MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-19 01:27:40+00:00
As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely never understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth.

If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that come with the OS, that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doing the same thing on a given distro of Linux is a headache at best, and impossible at worst (which is partly why game developers don't target native Linux).

The problems with Windows have always been in the user-mode (with the notable exception of Vista, and I still maintain that Vista was OK; its problems were due to Intel strong-arming MS into certifying a broken version of Vista for its sub-par integrated GPUs of the time). Windows 11 control panel sort-of gone? There's still the god-mode menu introduced in Vista. Right-click menu gone, or too much Copilot? Go to Group Policy editor, switch off what you don't need; revert what you can. People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'. Also not true, that feature is a fundamental part of Windows and probably won't ever be removed. There are workarounds. Any Windows user or sysadmin worth their salt will have a GPE fleet-wide policy, and registry settings.

Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there. Compile a program for 32-bit, set the compatibility mode to Windows 2000, and bam, there you go. If you add in the manifests for UTF-8 and high pixel density, the UI is scaled pixel-perfect by the system.

Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist, Linux distros are a minefield of Xorg, Wayland, a million different conf.d files, command-line arguments, and env variables.

Why would anyone want to replace their core product with something that a) they cannot control, and b) does not satisfy their business and customer needs?
by ares623 | 2026-01-19 01:27:40+00:00
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. An invite only platform where invites need to be given and received in person. It'll be pseudonymous, which should hopefully help make moderation manageable. It'll be an almost cult-like community, where everyone is a believer in the "cause", and violations can mean exile.

Of course, if (big if) it does end up being large enough, the value of getting an invite will get to a point where a member can sell access.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-19 01:28:25+00:00
The amount that Windows contributes to Microsoft's revenue has been falling for years. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue (including enterprise and OEM sales). They make most of their money in cloud services these days. I think Microsoft has been aiming for the effective retirement of Windows for a long time, and this will continue. That's why they don't care that Windows is getting increasingly irritating for people, and why they keep pushing their services so hard.

Windows being replaced by Linux (or something similar) would make perfect sense. It would reduce their maintenance and development costs by a lot, and for a product that isn't their breadwinner, that is likely very tempting.
by ggm | 2026-01-19 01:28:36+00:00
I would never predict this, but I think it's an idea which has occurred to many people over the years. the name WSL always hinted to me at a group inside MS who wanted Windows to BE the subsystem.

I think people who have run UNIX over non-traditional FS get this vibe too. We're used to thinking it has to be some linear progression from FS to VFS to UFS to "all the other FS" and the idea "nah, I can run on NTFS just fine thanks" never occurs to us. But DOSBOOT.EXE to boot unix from DOS...
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-01-19 01:29:05+00:00
In every case an enterprise is using Windows they are fundamentally not using the version that is getting worse. For a pricey enough SKU, every antifeature is actually optional.

And in a lot of ways the underlying engineering of Windows remains superior, once you scrape away all of the layers of garbage the services offerings have foisted on it. Windows 10 Mobile was so much more performant than Android it isn't even funny. Linux OSes still have an annoying habit of not automatically recovering their disk drive when the power cuts out. The occasional moment you discover that shadow copies/journaling is like... not something Linux machines generally do unless you very specifically choose otherwise...

If someone actually scraped the turds off the top of Windows, everyone would move to it. The problem is the turds are profitable. The primary difference between Linux and Windows is not engineering, it's capitalism.
by usere9364382 | 2026-01-19 01:29:18+00:00
For the record, JQuery is NOT to blame for the so called spaghetti code. Most people seem to blame JQuery for their own short coming. Most people also do not seem to understand the genius that was contained in JQuery. See "http://eyeandtea.com/crxcmp" for an example of what could already be done with JQuery in the IE8 era. A lot of the things later invented in the browser were to mask these shortcomings instead of admitting to them. The shadow DOM is one example. JQuery already had a feature that rendered the shadow DOM unnecessary, but it would require discipline that most developers did not have nor understand.

Having said that, after JQuery 1.x, and in particular, the changing, the deprecating, and the dropping of things here and there, JQuery no longer made sense. Somewhat similar to the SDL situation in the C/C++ word. An important role of JQuery, similar to SDL, was a strong code contract before anything else, and if the developer now has to account for JQuery's version differences like having to account for browser differences, what is the point.
by wenc | 2026-01-19 01:29:18+00:00
I'm not entitled to your time of course, but would you mind describing how?

All I know is beads is supposed to help me retain memory from one session to the next. But I'm finding myself having to curate it like a git repo (and I already have a git repo). Also it's quite tied to github, which I cannot use at work. I want to use it but I feel I need to see how others use it to understand how to tailor it for my workflow.
by viccis | 2026-01-19 01:29:36+00:00
>which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it

I know this was a throwaway parenthetical, but I agree 100%. I don't know when the meaning of "social media" went from "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL" to a catchall for any online forum like reddit, but one result of this semantic shift is that it takes attention away from the fact that the former type is all but obliterated now.
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-19 01:30:22+00:00
He very literally said nowhere in there that he thinks rape or non consentual sex or even statutory non-consent is ok.

