the first one: TPM and Secure Boot do not reduce user choice or promote state or corporate surveillance. If you want to be able to prevent root kits you need secure boot, and if you want to store secrets that don't need a user password to unlock and can't be stolen by taking apart the computer, you need a TPM; or you need substantially similar alternatives.

I would say that specifically with Secure Boot, Microsoft actually promoted user choice: A Windows Logo compliant PC needs to have Microsoft's root of trust installed by default. Microsoft could have stopped there, but they didn't. A Windows Logo compliant PC _also_ needs a way for users to install their own root of trust. Microsoft didn't need to add that requirement. Sure, there are large corporate and government buyers that would insist on that, but they could convince (without loss of generality) Dell to offer it to them. Instead, Microsoft said all PCs need it, and as a result, anybody who wants to take advantage of secure boot can do so if they go through the bother of installing their own root of trust and signing their boot image.