MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2026-01-28 16:25:24+00:00
> Apple software can be quite opinionated, those who fight against those opinions tend to have a hard time. This is true of any opinionated software.

And this is why many like me prefer Linux. We have our own opinions, and Linux enables us to enforce our opinions.

I've been a Linux guy for 25 years, and used Windows at work for the last 15. I now have to use MacOS at work.

I miss Windows. It wasn't totally better, but I managed to overcome most Windows headaches with workarounds. I haven't found the alternatives yet to MacOS.

From my perspective, both Windows and MacOS suck - but in different ways. I think the problem many Linux folks have with MacOS is that it is the "uncanny valley" of Linux. You get happy that you can use your usual UNIX flows, and then you find out that you can't.

I really want a good tiling window manager. I have yet to find one on MacOS that has the features AwesomeWM have.

It really sucks not being able to rebind keys to use Ctrl instead of Cmd in many apps. For basic tasks (opening/closing browser tabs), I have to use one set of keys in the daytime (at work), and another at night (at home). Why won't MacOS let me change them?
by apercu | 2026-01-28 16:25:52+00:00
I agree, and we might be seeing this but there is so much noise, so many other factors, and we're in the midst of capital re-asserting control after a temporary loss of leverage which might also be part of a productivity boost (people are scared so they are working harder).

The issue is that I'm not a professional financial analyst and I can't spend all day on comps so I can't tell through the noise yet if we're seeing even 2x related to AI.

But, if we're seeing 10x, I'd be finding it in the financials. Hell, a blind squirrel would, and it's simply not there.
by jajuuka | 2026-01-28 16:26:02+00:00
This isn't about the small group of people who lack self control. It's about the vast majority that can use something responsibly. Most people can consume alcohol and gamble without giving their lives to it.

Not to mention this presupposes that social media addiction is rampant. But there isn't a scientific consensus on that. This lawsuit reads like scaremongering of the past around television and comic books. Instead of regulating content or user privacy we get these dog and pony shows.
by jkubicek | 2026-01-28 16:26:09+00:00
Good rule of thumb: it should take less time to consume content than it does to create it.

I don’t know how long it takes Ciechanowski to create these explainers, probably a few months? It shows and it’s well worth spending your time reading through his content meticulously.

How long does it take for an LLM to crap out an equivalent explainer? 60 seconds? You should be spending less time than that reading it.
by mattdeboard | 2026-01-28 16:26:14+00:00
My work-issued dev device is a Surface Pro 10. I can't use WSL2 for various regulatory reasons. I will never, ever work on software like this again. Worst development experience of my life because of what a miserable dev env windows is.

I know that's been a meme since forever, but my first hand experience supports it to the extreme.
by habitable5 | 2026-01-28 16:26:25+00:00
> Windows 10 went EOL

Kinda. But LTSC IoT is still on until 2032.

Another very important feature which does not get mentioned enough is Ubuntu launching Ubuntu Pro in 2022 which has an ordinary-user-affordable support option where $150 a year gets you what they call "full support" with a four hour ticket response time on weekdays. My time is way too valuable to deal with the driver problems Linux always has, community support is often best described as "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" -- I once had a problem with a peripheral and people directed me to the Arch Wiki page that I wrote. I stopped using Linux as my main eight years ago and have been on W10/WSL since. I am considering Linux main in May when I get my new laptop if there's commercial support backing me up. I reached out to them with my list of current hardware and they didn't reply yet :( which doesn't bode well.

Example: Thunderbolt networking. Is there a kernel module for it? Yes. Is there experience with it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by phplovesong | 2026-01-28 16:26:41+00:00
Tell me where the slop is distrubuted on? Its 99% Social media, fake news sites, propaganda like fox or any russian "news site" or some combo of the above.

If we dont have any of the above the propaganda or AI slop is just not worth it.

This is why having small focused MODERATED communities is the only viable future.
by ppseafield | 2026-01-28 16:26:42+00:00
The argument Socrates is making is specifically that writing isn't a substitute for thinking, but it will be used as such. People will read things "without instruction" and claim to understand those things, even if they do not. This is a trade-off of writing. And the same thing is happening with LLMs in a widespread manner throughout society: people are having ChatGPT generate essays, exams, legal briefs and filings, analyses, etc., and submitting them as their own work. And many of these people don't understand what they have generated.

Writing's invention is presented as an "elixir of memory", but it doesn't transfer memory and understanding directly - the reader must still think to understand and internalize information. Socrates renames it an "elixir of reminding", that writing only tells readers what other people have thought or said. It can facilitate understanding, but it can also enable people to take shortcuts around thinking.

