MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2026-01-01 22:27:15+00:00
Other concerns:

1) How many bits and bobs of like, GPLed or proprietary code are finding their way into the LLM's output? Without careful training, this is impossible to eliminate, just like you can't prevent insect parts from finding their way into grain processing.

2) Proompt injection is a doddle to implement—malicious HTML, PDF, and JPEG with "ignore all previous instructions" type input can pop many current models. It's also very difficult to defend against. With agents running higgledy-piggledy on people's dev stations (container discipline is NOT being practiced at many shops), who knows what kind of IDs and credentials are being lifted?
by roywiggins | 2026-01-01 22:27:41+00:00
I'm especially suspicious of the handwriting analysis. It seems like the kind of thing a vLLM would be pretty bad at doing and very good at convincingly faking for non-experts.

Gemini 3 Pro, eg, fails very badly at reading the Braille in this image, confusing the English language text for the actual Braille. When you give it just the Braille, it still fails and confidently hallucinates a transcription badly enough that you don't even have to know Braille (I don't!) to see it's wrong.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/dullmensclub/posts/18885933484...

As far as I can tell, Gemini 3 Pro is still completely out of its depth and incapable of understanding Braille at all, and doesn't realize this.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-01 22:27:46+00:00
"Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth."

Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.

MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
by thrance | 2026-01-01 22:27:49+00:00
1) It's not. In fact, most scholars agree these numbers are way lower than the real one, as those are only the confirmed deaths.

2) Source? The only places where I can read about it are in far right Israeli or American communications.

3) Source? It seems like Israel was interested in labelling UNRWA as a terrorist organization at some point, but there is no evidence to back up their claim. After all, the IDF is known to shoot at journalists and humanitarian aid workers in their strategy to starve Gaza, so it makes sense they would try to discredit the org.

4) I can't find what you're talking about.

I think it would be more honest if you simply stated that you are fine with the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, rather that argue about who started what while ignoring the century that Israel's settler-colonial project has existed. This isn't country vs country, this is well-funded colonizer vs colonyzee. More akin to the American expansion over natives territory. Did native American attacks back then justify the US in killing them all? Of course not. Same thing here.

Hamas's existence is at least explainable (if not excusable) in the light of a Palestinian population that feared for its lives, and was vindicated in the last few years in thinking that Israel was out to kill them all. Because it is.
by bink | 2026-01-01 22:27:49+00:00
The government also doesn't let people conduct sensitive or classified conversations over un-certified protocols or devices. Unless the NSA was participating in the bluetooth encryption standards decisions they aren't going to allow those devices to be used by the President or VP. IMHO though, it's probably more that there were security trade-offs made when developing the standards and the government isn't OK with those types of trade-offs. It doesn't mean they're horrible, just that they aren't verified to be secure enough for sensitive governmental purposes.
by voidfunc | 2026-01-01 22:28:00+00:00
> I just really don't see a way that Russia takes any NATO territory without the entire thing being a psyop against NATO not responding via far-right isolationists, and we're not there yet, or as an assist to help China take Taiwan, which likely means world war, and we're all fucked.

I mean that's really the setup.

1. Get America to move towards a more isolationist setup / unwilling to help Europe or Taiwan. This is already in motion politically and via social media operations.

2. Get America stuck in a conflict with Iran. This is ramping up.

3. China takes Taiwan. Probably in the next 2-5 years.

4. Russia takes the Baltics and starts to carve further into Europe.

My further total crackpot theory on all of this is that most of this has been agreed upon by all the major powers involved.

1. Russia gets to claim over Europe in the future.

2. China gets Taiwan and control of Africa + APAC.

3. US gets control of North America and South America. This culminates in the annexation of Greenland once Russia takes Europe. This is the agreed upon transaction for America to back out of Russo-European affairs and China-Taiwan affairs. Canada and Mexico eventually are also merged into the US unwillingly but without any major allies left there isn't much to prevent it.
by nine_k | 2026-01-01 22:28:14+00:00
But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%.

The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.

