MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbozeman | 2026-01-11 18:07:37+00:00
Not even remotely true.

You're making the exact same argument everyone here is making, and that's because you're attempting to argue from technical parity / superiority. Windows isn't the dominant desktop OS because of it's technical superiority to Linux, it's dominant because of deeply entrenched compliance and industry reasons.

Healthcare, finance, legal, engineering (less so today, but still very sub-discipline dependant), and government all have very specific software needs that no one in their right mind will bother writing new software, or rewriting existing software, would do for 6% desktop market share.

EMR programs (Epic, Cerner, Meditech), Practice management and billing, Tax and compliance, Legal discovery and case-management tools, Niche hardware and it's control software

This is all the realm of Windows. Most of these applications are Windows-only (Win32 / .NET / ActiveX legacy), they're only certified and validated on Windows, and they're only contractually supported on Windows.

Even if Wolters-Kluwer rewrote the entire CCH ProSystem fx suite for Linux, now there's recertification, regulatory review, vendor retraining, staff retraining, potential issues with auditors and regulators, etc.

There's currently no upside large enough to justify: Vendor finger-pointing, Compliance risk, Training costs, Downtime risk

It's negative ROI all the way down.

Windows has to become so bad that switching to Linux for desktops overcomes all of the above.
by kingstnap | 2026-01-11 18:07:44+00:00
The root cause of what happened in that story was ultimately uncontextualized question asking.

Basically this guy starts with this fringe conspiracy theory belief that chloride ions are bad for you and asks a question to Chatgpt about alternatives to chloride ions and gets bromide as the next halogen.

We don't know this for certain, but when that video came out I tried it in ChatGPT and it this is what I could replicate about chloride bromide recommendations. It doesn't suggest eating sodium bromide but it will tell you bromide can fit where chloride is. The paper that discusses the case also mentions this.

> However, when we asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride can be replaced with, we also produced a response that included bromide. Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do. [0]

Of course this kind of bad question asking makes you fall short of the no free lunch theorem / XY Problem. Like if I ask you: "what is the best metal? Name one only." and you suggest "steel" then I reveal that actually I needed to conduct electricity so that is a terrible option.

[0] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260
by sigmar | 2026-01-11 18:07:45+00:00
>The site asks visitors to "assist the war effort by caching and retransmitting this poisoned training data"

This aspect seems like a challenge for this to be a successful attack. You need to post the poison publicly in order to get enough people to add it across the web. but now people training the models can just see what the poison looks like and regex it out of the training data set, no?
by jm4 | 2026-01-11 18:07:45+00:00
Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly contributes to another distro if it’s not a derivative or something?

Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the code for free. It’s a beautiful model.

If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at the top.
by tart-lemonade | 2026-01-11 18:07:51+00:00
A lot of the time the "solution" to problems on Windows is to reinstall/in-place upgrade because, as you said, Windows errors tend to be more generic so you can browse Google all you want but none of the instructions people provide will be of much help. So I'm not sure "widespread knowledge" is a point in favor of Windows when the errors frequently aren't specific enough to be reliably actionable.
by 112233 | 2026-01-11 18:08:21+00:00
I'll be glad if someone tells that I'm wrong but doesn't current windows 11 present even more of the same challenges? Last I tried, old driver compatibility in newer windowses was not fantastic, Wine slowly is becoming more compatible with legacy windows programs than the windows itself, forced updates are dealbreaker for many usecases. And need for workaroubds and poking around has reached Windows XP levels.

I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft...
by yatopifo | 2026-01-11 18:08:29+00:00
The real issue is that those dimples prevent you from getting the last bit. I also find it very annoying that in Canada quantity is often reported in ounces. Aside from the troy ounce, i have absolutely no idea how much an ounce is and whether it measures volume or mass. The only reason we still have ounces is because of trade with the US. Since no Canadian should be buying US made stuff, we should just ban most non metric units at this point.
by grogers | 2026-01-11 18:09:06+00:00
> You must implement a move constructor or a move assignment operator in order for std::move to do anything

Bit of a nitpick, but there are sometimes other functions with overloads for rvalue references to move the contents out - think something like std::optional's `value() &&`. And you don't necessarily need to implement those move constructor/assignment functions yourself, typically the compiler generated functions are what you want (i.e. the rule of 5 or 0)
by aruggirello | 2026-01-11 18:09:28+00:00
WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing.

But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé
by mindslight | 2026-01-11 18:09:55+00:00
I really hate that reasoning, but I haven't been able to find a better explanation.

One alternative is maybe they just default to cheerleading government power no matter what, and only understand lofty ideals like Constitutional rights in the context of things they directly experience and don't like.

