MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschmidt | 2026-01-10 21:13:44+00:00
> If the interfaces that controlled all the laptop goodies were exposed as normal hardware (and documented) instead of gatekept behind ACPI methods that have to be written by firmware vendors that can often barely spell the menu options correct in the setup screens, then this issue would not exist.

> UEFI is ACPI's successor and carries on this legacy. It's disappointing that it's seeping into the ARM world.

Arm (and Risc-V and other arches) Linux has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devicetree instead of ACPI, which is better in that it declaratively documents the hardware in a system and how to access it. However, the hardware support which can be found in the Arm ecosystem is in no way better than that for x86 laptops. Many SoC manufacturers still don't put any effort into upstreaming drivers or device trees, many devices are still only supported by tossing a single release of a heavily patched kernel over the corporate wall and then forgetting about them.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-10 21:14:38+00:00
> Isn’t it better to focus on other ways to reduce suffering?

Why?

> ways to treat diseases

Aging underlies tons of diseases.

> death is a way to “enforce” change. Sometimes it’s bad, other times it’s good

This is true of everything bad. You could use this logic for ceasing research into curing cancer, trauma medicine or seatbelts and traffic lights.

> of course it can be made against anything good

Which makes it a pointless argument. (And implicit concession that you’re arguing against something good.)

> When you work until you’re, say, 80, what happens? You have less time to enjoy some rest

…why? You have more time.

In a world without aging, retirement at 80 would be an objectively better deal than retiring at 60 today. You’d be retiring with a body that hasn’t started failing. And you’d have more years, on average, ahead of you.

> there is less room for people taking your job and gaining experience because you are as productive as always

Lump of labour fallacy. (Average adult lifespans have gone up over the last two centuries.)
by jerf | 2026-01-10 21:14:54+00:00
Fairly common from what I've seen. You're supposed to ooh and aah at the number of options they give you and not ask question about what they're actually going to be worth. This is one of the bigger reasons HN tends to advise people to treat stock options like lottery tickets rather than any sort of money in the bank. You generally have no idea what they've done to your "options" between giving them to you and you finally getting to exercise them, especially with the ever-lengthening time it takes for companies to finally go public. On the plus side, this has also driven the creation of other ways of getting options out of a company prior to an IPO.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-01-10 21:15:12+00:00
I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.

I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.

I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-10 21:15:21+00:00
When I was looking for a remote job in 2023 and 2024, I randomly submitted applications through LinkedIn and Indeed as a Plan B. Every remote opening gets hundreds of applications in a couple of hours. I heard crickets.

My plan A was as always using my network and targeted outreach to a companies where I had specialized experience and expertise (no full stack development is not specialized). I had multiple offers quickly in 2023.

All that to say, if your strategy is to just randomly apply for jobs and hope to stand out among literally thousands of applicants worldwide, you have already lost.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-01-10 21:15:29+00:00
The vast majority of people cheering on Iranian protesters don’t know anything about Ian’s oil. The see people in the street protesting their theocratic regime and they cheer them on. To imagine that these voices are all just oil puppets is the stuff of leftist group think.

Your comment wasn’t censored, your fellow readers flagged it because they thought it was bullshit.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-10 21:16:30+00:00
In general, people just use noIP home router VPN, ssh/sftp host on LAN, and a sshfs client on their iOS/Android device or MacOS/Windows/Linux. It will look like any other network shared drive in the native OS.

For paid services, there are also native Dropbox client support in MATE, Ubuntu, or Mint desktop file managers etc.

iOS sftp:

https://www.photosync-app.com/home

Android sftp:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.bukacek.fil...

Practically speaking, I often recommend dual booting from 2 ssd drives for windows and Linux. There are just some commercial software/games that can't run properly within a linux environment (programs like Wine do allow running some Windows native programs, but YMMV.)

https://www.linuxmint.com/ or https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop is a great starter OS.

If you already use a posix system like MacOS, than the workflow will seem more familiar. =3
by sciences44 | 2026-01-10 21:17:30+00:00
This is fascinating! I'm working on a problem using AI to accelerate game development workflows but never used it for playing.

Curious how Claude handles the game logic constraints in RollerCoaster Tycoon?