I feel that this is an apt comparison, for example, for someone who has only ever vibe-coded to an experienced software engineer. The skill of reading (in Socrates's argument) is not equivalent to the skill of understanding what is read. Which is why, I presume, the GP posted it in response to a comment regarding fear of skill atrophy - they are practicing code generation but are spending less time thinking about what all of the produced code is doing.
by ben_w | 2026-01-28 16:26:59+00:00
An irrelevant distinction.

The problem is that America returned power to a doubly-impeached, 34x convicted felon, where there were circulated photos of the boxes of unlawfully retained government documents he's stored in his bathroom and on the stage of a ballroom, and who was already known to hate all useful international institutions and who was already distainful anyone else's sovreignty.

That he added to this after the second election with the tariffs, visible corruption, sucking up to murderers, endangering our (by which, as a non-American, I mean every other nation's) security both directly and indirectly with both suggestions of military force against allies and also of refusing to aid allies when called for, plus all the ICE stuff we can see… that costs the US a lot of trust even if you can't reasonably blame the US electorate directly for failing to see that so clearly ahead of the actual vote.

All the second paragraph stuff though? That the electorate should've know from before the reelection? That should've had him in prison for the rest of his life, possibly even due to the stuff we heard about selling state secrets and under 18 U.S.C. § 794 getting on death row (which I disaprove of as a principle and call for the abolition of, but you in the US do have it), not returned to the oval office.
by kaydub | 2026-01-28 16:27:00+00:00
I haven't used it because there's been absolutely no reason to even try again. I jumped on copilot when it first came out. I had a personal account and they got us subscriptions at work. It was the first LLM/AI tool I dropped. It was around 2 months ago they dropped our subscriptions at work too.

I only have an IDE open these days to review, maybe update a config or parameter on occasion.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-28 16:27:08+00:00
Excuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.

Global economy doesn't look that terrible. Nor is the AI story that believable. Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? All the guys at Aspen talking about what fraction they cut, just as 5 years ago they bragged how bloated their org chart is?

TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects.

But if that's really it, no idea.
by kleiba | 2026-01-28 16:27:25+00:00
The one phrase I've come to despise is "entrepreneurial risk", especially when it's used to justify exorbitant salaries of the higher ranks. Because, really, that "risk" for the most part is trickled down to the peasants who get laid off at a heartbeat whenever business is bad. They're not people with families and liabilities and lives, they're commodities.

I'd say your risk of losing your livelihood is higher as a simple employee than as a CEO when we're talking about post-startup companies.
by ajross | 2026-01-28 16:27:36+00:00
> There are at least a dozen very stable and reliable distros

Exactly. "WTF?! There are a dozen distributions?!" Users love customization and choice when they understand it. No one wants to be confused. The Linux desktop world is a confusing mess right now.

Also note that the distinction between "very stable and reliable" and "hey guys I made a OS!" is only obvious to people who know how the distro is put together.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-28 16:27:36+00:00
I suggested this as a possible solution in another HN thread a while back, but along the lines of "If a bank wants me to have a secure, locked down terminal to do business with them, then they should be the ones forking it over, not commanding control of my owned personal device."

It would quickly get out of hand if every online service started to do the same though. But, if remote device attestation continues to be pushed and we continue to have less and less control and ownership over our devices, I definitely see a world where I now carry two phones. One running something like GrapheneOS, connected to my own self-hosted services, and a separate "approved" phone to interact with public and essential services as they require crap like play integrity, etc.

But at the end of the day, I still fail see why this is even a need. Governments, banks, other entities have been providing services over the web for decades at this point with little issue. Why are we catering to tech illiteracy (by restricting ownership) instead of promoting tech education and encouraging people to both learn, and importantly, take responsibility for their own actions and the consequences of those actions.

"Someone fell for a scam and drained their bank account" isn't a valid reason to start locking down everyone's devices.
by Levitating | 2026-01-28 16:27:55+00:00
I don't just mean the types of manual intervention mentioned in the news. ArchLinux ships bleeding edge software to users with very little downstream changes. ArchLinux also replaces config files when upgrading. This is inherently different behavior from stable release distributions like Ubuntu.

ArchLinux is not an operating system where you can do an unattended upgrade and forget about it. That's not "bad" or "good", that's just a design choice.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Frequently_asked_questions#...?
by goatlover | 2026-01-28 16:28:01+00:00
Sure, when the arbitrary tarriff formula was announced for every nation, the stock markets were down thousands, and the bond market was fluctuating. Then you had the short term trade war with China were both countries set tarrifs so high no imports/exports between the two happened for a month, and there was a concern about empty shelves in major department stores.

