MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dpifke | 2026-01-28 17:18:26+00:00
In the U.S., requiring a login (or any information other than your email address) to opt out is against the law. Additionally, you cannot require any steps other than "sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page."

I once wrote to the FTC for guidance as to whether or not this included requiring unsubscribers to solve a CAPTCHA or disable adblockers or enable Javascript, but did not get a response. I believe the law is plain with regards to this, but a lot of companies seem to be willing to risk it.

See: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-28 17:18:28+00:00
> macOS handles things on a per-section-of-window, per-application, per-display basis.

No, it does not. If you have two displays with different physical pixel densities, and especially if they are sufficiently different that Apple will consider one 'Retina' and 'not Retina' (this is usually the case if, for instance, you have your MacBook's display—which probably is 'Retina'—beneath a 2560 × 1440, 336 × 597 mm monitor, which is 'not Retina'), then the part of the window on the non-Retina display will be raster-scaled to account for the difference. This is how KDE Plasma on Wayland handles it, too.

In my opinion, any raster-scaling of vector/text UI is a deal-breaker.
by ra7 | 2026-01-28 17:18:30+00:00
If you want American companies to not outsource any jobs AND have full foreign market access, get ready to get market access revoked from places like India. They’ll just incentivize their local companies to compete, and Amazon has plenty of local competition there already.

Amazon themselves have experienced in the past how heavy-handed Indian regulators can be.

It’s not a zero-sum game anymore. You cannot have only one side (US companies) capture 100% of the value.
by litemars | 2026-01-28 17:18:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working on a gap in the open-source security tooling space: ARM64 Linux malware analysis and evasion research. While frameworks like UPX, Msfvenom, and other packers dominate x86/x64, ARM64 (AArch64) has almost nothing.

That's a problem because ARM64 is now everywhere: AWS Graviton instances, mobile edge devices, IoT infrastructure, and increasingly, production servers. Yet the security community treats ARM64 as second-class when it comes to offensive tooling and EDR evasion research.

So I built hARMless, focused ARM64 ELF packer and in-memory loader designed specifically for security research and red team operations.

The interesting part (for me) was understanding how modern EDRs detect process injection and in-memory execution on ARM64. The x86 equivalents are well-researched, but ARM64-specific EDR evasion is almost unstudied. I documented the techniques I found so defenders can build better detection.

I'd love technical feedback, especially from:
- what are we missing on ARM64?
- how would you catch these techniques in general?

https://github.com/litemars/hARMless

Open to discussion on ARM64 malware analysis, syscall evasion, or detection challenges.

Cheers,
litemars
by fogzen | 2026-01-28 17:18:59+00:00
It goes further back than 50 years for sure. Was small-government rhetoric embraced by the whole party that far back though? Seems to me it wasn't embraced by the whole party until after Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. I think it really got going after the New Deal as Republicans started framing their opposition to helping the working class in terms of small government and states rights.
by watwut | 2026-01-28 17:19:03+00:00
That is not an answer to the "who is responsible for X now" question. Laid off Bill is not responsible for X now.

Also, it is not useful answer at all, it is an uncooperative answer. Whoever is asking about the responsible person is trying to work. They have legitimate question about who they should contact about X, sending them to someone who does not work there is less then useless.
by mrexcess | 2026-01-28 17:19:19+00:00
>Woz invented the consumer personal computer.

Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-28 17:19:31+00:00
There are some commercial Applications that just won't work on wine. But virt-manager makes Qemu/kvm backing images for windows 10 or 11 easy. Freezing Windows in time is an absolute must if you do builds with vendors badly maintained development software.

Dual booting off 2 SSD is good now, and the deciding factor on most of our laptop purchases. Windows is still necessary if you do serious heavy GPU CGI rendering, CAD/CAM work, or Games.

I like Linux when everything is working well, as getting work done with the shell CLI is important for handling "Big" problems. Cloning identical Linux environments across all team workstations also greatly simplifies project support. =3
by Aldipower | 2026-01-28 17:19:39+00:00
Linux since 1996! In chronological order: Slackware, SuSE, DLD, LSF, Gentoo, Ubuntu (starting with 04.10!), eventually Debian 12, now 13.

Back in the days I compiled the kernel myself! :-D

Sure, occasionally I used Windows 3.11, 95, 98se, XP, Vista, 7 and 10, but never as my main system.

I am a software developer, but also do gaming, video production and audio producing. I never got the discussion, Linux works for me for almost 30 years now.