Also, what's your iteration loop like? Do you find yourself spending more time prompting or debugging the generated code?

Great work - it is really exciting.
by kccqzy | 2026-01-10 21:17:33+00:00
> Colleges should be prioritizing strong students

I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content to be just average. After admission, the first student has a much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman. The first student’s strength could very well be limited by the amount of resources available in this high school, and not by his/her innate ability.

At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe the UC admission officers.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-10 21:17:39+00:00
There has to be nuance yes. But the nuanced position starts with accepting the reality that a ton of people are indeed having their brain turned to goo. Just go outside of the bubble of somewhat tech literate highly educated young people and look at what 60+ year olds consume on Facebook.

There's AI generated content with tens of millions of views that is as fake as ancient aliens on the history channel but nobody seems to realize it. If you comment here there is a high chance you did not grow up among people with 8 years of basic education who haven't read a book in 20 years and believe quite literally everything they see. That is what a decent chunk of any population is like. The biggest blind spot of well-educated internet libertarians who taught themselves how to code at 15 is that they in all likelihood have no concept of how the average citizen navigates the world.

The problem with Putin isn't that he thinks a country needs intelligent and wise leaders, Plato would have told you the same thing. It's where he's steering it that's the issue and that the country's leadership is no more capable at the top than it is at the bottom.
Ask HN: How to design DB schema for multiplayer exp/level system?
by hnroo99 | 2026-01-10 21:18:48+00:00
I'm building a turn based multiplayer game where players can earn exp from playing matches and level up (levels will mainly be used for aesthetic purposes, although I might add restrictions such as "you must be level x to edit room names").

This is my first time designing an exp/leveling system though so I'm not 100% sure how to approach the database design. Is it best practice to store both exp and level? Or is it better to store only exp and derive level?

The latter sounds potentially nicer if I want to adjust the level curve later, although that implies that all users could see their level change hm...
by pixl97 | 2026-01-10 21:18:50+00:00
>Alignment is a marketing concept put there to appease stakeholders

This is a pretty odd statement.

Lets take LLMs alone out of this statement and go with a GenAI style guided humanoid robot. It has language models to interpret your instructions, vision models to interpret the world. Mechanical models to guide its movement.

If you tell this robot to take a knife and cut onions, alignment means it isn't going to take the knife and chop of your wife.

If you're a business, you want a model aligned not to give company secrets.

If it's a health model, you want it to not give dangerous information, like conflicting drugs that could kill a person.

Our LLMs interact with society and their behaviors will fall under the social conventions of those societies. Much like humans LLMs will still have the bad information, but we can greatly reduce the probabilities they will show it.
by 20after4 | 2026-01-10 21:18:54+00:00
I've been using nothing but Linux on my desktop since 2013. Converted my parents around 2015. Rarely a complaint from them and I haven't even once considered switching back to Windows. My shiny new Macbook Air is collecting dust. Almost all of my gaming is done on a SteamDeck or a Linux desktop. The only applications that I can think of where Windows or Mac are still relevant would be CAD and Audio/Video production. And even those are use-cases where Linux has viable options. Actually, Video probably doesn't even belong here since one of the most popular video packages (DaVinci Resolve) has Linux support and there are multiple open source options like Kdenlive. For music, it's really hard to beat Apple's ecosystem: Mac and iOS have an incredible variety of affordable and really high quality audio applications, however, the gap is narrowing with lots of great music software on Linux as well. There are free software options for CAD and 3d Modeling (Blender, Freecad) but most of the popular CAD software is either Windows only or Windows/Mac. Some of this may be possible to get working under Wine but I haven't tried.
by ikidd | 2026-01-10 21:18:56+00:00
>The driver sits in a recumbent position in an open cockpit, steering via a handlebar that is located under the knees. A power switch and front and rear brake levers are positioned on the handlebar. As a supplement to or replacement for electric power, the C5 can also be propelled via bicycle-style pedals located at the front of the cockpit. The maximum speed of an unmodified C5 is 15 miles per hour (24 km/h). At the rear of the vehicle is a small luggage compartment with a capacity of 28 litres (1 cu ft).[5] As the C5 does not have a reverse gear, reversing direction is done by getting out, picking up the front end and turning it around by hand.

