MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-10-07 15:30:59+00:00
Rufus and Massgravel still function as a pressure release valve to prevent too much outrage from building up, but Microsoft is working hard to direct more and more of the flow into the channels that get them the most revenue. If HN readers want to set up a machine without any of the bloatware, with all the "developer-mode" switches turned on, without a Microsoft account, there are still ways to get it done.

I actually just set up a new laptop this morning with Windows 11 LTSC 24H2. I'm an engineer, I can edit config files and burn bootable USB drives and install Intel storage drivers in the setup environment and validate sketchy batch files and compare ISO hashes. Now that I'm done, it's got a pair of fully-offline user accounts, it stays out of the way, it boots in seconds, the Windows-only software I have to use for work is no longer nagging me about being out of support, I'm quite happy with it.

But it was not trivial. Had I not known what I was doing, there were a dozen ways it could have gone wrong. I suppose it's nice that I'm not vulnerable to Mossad surreptitiously installing a MITM-patched OS while I sleep, but secure boot makes it scary simple to turn your new laptop into a $1800 brick. And I have a good sense for which links are the tools I actually want to download and run, and which links are scams.

But it's nowhere near smooth enough for me to point a non-technical peer at it and say "Oh yeah, if you don't want your OS to do that, just install LTSC."
by azemetre | 2025-10-07 15:31:06+00:00
Same here, in fact something I wish the neovim team would do is create a book where popular plugin authors create tutorials that recreate basic functionality of their plugins.

Seems like a no brainer that would help bring in more revenue too, it'd also be an "evergreen" book as new others can contribute over time.

I can't be the only one that would immediately buy a copy. :D
by myrmidon | 2025-10-07 15:31:10+00:00
This sounds bleak, but I'm pretty sure that any improvement (more justice/corporate responsibility) would at least not be free: It would also have chilling effects on research/innovation from perceived legal risk and higher costs (because the customer always pays in the end, which also applies to indirectly legally prescribed risk mitigation).

It is plausible to me that the public is "close to correct" in its current stance, and I would at least not dismiss that notion out of hand!
by eloisant | 2025-10-07 15:31:20+00:00
Fun fact: I once interviewed for a company offering a free VPN, which was actually using other users as endpoints for the VPN. Some kind of P2P VPN if you will.

How did they make money? Easy: there were also selling a botnet! So if you used their "free VPN", you could be part of a botnet for DDOS or to create fake reviews/upvotes from thousands of "legit" IP addresses.
by piltdownman | 2025-10-07 15:31:45+00:00
One of the main use-cases of the Steam Deck? Wii-U and Switch emulation!

Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude on their first handheld hardware launch, without some of the largest exclusive gaming IP in the world, selling direct to consumer... represent salient arguments for its ability to compete at a far greater extent when on more equal terms.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-07 15:31:48+00:00
But still a lot of things do, pesticides following the rain cycles is a good example. We're killing the biodiversity and ourselves with it. We already almost entirely rely on synthetically amending fields with petrol byproducts to feed ourselves, tomorrow we might have to manually pollinate crops when insects won't be enough to do the job.

PFAS are a problem, co2 is a problem, but we have dozens of other very big problems that are partially, if not entirely, obscured

https://usrtk.org/healthwire/banned-pesticides-found-in-clou...
by heap_perms | 2025-10-07 15:31:58+00:00
A better analogy: imagine if someone built a public water fountain, then chess.com set up next to it selling the exact same water for $100/year while limiting the public fountain to 1 cup per day through lobbying. Then they sponsored all the popular hydration influencers to only drink their bottled water on camera.

> Cause you can just go to a bar and get it for free.

Not at the same convenience, can you ;) So they are selling convenience. Chess.com isn't selling convenience - both platforms are websites you access identically. They're not offering portability or solving a distribution problem. They're artificially limiting a digital service that costs them essentially nothing to provide unlimited access to.
by mothballed | 2025-10-07 15:31:59+00:00
We had 'Asian road chaos' every fall where the rich ones would show up with their new Bugattis (edit: Maseratis) having never learned how to drive the thing and much less on the open American roads where you can really let the accelerator loose. They would cause endless crashes.