He very literally spoke nuanced thoughts that were unwise to speak where idiots can hear them. That is his promary failing is failing to understand others well enough to manage his own appearance to them.

Or maybe not even that. Masybe he knowingly and willingly accepts what comes because he has 140x the integrity of you or I who very much manage our appearance to get a more comfortable life at the expense of a more honest one and making the world a better place for everyone else who suffers various things because of all the little injustices you and I and almost everyone else let slide.

Only maybe. Maybe he would happily take a more comfortable life and simply doesn't know how to manage it.

Either way, he never did any such thing as advocate for rape or pedophilia or anything like that. He just didn't repeat the unthinking chant, and even questioned the official gospel is all. You that thing people with the most integrity are supposed to do.
by acdha | 2026-01-19 01:31:52+00:00
Sure, so at that point how much are we really saving versus using a better alternative? Using YAML correctly is harder because you need not only to do the validation everything needs to do but also doing other things specific to YAML to avoid problems created by YAML rather than the problem domain. For example, if typing less is my goal isn’t it easier to, say, always quote country_name rather than have to run a separate validator which catches the Norway problem?
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-01-19 01:32:06+00:00
My comment above already addresses this.

I'm aware there are large enterprises that are non-Windows. All of them are technology companies. They are well equipped to pay their own developers to compensate for not having Group Policy, and may even be Microsoft competitors who don't want to spend money on them. Ansible being a replacement for Group Policy is very funny. That is like saying Postgres is a replacement for Excel.
by p_ing | 2026-01-19 01:32:51+00:00
Your post lacks understanding of the NT executive and the ways (IOCP, personalities, VMM, WM) where it does a better job than the Linux kernel.

Or the only stable ABI, even on Linux - Win32.

Linux running on 'billions of devices' doesn't mean much when Azure is built on Hyper-V and ODSP/EXO/Dynamics on Windows Server and makes gobs of money for Microsoft.
by iamleppert | 2026-01-19 01:33:33+00:00
The texture of Gaussian Splatting always looks off to me. It looks like the entire scene has been textured or has a bad, uniform film grain filter to me. Everything looks a little off in an unpleasing way -- things that should be sharp are aren't, and things that should be blurry are not. It's uncanny valley and not in a good way. I don't get what all the rage is about it and it always looks like really poor B-roll to me.
Ask HN: Could we replace Job Descriptions with actual Git Issues?
by A1aM0 | 2026-01-19 01:33:38+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm exploring a concept to fix the disconnect between "Job Descriptions" and "Actual Work."

The Problem:
Companies usually hire with a specific intent (e.g., "We need someone to fix our legacy payment sync issues"), but by the time this reaches the JD, it becomes a generic soup of keywords: "Must have 5+ years Java, Microservices..."

The Hypothesis:
Hiring is about solving problems. So why don't we use the problem itself as the JD?

The Proposed Workflow:

Input = The Problem Context (Public or Private):
Instead of writing a JD, the hiring manager selects a set of actual tasks/issues from their issue tracker (GitHub, Jira, etc.).

Example (Open Source): "Here is Issue #123 (Memory Leak). Find me someone who has solved similar complexity."
Example (Enterprise): "Here is a resolved task regarding high-concurrency database locking. We need another person who can handle this level of work."
Vision: This could be done via an API or MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that securely fetches the task context—code diffs, discussions, and complexity metrics.
The Match:
We compare this "Problem Vector" against a candidate's "Activity Vector" (derived from their git log or contribution history).

Result: "Candidate X is a 90% match because they recently refactored a similar async queue system in Rust, which aligns with the complexity of your input issue."
The Privacy Challenge (The Elephant in the Room):
For this to work in Enterprise (Private Repos), privacy is paramount.

I'm thinking about a localized extraction layer where the "Problem Context" is sanitized (removing PII/secrets) before it's ever sent to an LLM for analysis. The goal is to extract the pattern of the problem, not the proprietary code itself.
My Question:
I'm building a prototype for the public GitHub use case first.
But for those of you hiring in enterprise: Would you trust a tool that parses your internal issue context (sanitized) to generate a precise candidate requirement profile?

I believe this "Task-based Hiring" is fairer than "Resume Parsing," but I'm curious where you think this model breaks down.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-19 01:33:46+00:00
He was right about Google in [1] when I was still drinking the Kool-Aid, in big and tangible ways that aren't discussed publicly.

[2] is 100% accurate, Grok was the backbone / glue of Google's internal developer tools.