Let's say Walker/Taylor was a working class white couple, still living in an apartment and unmarried. It seems like more stretching, but there would have still been some reasons to other them and cheer on the murderers. Especially when the media inevitably went to work dredging up other emotionally-laden details.
by anthk | 2026-01-11 18:10:34+00:00
Again, Russia would need to fight harsh natural disasters first. If any, they will need us. Earthquakes due to ice melts and current flows will be no joke. Temperatures will be warmer in the Arctic, and a potential small war due to gas/resources/routes will happen, everyone knows that. But what no one speaks it's that the damn nature can crush any vehicle in between no matter if it's from USA, Europe, Russia or China.
It will be scary and nature doesn't give a shit where are you from.
Every base you set on either ice or the coast can be plummeted down due to a quake/tsunami in hours.

Also, back to economics. The inner European market can be huge. We have decent armies ourservers, too, among market with the whole Mediterranean, Africa and South America (Spaniards know how to do deals, no matter which political side). Oh, and don't forget China, the Chinese will love to sell us advanced tech at bargain price.

The US tries to set right wing sided mafias in LatAm, Europe tries to get good deals. The US needs to behave like gentlemen and not like thugs.
by tekla | 2026-01-11 18:10:43+00:00
I hope the movement succeeds.

I've been curious myself about why the activist class seems weirdly quiet on this issue.

On a quick scan of media feeds I've seen a couple of things that stand out (I do not confirm or deny how true these claims are)

1) Current Iran is a enemy of the USA and thus activists can't support the destruction of the current regime. Iran is able to create nukes so can put pressure on the USA in Middle East Politics (esp. Palestine and Israel)

2) The uprising and the Shah are CIA/Western Backed and thus supporting the protestors is de-facto colonialism/imperialism.

3) Contrary to popular belief Iran is not actually a Muslim nation, only the leadership is. The population is significantly more varied and people do not want to be seen supporting the firebombing of Mosques because Islamphobia.

I don't know how widespread these opinions are, but it IS very strange how I don't see more outrage.
by dagmx | 2026-01-11 18:10:49+00:00
This is such a completely insane proposal.

As an Indian (but now an NRI), I would not want the government having access to the source of my device.

For one, I don’t think governments should be allowed to dictate what to ship on phones by default beyond perhaps regulating what you cannot ship.

Secondly, I don’t think any government has the long term trust to prevent using this for state sponsored cyberattacks. If not the current administration, then another.

Lastly, I also don’t trust any government (but especially the Indian governments to have the technical capacity to prevent leaks. Which I think would be devastating for any companies IP, and also taint a lot of open source out there globally.
by overfeed | 2026-01-11 18:11:17+00:00
> basically a dish pointed at the satellite, so the jammer should be in between to work.

Which isn't hard to do if you have the budget of a government. Directional antennae, GPS and a helicopter/Cessna flying patterns over a metro. Beams from the terminal are constantly scanning the sky chasing the constellations.

A higher hit rate option would be a fleet of low altitude drones taking high-res pictures of the ground, and running a fine-tuned classifier to identify Starlink Dishies which require a clear line of sight to the sky.

People who think Starlink is unblockable, or somehow anonymous IRL are unimaginative. Iran is well-versed enough with electronic warfare that it tricked a RQ-170 Sentinel land on it's territory - how hardened are Starlink terminals against responding to a spoofed signal and exposing their locations?
by stuartjohnson12 | 2026-01-11 18:11:59+00:00
This is a huge break from the original post you made - take a step back and compare the two. The LLM is tricking you again into thinking that it wasn't trying to make a claim about the world. In the original post, the LLM was causing you to use language like "quantify", "formal proof" and "concrete engineering" to describe what you'd come up with and position it as a mathematical/computational/engineering idea. It wasn't that.

Now that you got some outside input, it's reframing it for you as an abstract philosophical/legal/moral concept, but the underlying problems are the same. The reason it's talking to you using high level abstract words like "concept" and "proposal" and "framework" now is because the process you just went through - the "step 1" - beat back its potential to frame the idea as a real model of the world. This may feel like just a different way to describe the same idea, but really it's the LLM pulling back from trying to ground the concept in the world at all.

If you're continuing to talk to the LLM about the idea, it's going to try and convince you that really this was a moral/theory of mind discovery and not a mathematical one all along. You're going to end up convinced of the importance and novelty of this idea in exactly the same way, but this time there are no pesky ideas like rigor or testability that could falsify it.

