MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crystal_revenge | 2026-01-28 17:29:21+00:00
Can one criticize pandas by comparing to R's native DataFrames that have existed since R's inception in the 90s?

I (and many others) hated Pandas long before Polars was a thing. The main problem is that it's a DSL that doesn't really work well with the rest of Python (that and multi-index is awful outside of the original financial setting). If you're doing pure data science work it doesn't really come up, but as soon as you need to transform that work into a production solution it starts to feel quite gross.

Before Polars my solution was (and still largely remains) to do most of the relational data transformations in the data layer, and the use dicts, lists and numpy for all the additional downstream transformations. This made it much easier to break out of the "DS bubble" and incorporate solutions into main products.
by wanderr | 2026-01-28 17:29:21+00:00
My hot take is that AI is shaping up to be a tax on big tech.

Yet another round of layoffs being blamed on AI. As with last time, this is not due to productivity gains from AI, rather it's due to wanting to reallocate budget towards investing in AI. (and maybe an excuse for something they already wanted to do)

I think some productivity gains from AI are real, and I've experienced some firsthand, but reductions in force being ENABLED by AI are not, and I don't think we will see much of that for a good while still.

AI is attracting a lot of investment dollars because it's seen as disruptive; the capabilities it potentially unlocks for people are enormous. The problem is that general intelligence is still far away (fundamentally cannot be reached with the current approaches to AI, in my opinion), and the level of investment required is so high that the only way folks are getting that money back is if it does enable a level of layoffs that would be crippling to the economy.

Additionally, there is not a huge difference between the top models, and thanks to the massive investments the models are incrementally improving. It seems obvious from the outside that AI models are going to be a commodity, and good free models put downward pressure on prices, which they are already losing money on. So I think it's going to be a race to the bottom, and is very unlikely to be a winner-takes-all situation.

I think this means that the reward for big tech companies pouring insane amounts of money into AI will be maintaining their current position, or maybe stealing a bit of business from each other. That's why I think AI is more of a tax on big tech than a real investment opportunity.
by blintz | 2026-01-28 17:29:32+00:00
I have tried many times to do this, but lack even the minor discipline required. I inevitably make changes to the commands I want to run at the command line, rather than in the script, and then later forget to edit them in the script.

Instead, I now swear by atuin.sh, which just remembers every command I've typed. It's sort of bad, since I never actually get nice scripts, just really long commands, but it gets you 50% of the way there with 0 effort. When leaving my last job, I even donated my (very long) atuin history to my successor, which I suspect was more useful than any document I wrote.

My only hot tip: atuin overrides the up-arrow by default, which is really annoying, so do `atuin init zsh --disable-up-arrow` to make it only run on Ctrl-R.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-28 17:29:53+00:00
Philosophers don't "vacate the field". Many, maybe even most ethics texts are directly applicable to one's life. It comes with the territory of a field based around asking "What ought one do?".

They do tend to enjoy less market success than the less rigorous slop, but that's a symptom of a much broader problem in the world: Someone dedicated to doing something well is at a disadvantage versus someone dedicated to winning. It's the whole "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job" Douglas Adams quote, it's why it's still not the year of Linux desktop despite having offered the superior OS for years, it's why IKEA has practically killed the market for quality furniture, and it's why damn near every corporation you can name is lead by some ghoulish psychopath. In most competitions, you can simply get a lot more mileage out of optimizing for the competition than you can squeeze out of the underlying skill. So the dude optimizing for selling books is going to knock the socks off the one trying to rigorously convey a robust ethical framework.

If you can fix that basic flaw in society, I think we should probably start with the more pressing matters than who's selling more self-help books.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-28 17:29:54+00:00
Ok, yes, I wasn't aware of the history, I use whatever my distribution uses as default, and been doing that for decades now, as that tends to be less hassle, so been using systemd for a while because of that.

With this new knowledge about the history, I still feel the same as the original question. AFAIK, no one is forcing people/distributions to adopt systemd. It might be easier, and most takes the easiest route, but that's OK, right? That doesn't mean that you cannot make another choice, maybe involving more work, but you can still make that choice, unless again I miss something obvious here.
by apenwarr | 2026-01-28 17:29:58+00:00
[Tailscale CEO here] I see a lot of comments asking why Tailscale would branch away from our "core product" and build this thing that seems unrelated at first. One answer is that just about every single Tailscale customer (or homelab user!) is dipping their toes into AI right now, and they often come to us and ask how to integrate their stuff into Tailscale. Aperture is our answer to that.

