MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-02 09:05:37+00:00
Linux can't be a good desktop, almost by definition.

1. Look at commercial desktop OSes (Windows, MacOS). They spend hundreds of millions to develop and maintain the OS, do updates, quality assurance testing, working with hundreds of thousands of hardware vendors and enterprises, etc, just to try to not break things constantly. This is with "an ecosystem" that is one stack developed by one company. And even they can't get it right. Several Linux-Desktop companies have tried to mimic the commercial companies by not only custom-tailoring their own stack and doing QA, but sometimes even partnering on certified hardware. They're spending serious cash to try to do it right. But still there's plenty of bugs (go look at their issue trackers, community forums, package updates, etc) and no significant benefit over the competition.

2. There is no incentive for Linux to have consistency, quality, or a good UX. The incentive is to create free software that a developer wants. The entire ethos of the OSS community is, and has always been, I want the software, I make the software, you're welcome to use it too. And that's fine, for developers! But that's not how you make something regular people can use reliably and enjoyably. It's a hodge-podge of different solutions glued together. Which works up to a point, but then...

3. Eventually Linux desktop reaches a point where it doesn't work. The new mouse you bought's extra buttons don't work. Or the expensive webcam you bought can't be controlled because it requires a custom app only shipped on Windows/Mac. Or your graphics card's vendor uses proprietary firmware blobs causing bugs on only Linux for unknown reasons. Or your speakers sound like crap because they need a custom firmware blob loaded by the commercial OSes. Or your touchscreen can't be enabled/disabled because Wayland doesn't support the X extensions that used to allow that to work with xrandr. Or your need to look up obscure bootloader flags, edit the bootloader, and restart, to enable/disable some obscure fix for your hardware (lcd low power settings, acpi, disk controller, or any of a thousand other issues). Or, quite simply, the software you try to install just doesn't work; random errors are popping up, things are not working, and you don't know why. In any of these cases, your only hope is... to go on Reddit and ask for help from strangers. There's no customer support line. Your ISP ain't gonna help you. The Geek Squad just shrugs. You are on your own.

And this is the most frustrating part... the extremely nerdy core fan-group, like those on HN or Reddit, who are lucky enough not to be experiencing the problems unique to Linux, gaslight you and tell you all your problems are imagined or your fault.
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-02 09:05:47+00:00
I remember people welcoming Uber not because of the app, but because the idea "you'll know exactly how much the ride will cost you before you take it" was revolutionary at the time. Over here, what used to happen was that you order the taxi, the guy says "yeah I'll take you there it'll cost you $10" and then the bill was $20 and there was nothing you could do about it except pay. It was completely normal for taxis to scam people. So when Uber came and started scamming drivers, everyone cheered.

The point is, you're essentially right. It's just that before Uber customers were most likely victims of scams, while with Uber it's the drivers. As in, in a capitalistic market the scamming is always present, the question is who scams who.
by hugh1st | 2026-01-02 09:07:48+00:00
Hi HN, maker here.

I built a free, privacy-focused pixel avatar generator. It runs 100% in the browser (no server uploads) and requires no login.

It's designed for creating quick PFPs for Discord, GitHub, or gaming profiles. I tried to recreate that retro 8-bit aesthetic from old flash games.

Let me know what you think!
by xnorswap | 2026-01-02 09:07:51+00:00
Now let us suppose the squirrel is at the same distance as the man.

Has the man have gone around the squirrel and the squirrel around the man?

If it's only radii less than the other, where is the limit?

To get it I think I have to re-frame it like this:

If you hold out an object toward the centre, you clearly go around it when completing an orbit.

If you keep extending that to the origin but then go beyond, so your arm is longer than the radius, then you still go around it, until your arm reaches twice the radius.
by thyristan | 2026-01-02 09:07:54+00:00
"Benevolent" more in the sense of "currently unable to order the next massacre". The German unification only went ahead because soviet troops didn't intervene like they did in many prior instances:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Georgian_demonstrations

Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachev were not benevolence but necessary because the centralized power of the Soviet Union was dwindling. The SU became more and more occupied with fixing its own problems and could no longer hold together the Eastern Bloc by influence or force. Which is why the Eastern Bloc then slowly dissolved. This didn't start with the German unification, but earlier, and encompassed Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989

The SU (who are actually dominated by, but different from "the Russians") certainly would have liked to hold it together. And while under Yeltsin, there was a period of acceptance of the dissolution of the SU, currently Putin seems to want to revive it, at least in terms of territory.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-02 09:08:23+00:00
Propaganda ate your brain if you really believe BRICS is a real alliance or that it matches, or surpasses (sic!), G7.