One day, I applied for a new job and was already on the company tour. When they told me that I could only use a Windows computer provided by them, I quickly said, ‘No, thank you,’ and left. The faces they made were truly priceless.

Another day, I applied for another job again and, after some hesitation, unfortunately said yes when they tried to foist a Windows computer on me, because the actual project was really cool. That was the worst year of my career, thanks to restricted Windows 10.
by 0dayz | 2026-01-28 17:19:41+00:00
So anytime an officer kills a person with a gun, that is now justified?

Despite the fact that the man in question that was killed had a legal permit for said gun AND 1 of the ICE agent even took his gun away and despite this was shot to death while lying on the ground?

So where is the urgency? Not enough KDA ratio to score high enough on the scoreboard?
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-28 17:19:46+00:00
Undoubtedly his tool turned out to suck, and his managers realized that it made him faster but didn't eliminate the need for his role. "Every other manager" is a pipe dream and if it's true it means that group is pathetically inefficient and underutilizing the talents of even an average manager.

That's what I'd say in 2026. 2-3 years from now, not sure. But right now, AI can't run a vending machine without selling too many tungsten cubes.
by 6510 | 2026-01-28 17:19:47+00:00
Can make flatbread in any crappy oven. You should be able to get a used dirty one for next to nothing. Don't even have to clean it, just let it burn empty for 45 minutes. 75C (167F) should be enough but on the highest settings it doesn't take as long.

Baking bread in a pan/pot on the stove is also doable. Research the recipes a bit.

Also, there is nothing wrong with pancakes.
by AceyMan | 2026-01-28 17:19:49+00:00
A germane chemistry story but not about lubricants. I grew up in Atlanta. My mom was a scientific librarian and for a while she worked in the chemistry department at Coca-Cola. She worked with the guys who knew the syrup secret formula ("7x"). She told me she had to burn her carbons (this was before duplicating machines). She could take shorthand and perfectly type organic chemistry expressions using just a regular typewriter; truly lost skills, anymore.
by jermberj | 2026-01-28 17:19:53+00:00
> You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.

The absolute choice quote here. Tattoo it on your forehead.
by drdaeman | 2026-01-28 17:20:01+00:00
I don’t think attestation can provide such guarantees. To best of my understanding, it won’t protect from any RCE, and it won’t protect from malicious updates to configuration files. It won’t let me run arbitrary binaries (putting a nail to any local development), or if it will - it would be a temporary security theater (as attackers would reuse the same processes to sign their malware). IDSes are sufficient for this purpose, without negative side effects.

And that’s why I said “not a security mechanism”. Attestation is for protecting against actors with local hardware access. I have FDE and door locks for that already.
by josefx | 2026-01-28 17:20:33+00:00
> I don't think Wayland ever supported

Isn't that true for even the most basic features you expect from a windowing system? X11 may have come with everything and the kitchen sink, Wayland drops all that fun on the implementations.

GNOME does unredirect on Wayland since 2019: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/g2g99z/wayland_surfa...
by unclad5968 | 2026-01-28 17:20:40+00:00
Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.
by tannerc | 2026-01-28 17:21:05+00:00
I have also used GPTs since 2020. I am also a writer. Much of the writing equated with “generated by AI” is so precisely because it’s broadly trained on real writing.

So the claim of “AI slop” without proof is little more than heresy. It would be helpful to have any evidence.

It’s not about just the writing in one example, it’s about writing patterns—which are common—being equated with AI simply because they’re common.
by simgoh | 2026-01-28 17:21:05+00:00
Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key.

On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
by T-R | 2026-01-28 17:21:09+00:00
I'm a huge fan of it - I was never able to get one while they were officially available, I only managed to rent one from Blockbuster a few times. I eventually picked one up on eBay in the early 2000's for $60, before they became collectors items.

The appeal is definitely somewhere between intrinsic and from the rarity - there's not just been no official way to play these games for the last 30 years, they've barely even gotten a passing mention, and even emualators have been few and far between. It was sad that Teleroboxer, Wario Land, and Mario Clash were basically lost to time.

The games definitely weren't up to to NES/SNES quality, but they were at least up to par with the average portable game at the time, which I think is what they were meant to be compared against. I see the Virtual Boy games as Game Boy games that suffered from the mechanics of the platform the platform they were released on. In that light, I think they compare pretty favorably to similar lesser-known games of the time; most WonderSwan games I've played, hell even a lot of Game Gear and Game Boy games, had much more serious gameplay issues, even though they were on hardware that was arguably less... challenging.
by mayhemducks | 2026-01-28 17:21:28+00:00
If I set aside for a moment, and for the sake of argument, the fact that we all have to earn a living, why would anyone want a job where you distill a bunch of input from those "below you" and relay it to those "above you"? That sounds like a job I would never want to get out of bed to do. If I were one of the people fired, I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.
by hajile | 2026-01-28 17:21:28+00:00
Producing AI papers isn't the job requirement for 99.9% of STEM jobs.