A separate goal I have personally: demonstrate that anyone can build really neat stuff directly on top of the "Tailscale platform." One of my rules for the Aperture team was, you're not allowed to change core Tailscale, you have to build entirely on top as if you were some partner company. So this is a demo of how anybody can make pretty slick, easy-to-use, and yet highly secure stuff by building on Tailscale (the open source packages, or the commercial product, or both).
by hajile | 2026-01-28 17:30:02+00:00
Maybe they wanted to live together to save money (remember, the rest of their family isn't in the US), but that is irrelevant to the fact that they were paid way less than half the going rate in that city (I remember his stated salary being a little over $30k, so I errored on the high side). We were pretty close and when he told me the story, there wasn't any reason for him to lie. Who am I to say his experience isn't real?
by crazygringo | 2026-01-28 17:30:33+00:00
1. I've already put down the groceries I was carrying, so the cashier can scan them. I have free hands.

2. The cashier is busy scanning, you don't need to mention anything.

3. FaceID unlocks it automatically.

4. What Amazon app? I use the Whole Foods app. I keep it easily accessible, I don't need to find it.

5. The code is always displayed by default when you open the app. You never have to dig around anything.

6. Or scan it yourself under the customer-facing scanner they have for that.
by nailer | 2026-01-28 17:30:53+00:00
Organised in that they have training manuals, roles, procedures and coordination via 1000 member signal groups.

Criminal because grabbing officers, directing traffic into operations, biting off fingers, blowing whistles directly into people’s ears, blocking agents with vehicles, and intimidating agents via doxxing all violate
18 U.S.C. § 111 which makes it illegal to forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with federal officers (including ICE agents) during their duties
by derf_ | 2026-01-28 17:31:00+00:00
> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average...

This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous.

Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).

[0] https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term...

[1] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/01/historical-returns-...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rmiller/2024/06/20/90-years-of-...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-28 17:31:11+00:00
> The behaviour being impeded and obstructed is not criminal. It is, in fact, law enforcement.

If the behavior appears criminal at a glance, it is reasonable to step in; law enforcement should be aware of this and exhibit accordingly professional behavior such that it does not appear to be so criminally violent. The simple fact they're law enforcement is moot to whether said behavior is criminal, seeing as law enforcement can still be charge with crimes.
by gonzalohm | 2026-01-28 17:31:29+00:00
I think the problem is that in the current system, the blame is always on the engineer. If you ship something early and it didn't work, then it's your fault because you didn't QA it enough.

If you don't ship it in time it's also your fault

This is bound to happen with any company that needs to deliver to clients. Sales are incentivized to sell at all cost, even if the product is not there yet.
by sylens | 2026-01-28 17:31:32+00:00
Safeguarding photos of my kids has also been my driver for moving off Google Photos over the last year. The author is hosting all his infra on AWS which makes access outside his home pretty straightforward; for those running it at home, this gets a little more complicated. You can't add everybody you might want to share photos with to your Tailscale network. What are some of the ways people are solving this problem?
by foxyv | 2026-01-28 17:31:41+00:00
Leaving the Republican party is so close to leaving a cult as to be indistinguishable. They are so dead set on vilifying outsiders that they won't even associate with non-republicans and Democrats in a civil fashion. I once had a family member threaten to punch me in the face for mentioning UBI.

It takes years to shrug off the programming.
by anonym29 | 2026-01-28 17:31:46+00:00
Torrenting is becoming more popular again. The alternative to being allowed to pay to watch on an "insecure" device isn't switching to an attested device, it's to stop paying for the content at all. Games industry, same thing (or just play the good older games, the new ones suck anyway).

Finances, just pay everything by cheque or physical pennies. Fight back. Starve the tyrants to death where you can, force the tyrants to incur additional costs and inefficiencies where you can't.
by jaredcwhite | 2026-01-28 17:32:03+00:00
Sure, let's throw more wild amounts of money at a wildly unprofitable company with no clear roadmap to profitability any time in the near-term, and in the long-term it's very probable that any arguably-useful use cases for LLM-based technology will be a commodity anyone can run anywhere.

My gosh, this bubble can't burst soon enough. It's a form of torture to keep waiting on the pain we all know is coming…
by Romario77 | 2026-01-28 17:32:12+00:00
I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.

AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.

They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
by runarberg | 2026-01-28 17:32:17+00:00
I provided it as a counter example to the learning how to bike myth.