> And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies

By… employing endless stream of their own meat and paying them obscene (locally) money.
Difference is that Ukraine fights for survival.

Reading your comment, I’m a bit confused about your moral compass. Would you also call Polish Armed Forces during WW2 “endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies” when they resisted numerically superior opponent?
by INTPenis | 2026-01-02 09:08:53+00:00
You don't.

I had a similar co-worker 12 years ago. He was a wonderful person, very positive, always nice to deal with, but he clearly had dyslexia. He would type in passwords wrong in our password manager. And he was in charge of our backups so once it came time to restore a backup you discover that none of the passwords work.

He had a terrible track record, so bad that he was passed over for the annual salary bump, he eventually quit and became a middle manager at another company.
by victorbjorklund | 2026-01-02 09:08:59+00:00
It takes me almost equal time to manage a Kubernetes cluster with 10 nodes as with 100 nodes. If I have to spend say 5 hours per month and with a cost of say 100 usd/hour it means it cost 500 usd/month to manage. If leaving cloud saves say 100 usd/node from 200 usd/node it means for a small company its cost would be (10100)+500=1500 usd/month which is a cost reduction of 25%. For a large company it would be greater (100100)+500=10500 which means a 47.5% savings. Do you see why the savings are greater with scale?
by snakeboy | 2026-01-02 09:10:09+00:00
The post is just about doctors, but I hear similar arguments about professors (in the US, at least). These two fields attract the greatest minds and most dedicated souls to do actually important work for society (compared to those great minds going to Silicon Valley or Wall Street), and we pile all kinds of extra busy-work on to their plates that could be done by any replacable wage employee.

It enrages me to think that a single second of Terry Tao's ~80 years on our planet is wasted to bureaucratic nonsense rather than teaching and researching.
by leptons | 2026-01-02 09:10:28+00:00
>Also, why would your company cut off its nose to spite its face?

That seems like victim blaming. Apple is the tyrant here.

> If using Bluetooth is a customer requirement (as opposed to merely a “nice to have”), why wouldn’t you go to the lengths to provide an app for them?

Because then have to hire an iOS developer and pay for everything to develop an app, which Apple can then use to extort a percentage of sales for anything purchased through the app. Or I have to write the app myself, and I'm already working 18 hours a day. FUCK THAT. Not going to happen. Apple users will always be second class citizens to me as long as Apple treats other browsers like second class citizens and forbids other browser engines. Making an iOS app isn't a clear pathway to riches, so Apple users will just have to use a more clunky wifi experience. That's just the way it is.
by leptons | 2026-01-02 09:10:33+00:00
I don't really care what Firefox does. They get paid massively by Google, so who knows what their motivations are for what they do. Opera implements the same APIs in their browser, but that also doesn't work on iOS because Apple are dicks and force Safari on Opera too.

>Not on the formal standards track.

What a coincidence, Apple gets to vote on what the "formal standards track" is, and they have voted against anything that would hurt their app business.

>But go on assuming it's all about being anticompetitive...

Okay... Apple are anticompetitive and always have been. They forbid their OS from being installed on any hardware that isn't manufactured by Apple, even though it was easily possible to do. Their walled garden is very famous for being anticompetitive - banning any browser from using their own browser engine and forcing Safari is absolutely anti-competitive.

You know what? Just go fucking read the DOJ antitrust suit against Apple, it details the very many ways Apple is anti-competitive:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

But I bet you won't.
by leptons | 2026-01-02 09:10:37+00:00
Firefox gets paid by Google. A lot. Maybe part of their agreement is to not implement some features because it would compete with Chrome. I don't really know, and I don't really care what Firefox does or doesn't do. I only care that Apple does not allow other browsers to use their own browser engines. Opera mobile also implements the APIs I need (on Android). Even MS Edge supports the APIs. Firefox can join Apple in being lame, I don't really care.
by phito | 2026-01-02 09:11:24+00:00
So we're reposting fake reddit engagement bait posts here now? Come on, this is barely credible. Even if it seemed credible, this is not how you whistleblow effectively.

To be clear I'm not trying to defend these companies, they suck and getting fast food delivered at home is stupid. But the way the post is clearly written by someone with surface level technical knowledge, passed through a LLM. And the provide absolutely no evidence.
by benterix | 2026-01-02 09:11:38+00:00
> Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war.

OK, let's play this game. The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada. (I use this example because we know Russians were influencing the elections in the USA.)

A simply more unsettling conclusion from thsi narrative is that if there is a causal link indeed, and Ukraine taking a pro-EU direction can cause a regime change in Russia, it means that the basis of the latter is very weak - so weak it has to start the war to prevent its fall.
by sudosays | 2026-01-02 09:11:57+00:00
This tickled my brain in a nice way.