I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

I was tasked with finding an Indian hire a while ago. I lost count of exactly how many people I had to interview. (I spent a huge portion of my time for over a year doing interviews). We were looking for a senior developer, but settled for at most an intermediate developer. We swapped between multiple top-rated Indian recruiting firms, gave automated tests, had their interviewers ask pre-screening questions, but nothing helped improve candidate quality in any real way. I caught more people than I could count cheating answers on technical interviews (probably how they got past the screeners). We didn't even look at anyone without at least 10 years of "experience", but less than 10% of candidates could write basic fizzbuzz (and some of them accidentally showed that they were using GPT to try to code what we wanted because they didn't have a clue).

It may be an anecdote, but the sample size was quite large and we are a F500 company with the ability to attract talent, so I think its likely that we were attracting better-than-average candidates too.

EDIT: I'd add that it's not just my team. I've sat as an observer for a lot of other hiring interviews and they had the same problem. Across our company, we've had massive turnover in our outsourced India centers because the people they hired did such poor work.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-28 17:21:39+00:00
So just don't use windows? The only reason I use android to begin with is because the mobile centric distros I looked into didn't appear to be to the point I would want to daily drive them yet. If and when that changes I'll switch.

The only real issue is sourcing good mobile hardware that isn't locked down. At least for the time being the pixel line satisfies that.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-01-28 17:22:03+00:00
>native Americans
I know you don't mean indigenous people, so what's the cutoff?

Is it birthright citizenship? But then what about naturalized citizens? And if they count, thennare they screwing over "natives" up and until their swearing in when they instantly join the screwed, or is it more of a continuous spectrum of screwer/screwed?
Or, in the other direction, does your family need to have been here a couple of generations for you to count?
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 17:22:06+00:00
The current version appears to be that the victims gun went off (in the hands of the police officer), by which the rest of them thought that it was the victim who was shooting, so they shot back.

It's the opposition to the current presidency who is trying to spin it their own way. They want it to get out of hand, that there are masses on the streets, whistling to police doing their work, to create more of such situations, so they could blame the government even more.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-28 17:22:09+00:00
You don’t need to learn performance, you can always scale later.

My (half-joking) attitude was always, "Performance? That sounds like Intel's job, not mine. My code magically gets faster if I do nothing at all, so I'll focus on new stuff instead."

That didn't scale very well at all, as it turned out.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-28 17:22:11+00:00
Reddit comments would focus on the headline—essentially confirming they never read the article. And of course add a sprinkling of "Cheeto Emperor" or whatever. I've not seen that (that wasn't also then heavily "disappeared" on HN).

Regarding the past couple of weeks, I think it's rather difficult to find nuance when we all saw the videos of protesters being killed by a federal police force. Anyone trying to take the Administration's side is, I imagine, going to come across as shrill.

On the more nuanced political issues though I have been happy to see opposing viewpoints well reasoned—even when I disagreed with them. There was a time when reddit was young that you might have found the same level of discussions.
by Swimhack | 2026-01-28 17:22:19+00:00
We built an open-source starter kit for deploying AI business agents that actually operate — make phone calls, send emails, run outreach, and remember everything between sessions.

Define a personality (SOUL.md), give it memory (daily logs + long-term), connect channels (voice, email, WhatsApp), and let it run. Built on Clawdbot with Claude.
by ampham | 2026-01-28 17:22:27+00:00
iOS making a random app on my phone the default ‘Open with’ in Files instead of opening quickly in Preview.

Recently was trying to open images in Files and it kept opening in my Canon print app. Thought it was a glitch so I just deleted the Canon print app.

Tried opening the file again and it opened in Copilot. Figured out I had to change ‘open with’ to Preview. Copilot is still set as the default. I’m sure I can change it somewhere but why is that the default in the first place?
by abustamam | 2026-01-28 17:22:31+00:00
This is true in principle but most gamers are just gonna take the path of least resistance. If they can't play fortnite on Linux (I'm using an example, I don't know if it's actually unplayable on Linux) then they will use whatever OS lets them play.

People have been saying "vote with your wallet" every time gaming companies do something anti consumer like day one dlc or buggy releases (don't pre-order!) or $90 games, but gaming companies continue to push the envelope on what gamers will pay for because gamers keep paying for it.