One or two of poor ones would end up committing suicide in the spring when they flunked out and had spent their entire little farming family's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.

It was quite the sight to see. I want to say they were fairly normal in intelligence, relatively, but the set of incentives for them to perform were wildly different.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-10-07 15:32:01+00:00
That's what a shortage is, a short-term undersupply. Market forces will eventually correct the problem if allowed to operate normally (e.g. prices spike, incentivizing more supply), but like you said that takes time. If it's a shortage of goods it can take a while to ramp up production. If it's a shortage of skilled labor it can take a while for people to learn those skills. Either way it's fundamentally the same type of problem.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-07 15:32:56+00:00
If they assess that a repair needs three hours, then only pay two hours of work if it's under warranty, I don't see how that doesn't mean that either they know that the book estimate is an overestimate and reimburse the correct amount, or the book estimate is correct and the dealership effectivley assumes 33% of the warranty risk because they only get reimbursed for 66% of the repair cost. (the third alternative is that the book estimate is underestimating, but that's basically the second case, but worse).

Neither of those cases looks like fair business dealings
by k3nx | 2025-10-07 15:32:57+00:00
It was enough to get me to try Linux again, and it was pretty eye opening for me. My work laptop is a $3,200 USD Dell 5570 from 2023. I bought a Beelink SER5 on amazon on discount because it was an older model around $300. I installed Ubuntu on the SER5. I've used gentoo and other distros, I wanted to use the computer, not configure it, that's why I went with Ubuntu. That little Beelink box runs circles over the Dell, it's embarrassing. Granted, the Dell has a bunch of corporate stuff that kills the performance, but I'm just happier using the Linux box. Luckily JetBrains tools, VSCode, Obsidian work just fine, which is what I use it for most of the time. I did install a steam game for giggles and it works. Like Dr. Seuss says in Green Eggs and Ham "Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say." I still have a Windows tower though...
by motorest | 2025-10-07 15:33:07+00:00
> While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.

The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.

This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.

The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
by gruez | 2025-10-07 15:33:25+00:00
>Nobody has been criminally charged. The government tried to give them a Jeffrey Epstein level pass by essentially allowing them to pay a few billion dollars over 20 years

Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims? It doesn't grant them immunity over any criminal claims. It's more correct to say that they didn't bother prosecuting them criminally (possibly because it's hard to do so), and got a civil settlement instead because the evidentiary standards are lower.

> which essentially amounted to interest off their ill-gotten gains.

They offered to pay $6B of $11B gains. Maybe you think they should have been fined $100 trillion or whatever for all the harm they caused, but that money doesn't exist, and moreover it's unclear whether a long drawn out legal battle would result in more money than the settlement they offered.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-27/purdue...
by pavon | 2025-10-07 15:33:37+00:00
> What are the American ones? One of them is the second Vulcan Centaur flight[2]. IIRC an SRB nozzle failed, and the other stages had to make up the missing thrust, which didn't leave enough for a deorbit burn.

[1] https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=61448

I know I read about another over the last year, but can't remember of the top of my head.
by Akranazon | 2025-10-07 15:34:00+00:00
I would argue that unemployment isn't solely about "money", but fair enough. I'm not sure how to respond overall. Because every time I debate this topic (which isn't a lot), a Europe defender will basically diminish the importance income numbers. Because "money is a poor measure of being better-off". In fact, money is quite a good measure of being better-off, and there is a lot of evidence for this. Europe has better public transportation, Europe has better healthcare, people are happier in Europe, etc etc... There is always more things. But the original discussion was specifically in the context of labor economics. Whether or not the US has single-player healthcare, that has a different topic. Average self-reported happiness numbers is obviously subjective and influenced by an infinitude of different things that are going on in one's life, which may or may not be related to labor. I also didn't find the other wikipedia articles very convincing. They show that ~2.0% of the US population is living below even the most generous measure of absolute poverty. I only see income inequality numbers as useful insofar as they give to average income number. I had cited median income so that the typical worker could be represented.

