MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-21 19:13:11+00:00
"I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified."

What do they mean?

To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.

He cannot control its default behaviour hence he wants to "slim MacOS down"

"UNIX" was a pun on the name of another OS that allegedly was accused of being too large and complex. That OS, Multics, was designed to run only on specific hardware from GE and later Honeywell

UNIX was a smaller, less complex alternative that, after its rewrite in C, could more easily run on a variety of hardware and be modified by the people using it

Apple does not allow people using MacOS to modify it

MacOS is proprietary; unlike AT&T's UNIX it has not been released into the research community resulting in non-commercial, open source "MacOS-like" OS projects (HackIntosh notwithstanding)

A user cannot write programs for MacOS without restriction by the company, e.g., prior approval, "developer" fees, etc.

MacOS cannot easily be used on a variety of hardware, only on Apple's proprietary hardware

Compared to non-commercial UNIX-like OS, MacOS is larger and more complex

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/12/04/macos-sonoma-is-setting-...
by Terr_ | 2026-01-21 19:14:18+00:00
OK, I'll try to err towards the "5" with this one.

1. We built a machine that takes a bunch of words on a piece of paper, and suggests what words fit next.

2. A lot of people are using it to make stories, where you fill in "User says 'X'", and then the machine adds something like "Bot says 'Y'". You aren't shown the whole thing, a program finds the Y part and sends it to your computer screen.

3. Suppose the story ends, unfinished, with "User says 'Why did the chicken cross the road?'". We can use the machine to fix up the end, and it suggests "Bot says: 'To get to the other side!'"

4. Funny! But User character asks where the answer came from, the machine doesn't have a brain to think "Oh, wait that means ME!". Instead, it keeps making things longer in the same way as before, so that you'll see "words that fit" instead of words that are true. The true answer is something unsatisfying, like "it fit the math best".

5. This means there's no difference between "Bot says 'From the April Newsletter of Jokes Monthly'" versus "Bot says 'I don't feel like answering.'" Both are made-up the same way.

> Google's search result AI summary shows the links for example.

That's not the LLM/mad-libs program answering what data flowed into it during training, that's the LLM generating document text like "Bot runs do_web_search(XYZ) and displays the results." A regular normal program is looking for "Bot runs", snips out that text, does a regular web search right away, and then substitutes the results back inside.
by em-bee | 2026-01-21 19:14:19+00:00
that happens to me if i have lots on my mind or if the story is not very engaging. the reading style can also be factor (sleepy voice :-)

i believe part of the issue is that our eyes are our primary source of input. we can control what we see by the direction where we look, or we can close our eyes. we can not control hearing in the same way, and therefore we instead learn to focus or not focus on specific sounds. but that happens much more subconsciously than how we control our eyes, therefore it can happen even if we don't intent to. (ok, when you are deep in thought you can also gaze into nothingness without closing your eyes, but that's less common)
by mlsu | 2026-01-21 19:14:52+00:00
When you read something like this it demands that you frame Claude in your mind as something on par with a human being which to me really indicates how antisocial these companies are.

Ofc it's in their financial interest to do this, since they're selling a replacement for human labor.

But still. This fucking thing predicts tokens. Using a 3b, 7b, or 22b sized model for a minute makes the ridiculousness of this anthropomorphization so painfully obvious.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-21 19:15:43+00:00
That will only give the NTP server the IP you use for outbound connections. If you use privacy extensions, they'll get a temporary address.

If you don't configure your firewall to allow inbound connections to the temporary address, knowing your temporary address doesn't help them connect back to you. (Also, it's temporary, so their logs of IPs will be useless after a small window.)

Compare this to v4, where connecting out to someone gives them enough information to exhaustively port scan your whole network and trivially find every server you're running.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 19:16:24+00:00
> Free software is an ideology, not just a license.

Yes and people shouldn't enforce ideology on top of each other. I am speaking this as an free software advocate too.

the fact of the matter is open source is still barely fundable and I am pretty sure that they evaluated multiple decisions to come up to this regarding how fundable it is and other factors.

If we have to indoctrinate someone into our ideology, it means that our ideology is unable to gain weight by its own merit. No, let open source do the work and welcome people for who are now open source. Have open arms to everyone who open sources their work & incentive them to do so with a happy heart.

Open source is about freedom. And being honest, If they wrote the code themselves, then its their freedom to have it in open source or not.

I for one, welcome another great open source! Thanks for going open source and Good luck to skip in future!

I know Open source has some issues regarding funding etc. so I hope that people donate to skip & make the project sustainable!

Have a nice day skip team!
by LeFantome | 2026-01-21 19:16:30+00:00
[EDIT: I may be the one with the reading comprehension problem. I think they are saying that ARM having better tooling is a wrong. I agree. I leave my comment to own my shame.]