If you ask ChatGPT about this comment without this bit I'm writing at the end, it'll tell you that this is fair pushback, but really your work is still important because really you're not trying to write about engineering or philosophy directly, but rather something connecting these two or a new category entirely. It's important you don't fall for this because exaggerating the explanatory power of pattern recognition is how ChatGPT gets you. Patterns and ideas exist everywhere, and you should be able to identify those patterns and ideas, acknowledge them, and then move on. Getting stuck on trying to prove the greatness of a true but simple observation will lead you to the frustration you experienced today.
by vulkoingim | 2026-01-11 18:12:00+00:00
Built my own Spotify recommendation egnine after getting tired of Spotify’s repetitive recommendations.

You get to choose the genres you're interested in, and it creates playlists from the music in your library. They get updated every day - think a better, curated by you version of the Daily Mixes. You can add some advanced filters as well, if you really want to customise what music you'll get.

It works best if you follow a good amount of artists. Optionally you can get recommendations from artists that belong to playlists you follow or you've created - if you don't follow much or any artists, then you should enable that in order for the service to be useful.

https://riffradar.org/
by ghaff | 2026-01-11 18:12:39+00:00
Intel has long been a big contributor--mostly driver stuff as I understand it. (Intel does a lot more software work than most people realize.) Samsung was pretty high on the list at one point as well. My grad school roommate (now mostly retired though he keeps his hand in) was in the top 10 individual list at one point--mostly for networking-related stuff.
by ralferoo | 2026-01-11 18:13:15+00:00
Unfortunately, the one thing this article needs to get right is broken: the examples.

On my screen (Chrome on Windows on 1080p screen), it's in a scrollable box filling the middle half of the width of the screen. Some of the screens are set to display so many rows in the viewport, I have to scroll down several screenfuls to get to the horizontal scrollbar to view the right hand half, and then I can't see all the important stuff at the top right.

Secondly, mixing in emojis makes the font non-proportional so most of the screens don't line up properly. This isn't ASCII driven development, it's not even iso8859-1 driven development.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-11 18:13:19+00:00
> I never understood why the more strict rules of XML for HTML never took off.

Because of the vast quantity of legacy HTML content, largely.

> HTML 5 was an opportunity to make a clear cut between legacy HTML and the future of HTML.

WHATWG and its living standard that W3C took various versions of and made changes to and called it HTML 5, 5.1, etc., to pretend that they were still relevant in HTML, before finally giving up on that entirely, was a direct result of the failure of XHTML and the idea of a clear cut between legacy HTML and the future of HTML. It was a direct reaction against the “clear cut” approach based on experience, not an opportunity to repeat its mistakes. (Instead of a clear break, HTML incorporated the “more strict rules of XML” via the XML serialization for HTML; for the applications where that approach offers value, it is available and supported and has an object model 100% compatible with the more common form, and they are maintained together rather than competing.)
by leptons | 2026-01-11 18:13:19+00:00
>Watch the Dow Jones collape in minutes.

>it's the end of the American economy.

You assume that this is not the goal of the current US "leadership". They want the country to fail, so they can rule over the ashes. They are a lot more fucked up in the head than you probably think they are. They simply don't care what happens, so long as they are the ones in power.

Trump would love nothing more than to dissolve NATO, and isolate from all of the EU. He would see that as an accomplishment. I wish I were joking.
by shashimudunuri | 2026-01-11 18:14:02+00:00
Author here. I built this to solve a simple problem: Claude Code is great, but it works sequentially. Complex features that touch auth, API, and frontend mean waiting through each step or dealing with merge conflicts.

This tool spawns parallel Claude sessions, each in its own git worktree with its own branch. Avoids merge conflicts.

Basic usage:

/spawn auth "implement login"
/spawn api "build REST endpoints"
/spawn tests "write test suite"

Each command opens a new iTerm tab, creates a worktree, and starts Claude with the task.

There's also a fully automated mode — an orchestrator loop that initializes workers, handles prompts, monitors CI, runs code reviews, and auto-merges when checks pass.

Technical details:
- macOS only (uses AppleScript for iTerm2 tab automation)
- Git worktrees for isolation
- State machine tracks worker progress (NEEDS_INIT → WORKING → PR_OPEN → MERGED)
- Built-in review agents before merge

Based on patterns from Boris Cherny (bcherny), who created Claude Code at Anthropic.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation.
by 0xy | 2026-01-11 18:14:24+00:00
Are you suggesting hitting a federal agent when not trying to hit them after fleeing a lawful order is not sufficient to show self defense?

