MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tofuahdude | 2026-01-28 16:05:14+00:00
My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story:

One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents.

The phones all stop working.

So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!".

He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms.

My dad let him do his thing.
by barrkel | 2026-01-28 16:05:14+00:00
I think this mostly only holds if you use local compute in a portable form factor.

Most of my personal development these days is done on my home server - 9995wx, 768GB, rtx 6000 pro blackwell GPU in headless mode. My work development happens in a cloud workstation with 64 cores and 128GB of ram but builds are distributed and I can dial up the box size on demand for heavier development.

I use laptops practically entirely as network client devices. Browser, terminal window, perhaps a VS Code based IDE with a remote connection to my code. Tailscale on my personal laptop to work anywhere.

I'm not limited by local compute, my devices are lightweight, cheap(ish) and replaceable, not an investment.
by graemep | 2026-01-28 16:05:24+00:00
> use python-dotenv to pull settings from environment / .env

I disagree strongly with this one. All you are doing is moving those settings to a different file. You might as well use a local settings file that reads the common settings.

On production keep things like API keys that need to be kept secret elsewhere - as a minimum outside the project directories and owned by a different user.
by fguerraz | 2026-01-28 16:05:40+00:00
They lost me at Vista lol

In all honesty, it was easy for me to switch to Linux because I was always more interested in the computer itself rather than what useful things I could do with it, so I actually never missed a particular application. I also was more interested in making a game run in Wine with maximum effort rather than actually playing it (I did play countless hours of World of Warcraft though...)
by dangus | 2026-01-28 16:05:40+00:00
This ignorance comes from a barely-regulated advertising industry and an inadequate and highly unequal education system, which is a lot of the point I’m trying to make.

Don’t lose sight of what it’s really like to be poor. Being poor means having very little time, and mostly thinking about survival. Learning to cook from scratch is a real hobby and something of a luxury. This isn’t the pre-industrial era where peasants had ample free time, this is an era where the poorest people have the least amount of time. They and their parents work multiple jobs for long hours with no paid time off.

It’s also a system where healthier food costs more and there’s no good societal way to offset that and make nutrition more equally accessible. (Let’s not forget the federal government recently playing political games with SNAP)

Let’s also talk about food deserts. I am an upper middle class person and I once lived on the border of one of the poorest areas of a rust belt city with declining population.

I once went into a big chain grocery store because it was close by, but it was the B tier store for the poor local population.

I shit you not, they did not carry tortellini. One of the most common pastas you can find in an American supermarket. Not fresh, not frozen, not dry. They didn’t have it. I asked an employee and they said they don’t carry it, it wasn’t out of stock or anything.

This was a full grocery store, which the community was lucky to have instead of just a corner cigarette and energy drink store, and they didn’t have a basic staple pasta.
by ep103 | 2026-01-28 16:05:40+00:00
MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.

Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.

On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.

If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!

If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.
Show HN: New to System Programmings
by daniil-gi | 2026-01-28 16:05:41+00:00
Hi everyone, I want to say that I'm new to system programmings (a little over than six months in total) and I want to ask for feedback about my recently-made projects especially my compiler & kernel on Rust/GNU ASM, I'm happy to any feedback!

Link to my Github repositories - https://github.com/daniil-gi?tab=repositories
by Terretta | 2026-01-28 16:06:11+00:00
> Visualize your systems, discover architecture from code, and keep everything in sync.

Not everything.

Lock up your c4 models in a proprietary platform instead of a diagrams-as-code.

Connect to git not to bidirectionally sync c4 models in a preservable text format, but to slurp more info into the golden-handcuffs source of truth.

Avoid detailing how invention intellectual property disclosure and platform security reconnaissance are protected against.

(On the outbound sync, see Structurizer or plant uml c4 for text portable examples, or icepanel.io for JSON metadata export of full models.)

It's a beautiful product and we'd authorize our teams to use it instantly, except for the philosophical and practical non-starters, and we'd need to have a deep understanding for the security model around keys-to-the-kingdom systems.
by wlesieutre | 2026-01-28 16:06:25+00:00
500% maybe not, but I've seen sites blow up at much less drastic zoom levels.