I don't disagree on the current situation, and I'm uncomfortable sticking my neck out on this because I'm basically saying "the guy who kinda seems out of totally wasn't out of when you think he was", but [1] and [2] definitely aren't grandiose, the claims he makes re: Google and his work there are accurate. A small piece of why I feel comfortable in this, is that both of these were public blogs his employer was 100% happy about when hiring him to top positions.
by hintymad | 2026-01-19 01:33:55+00:00
It looks there's a difference this time: copying the details of other people's work has become exceedingly easy and reliable, at least for commonly tried use cases. Say I want to vibe code a dashboard, and AI codes it out. It works. In fact, it works so much better than I could ever build, because the AI was trained with the best dashboard code out there. Yes, I can't think of all the details of a world-class dashboard, but hey, someone else did and AI correctly responds to my prompt with those details. Such "copying" used to be really hard among humans. Without AI, I would have to learn so much first even if I can use the open-source code as the starting point: the APIs of the libraries, the basic concepts of web programming, and etc. Yet, the AI doesn't care. It's just a gigantic Bayesian machine that emits code that nearly probability 1 for common use cases.

So it is not that details don't matter, but that now people can easily transfer certain know-how from other great minds. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), most people's jobs are learning and replicating know-hows from others.
by zmmmmm | 2026-01-19 01:34:05+00:00
It seems like one of the key events that needs to happen for any professional domain to take off is for it to develop an "inside" language that nobody else understands. For example, I still don't know what a kanban or a scrum is. So I'm very ill positioned to challenge their use or question how they are done. Hence they got to dodge a whole lot of opposition that would probably have brought it all down. The invention of a new mysterious terminology I think was critical for agile to take off.

The problem with this phenomenon is that the same freedom from critique that is seemingly necessary for new domains to establish themselves also detaches them from necessary criticism. There's simply no way to tell if this isn't a load of baloney. And by the time it's a bullet point requirement on CVs to get employed it's too late for anybody to critique it.
by dairis | 2026-01-19 01:34:17+00:00
I’ve spent the last 10 years in e-commerce operations and product development. AI can be super helpful with workflow/process optimization in e-commerce, but one thing I've realized is that while image models like Nano Banana and image-1.5 are powerful, the chat interfaces are actually terrible for real work e-commerce work.

If you are a merchant with 100 SKUs or just a side hustler trying to test creatives, you can't be pasting prompts into multiple different chats all day. Plus, chats often result in hallucinations, even just after a couple re-prompts. Keeping track of anything becomes super hard very fast.

I built AI Mockup Generator as a simple tool to solve this workflow problem.

It’s a specialized interface built on top of Google's Nano Banana (latest model).

Why I built it instead of just using chat tools...

No prompt engineering: You don't need to know how to talk to the AI. The system handles the complex lighting, product angle, etc. instructions for you.

Asset management: chat history is a mess. My app saves everything in a gallery so you can batch generate variations, edit them one-by-one, and organize by project.

Model choice: I found that Gemini 3 pro image handles product geometry and details (such as text rendering) significantly better than other models (including OAI's image 1.5).

AI Mockup Generator is designed for batch work. Upload a product reference, one ore multiple model or background references, and easily generate multiple product listing images or ad creatives at once. If you need to swap the product later but keep the scene, you can do that without starting from scratch.

The stack is Next.js, Supabase, and Stripe.

Would love to hear feedback on the workflow.

Link: https://aimockupgenerator.co
by hougaard | 2026-01-19 01:34:41+00:00
Because the "UX" of Windows sucks, Microsoft will switch the "Kernel" to Linux?

I don't get the argument. There are parts of Windows I don't like, so I have chosen a 3rd-party (often open-source) replacement. The exact same process as I do on Linux. I don't see why I have to switch to Linux to have that freedom.

(and to be honest, I don't care where the taskbar is)
Show HN: PixelMotion:AI video generation with Sora 2, Veo 3.1, and 9 more models
by anotherbuilder | 2026-01-19 01:34:54+00:00
Hi HN! I built PixelMotion to solve a problem I had as a content creator: juggling too many tools while trying to scale.

The stack:
- Frontend: Next.js 15 + React 19 + TailwindCSS
- Backend: Express.js + PostgreSQL + Sequelize
- AI: Replicate, FAL AI, OpenAI APIs
- Video Models: Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Luma Ray2, Runway Gen-3, Kling, Hailuo 2.3, and more
- Storage: Google Cloud Storage

What makes it different:
1. All 11 premium video models in one place (no more switching between services)
2. Built-in client discovery — find businesses to pitch directly
3. Direct posting to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram

Happy to answer any technical questions about the architecture or AI model integrations.