She literally hit him. Gunning it towards an officer after being repeatedly asked to exit your vehicle, so you've racked up 2 felonies even before you hit the officer. Obstructing federal law enforcement and fleeing.
by nurettin | 2026-01-11 18:14:43+00:00
I remember implementing some of these

https://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr/sudoku/12rules.htm

With a simple array of unsigned int and bit operations like 20 years ago. It could solve a lot of puzzles within microseconds. Later I realized rules 1, 2, 5, 6 are pretty much the same.
by dhosek | 2026-01-11 18:15:14+00:00
The “loose” standards of HTML led to some really awful things happening in the early web. I remember seeing, e.g.,

<large><li></large> item text

to get a bigger bullet on a list item which worked fine in Netscape but broke other browsers (and since I was on OS/2 at the time, it was an issue for me).

Really, in 2025 people should just write XHTML and better yet, shouldn’t be generating HTML by hand at all except for borderline cases not handled by their tools.
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-11 18:15:56+00:00
> …I’m sure they exist somewhere as a prototype in someone’s public Github…

Coincidentally, the Spring of last year for fun I designed and built a Visual Studio Code extension that does something close to what one of the tools the OP talks about does.

Aside from needing the features of the extension itself, my second most important goal for that project was to see how well "Agentic Coding" could follow Sandro Mancuso's principles of "Outside-In TDD" (a/k/a the "London Style" of TDD) [1]

I'd give the coding agent credit for what it did well: It was stellar at helping me brainstorm a spec that was similar in intent and structure to the one for Mancuso's Bank Kata [2]

But when it came to following "Software Craftsmanship" best practices, this particular agent (Cody) convinced me that the jobs of software craftspeople at solution providers like Codurance are secure.

I admit my experience using AI coding agents is relatively lightweight. But I'm familiar enough to appreciate what they're good at.

However, I've yet to be convinced that Outside-In TDD is in most agents' wheelhouse.

[1] https://www.codurance.com/katas/bank

[2] https://github.com/sandromancuso/bank-kata-outsidein-screenc...
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-01-11 18:16:07+00:00
I call it silly because essentially I’m complaining that I don’t like setting up a service on an OS I don’t normally set up services for. My quibbles with that process can in part be addressed by crafting a terminal based workflow to configure the host and enable the service on my desktop, skipping the GUI completely. E.g. I’m sure I can do Task Scheduler shenanigans through powershell. More experience would help sand down the rough parts I experienced.

Now the product decisions behind the OS giving me the icks… The terminal can’t (completely) help with that ^_^
by graemep | 2026-01-11 18:16:19+00:00
> Any of the above moves (military bases, Visa/MC, ASML, etc) would make the US suffer, but it would collapse the EU

And many other places - most countries depend in US tech and increasingly so (recent NH stories about Vietnam mandating banks only use unrooted mobile phones). Just card payments not working would be an economic disaster. So would closing down all the businesses and services that rely on AWS, GCP and Azure. So would whatever the US chose to do through Apple, MS, and Google OSes.

> we'll all see how far Russia can project power. Not as far as they'd like, but enough to make life miserable in a half-dozen or more current-NATO countries. Which puts pressure on their neighbors of course. This would be a shooting war in the east, which would require central and western European countries to decide whether they want to spend blood and treasure to respond

I am more optimistic than you about this. Russia is struggling just against Ukraine. They might just invade the Baltic states but anything more would force Western Europe to commit and the Russians know this. Even in Ukraine they invaded because we had signalled we would do nothing by not responding to the previous invasion of Ukraine, to threats to invade and previous Russian invasions of other countries.

> The rhetoric here in the US is that RU and CN are waiting to pounce on Greenland already, and that if we don't, they will. I honestly don't know if there's even a shred of truth to that - RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance

If Greenland becomes independent in a few years time would it then become more of a threat?

> RU isn't strong enough to hold it, and CN can't project at that distance

China is building its armed forces, and there are ways of getting a country within your sphere if influence short of invasion.

> I wish wisdom, resilience, and peace, for all of us.

We all do but I think we are living in a new cold war.
by Edmond | 2026-01-11 18:17:04+00:00
Trying to bootstrap a PKI certificate trust chain for facilitating trust projection and information verification online. Think of it as the ability to do something such as age verification at scale via a peer-2-peer ish mechanism instead of sending your government id to a porno service.

We are experimenting with Keybase key holders as CAs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46576590

And also .gov email holders:

https://blog.certisfy.com/2025/12/using-gov-email-addresses-...

It's all self-service and requires no sign-up or download of anything, the app (https://certisfy.com/app) is an in-browser app and all the cryptography happens in the browser.
by jftuga | 2026-01-11 18:17:51+00:00
For my home lab, I built a 3 node Talos (from https://www.talos.dev/) cluster from older Dell Optiplex systems. I am using:

MetalLB - https://metallb.io/ load balancer

Traefik - https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/getting-started/quick-start-with-kubernetes/ ingress

Local Path - https://docs.apps.rancher.io/reference-guides/local-path-provisioner storage

Open to suggestions.