Well, hard to believe this was a flop.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-10 21:19:04+00:00
Ok, I really liked this! A cool concept that would've been sci-fi ~5 years ago (not this specific library, but the idea of spec->code in any language, 0 human intervention). I can see a collection of utilities "specced out" and then shared as specs + tests. Perhaps for harder stuff even some spec formal verification + tests? (no idea how feasible this is, but it's something to look into)

I had no doubts claude/codex/gemini could handle this, but I was surprised that even an open-source model (glm4.7) did it 1 shot (just c/p the prompt from Install.md and came back 10 min later):

============================= 123 passed in 0.18s ==============================

Test Results:

All 123 tests from tests.yaml pass successfully:
- 35 timeago tests
- 26 duration tests
- 28 parse_duration tests
- 19 human_date tests
- 9 date_range tests

Files Created:

1. /workspaces/glmcode/whenwords/src/__init__.py - Library implementation
2. /workspaces/glmcode/whenwords/test_whenwords.py - Test file generated from tests.yaml
3. /workspaces/glmcode/whenwords/usage.md - Usage documentation

Crunched for 11m 38s

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Showing detailed transcript · ctrl+o to toggle

I mean, it's a "toy" library, but the concept is so cool! And the fact that an open, locally hostable model can do it 1shot is insane.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-10 21:20:11+00:00
I switched fully to Linux about four years ago. I chose Kubuntu. I had previously used Linux Mint for quite a while, but on a computer that wasn't my main one. I downloaded some ISOs and tried out a few distros in VMs.

I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.

It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.

Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.
by itopaloglu83 | 2026-01-10 21:20:12+00:00
At work employees generally use okay machines, not great but still at least 3GHz i5 processor with 16GB of ram etc. and they only run an ERP client and a browser with a few tabs.

Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.

These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.

Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
by dualogy | 2026-01-10 21:20:13+00:00
Since I found with searchable app menus / start menus that I don't ever navigate through menus but just start typing, I ditched the menu entirely and have KRunner bound to the Win key. Not only is it fine with any desktop app GTK or not (that packagers have ensured will install with its FreeDesktop metadata file or some such), it supports all the enabled KDE Search plugins. So I don't ever open a calc app again, either..
by Leftium | 2026-01-10 21:20:23+00:00
Inspired by MerrySky: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

Some differences:

- Shows weather from yesterday for comparison

- All hourly plot trackers connected; not just the top one

- Includes AQI

- Sky color visualization (try scrubbing across dawn/dusk!)

- Non-precipitation colors approximate sky color (haziness)

- Temperature variation visualized both spatially and with colors

- Data source is Open Meteo

- Planned: 60 minutely forecast like https://openweathermap.org
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-10 21:20:40+00:00
I can only speak for my own experiences, but I found my instructors at community college to be absolutely fantastic and even better than the ones I had when I eventually transferred to a UC. I had transferred to a UC first, ran out of money and then I wrapped up at a cheaper CSU years later.

At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching assistants anyway.

I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and medicine.

Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The kid is expected to do really well in college and then become a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.

Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing because your parents are threatening to send you back to the old country for an arranged marriage.
by joe_the_user | 2026-01-10 21:20:50+00:00
A fun tendency is that Claude kept getting distracted by topics of secrecy, conspiracy, and hidden systems - as if the task itself summoned a Foucault’s Pendulum mindset.

It's all fun and game 'till someone loses an eye/mind/even-tenuous-connection-to-reality.

Edit: I'd mention that the themes Claude finds qualify as important stuff imo. But they're all pretty grim and it's a bit problematic focusing on them for a long period. Also, they are often the grimmest spin things that are well known.
macOS Tahoe 26.2 ships with an outdated version of Python 3.9.6
by Gabrielfair | 2026-01-10 21:21:49+00:00
Not only is 3.9 reached end-of-life, the last release was 3.9.25

% python3
Python 3.9.6 (default, Dec 2 2025, 07:27:58)
[Clang 17.0.0 (clang-1700.6.3.2)] on darwin
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-10 21:22:47+00:00
Yes what the Bernie people are proposing isn't really a 1:1 match of what Europe has. Thats too ambitious and only a small percentage of the left even believe we can strive for that. The rest of the progressive left is thinking smaller because they feel that some progress is better than nothing.