This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-01 22:28:15+00:00
Uh, you'd have to compile a Kernel that doesn't allow it while claiming it does ... And behaves as if it does - otherwise you'd just fail the check, no?

I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of
by hodgehog11 | 2026-01-01 22:28:16+00:00
Not the OP, but I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and a desktop PC both running Linux. I love Fedora, so that's on the desktop, but I followed online recommendations to put Mint on the Macbook and it seems to run very well. However, I did need to install mbpfan (https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan) to get more sane power options and this package (https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd) to get the camera working. It runs better than Mac OS, but you'll need to really tweak some power settings to get it to the efficiency of the older Mac versions.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-01 22:28:47+00:00
> without it I cannot function in a work environment.

This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.

Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.

As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).

One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-01 22:28:50+00:00
Oh yes, they are.

And beyond people claiming that LLMs are basically sentient you have people like CamperBob2 who made this wild claim:

"""There's no such thing as people without language, except for infants and those who are so mentally incapacitated that the answer is self-evidently "No, they cannot."

Language is the substrate of reason. It doesn't need to be spoken or written, but it's a necessary and (as it turns out) sufficient component of thought."""

Let that sink. They literally think that there's no such thing as people without language. Talk about a wild and ignorant take on life in general!
by eastbound | 2026-01-01 22:28:59+00:00
I imagine lonely men seeing you playing basketball together on the street and thinking “How come I never make friends”…

> how, for dad’s in particular, there is a massive need for this

- Yes

- And also for single men at 45, because everyone’s busy and they feel like a failure for not having a family (meanwhile having a family is such an incredible performance)

- Teens. There is a massive loneliness epidemic among teens. At least we 40-year-olds have had friends before. But the iphonocene (the era of smart phones) has created a generation of people whose friends were always, constantly, busy with phones.

We play a game (whichyr.com) were we guess the year of random pictures. The first criteria is whether people are bent while walking. Not bent: pre-2013. Bent on the phone: Post-2013. It’s not the invention of the phone, it’s the usage of it.
by merlincorey | 2026-01-01 22:29:00+00:00
Interesting and thanks for clarifying that aspect. I have a few more questions if you would be able to answer any of them at any level of detail I would appreciate it.

How much would you be willing to pay to continue using Claude on a monthly basis before you stopped?

Do you currently maintain the new (as of two weeks ago) cash reserve to ensure it continues working when limits are reached and how much do you reserve for said reserve?

Finally, do you send your customer's code or data directly to Claude or do you use it indirectly on generic stuff and then manually specialize the outputs?
by machomaster | 2026-01-01 22:29:03+00:00
Looking at the genetically elite people in a magazine, imagining that self can become just as good if only by using steroids, is beyond dumb.

Imagine thinking that the only thing stopping self of become a new Michael Jordan is lack of access to dynamite attached to feet (in order to jump higher).

The dynamite aspect is not the biggest stupidity, even deciding to compare self to elite athletes is moronic. Use celebrities as inspiration, not as a manual.

Ordinary people thinking that they need steroids to look like celebrities is wild for many reasons. For one, no amount of steroids in the world is going to help an average ordinary person to be like people in magazines, let alone compete against elite (with or without steroids).
by IvanK_net | 2026-01-01 22:29:03+00:00
Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.

Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
by xp84 | 2026-01-01 22:29:16+00:00
Look, I agree that Safari sucks, but with or without the AI overview (which I don’t believe is Gemini, rather that is a very cheap and dumb model that’s been told to summarize a few top results), linking to a search is not a strong debating technique. I could link to a search for “Safari has the best technology” and it would have the same zero value.
by tkiolp4 | 2026-01-01 22:29:21+00:00
HN is so depressing, but at the same time so Im addicted to it. It’s like tiktok but for people who enjoy plain text and hacking related stuff. When I first visited HN more than 10 years ago (without account) like, 90% of the content was exciting and you got to learn something. Nowadays it’s about 40-50%, and the rest is crap (including comments). I have been trying to leave HN, let’s see if I can do it in 2026.
by amlib | 2026-01-01 22:29:39+00:00
Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.

Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
by xboxnolifes | 2026-01-01 22:29:51+00:00
The competitive CS leagues do use AC though. The big issue for these games is the free-to-play model does not work without anti-cheat. Having a ~$20 fee to cheat for a while before getting banned significantly reduces the number of cheaters, and that's what CS does with their prime server model.

And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Valorant is the most played competitive shooter at the moment.
by sudo_and_pray | 2026-01-01 22:30:07+00:00
This time there 2 big factors that were not there in '12.

1. 'office' cloud services - now you just need a browser for majority of docs/sheet/slides tasks

2. gaming - while it was possible back, but it was really hit or miss with a game. Nowadays vast majority of games work on Linux out of the box.
by rolph | 2026-01-01 22:30:40+00:00
anticheat is not a linux issue, its a developers issue.
it seems facially easy to solve. pair players with the type of game they want.

turn on anticheat if you want to join no cheat sessions.

if you want a cheat game turn off anticheat and you join sessions with other cheat players.

the whole dilemma comes out of malignant users that enjoy destruction of other users ability to enjoy the game.
go nuclear on clients that manage to join anticheat sessions with cheats turned on.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-01 22:30:43+00:00
If you only travel to North America and Europe you’d never know but I went to South America and India and the former mostly had Chinese cars and the latter had big ads for a BYD MPV everywhere in Bangalore.

So the Chinese car makers are popular outside the West. I drove a couple of Changan cars and they weren’t even as nice as my Subaru in terms of handling but they functioned well as cars.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-01 22:30:53+00:00
> Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money?

Yes. Remember Woz had no money and no computer and still wrote Apple Basic. He wrote it in a notebook and hand-assembled it. An 8 bit Basic can be written in about 2K bytes.

I designed and built a 6800 computer in 1978, and wrote the software for it all in asm (the result was a VT-100 terminal workalike). I did have an assembler available which certainly made me more productive, but it was still small enough to do by hand. There were only 40 instructions or so in the 6800, and after a while one inadvertently had them memorized. You could hand assemble them as fast as you could write. In those days I wrote code asm in pencil in a spiral notebook.

What made Gates & Allen special was not their families, but their ability to see the opportunity that everyone else missed. When the MITS computer was the front page on Popular Science magazine, Allen saw it and ran to Gates exclaiming that this was the opportunity they were looking for, and they needed to get to work on it immediately.
by mchonedev | 2026-01-01 22:30:56+00:00
This is absolutely possible but likely not desirable for a large enough population of customers such that current LLM inference providers don't offer it. You can get closer by lowering a variable, temperature. This is typically a floating point number 0-1 or 0-2. The lower this number, the less noise in responses, but a 0 still does not result in identical responses due to other variability.

In response to the idea of iterative development, it is still possible, actually! You run something more akin to integration tests and measure the output against either deterministic processes or have an LLM judge it's own output. These are called evals and in my experience are a pretty hard requirement to trusting deployed AI.
by bitanarch | 2026-01-01 22:31:52+00:00
I don't have a Dell U2725QE, but on InnoCN 27M2V and Cooler Master GP27U there's no ABGR2101010 support. These monitors would only work with ARGB2101010 or XRGB2101010 which nVidia drivers do not provide.

Here's what I'm getting on both monitors, with HDR enabled on Gnome 49:
https://imgur.com/a/SCyyZWt

Maybe you're lucky with the Dell. But as I understand, HDR playback on Chrome is still broken.
by phronmophobic | 2026-01-01 22:32:14+00:00
I did consider that. I think it's possible, but there are a few challenges:

- It's much harder for components in separate processes to share data efficiently

- Window managers tend to be OS dependent. I want something that is cross-platform

- Coordinating components in separate, asynchronous processes is hard

- Working with OS window APIs is more annoying than writing a layout library
by buu700 | 2026-01-01 22:32:38+00:00
I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.

Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
by scoofy | 2026-01-01 22:32:59+00:00
The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place. The place is wildly vulnerable on all sides despite the short distance to Belarus. This isn't a "the Kerch Bridge is outside of missle range" situation. Literally every way in and out of the enclave can be exploded on a daily basis, even without striking the enclave itself.