The unfortunate reality of accessibility is that there was no expectation of wheelchair ramps until the ADA forced everyone to quit saying "but ramps cost money and I don't personally need that" and do the right thing, web accessibility may end up requiring the same treatment.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-28 16:06:39+00:00
I do sort of wonder if there’s room in my life for a small attested device. Like, I could actually see a little room for my bank to say “we don’t know what other programs are running on your device so we can’t actually take full responsibility for transactions that take place originated from your device,” and if I look at it from the bank’s point of view that doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Of course, we’ll see if anybody is actually engaging with this idea in good faith when it all gets rolled out. Because the bank has full end-to-end control over the device, authentication will be fully their responsibility and the (basically bullshit in the first place) excuse of “your identity was stolen,” will become not-a-thing.

Obviously I would not pay for such a device (and will always have a general purpose computer that runs my own software), but if the bank or Netflix want to send me a locked down terminal to act as a portal to their services, I guess I would be fine with using it to access (just) their services.
by qaq | 2026-01-28 16:07:01+00:00
Where did I say russians are dumb? The claim I am disputing is a myth that Ukraine was just a place the nukes were stationed in and they had no capability to manage them. While USSR was often making sub-optimal decisions availability of eng. talent was def a consideration when sites were being chosen. There is a very long list of key Nuke and space related R&D and manufacturing in UA. They are concentrated in exactly 3 places (Dnepr, Kyiv, Kharkiv), so you spiel on distributing does not make much sense.
by apercu | 2026-01-28 16:07:01+00:00
Some of these are obviously related to the closing of some of the retail businesses. And some might simply be middle management bloat that happens often at tech companies.

But imagine you're one of the people who remain (e.g., not impacted by the eliminated companies or products) and now there are fewer people to do the same amount of work? I've seen that movie and it usually has an economic impact 6-9 months later when people burn out.

It's almost like you can write the script:

Month 0–3:
Survivors are relieved, grateful, and over-perform. Leadership reads this as “proof the cuts worked.”

Month 3–6:
Context loss shows up. Decision latency increases. Domain knowledge walked out the door.

Month 6–9:
Burnout, attrition, and quality failures begin. The “hidden layoffs” start as top performers quietly leave.

Month 9–12:
Rehiring or contracting resumes (usually at higher cost)

The key misunderstanding here is assuming AI substitutes for organizational slack and human coordination. It doesn’t.

And sometimes middle management "bloat" is misdiagnosed. Remove them without redesigning decision rights and workflows, and the load doesn’t disappear it redistributes to the IC's.

Watch for Amazon "strategic investments" in early Q4 2026 (this will be a cover for the rehiring).
by Macha | 2026-01-28 16:07:03+00:00
From Steam’s 2025 top X charts (https://store.steampowered.com/charts/bestofyear/2025?tab=3)

11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)

9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)

11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)

So if you’re into competitive ranked games (especially fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but practically everything else works
by khat | 2026-01-28 16:07:05+00:00
Microsoft has always been crap. It's success is contributed to hostile business practices and familiarity not quality of product. IBM and Gates partnered to have an OS installed on its computers to gain customers. With no actual OS Gates bought 86-DOS from Tim Patterson and partnered with IBM. This created a direct competitor to Apple. Then Gates partnered with all other PC manufacturers to do the same. This paved way for Microsoft to dominate Apple because they weren't tied to any specific hardware. Then came Active Directory to solidify business use. The businesses rolled with it and users learned Windows which deepened home PC use. Every app "just worked" BECAUSE of the popularity and developers directly targeted it since most people used it, not because it was a good product. Their file system NTFS is crap. Their registry is a mess. Everything about Windows is just awful.
by mock-possum | 2026-01-28 16:07:21+00:00
You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account?

I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-28 16:07:50+00:00
> Protesting is absolutely something you can and should be able to do casually and without having to protect your face/identity.

I am unwilling to risk protesting against this administration given the combination of facial scanning, IMSI catchers, ALPRs, and surveillance cameras in general. I cannot think of a way to stay truly anonymous when protesting, with enough access and time, you could be tracked back to your home even if you leave your phone at home and take public transportation. I believe the aforementioned technology chills free speech in combination with the current administration.