I'm probably butchering this, but in my mind it is something like:

1. From the squirrels frame of reference and local coordinate system, the man has remained "in front" of the squirrel. The squirrel is orienting and rotating in sync with the man and therefore has not observed that the man has "gone round" it.

2. From our perspective (and on reflection from the man), the man has circled the squirrel in the global coordinate system of the scene.

As the reader we assume that our perspective is the authoritative one, but I am sure the squirrel disagrees.
by tpoacher | 2026-01-02 09:11:59+00:00
just because there's nothing particularly wrong with only getting the usb in on the 3rd try doesn't mean it's not a minor inconvenience worth resolving.

but if you want a more dramatic example, it's right there in the text: Moylan got soaked because of this inconvenience. if he'd gotten a pneumonia as a result of this and died, then that is suddenly much more than a minor inconvenience.
by ifh-hn | 2026-01-02 09:13:31+00:00
Context: severely dyslexic and have a visual stress thing too; both diagnosed, both late in life.

With that out the way. This person, unless completely not self aware, knows they can't spell and are making mistakes.

It's just a fact. Tell them to slow down and double check their work because they're making mistakes. Offer support and point them in the direction of help as appropriate per company guidelines.

But at the end of the day if they're causing issues, they're causing issues and they need to know. It's something they need to adapt to, not you to them.

You cannot engineer your way around this specific person's faults (for want of a better word). You'd have to do the same for the next person who was making mistakes.

TL;DR

Be up front and tell them they are making mistakes and need to improve. Offer support as required.
by masklinn | 2026-01-02 09:13:42+00:00
> I don't feel you're quite following what I'm saying unfortunately.

Disagreeing with your plainly incorrect assertion is not "not following" what you're saying.

> In your specific example: couldn't the optimizer just optimize out all the mutations you've written, under the assumption that such a program would not have passed borrow-checking and thus isn't a case it needs to handle?

No. The borrow checker ensures specific rules are followed, the borrow checker is not the rules themselves, and the optimisations are based on the underlying rules not on the borrow checker.

The program above abides by the underlying rules, it's literally the sort of examples used by people working on the next generation borrow checker, but the current borrow checker is not able to understand that.

> This seems like an entirely legal and sane optimization

It's neither of those things.

> You seem to be operating on some (generous) underlying assumptions about what a borrow-checker-violating Rust program really means and what optimizations the compiler has the liberty to make even when borrow-checker assumptions are violated. But are you sure that assumption is well-founded? What is it formally based on?

They are not assumptions, or generous. They are an understanding of the gap between the capabilities of the NLL borrow checker and "Behavior considered undefined".

They are what anyone working on the borrow checker sees as limitations of the borrow checker (some fixable, others intrinsic).
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-01-02 09:14:37+00:00
I like the text. A few additions: not everyone has to have children. Not all of us have the opportunity to do so. It is possible to live a fulfilling life even if you have not brought children into the world. If you do not have children and it is foreseeable that you will not have any, do not let anyone convince you that you are doomed to a marginal existence. A child does not only need parents. It also needs other adults: uncles, aunts, neighbors, teachers, etc. Children need a healthy society, and everyone who contributes to this is contributing to the well-being of children. For my taste, the text also lacks a political component. Parenting is not just a personal project. It is also a service to society. The parents of a child are raising a person who will participate productively in the economy of the future. It annoys me that this is treated as a free side effect. When you realize this connection, parenthood as an imperative for personal fulfillment takes on a strong ideological connotation. The fact that so many people remain childless today is a failure at the societal level and should not be compensated for by appeals at the individual level.
by Etheryte | 2026-01-02 09:15:17+00:00
For me, this is the holy grail. Every time I switch laptops, I lift all my config files and such over, but there's always so many system level configs and other things that you have to go and manually fiddle. On top of that, some apps don't really behave well when you just move config files to e.g. under a different username etc. Would be nice if there was a comprehensive solution to this problem, need to try nix-darwin out.
by olalonde | 2026-01-02 09:15:32+00:00
Some of this seems plausible—even expected—but other parts feel implausible. It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does literally nothing. Optimizing payouts down to the lowest amount drivers will accept, on the other hand, is entirely believable. Also, given Uber's well-known microservice architecture, it seems unlikely that a random backend engineer would have deep insight across multiple independent systems, including money flows. My guess is that this was written by a real employee who took some liberties with the truth.
by nicbou | 2026-01-02 09:15:38+00:00
Germany has a tendency to wish something into existence with a law, and stop there. No guidelines, no tools, no enforcement. Often not a thought about feasibility. Nothing past the press release.