Learning how to bike requires only a handful of skills, most of them are located in the motor control centers in your brain (mostly in the Cerebellum), which is known to retain skills much better then any other parts of your brain. Your programing skills are comprised of thousands of separate skills which are mostly located in your frontal-cortex (mostly in your frontal and temporal lobes), and learning a foreign language is basically that but more (like 10x more).

So while a foreign language is not the perfect analogy (nothing is), I think it is a reasonable analogy as a counter example to the bicycle myth.
by Xirdus | 2026-01-28 17:32:18+00:00
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who never had an issue with USB flash drives. Or HDDs for that matter. Or SSDs. I don't think I've ever had any storage die on me except optical disks.

Internet says both HDDs and SSDs have similar average lifespans, but with HDDs it's usually a mechanical failure so yes, you can often DIY it back to life if you have the right parts. With SSDs it's almost always the memory cells themselves wearing out. On the flip side, data recovery is usually much easier since SSD will usually keep working in read-only mode for a while, whereas a faulty HDD won't work at all.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 17:32:26+00:00
In my comments, I add opinions after the facts. Nor have I been donwvoted to oblivion. IMO, the people who I reply to aren't really acquainted with the facts.

I on the other hand happen to be a "bootlicker", while their opinion seems to be that it's ok to interfere with police work, and that the person that got shot did nothing wrong..
by stackghost | 2026-01-28 17:32:36+00:00
The bank thing is a smoke screen.

This entire shit storm is 100% driven by the music, film, and tv industries, who are desperate to eke a few more millions in profit from the latest Marvel snoozefest (or whatever), and who tried to argue with a straight face that they were owed more than triple the entire global GDP [0].

These people are the enemy. They do not care about about computing freedom. They don't care about you or I at all. They only care about increasing profits via and they're using the threat of locking people out of Netflix via HDCP and TPM, in order to force remote attestation on everyone.

I don't know what the average age on HN is, but I came up in the 90s when "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" still formed a large part of the zeitgeist, and it's absolutely infuriating to see people like TFfounders actively building things that will measurably make things worse for everyone except the C-suite class. So much for "hacker spirit".

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11026906/music-industry-limewire-...
by pyrophane | 2026-01-28 17:32:39+00:00
I can't believe how many times I have to click "decline" now to install Windows 11.

Office 365? no thanks. How about a cheaper version? No thanks. Did you know you could use it for free. Okay. How about XBox. No! Am I forgetting one?

All that before I can even use the computer. Ridiculous.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-28 17:32:44+00:00
No, it really shouldn't be... You can reduce headcount a lot, which they did, and concentrate on bugs (including security reports), while working with hardware vendors for if/when new features need to be integrated for better usability.

If/when you decide to do a redesign, it should be limited to a specific area, or done in such a way that all functionality gets moved to its' new UI/UX in a specified timeframe and released when done. Not, oh, here's a new right click menu that you now have an extra click 1/3 of the time for the old menu that has what you are actually looking for because the old extension interface was broken.

Want a real exercise in fun ... just for fun, because I know it's not as useful on a laptop, but was fun on desktops... get a screensaver working in windows that runs for an hour or so before going to sleep... just try it... that's a fun exercise in frustration... oh, it's still in there, but every third update will disable it all again. I get it... but you know what, I want my matrix screensaver to run when I'm only away for a few minutes or over lunch.
by wowczarek | 2026-01-28 17:32:44+00:00
Linux user since about 1998, leaning towards BSDs today. Network engineer + R&D + software dev. Daily driver (desktop) about 2002-2010 - work made it too difficult later. Very occasional gamer. Corporate world will give you a Windows VDI or web cloudy things if need be. Win10 on my laptop out of habit, mostly using terminals + WSL and a browser. Lightroom user, but flexible. None of the other gear I own runs Windows, and the numbers are significant (racks). I run my laptops until they die - the current one is 10y and hasn't died yet but won't run Win11 without going through hoops. Next laptop will not be running Windows outside of a VM.

Win7 was a workhorse, moving to win10 felt unnecessary - and I still remember how the laptop vendor had a system performance tuning app for win7 that you could use to put it into limp mode and have it run on battery for a full day and most of the night. No such thing on win10 on the same hardware. Everything has its time, and hopefully I'll never even get to experience the joy that apparently is win11. The times for software freedom of choice are as good as they have ever been.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-01-28 17:32:47+00:00
My wife recently got a new laptop. She mostly just uses office and the browser so I gave her some specs to look for SSD, 16GB ram, Lenovo should be good (fatal mistake I didn't specify the CPU). She went out and bought a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core and 16GB ram, SSD. It can barely run windows 11. Everything slows to a crawl, she can't be on a video call, and have a google doc open at the same time. It's insane and frankly should be criminal to sell such a poorly performing piece of hardware.