>By the actual numbers, social spending and so on, the US isn't that incredibly different from Europe. And Europe is by any definition capitalist.

Do you live in the US? The US is the worst of all worlds, spending (ie taxes) similar to Europe in many respects but the value is extracted at many layers along the way so the results are nowhere near what Europe can produce. Just look at the outcomes from healthcare, education, infrastructure etc.

>And the US has plenty of regulation, so its not really unchecked, its just differently checked.

You are just describing a symptom of the overall problem. Regulation is a tool that can be used incorrectly to further the goal of unchecked capitalism. Example: NYC elected a Democratic Socialist recently and he talks about corner store small business owners having to deal with extra permitting and regulation that affects them more than bix box stores because every little expense hurts them more than the big guys, this naturally leads to the small business more likelihood of failing when competing with the big guys. Its regulation weaponized due to corruption.

>This is just incredibly simplistics marxist 'stages of history' thinking and almost completely useless. If the US adopt European regulation we wouldn't 'enter a new era'.

ok. We've tried everything else and its failing. So there are really only two directions. We either try to check unrestricted capitalism or we just accept that the old way of living that we all went through will not be coming back ever and it was just a footnote of history.
by Fischgericht | 2026-01-10 21:22:48+00:00
Mine had the HDi engine with DPF and 70hp.

Citroën were the first to make DPF standard.

Also, I would like to kindly remind you of the concept of "time". This was 25 year ago. The alternatives would have been worse. These days a C15 would be electric.

Obviously the OP is tounge-in-cheek, so keep it lightly.

But it does have merit: If you wish to measure your environmental footprint, you must look at the total lifetime of car, most importantly the manufacturing part. There is a difference between 900 KG of parts for a C15 vs 1,900 - 2400 KG for a Ford Ranger. These days most PM come from braking. Stopping 2000 KG will obviously cause more emissions from the brakes than stopping 1000 KG.

All in all, the point really is: The ratio between weight/size of the car itself and what is inside (people and/or server racks) has gotten completely out of hand. No, you do not need a 2,000 KG tank to move your 50-100 KG of flesh around. It's insanity, no matter if your care about the planet or not.
by sea-gold | 2026-01-10 21:23:53+00:00
Here is a very similar project: https://emailengine.app/

Similar to Bichon, it also has a commercial license[1]:

> EmailEngine is not free open-source software. It is "source available" software, meaning you can view and copy the source code, but you need a paid subscription[2] to run it beyond the free 14-day trial. Each EmailEngine instance comes with this trial, so you can test EmailEngine without any commitment.

EmailEngine is based on ImapFlow[3], a modern and easy-to-use IMAP client library for Node.js that is MIT-licensed.

[1] https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine/blob/master/LICENSE...

[2] https://postalsys.com/plans

[3] https://github.com/postalsys/imapflow
Intelligence Platform for the Modern Hunter
by Wysspr | 2026-01-10 21:24:45+00:00
I created Wysspr to make it easy for the most wanted fugitives to be captured through crowd sourced information and intelligence while being able to get a cash reward for information. Just launched the platform and looking for users to test out the site and give feedback. You can find it here at stealth.wysspr.com. Tell me what you think!
by jijijijij | 2026-01-10 21:24:59+00:00
It's a bit hyperbole, of course, and I was speaking to the sentiment of the time. In Germany Cologne would be an example of heavy car-centric development, coming to mind, but pretty much any city in West-Germany suffered this fate to some extent. I think there are far more drastic examples in America, but I am not knowledgeable about that.

> Das Konzept der autogerechten Stadt wurde in West-Deutschland beim Wiederaufbau der im Krieg zerstörten Städte umgesetzt, beispielsweise in Hannover (durch den damaligen Stadtbaurat Rudolf Hillebrecht), Dortmund, Köln und Kassel, aber auch in kleineren Städten wie Minden und Gießen. Dabei wurde in großem Umfang auch erhaltene Bausubstanz abgerissen. Vielfach wurden Stadtteile ohne Berücksichtigung sozioökonomischer und kultureller Faktoren zur Anlage von Durchgangsstraßen zerschnitten.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogerechte_Stadt