I don't consider "who is better off" to be a very good question. The answer is, the average worker is better off. My answer is therefore going to be vague. Of course, there are differences by industry, but do you have a point about that? Also, I am really arguing that with the current state of the USA, immigrants make higher incomes than immigrants to other countries. Saying that immigrants are treated poorly in other ways is just bringing up a political issue unrelated to labor economics.
by everdrive | 2025-10-07 15:34:17+00:00
Dumb question:

"We know that the ball will bounce back every time it is thrown at a wall. A single particle, however, will sometimes pass straight through an equivalent barrier in its microscopic world and appear on the other side. This quantum mechanical phenomenon is called tunnelling."

Is the particle just failing to collide with the wall since objects are mostly empty space? Or is something more spooky or interesting happening?
by slfnflctd | 2025-10-07 15:34:21+00:00
Your last sentence sums it up. This is what users want.

The main killer app, I think, boils down really expensive speech-to-text (and vice versa) with a reasonable number of seemingly authoritative querying details in fairly plain language. It's a new, 'better' search engine, just with different pitfalls people need to get up to speed on. And that may be enough, because employing humans to fill the same role as effectively is more expensive still.
by kelnos | 2025-10-07 15:34:22+00:00
> Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?

I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.

The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
by shelled | 2025-10-07 15:35:07+00:00
Did you really do one-bag?

There are things I can't think of my days/weeks without. So for

> In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack

There go my badminton rackets, cricket bat, and cycle. I couldn't care less about everything else :)

(To be fair, the rackets may possibly fit into my Osprey 45L. Never tried.)

On a more serious note: How much does health-care certainty factor into such travels? I am someone who doesn't have a family. So if a sudden death comes, I couldn't care less (I mean as of now - in advance), but I am perennially scared of falling sick and possibly needing care and hospitalisations, and when travelling (or without a base i.e one-bag kind of setup) and then there's at least the allergies, it becomes such a nightmare if you live in a country that doesn't have universal health care and is decidedly third world irrespective of the GDP.

I am asking because when people blog about such plans and minimalism, the gory details of behind-the-curtain things are often left out, maybe not deliberately.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-10-07 15:35:20+00:00
If you're familiar with cPanel, these tools are basically cPanel for the 2020s.

As a web developer, you develop your app on your computer (normally), but then folks can't actually access your app when it's running on your computer, it needs to be deployed to a publicly accessible web host.

Basically, these tools run on your servers and give you nice front ends which allow you to build and host your web apps.

Most of them integrate with your version control system so you can automatically build and deploy your app based on specific rules (often 'when main gets updated') or allow you to create preview deployments (if I merged my-feature-branch into main, what would my web app look like?)

Coolify and Dokploy do this with containers, this tool apparently doesn't.

Vercel, Netlify and others offer this as a service (you pay us $X per month and we manage it all for you), these tools run on your own server (either one you actually own or one you rent from a cloud provider).
by willidiots | 2025-10-07 15:35:32+00:00
To TFA's point - "Bars" are relative and relatively meaningless - [SS]RSRP, RSRQ and SINR are your real numeric signal strength / quality measurements.

Not sure about Apple, but on Android, individual carriers can set the number-to-bars thresholds. Two otherwise-identical signals could be represented as a different number of bars depending on your particular carrier: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/signal-strength
by jordanb | 2025-10-07 15:35:34+00:00
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.

This would have been in the early 2010s.

The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.

There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
by bccdee | 2025-10-07 15:36:15+00:00
I actually don't think it's fine to hear someone mention another culture and immediately butt in to say how disgusting you think their dietary practices are, especially given that our culture engages in factory farming, which is far crueller and more disgusting.