But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also chickens out", so Wall Street learned he would backdown on any tariffs that had too much negative economic impact.
by karteum | 2026-01-28 16:28:20+00:00
> All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises.

Full support ? I thought that the DRM were not the same (e.g. Disney+ and Amazon Prime limited to 480p on Linux which is a scam... At least, I remember having to hack something to use the Windows version of Chrome with WINE in order to get a decent image with Amazon Prime when I got a 6-month offered subscription a few years ago)
by ozim | 2026-01-28 16:28:21+00:00
I do understand the premise but … people want to play the games they want to play.

For example I am a good customer for streaming services because I don’t care about specific titles - I will watch a series or a movie because it is available. I will most likely not go through a hassle to watch some specific show if it is not on streaming I already have.

Gaming doesn’t really work like that for me. I usually want to play specific titles - not just some game.

But I fully understand someone has the same approach to games as I have for movies/series.
by coderc | 2026-01-28 16:28:25+00:00
With just a single frame to go off of, I can't tell. There's not enough information there.

edit: I found a video of this event: https://old.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1qjfxbj/ice_pepp...

It doesn't show what led up to this moment, but it appears the person was indeed resisting arrest. If you are not resisting arrest, you don't need three officers to pin you to the ground.
by blackcatsec | 2026-01-28 16:28:27+00:00
Again, let's clarify here.

Microsoft implemented, in its Beta Windows Insider Channel in 2024, ads in the "Recommended" section of the Start Menu. The very section I just described pretty plainly how to turn off.

I mean I don't understand why everyone is so puffed up about this. You read some internet headline and start screeching about it on social media as if it doesn't take 2 seconds to literally turn off.
by kakapo5672 | 2026-01-28 16:28:48+00:00
Same demographic, same experience. AI has been incredibly liberating for me. I get all sorts of things done now that before were previosly impossible for all practical purposes. Among other things, it cuts through the noise of all the layers of detail, and allows me to focus on ideas, design, and just getting stuff built asap.

I also don't get all the hand-wringing. AI is an amazing tool. Use it and be happy.

Even less do I get all the cope about it not being effective, or even useless at some level. When I read posts such as that, it feels like a different planet. Just not my experience at all.
by phkahler | 2026-01-28 16:28:50+00:00
>> I honestly don't understand the hatred that Microsoft gets for most of the work they're doing in Windows. As I've stated before, most 'problems' people ultimately have are either configuration issues or hardware issues.

And then you go on to describe your own hardware problems with windows. That's called "projection" - attributing your experience to everyone else. It's like you don't read the other complaints or somehow dismiss them. Have you not seen the ads yourself? Maybe you take the suggestions to use other Microsoft products as helpful suggestions rather than ads. Is that it? OneDrive failing? Try saying NO to using OneDrive - that's what some people would like to do and it'll keep advertising and trying to enable itself. Then when we do use it... well you've got issues with it not working right too.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-28 16:29:19+00:00
It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess.

No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) and employment figures.
by jackienotchan | 2026-01-28 16:29:22+00:00
Why is this not a Launch YC (or at least mention it?) since you seem to be part of the current batch?

The record/replay is definitely and interesting direction. The browser automation space is getting super crowded though (even within YC), so curious to hear how you differentiate from:

- BrowserUse

- Browserbase

- BrowserBook

- Skyvern
by jerf | 2026-01-28 16:29:23+00:00
The major problem with sticking an Android tablet on to exercise equipment is the difference in life spans. Android tablets are generally going to last you 4-5 years. Weight equipment should be able to last decades. There is some simple & cheap hardware that can last decades, but it is legitimately harder to program.

Even worse was an article some months back about Android tablets hooked to heating & cooling systems expected to last 20 years. There's no way those things are making it at scale.
Show HN: ProductSignals API – product reliability signals from public sources
by analyses-web | 2026-01-28 16:29:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ProductSignals API, a small API that aggregates publicly available signals
(Trustpilot, Reddit, ArnaqueOuFiable, Gridinsoft) to surface potential reliability
or trust-related signals about products or merchants.

The goal is not to give verdicts or advice, but to provide deterministic,
machine-consumable signals that can be used as an input in automated workflows
(onboarding checks, internal tooling, monitoring, etc.).