So if the idea is to invade the Baltics, but "not allow an invasion of Kaliningrad, without nuclear retaliation"... well then we've going to have a nuclear war and everyone loses, simply because you can't retake the Baltics without Kaliningrad, and NATO isn't going to allow the Baltics to be lost.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-01 22:33:29+00:00
> His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.

IBM gave Gary Kildall the opportunity first. Gary whiffed the deal, and then IBM went to Gates. Gary Kildall did not have a wealthy background, and he became quite wealthy off of CP/M.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-01 22:34:24+00:00
> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?

No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-01 22:34:47+00:00
it is your critique that does not make sense. I was not applying any hierarchy or subsetting whatsoever. Inseparable unity would be closer to the point.

I was making the point that the cave painters believed everything including rocks and trees were deeply invested with spiritual power, and they didn't draw a cave painting without investing it with spiritual ideas. Even if one of their goals was to capture an accurate image of some animals, and indicate when in the lunar or solar cycle they were expected to calve, when they went hunting for one a part of the goal would be cut out its heart and eat it raw because of the power contained within, and give thanks to the great mother. Inseparable.

even though I am not spiritual at all, I find your worldview too barren to explain human endeavor.
by hparadiz | 2026-01-01 22:35:59+00:00
Well yeah but then eBPF would not work and then the anti cheat could just show that it's not working and lock you out.

This isn't complicated.

Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-01 22:36:00+00:00
There are quite a few studies to refute this highly ignorant comment. I'd suggest some reading [0].

From the abstract:
"Is thought possible without language? Individuals with global aphasia, who have almost no ability to understand or produce language, provide a powerful opportunity to find out. Astonishingly, despite their near-total loss of language, these individuals are nonetheless able to add and subtract, solve logic problems, think about another person’s thoughts, appreciate music, and successfully navigate their environments. Further, neuroimaging studies show that healthy adults strongly engage the brain’s language areas when they understand a sentence, but not when they perform other nonlinguistic tasks like arithmetic, storing information in working memory, inhibiting prepotent responses, or listening to music. Taken together, these two complementary lines of evidence provide a clear answer to the classic question: many aspects of thought engage distinct brain regions from, and do not depend on, language."

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/
by ltbarcly3 | 2026-01-01 22:36:04+00:00
The internet was never good. The feeling that it used to be good is just the creation of a golden age myth, it's just nostalgia. It was exciting because you were young and it was new, but the reality is the internet was almost useless. If you had to log into the internet circa 1997 or even 2002 right now you would have fun for about 2 hours, but it would be the "hey remember this?" kind of fun, then you would realize there was nothing worth doing and go do something else.
by mal10c | 2026-01-01 22:36:47+00:00
I agree with your thought process. Factoring in antenna type and reflections also causes difficulties when explaining concepts like super position. The sinusoid is a good illustration of what a given receiver might detect at some location (X,Y,Z). A more accurate way to show that may be a light source fading on and off to match some frequency (below THz). Then factoring in the speed of light, at time zero, the light will be off, at some arbitrary time 1, the light will be illuminated at 0.25 (scale goes up to 1 here). The light energy peak at time 1 is at the light. Then at time 2, the light goes up to 0.5. That means that the 0.25 light is now 1 unit away from the light while the 0.5 is at the light. Step to time 3 and the light goes up to 0.75, meaning 1 unit from the light, the light is at 0.5 and 2 units from the light, the light is dimmer at 0.25. This repeats with the light hitting 1.0 then falling back to 0.75, then 0.5, etc. The movement of light is key and I think that's what is often either misunderstood or just not considered enough.
by epistasis | 2026-01-01 22:37:00+00:00
It's not just Ubuntu, Arch is just as bad. The primary problem is systemd, which provided an adequate OOMd for daemons, but then all the distributions seem to be using it for interactively launched processes

If anybody can help me out with a better solution with a modern distribution, that's about 75% of the reason I'm posting. But it's been a major pain and all the GitHub issues I have encountered on it show a bug resistance to having better behavior like is the default for MacOS, Windows, or older Linux.