It's a sad reality.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-28 17:22:41+00:00
One could imagine a design where even the app vendor is untrusted... You would send an encrypted chunk direct to the GPU, which would then decrypt and render the message text in some secure environment onto the screen.

Neither the OS nor the application would know the contents of your message beyond "it's 500x700 pixels".

Similar things are done for DRM video, and widevine level 1 or 2 haven't seen many breaches despite running on a wide array of hardware open to physical attack.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-28 17:22:42+00:00
> Please more of this.

Same, I'm caring less about "Yeah, I've learned something new" and more about "Yeah, this sounds like I'm reading the thoughts of a human, how refreshing" which is a sad state of affairs.

I've adopted my own writing style because of this too, used to be very careful about spelling and grammar, very nitpicky, but have now stopped doing that, because people started calling my perfectly spelled responses LLM-generated...
by alwa | 2026-01-28 17:22:46+00:00
I mean

Marketing budgets can fund stuff whose authenticity is independent of who’s writing the check, right? Especially when their audience is extra-contrarian and sensitive to authenticity. Xerox can be an evil megacorp and also be sugar daddy to the PARC.

If the fun maze is taking YC’s money and using it to start a company, sure, I see your point. I’d say (right here on YC’s digital estate!) probably don’t do that.

If the fun maze is the community that’s emerged on this site, which is indeed something the VC firm sponsors (surprisingly cheaply)…

Then in my case, it’s different because I frequently walk through the fun maze for as long as the maze is fun, then I wander back out to my fields. If the maze stopped being fun, or started requiring me to set aside my values, I would stop coming, and the farmer knows that.

The farmer doesn’t prod me, much less sneak up on me with a captive bolt. He doesn’t try to milk me while I’m walking through his maze. If I’m ever considering selling my steak, I’ll probably apply commercial reasoning to my choice of abattoir, regardless of how fun the maze was.

I contribute voluntarily, I enjoy the voluntary contributions of others. It’s a maze where people want to come.

I’d like this to be true, so I contribute to it being true, and I observe others contributing to sustaining its truth too. Intersubjective belief creates reality!
by cykros | 2026-01-28 17:22:53+00:00
Debian without systemd is a good start. Now, do Debian without dpkg, and you may finally be getting somewhere.

The reason Debian fell to the systemd behemoth is because its sysvinit scripts were already a complete disaster. Slackware and Gentoo, on the other hand, were able to stay clear of the mess because they had a decent implementation to begin with.

And Sysvinit was never the only place Debian kept its mess.
by k310 | 2026-01-28 17:22:57+00:00
My brother, the least techie person on earth, got tired of Windows updates trashing his drivers, which required reinstallation every time.

He settled on a Dell desktop with Ubuntu, supported, (available online only) and after some questions on apps, never asked me for help afterwards.

From his and my experience: All the apps you use in daily life are there and work well. With me, Firefox and GIMP are overwhelming favorites, with DarkTable and RawTherapee in the background, should I have a tricky photo. (I don't. Nikon has been very very good to me). I rarely use "office" apps, but there's Libre Office, of course. (currently using a mac.)

Long story short, I am done with future macs thanks to Tim Cook (you know why) and developer tools have to be shoehorned into macos, and nurtured through Apple's yearly "break things" updates, whereas they are integral to Linux distros.

They are real and they are spectacular.

My fond wish: that Knoppix be updated. I have begged Klaus.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-28 17:23:06+00:00
It's not even that. The main reason is probably that attackers are going to be writing code to automate their attacks, and desktops are easier to develop on than phones, so that's what they use with no reason to do otherwise.

Even if you stopped supporting desktops, then they would just reverse engineer the mobile app instead of the web app and extract the attestation keys from any unpatched model of phone and still run their code on a server, and then it would show up as "mobile fraud" because they're pretending to be a phone instead of a desktop, when in reality it was always a server rather than a phone or a desktop.

And even if attestation actually worked (which it doesn't), that still wouldn't prevent fraud, because it only tries to prove that the person requesting the transfer is using a commercial device. If the user's device is compromised then it doesn't matter if it can pass attestation because the attacker is only running the fake, credential stealing "bank app" on the user's device, not the real bank app. Then they can run the official bank app on an official device and use the stolen credentials to transfer the money. The attestation buys you nothing.
by sejje | 2026-01-28 17:23:32+00:00
> No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing

On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking.

Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah.

That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications, etc.

Then it just never happened. Things went up.