It's so bad that she actually switches to her old laptop from 10 years ago (still on windows 10, also a dual core) for video calls, and it performs way better.

The engineers working on Windows should be embarrassed. I may just try to load ChromeOS on it. Would be nice to get Windows out of my house for good.
by sejje | 2026-01-28 17:33:02+00:00
> A Trump-appointed Federal judge clearly did not find that excuse compelling.

A Trump-appointed judge set a hearing about a situation where he was told a US citizen was being deported. I would expect any judge to care about that, regardless of who appointed them. Because we don't actually deport US citizens, it turns out.

> The same org claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin who was attempting to massacre ICE, remember. They lie; that's a matter of public record.

The same org that is claiming what?

> https://nipnlg.org/...

They didn't allege in that document that it was coerced. They allege that they didn't give them enough options to contact family etc. She had an option to leave the child in the US.

> "the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."

This shows that the child going to Honduras was a choice by the mother. Under duress? Sure, she's getting deported. Tough choice. But she made it, not the government.

> That's directly contradicted by your link; "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".

No it's not. What, you think the judge never saw the piece of paper? You think active cases are closed without involving the judge?

> I have no difficulty at all finding this case; I replied to your comment about five minutes after you posted it.

Sure, but it didn't fit the criteria. This US citizen wasn't deported by the government. Their mother was, and she chose to take the child with her.
by kalap_ur | 2026-01-28 17:33:15+00:00
Well, Linux reached ~5% market share in 2025. Imagine the incremental market share they have. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lpepvq/linux_breaks...

My only issue is that i am not a developer, I am heavily reliant on Excel, i know it inside and out and just not sure whether OpenOffice supports excel files. In the past it barely did.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-28 17:33:26+00:00
Another article about this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ywzxlxnlo

> In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.

With this kind of employee hostile policies and threat of job cut, how does it manage to be the A of FANG (or as they call it, MANGA)? But apparently people still want to get a job there? The pay is a little less than other companies in the same league. So pay can't be the reason. Or is it? Honestly want to know what it is that make IT people get a job there?
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-28 17:33:31+00:00
You shouldn't need a separate device, but we are quickly entering an era where a lot of banking (and other) apps will outright refuse to run or allow logins if it detects a rooted device, or play integrity fails.

In this way, the banks are asserting control over your device. It's beyond authentication, they are saying "If you have full control over your device, you cannot access our services."

I'll agree with you that they don't have a valid position, because I can just as easily open up a web browser on said rooted device and access just fine via the web, but how long until services move away from web interfaces in favor of apps instead to assert more control?
by solaarphunk | 2026-01-28 17:34:11+00:00
I've been building something similar (GPU-native OS research project) and wanted to share a mental model shift that unlocked things for me.

The question "why run CPU code on GPU when GPU cores are slower?" assumes you're running ONE program. But GPUs execute in SIMD wavefronts of 32 threads - and here's the trick: each of those 32 lanes can run a DIFFERENT process. Same instruction, different data. Calculator on lane 0, text editor on lane 1, file indexer on lane 2. No divergence, legal SIMD, full utilization.
Suddenly you're not running "slow CPU code on GPU" - you're running 32 independent programs in parallel on hardware designed for exactly this pattern.

The win isn't throughput for compute-heavy code. It's eliminating CPU roundtrips for interactive stuff. Every kernel launch, every synchronization, every "GPU done, back to CPU, dispatch next thing" adds latency. A persistent kernel that polls for input, updates state, and renders - all without returning to CPU - changes the responsiveness equation entirely.

A few things to try at home if you're curious:

1. Write a Metal/CUDA kernel with while(true) and an atomic shutdown flag. See how long it runs.
(Spoiler: indefinitely, if you do it right)

2. Put 32 different "process states" in a buffer and have each SIMD lane execute instructions for its
own process. Watch all 32 make progress simultaneously.

3. Measure the latency from "input event" to "pixel on screen" with CPU orchestration vs GPU polling an input queue directly. The difference surprised me.

The persistent kernel thing has a nasty gotcha though - ALL 32 threads must participate in the while loop. If you do if (tid != 0) return; then while(true), it'll work for a few million iterations then hard-lock. Ask me how I know.