Did you even bother to click the link that this story was about?

The Milk-V Titan supports UEFI, ACPI, CPPC, and SMBIOS. The board is otherwise bog standard PC architecture from the PCIe to the form factor (ITX). You can boot multiple Linux distros on it out-of-the-box. They are pushing support into the Linux kernel mainline.

The Titan supports RVA22 + virtualization (the H extension) which you could also frame as RVA23 minus the vector extension. Another way of saying RVA23 is to say that it is RISC-V with the same feature set as X86-64 v4. Why did I have to say "v4" when talking about x86? Because of the myriad of extensions offered on x86-64 that differ between v1, v2, v3, and v4.

Honestly, what the hell are you talking about?
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-21 19:16:46+00:00
The BeagleBoard was awesome at it's out of box experience. Connect it to a computer & a network interface shows up. ZeroConf advertises a webserver. The page is a web based IDE for programming the beagleboard.

USB gadget remains such a great fan favorite. Peripherals affording your main computer the option to do more is sweet, and that rpi & others can offer up their services as so is sweet.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-21 19:16:54+00:00
> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes

It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.
by 0xbeefcab | 2026-01-21 19:17:04+00:00
Interesting there is an optical networking option for end users (claims ~6TBps). Maybe a really dumb question, but how would the end user's ground station maintain connectivity during cloudy weather? Do they have cloud-penetrating lasers from the MEO satellites? Would that interfere with aircraft, astronomy tools, etc?

Some short googling says they have lasers that clear a path for a data carrying beam, but that seems wasteful/infeasible for commercial uses
by zahlman | 2026-01-21 19:17:11+00:00
The point of avoiding tags is to improve the ergonomics: you don't have to remember tag names, use a separate delimiting syntax anyway to indicate where the tag name is, and then repeat the tag name when you close the block. Especially given that this is for a block-level construct anyway, simply using a bracketing syntax isn't causing any of those problems.

Indenting inline code requires a text editor that makes indentation ergonomic or else extra effort per line; and it doesn't mesh well with lists or block quotes.
Show HN: Remember Me – O(1) Client-Side Memory (40x cheaper than Vector DBs)
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-21 19:17:13+00:00
OP here.
I posted an early version of this a couple of weeks ago and got some great feedback (and 3 forks!) from engineers dealing with vector DB bloat.

The Core Thesis: We don't need Vector DBs for local AI memory. They are overkill (O(log n)) and expensive.

Remember-Me uses a Coherent State Network Protocol (CSNP) based on Optimal Transport theory (Wasserstein Distance) to achieve O(1) retrieval latency without the massive index overhead.

Benchmarks vs ChromaDB:

Latency: 12ms (CSNP) vs 45ms (Vector)

Cost: $0.06/GB vs $2.40/GB

I'm looking for people to try breaking the 'Zero-Hallucination' guarantee on the new release.
by benj111 | 2026-01-21 19:17:37+00:00
To me, the psychology is the same. I'm not going to say history will repeat, but to me, as a voter, my main responsibility is to elect someone who respects the process. Trump, like Hitler, fundamentally doesn't, which means there's nothing to stop him.

I just don't think it's helpful to think of these people or their supporters as 'evil'. They are 3 dimensional people. It isn't the skinheads that are the issue, it's your neighbours, it's you.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-21 19:17:38+00:00
Not really. Fixed-term contracts can not be used indefinitely. A worker must be permanently hired after the first extension. Agencies can not be used indefinitely, and also, the agency is required to support the employee after the client lets them go. So the company just pays to shift that responsibility but the responsibility towards the employee is there. A company is also not allowed to make an employee 'self-employed' by making them start their own company. They must always have multiple clients, if they have just one the government will consider it permanent employment with all strings attached and will apply all relevant restrictions and taxation retroactively.

I'm just talking about holland here but all over europe the conditions are similar.

All the exceptions you mention were just sly ways the companies have tried to circumvent their responsibilities and the law has caught up with regulations to make those impossible or at least impractical.

And there are some exceptions yes. But those are mostly for in-between gig jobs. Not for stuff people make a career out of.

Of course there are also exceptions with easy firing for things like gross negligence. Though the employee always has the ability to countersue.
by deng | 2026-01-21 19:17:38+00:00
> That whole section is talking about outbound connections

Erm... no? Immediately after the paragraph you cited, it continues with

The key behavior to describe is what criteria are used by the NAT to
filter packets originating from specific external endpoints.

and then, on "Address-Dependent Filtering", it says

Additionally, the NAT will filter out packets
from Y:y destined for the internal endpoint X:x if X:x has not
sent packets to Y:any previously [...]. In other words, for receiving packets from a
specific external endpoint, it is necessary for the internal
endpoint to send packets first to that specific external
endpoint's IP address.