Whenever the Faroe Islands come up, people complain about whaling. Do people complain about factory farms any time (e.g.) France gets mentioned? No. Frankly, even as an opponent of animal agriculture, I find it a bit xenophobic.
by henearkr | 2025-10-07 15:36:25+00:00
Interesting, this constant current source notion.

For a design without feedback, and in an energetically inefficient way, maybe this can work too:

1. Determine what will be the maximum resistance of the "current consumer" part of your circuit throughout its operation.

2. Prepare a resistor several magnitudes larger than the resistance above.

3. Connect to the resistor above a (huge) voltage source so that the resulting current is the one you target for your current source

4. Put the "current consumer" part of your circuit in series with the large resistor.
by logifail | 2025-10-07 15:36:35+00:00
I've been using Win10 LTSC since it first shipped, but the pain of it just keeps on increasing (not being able to load the latest .Net; Teams and more and more other apps refuse to run despite the OS still being "in support" now and for many years to come).

Any tips for moving to Win11 LTSC? (I've been avoiding Win11 for as long as I can...)
by PaulRobinson | 2025-10-07 15:36:42+00:00
TLDR: No, probably not.

If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.

We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.

At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.

For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.

A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.

I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.
by kkylin | 2025-10-07 15:36:52+00:00
Also, new stuff just isn't designed to be opened up.

I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.

It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
by Nasrudith | 2025-10-07 15:36:54+00:00
The punchline is that sports gambling companies aren't even getting rich either. Their spend on advertisement and promotions to draw people in is so high that they're losing money net. Of course given means right now sports betting is just producing suffering en masse, not even making a few people rich it is a punchline in the same sense as 'The Aristocrats'.
by churchill | 2025-10-07 15:37:02+00:00
Sorry to break it to you, but the average American is quite...let's say, average. That's why they're average, lol. Likewise, the average Chinese. That's why their school system filters out tens of millions of schoolkids from higher education and puts them in trade school early. Same goes for India, Europe, etc.

Gifted, driven kids, the kind who will leave their family and everything they've known, to cross an ocean to study in your country, are a scarce resource.

I'm not saying you shouldn't prioritize locals, but if you want competitive, world-class educational system, you should be open to foreign students and faculty helping to keep your system competitive. It's the same worldwide, whether it's in Singapore's NUS, or Oxford, or Saudi Arabia's KAUST.

But, what do I even know?
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2025-10-07 15:37:19+00:00
Neither would I, in the balance it was a decent summary. That's why I submitted it, as a longtime customer of Gore Vidal's writings (I can stop anytime, really *).

But yes, there was some "unnecessary roughness" to the piece, perhaps the author wanted to assert intellectual independence.

That would go down better if he understood that there have been aristocrats who were political populists for all of recorded history, most notably a certain Caius Julius Caesar who started out with the bluest blood and thinnest purse in Rome.

(* besides I've run out of new material, having a while ago snarfed the Edgar Box mysteries, 1950s potboilers where Vidal just had to portray power-adjacent milieus.)
by dafelst | 2025-10-07 15:37:31+00:00
More people need to know how this, it is absolutely bonkers how much perf you lose for each file open operation to defender and its kin.

Even excluding directories (like D:\MyProject) from defender isn't a full solution, the fs filter will still use the file handle to do lookup of the file path to see if it is in an excluded directory (at least on win10), but excluding an entire drive (like D:\) does solve this.

I have found that adding git.exe to the process exclusion list makes the biggest difference here, although git is still slow when dealing with lots of files, it goes from unbearable to bearable.
by addicted | 2025-10-07 15:37:32+00:00
Yes, they should.

Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.

Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.

If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.
by tombert | 2025-10-07 15:37:44+00:00
Everyone says that it’s a step backwards, and even I did for awhile until I, you know, actually used it.

I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.

One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.

Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).