Sometimes a law will be in effect for two or three years and virtually no one will even know about it. Recycling electronics in supermarkets? Nope. E-Rechnung mandated for all B2B invoices? In your dreams.

I work at the other end of the spectrum, reducing friction for new immigrants to Germany. I find it especially frustrating. I could explain how things should be, but it would be pointless when reality is far more disappointing.
by GlobalChubby | 2026-01-02 09:16:08+00:00
Software Engineer (10 YOE) | Backend/Infrastructure

Spent the last 5 years at Google building and operating critical services with massive scale. I designed and shipped distributed monitoring systems (a global, sharded streaming pipeline), migrated a huge global, sharded database to safe rollout automation, and shipped code in Go, Python and C++, both internal tooling, as well as instrumenting / adding features to user-facing binaries serving many QPS. Before that, moved fast at startups and mid-sized US companies. Now seeking: Backend or infrastructure engineering roles where I can build resilient systems that matter. Strong preference for companies with meaningful mission, but open to any team with high ownership culture.

Location: Currently Japan, relocating to US (PNW preferred) or remote
Remote: Open to remote or hybrid
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Golang (current focus), Python, C++, Kubernetes, protocol buffers, PostgresQL, AWS, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, batch / streaming pipelines...More than the specific technologies, I think it's important to know what questions to ask of it, its limitations, and how to pick up anything.
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EP4ME2XGhXWFRhf77pgPE6bSlqr... (PII removed)
Email: sapien.reversing.entropy@gmail.com
by gethly | 2026-01-02 09:16:29+00:00
I am surprised engineers have not been leaking information like this more. Like waaay waaay more. Especially youtube, due to its reach and history of adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0 and others. Google as whole and the big daddy - Facebook, who has been proven to run psychological experiments on selected samples of population and scamming advertisers. I do not buy that NDA bullshit. That has nothing to do with ethics. I am frankly quite disappointed in people working in IT nowadays that they just keep on grinding with these manipulative and exploitative companies and their policies and agendas. I actually have way more respect for an engineer whom is writing code for ballistic missiles than people working in these big tech companies. Sure, the salary is nice, but how much does it take to sell your soul? I am not being spiritual or religious here but rather looking at it from one own's psyche point of view and long term health effects of doing work like this, despite the big bucks at the end of the month.
by leptons | 2026-01-02 09:16:34+00:00
>First, are you a security expert? If so, please provide your bona fides.

Nice goalpost move. I'm not playing that game with you.

>Apple employs some of the brightest software and hardware security experts in the business.

And yet Safari still gets hacked.

From the DOJ lawsuit:

16. Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to
justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to
promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumers’ privacy and security
interests. Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in
Apple’s own financial interest—such as degrading the security of text messages, offering
governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app
stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine
when more private options are available. In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security
justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and
business interests.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

>If they perceive handling out JIT capabilities to apps as risky, I believe them. You, on the other hand, come with no evidence to the contrary other than a bare assertion.

You are influenced by the reality distortion field, that much is clear, no conversation can be had with a cult member. Have a nice day.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-02 09:16:44+00:00
I avoid ad supported apps, so if those devs move to companies that I support, it might actually help me?

If it damages the the OS, that’s a problem for me on a Mac/ios but not so much with Ubuntu.

It’s not that long ago that I was paying for OS updates (that seems wild, I had to go and check). If it went back to that and I had no ads, it would be a straight win.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-02 09:17:09+00:00
I probably sound like a hipster or something, but it really feels like many people are finally catching up to the way I've been working for the past 15 years.

I fully switched to GNU/Linux back then and have never looked back. Initially I was quite evangelical but got tired of it and gave up probably around 10 years ago thinking "oh well, their loss". But slowly more and more of the world has switched over, first servers, then developer workstations and now finally just "normal" users.

Similarly, I've always been hugely invested into my tools and have a strong distaste for manual labour. I often watch how others work and can't believe how slow and inefficient it is. Typing up repetitive syntax every time, copy/pasting huge blocks of code, performing repetitive actions when booting their PC etc. I simply haven't been doing this for my whole career, I've been writing scripts, using clever editors, using programming languages to their fullest etc.

I think this is why LLMs don't seem like such the huge breakthrough to me as they do to others. I wasn't doing this stuff manually before, that's ridiculous. I don't need to generate globs of code because I already know how to get the computer to do it for me, and I know how to do that in a sustainable and maintainable way too. It's sad that LLMs are giving people their first real sense of control, when it's actually been available for a very long by now, and in a way that you can actually own it, rather than paying for a service that might be taken away at any moment.