I’m not particularly worried about protesters being targeted by this administration, I worry about future administrations that could be far worse.
by Etherlord87 | 2026-01-28 16:08:02+00:00
There's very little decision making in the game: You don't choose battle rewards, they are forced onto you, you get only one reroll that rerolls the entire triplet. Choosing the path is choosing between fighting an elite or not, and between visiting something different than normal battle encounter or not. Only the shop allows for some strategy. On the plus side, everything worked for the most part on Firefox, except when I decided to pass an item as inheritance, it wasn't passed.
by mrashiddev | 2026-01-28 16:09:03+00:00
Rejourney.co is a 3-lines of code only observaiblity tool.

This tool is part of a 12-week effort to design a lightweight Sentry.io alternative that has 70% of the features -- including pixel perfect session replay (not dom based replay) -- for a much smaller unpacked size. Rejourney is 1.65 mb unpacked while Sentry is around 7.1 mb. Frame time performance is very comparable, but Rejourney performs better visually due to the heuristic logic that instructs capture on moments of stillness making the package nearly impossible to notice for end-users. Our benchmarks are in our github read me.

What are your thoughts on this? How can we offer something beyond just being much cheaper and lighter than Sentry to become a go-to product?
by mekdoonggi | 2026-01-28 16:09:07+00:00
Not sure if this is the same sentiment, but I feel that even though the technology is handy, the investment is speculation. Billions and billions are being spent on developing this technology hoping to create a unicorn that turns billions into trillions.

I know it's unrealistic, but imagine you took $30b and just started ploughing into a random city. Real estate, development grants, EV charging infra, renewable projects, transit. Just boring existing technology, but concentrated investment to make the other investments more valuable. You could turn that $30b into $60b in a few years while changing the lives of an entire city.

But American capital says no, and gambles it, because it's just a game to the people in charge.

Money is responsibility. While I pinch my pennies and show up to my day job, the people with the keys throw billions on an oil fire hoping it magically turns into gold.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-28 16:09:19+00:00
> Or, get this - they'd go after the people who employ illegal immigrants en masse in those states.

This is not economically feasible, the cost of food would double or more. They know that and I know that. That’s why they aren’t actually targeting illegal immigrants, America’s dirty secret is that we need them to keep prices low on certain things.

Good luck finding Americans that will pick strawberries or work in a meatpacking plant for $12-16/hr
by anonym29 | 2026-01-28 16:09:21+00:00
Violent crime plummeted throughout the 90s because abortions was legalized in 1973, 17-27 years before 1990 and 2000, respectively, roughly coinciding with the early adulthood period where a vast majority of criminal offenses are committed, the offender having the freedom of an adult without the fully formed prefrontal cortex of one yet.

The fetuses that were aborted were overwhelmingly from socioeconomic demographics (e.g. poverty, single mother households) where they would've been statistically far more likely to become criminals, so by allowing that generation to be aborted, we effectively aborted (for the first time) a large chunk of an entire generation of people that would've been statistically overrepresented among criminals, entering their peak criminal years right when Bill Clinton was president.
by radicalethics | 2026-01-28 16:09:22+00:00
I just have to figure out how to play a few of my games on Steam and I can move over. Unfortunately, a few titles are still PC only so I can't make the switch. I very much would love to, but I basically need a $600 PC at all times to play a few select titles that will never come to Linux due to anti-cheat.
Show HN: I gamified a productivity app to help my ADHD friends get things done
by jcylim21 | 2026-01-28 16:10:12+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Jon.

About a year ago, I built Hypermonkey, a productivity app for my friends who were struggling to stay productive because of their ADHD. I gamified it so my ADHD friends would stick to using the app like Duolingo and start checking off tasks on their to-do lists. The trick is to earn a banana every day by interacting with the app.

The app uses the latest GPT and Sonnet models for all the smart features in the app, such as using your voice to add/edit/delete tasks, breaking down your tasks, prioritizing them, or suggesting the next tasks to start.

Currently, users can use the bananas they have earned to shop for stickers in the app. Planning to add more items to the shop in the future!