Meaning: unsolicited inbound connections will be filtered out.
by InfamousRece | 2026-01-21 19:17:41+00:00
At my previous place IPv6 was useable (I was getting /60 prefix rather than /64 I’m getting now) but the prefix was changing often - several times per day. This was annoying because every prefix change all addresses of my devices changed too. So in practice I always used private IPv4 addresses to connect to them.
A NAT would solve this issue.
by zauguin | 2026-01-21 19:17:43+00:00
Can't that just be done by sealing to PCRs? By protecting the unsealing key with PCR which depends on the OS (I usually use the secure boot signing key PCRs since they are different between systems and stable across updates) and some PCR which gets extended by the OS (or for stuff stored in NV making it readlocked during boot). Then any process that launches later can no longer access it and booting another OS also doesn't help.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-01-21 19:17:45+00:00
How about an origin agnostic rule for soccer fans: they must wear portable cameras, and pay a bail (which they get back upon good behavior), they pay the escrow at the point of arrival (border train station or at the airport) and return the camera gear at point of departure, upon which they get their escrow back.

Aggressive hooligans don't come at all, or pay ever greater escrows (doubling whenever they misbehave, or halvig when they behave (but never halving below the minimum escrow value).

I think local population would appreciate such measures, regardless of the origin or religious affiliation of aggressive soccer fans.

Sure the soccer industry may suffer from a decrease in ticket sales, but at some point its not soccer industry, but a vacation of violence for the highest bidder... and the local population pays in material damages...
by giantrobot | 2026-01-21 19:17:46+00:00
One of the ways both macOS and iOS get good battery life is burst-y CPU loads to return the CPU to idle as quickly as possible. They also both run background tasks like Spotlight on the e-cores whenever possible. So some process maxing out an e-core is using a lot less power than one maxing out a p-core. Background processes maxing out a core occasionally is not as much of a problem as a lot of people seem to assume.
by sudosteph | 2026-01-21 19:18:19+00:00
> Sophisticated AIs are a genuinely new kind of entity...

Interesting that they've opted to double down on the term "entity" in at least a few places here.

I guess that's an usefully vague term, but definitely seems intentionally selected vs "assistant" or "model'. Likely meant to be neutral, but it does imply (or at least leave room for) a degree of agency/cohesiveness/individuation that the other terms lacked.
by sharkjacobs | 2026-01-21 19:18:33+00:00
Has MacOS ever been better than Windows for allowing fine grained control over system services?

I've been a Mac user for my entire life so maybe I didn't understand what things were like with Windows, but the fundamental problem identified by Howard, that there are many many system daemons and it is expected that the user not know what they are, or what they do, and to just leave them alone, has been the case for at least 20 years, I think.
by spogbiper | 2026-01-21 19:18:44+00:00
maybe that's why its popular in the US? for most of this country the 0-100 range works quite well to describe the normal range of outdoor temperature. we seem to like 0-100 ranges, for instance speed in MPH works out nicely.. "over 100 MPH!" is a common expression for extreme speed drivers. school grades are often a value out of 100, etc. which makes you wonder why we don't prefer metric lol
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-21 19:18:52+00:00
Ah… so the media is all “hearsay” say when you don’t like what it says?

She hit an agent with her car. She accelerated with him in front of the car BEFORE he drew his gun. Her wife yelled DRIVE BABY, DRIVE DRIVE, then complained why the cops had to use “real bullets”. I see no scenario other than these were two people playing a game and not know that reality wasn’t playing along.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 19:19:25+00:00
No, I'm quite confident that I'm very strong in these languages. Certainly not world-class but I write very good code and I know well-written code when I see it.

If you'd like some evidence, I literally just flipped a feature flag to change how we use queues to orchestrate workflows. The bulk of this new feature was introduced in a 1300-line PR, touching at least four different services, written in Golang and Python. It was very much AI agent driven using the flow I described. Enabling the feature worked the first time without a hiccup.

(To forestall the inevitable quibble, I am aware that very large PRs are against best practice and it's preferable to use smaller, stacked PRs. In this case for clarity purposes and atomicity of rollbacks I judged it preferable to use a single large PR.)
by worik | 2026-01-21 19:19:33+00:00
I feel no nostalgia for Stackoverflow.

I always found it very frustrating that for a person at the start of the learning curve it was "read only"

Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being

LLMs on the other hand are sweet and welcoming (to a fault) of the naive newbie

I have been learning to use Shell script with the help of LLMs, I could not achieve that using SO

Good riddance
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-01-21 19:20:01+00:00
> Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS.