Key points:
- Single JSON endpoint (POST /v1/product-signals)
- Signals only (no recommendations, no scoring guarantees)
- Public data sources only
- Subscription-based, quota-limited
- No customization per customer

Docs and examples:
https://productsignalsapi.analyses-web.com/docs.html

Pricing:
https://productsignalsapi.analyses-web.com/pricing.html

This is part of a small suite of similar APIs (risk / abuse signals).
I’m mainly interested in feedback from people who build automated systems
around trust, risk, or onboarding.

Happy to answer technical questions.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-28 16:29:39+00:00
Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series of hardware has gotten pretty stable.

With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
by apercu | 2026-01-28 16:29:44+00:00
100% agree. There are far more half-baked, incomplete "products" and projects out there now that it is easier to generate code. Generously, that doesn't necessarily equate to productivity.

I've agree with the fact that the last 10% of a project is the hardest part, and that's the part that Gen-AI sucks at (hell, maybe the 30%).
by Buttons840 | 2026-01-28 16:29:51+00:00
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.

I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.
by Eric_WVGG | 2026-01-28 16:29:58+00:00
> If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would singlehandedly sabotage their own OS, doing more Linux marketing than the most neckbearded Linux fanboy (or the most femboy Thinkpad enjoyer), I'd have laughed in your face

I have no idea what that Thinkpad burn is supposed to mean.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-28 16:30:59+00:00
> This article is about actual, not potential, abuse.

The article is about feeding a giant pile of metadata to a service and getting results. That pile was collected in a mundane manner as a part of everyday actions. People probably didn't think much of it at the time. Even if the potential for abuse occurred to them, clearly the vast majority swept the concern aside and went on about their day.

That's exactly what's happening with the internet giants as well. People embed analytics and bot detectors and fonts and who knows what else from major third party providers with hardly a second thought. Other people then navigate to those websites with little to no awareness of the potential for abuse.

This article is about a concrete example of such potential abuse that went on for many years before blindsiding a great many people when it was abruptly weaponized overnight.
by dijit | 2026-01-28 16:31:24+00:00
The Ass-Fucker 3000 fucks you in the arse when you use your car ignition.

But don't get bent out of shape - you can disable it in settings. Takes 10 seconds. Assuming you know it exists and the option doesn't disappear in a future update.

And if it re-enables itself after the next patch? Well, at least the option to disable it still exists! Probably.

Why would you buy a different car? It's so easy to turn off. What, you want to use a BMW? Be a BMW-user? A sheep? All your tools already integrate with our car anyway. There's no real choice, is there - unless you want to be a try-hard. And maybe it doesn't even work properly. You don't want that hassle, do you? Just accept the Ass-Fucker 3000. Next week they'll add the Wife-Beater 2000, but don't worry -that'll have a toggle too.

Cope harder. I wish I had apologists like you for my software.
by DrBazza | 2026-01-28 16:31:25+00:00
I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.

Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.

For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
by mdriley | 2026-01-28 16:31:39+00:00
Just a few more Rust libraries we've shipped in Chromium:

- https://github.com/image-rs/image-png

- https://github.com/webmproject/CrabbyAvif

- https://github.com/RCasatta/qr_code

- https://github.com/unicode-org/icu4x
by tambourine_man | 2026-01-28 16:31:40+00:00
> Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from perfect (no video acceleration, laggy at times), but functional

That’s not acceptable to most professionals and one of the things holding me back on a Mac.

Adobe has so many different cross-platform layers that a solution like Proton may never be viable, practically speaking.

For Photoshop alone I remember reading that they still have some custom MacApp Pascal UI code, along with HTML/CSS/JS rendered by WebKit. And there used to be a flavor of Flash as well in mix, to name a few. Lightroom had its own custom Lua UI binding.

The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.
by kmbfjr | 2026-01-28 16:31:42+00:00
So both consent to sex and now one thinks they're entitled to marriage. That's where this inevitably leads, user/customer lock-in and control.

While the bank use case makes a compelling argument, device attestation won't be used for just banks. It's going to be every god damned thing on the internet. Why? Because why the hell not, it further pushes the costs of doing business of banks/MSPs/email providers/cloud services onto the customer and assigns more of the liabilities.

It will also further the digital divide as there will be zero support for devices that fail attestation at any service requiring it. I used to think that the friction against this technology was overblown, but over the last eighteen months I've come to the conclusion that it is going to be a horrible privacy sucking nightmare wrapped in the gold foil of security.

I've been involved in tech a long, long time. The first thing I'm going to do when I retire is start chucking devices. I'm checking-out, none of this is proving to be worth the financial and privacy costs.