Open to any feedback, good or bad, and questions! Thanks in advance.
by waffletower | 2026-01-28 16:10:14+00:00
I couldn't burn the letter, as it didn't let me have matches in my pocket:

Set the leaflet on fire with a match from my pocket. "Burn after reading"

You decide that the leaflet's secrets must remain hidden and try to set it aflame with a match from your pocket.
You search your pockets for a match to burn the leaflet, but alas, you find nothing of the sort. It seems you'll need to find another way if you wish to dispose of the evidence.

Shred the leaflet and slowly eat the pieces.

Intent on secrecy, you tear the leaflet into tiny pieces, preparing to consume them one by one.
You attempt to rip apart the leaflet, but the act baffles you—this stubborn paper refuses to tear, as if protected by some strange magic. The leaflet remains whole, defiantly intact in your hands.

put the leaflet back in the mailbox. Shake your fist to the sky and curse the rigidity of this universe.

Unable to destroy the leaflet, you decide to return it to the mailbox.
With a dramatic glare, you raise your fist to the heavens, venting your frustration at this world's strange laws. The birds and trees ignore your plight, and the universe remains as unyielding as ever.
No matter how passionately you try to shake your fist at the sky, the very concept escapes you. The universe itself seems to smirk at your futile rebellion.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-28 16:10:17+00:00
It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.

Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...

One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.

But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-28 16:10:23+00:00
I came to rely pretty heavily on Docker and WSL(2) in Windows. I was an insiders user for a bit over a decade, and worked with .Net and C# since it was "ASP+" ...

I had setup a dual boot when I swapped my old GTX 1080 for an RX 5700XT, figuring the "open source" drivers would give me a good Linux experience... it didn't. Every other update was a blank/black screen and me without a good remote config to try to recover it. After about 6 months it was actually stable, but I'd since gone ahead and paid too much for an RTX 3080, and gone back to my windows drive...

I still used WSL almost all day, relying mostly on VS Code and a Browser open, terminal commands through WSL remoting in Code and results etc. on the browser.

Then, one day, I clicked the trusty super/win menu and started typing in the name of he installed program I wanted to run... a freaking ad. In the start menu search results. I mean, it was a beta channel of windows, but the fact that anyone thought this was a good idea and it got implemented, I was out.

I rebooted my personal desktop back to Linux... ran all the updates and it's run smoothly since. My current RX 9070XT better still, couldn't be happier. And it does everything I want it to do, and there's enough games in Steam through Proton that I can play what I want, when I want. Even the last half year on Pop Coxmic pre-release versions was overall less painful than a lot of my Windows experiences the past few years. Still not perfect, but at least it's fast and doesn't fail in ways that Windows now seems to regularly.

Whoever is steering Windows development at Microsoft is clearly drunk at the wheel over something that should be the most "done" and polished product on the planet and it just keeps getting worse.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-28 16:10:47+00:00
Can everyone be rich enough to not be food insecure or medically insecure? I'd like to think so.

Can everyone be rich enough to not be in the bottom 20%? No, no matter how rich we become.

Can everyone be rich enough to have servants? No, unless you count machines as servants. But if you do, then I'm rich enough to have several.
by dangus | 2026-01-28 16:10:57+00:00
Okay, so what am I doing about the fact that buying anything in the produce section costs a lot? The dollars per calories basically makes no sense if I’m on an extreme budget.

I can buy a pack of strawberries that will last the family a day or two for $5+ and has a total of 200 calories in the entire package and we go hungry, or I can buy something processed that’s calorie dense.

Or I can buy something calorie dense and cheap like rice and beans that takes a lot of time to prep and make, which I don’t have because I work two part time jobs to pay rent - my main way to stay afloat is working long hours and overtime.

Meanwhile all the media that is presented to me tells me not to buy whole foods but to buy packaged products that are a lot more fun and tasty instead. It’s not like I am out here paying for the ad-free Netflix tier. My school and family never taught me how to cook because my school was a low income public school in a segregated society, and my parents also worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and didn’t spend a lot of time at home as a result.

A lot of 9 to 5 corporate employees really don’t understand what it’s like to be poor.
by byronic | 2026-01-28 16:10:57+00:00
[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]

I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.

In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
by Levitating | 2026-01-28 16:11:01+00:00
Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to have:

* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption

* The limine bootloader

* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks

* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved

* sway with my custom ruby based bar

* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0

If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.