That blog, Howard Oakley at eclecticlight.co, is consistently the most informative on the internet about macOS behaviors and internals, that Apple does not explain. He is also the author of several useful tools [1] to help observe and understand some of its underlying details. It's maybe the closest we have to a SysInternals for macOS.

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/free-software-menu/
by duped | 2026-01-21 19:20:18+00:00
This is dripping in either dishonesty or psychosis and I'm not sure which. This statement:

> Sophisticated AIs are a genuinely new kind of entity, and the questions they raise bring us to the edge of existing scientific and philosophical understanding.

Is an example of either someone lying to promote LLMs as something they are not _or_ indicative of someone falling victim to the very information hazards they're trying to avoid.
by bikenaga | 2026-01-21 19:20:47+00:00
Original article: "The influence of intermittent hypercapnia on cerebrospinal fluid flow and clearance in Parkinson’s disease and healthy older adults" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-025-01179-6

Abstract: "A failure of the glymphatic pathway to clear brain byproducts implicated in neurodegeneration may contribute to the pathophysiology of Parkinson’s disease. The glymphatic pathway relies on vasomotion (rhythmic constriction and dilation of blood vessels) to drive cerebrospinal fluid through the interstitial space and clear waste from the brain. The current study demonstrated that intermittent hypercapnia, exposure to low levels of CO2 in ON-OFF cycles, elicited vasomotion-induced cerebrospinal fluid inflow in both healthy controls and individuals with Parkinson’s disease. The magnitude of the vasomotion-induced cerebrospinal fluid inflow in patients with Parkinson’s disease was reduced relative to healthy controls. However, intermittent hypercapnia, administered in three 10-minute sessions totaling approximately 30 minutes, increased the appearance of total α-synuclein, neurofilament light, glial fibrillary acidic protein, amyloid β<sub>1-42</sub>, amyloid β<sub>1-40</sub>, and phosphorylated tau 217 in the plasma of both healthy controls and individuals with Parkinson’s disease. This suggests that intermittent hypercapnia can be used to clear potentially toxic brain byproducts from the brain, highlighting its potential use as a disease modifying treatment."
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-21 19:21:21+00:00
Yet, overall it was a net positive for society... as almost every technological innovation in history has been.

Did you know the 2/3rds of the people alive today wouldn't be if it hadn't been for the invention of the Haber-bosch process? Technology isn't just a toy, it's our life support mechanism. The only way our population gets to keep growing is if our technology continues to improve.

Will there be some unintended consequences? Absolutely. Does that mean we can (or even should) stop it? Hell no. Being pro-human requires you to be pro-technology.
by svrtknst | 2026-01-21 19:21:53+00:00
I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?

Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.

Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.

My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS.

Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-01-21 19:22:49+00:00
All I'm saying is that people or no people, wet or dry, there is an actual calculation and a drought scale. The conversation seems to be wanting to place 'blame', but you can have droughts anywhere, under a lot of conditions (like people moved in) for lots of reasons.

I looked it up

Calculating drought involves comparing current conditions (precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water levels) to historical norms using standardized indices like the Palmer Drought Index (PDSI) or the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which measure water supply/demand imbalances over short or long periods to assign severity levels (e.g., D0 Abnormally Dry to D4 Exceptional Drought).

A common method uses indices that turn negative as drought intensifies, with thresholds indicating different drought stages, often combined with expert analysis for the official U.S. Drought Monitor.

Common Drought Indices

Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI):

Uses precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture.
Calculates water supply and demand.
Values: Below -0.5 indicates drought; below -2.0 is moderate.

Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI):

Focuses on precipitation deficits at various timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6 months).
Classifies drought: e.g., -1.0 to -1.49 is Moderate, -2.0 or less is Extreme.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-21 19:22:57+00:00
Claude Code has genuinely changed my workflow. Not in a "write the whole thing for me" way - more like having a really fast pair who knows the codebase.

The pattern that works best for me: I describe what I want at a high level, let it scaffold, then I read through and course-correct. The reading step is crucial. Blindly accepting generates technical debt faster than you can imagine.

Where it really shines is the tedious stuff - writing tests for edge cases, refactoring patterns across multiple files, generating boilerplate that follows existing conventions. Things that would take me 45 minutes of context-switching I can knock out in 5.

The automation piece I've landed on: I let it handle file operations and running commands, but I stay in the loop on architecture decisions. The moment you start rubber-stamping those, you end up with a codebase you don't understand.
by branon | 2026-01-21 19:23:28+00:00
> At this very moment of writing this post, I don’t care about the lack of Microsoft support. [...] [U]sing Win10 as a regular desktop OS on a machine connected to the Internet past the last security update, I'm aware that the risk of a compromise only increases as time goes on...

Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)