Try it: 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
by hunterpayne | 2026-01-19 01:35:23+00:00
I call BS on those Rust 10-100x claims. Rust and Java are roughly equal in performance. It is just that there are a lot of old NoSQL frameworks in Java which are trash. I also checked out those companies, some of which are doing interesting stuff. None claim things are 100x faster because of Rust. You just hurt your credibility when you say such clearly false things. That's how you end up with a Hadoop cluster which is 236x slower than a batch script.

PS None of the companies you linked seem to be using a datapath architecture which is the key to the highest level of performance
by Chunkbase | 2026-01-19 01:35:44+00:00
I wrote this after a bunch of conversations with UK wealth teams where the same pattern kept showing up: the data exists, but it’s trapped in scattered PDFs, emails, drives, portals, and unclear versions, so people end up searching, confirming, and retyping as part of the workflow.

The post defines what I’m calling the “Vault Problem”, where it hits hardest (onboarding/KYC, meeting prep, suitability and evidence packs, proposals), and a practical fix that isn’t “just add AI”: a document vault plus extraction with review and traceability back to source.

I’m building in this space (regulated workflows), so I’d really value critique from HN on:

1. Where you’ve seen this problem outside wealth management (legal, insurance, accounting, healthcare)
2. What “trust” and “auditability” should look like in an AI-assisted extraction workflow
3. What a realistic pilot should measure to prove ROI without boiling the ocean
by wild_egg | 2026-01-19 01:36:03+00:00
Beads was phenomenal back in October when it was released. Unfortunately it has somehow grown like a cancer. Now 275k lines of Go for task tracking? And no human fully knows what it is all doing. Steve Yegge is quite proud to say he's never looked at any of its code. It installs magic hooks and daemons all over your system and refuses to let go. Most user hostile software I've used in a long time.

Lot of folks rolling their own tools as replacements now. I shared mine [0] a couple weeks ago and quite a few folks have been happy with the change.

Regardless of what you do, I highly recommend to everyone that they get off the Beads bandwagon before it crashes them into a brick wall.

[0] https://github.com/wedow/ticket
by p_ing | 2026-01-19 01:36:35+00:00
Exchange is very dependent on Win32 and .NET Framework. As is ODSP and Dynamics.

Azure under the hood is Hyper-V with most services built upon that dependency.

Yes, millions of man hours, monkies, and typewriters you could transform this to Linux. The economics aren't there when Azure/M365 keeps pulling in money running on it's current platform hand over fist.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-19 01:36:51+00:00
You are assuming everyone stay rational & this becomes a pre-election itself (like poll) but it can change and multiple reasons

You got to give even a 1000$ or something in this bet, you are gonna be so vocal about support, manipulation of data to convince unconvinced voters to join you or other details

The unconvinced voters are simply gonna bet on the voting side after sometime. For context, a third of the population in US iirc doesn't vote so what's gonna happen is that a difference of few %'s Lead could turn into something massive

And that few % can easily be rigged by an irrational actor. You are thinking 1 person = 1 vote (yes/no) but I may be wrong but how these work is in the aggregate and so a rich person can cause much more disruption within the voting system "legally" as well.

The point here is the legal part where what can end/what would end up happening is that elites around the world with irrational money can basically get political bases & favours established around the world for their purposes

Suppose an election is at 49 A / 51 B but now a rich guy contacted A and said to invest x$ to now make the odds 51 A / 49 B and then this news gets to twitter or any platform and now people get false news and some undecided voters might go bet on 51 itself too so now it might be 53/47 and in real voting election 51 A/49B

Some Elections are really close so I am pretty sure something like this is bound to happen sooner than later
by kcplate | 2026-01-19 01:37:11+00:00
To what end? I think this has become the “feel good that I am doing something about it” approach but it literally has almost zero effect beyond creating rhetoric from the politicians.

You need to hold your political leaders responsible with your vote. Don’t just automatically vote for the politicians that are “saying” the right things. Find out what your representatives are “doing” and hold them responsible for their actions or more importantly, inactions.
by zbentley | 2026-01-19 01:37:21+00:00
I’m with you that it’s terrible, but it very much does have schemas! The vast vast majority of YAML-based big APIs (k8s, helm, compose, and so on) all absolutely do check documents against schemas (not just ad-hoc validation rules) internally.

The real issue is two things: the smaller one is that there’s no single or self-describing schema system (like XML supports); the larger thing is that most YAML schema validations prioritize supporting extremely permissive and complex input documents over being predictable and appropriately restrictive. And that’s a harder problem to fix, because it has more to do with priorities and community conventions.

If people wanted strict schemaful YAML to be the norm, they would have consolidated on one of the many tools that does that by now. The issue is, people don’t want that; they want extremely flexible and open-ended APIs. YAML as currently practiced is conducive to that goal, but it’s the goal that leads to issues, not the choice of (bad, I agree) data language.