MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-11 17:52:30+00:00
I'm fairly proficient when it comes to Windows, but the diversity in install methods for Fedora threw me for a loop, too. It seemed easier at first -- get all your software from trusted sources in the default package manager, just like an app store! But then there's the question of RPM vs. Snap vs. Flatpak vs. downloading an installer from their website, some versions being further behind than others, the method you use having implications for where/how programs are installed and maintained, etc. It adds cognitive friction and makes troubleshooting harder; I'm not even sure if there's a reliable way to see a list of all programs installed on your machine (regardless of method) or how to easily uninstall them. I don't regret switching, but it is an obstacle, and more consistently than the initial question of which distro to use.
Ask HN: How are you balancing AI coding tools with junior developers growth?
by rubslopes | 2026-01-11 17:52:38+00:00
I'm a developer who wrote everything by hand for years, but now I mostly use Claude Code and only dive into the code when necessary. I can still review everything and get my hands dirty when needed. The AI augments skills I already built.

My junior developers don't have that foundation yet,but there's pressure: management already expects shorter deadlines because "AI makes development faster."
So I need to push my team to be more productive, but if they rely heavily on AI tools, will they ever develop the debugging intuition that I built by struggling through problems manually?
It feels like I'm asking them to learn to drive while also handing them a self-driving car.

On the other hand, LLMs really do make the team more productive, I use it a lot, and I also feel that I need to help them the adapt to modern tools.

Team leaders: how are you handling this tradeoff?
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-11 17:53:27+00:00
> If and that is a big if, Trump were to get Greenland, there is not much that Europe can do in any case.

Whether or not that's true, that doesn't mean they won't try anyway. Pride sometimes beats pragmatism. I think it's foolish to dismiss the possibility of war, been if you believe it will be one-sided.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-11 17:53:29+00:00
I have come to feel a (if not -the-) central tenet of white supremacy culture is the idea that the state is there to protect "white" folks and punish everyone else.

So when I see people do math that way, I don't think those folks are hypocritical; rather, I think they are just white supremacists, regardless of how they'd protest about that understanding of their position.
by rasmus-kirk | 2026-01-11 17:53:39+00:00
Not really, Linux evangelists are a thing because Linux is primarily held back by lack of adoption. A lot of common issues can be attributed to either:

1. The hardware manufacturer has never tested Linux support for drivers.
2. Some application that you need doesn't target Linux due to lack of users

This isn't everything, sure. But I think it's a majority of the headaches. Thus, Linux-users really want other people to also use Linux, so that companies actually give a shit about supporting it.

There's also the whole ideology involved. A lot of companies are increasingly pushing that you are not allowed to control the computer/phone/device you buy and Linux is at the forefront of combating this.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-11 17:54:56+00:00
I use this daily with local HTML files, specifically not closing <li> tags

For example, I generate numbered lists of URLs something like

<li><a href=http://example.com>http://example.com</a>

This is for text-only browser

If I am viewing in graphical browser I wrap the lists in <pre> tags

I don't think I've ever closed <br> tags
by linkdd | 2026-01-11 17:55:02+00:00
You can't say you love opensource and be mad that users are using the freedom you granted.

OpenSource projects are not becoming free training material for AI, AI companies are using a freedom OpenSource projects granted.

The claim that AI can build far superior software is dubious and I don't believe it one second. And even if it were true, that does not change anything.

With or without AI, permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, ISC, ...) always allowed the code to be used and redistributed in non opensource software. If you don't want that, use the GPL or a derive. If you don't believe that the GPL would be enforceable on the derivative works produced by AI, don't release your code as opensource.

OpenSource is essentially an ideology, that software should be free of use, and transparent, and freely shareable, without restriction. If you don't buy into that ideology, it's fine, but don't claim to love OpenSource when you don't. Just like a person who eats fish should not claim to be vegan.

AI will not be the end of OpenSource, firstly because it's a dead-end technology, it has already peaked years ago and is becoming worse with each new model. It does not have the ability to build complex software beyond a CRUD app (would you use a kernel that was entirely vibecoded? would you trust it the way you trust the Linux kernel?). Secondly, because OpenSource does not discriminate who gets to enjoy the freedom you granted.

You decided to "work for free" when you decided to distribute as OpenSource. If you don't want to work for free, maybe OpenSource is not for you.
by guiambros | 2026-01-11 17:55:18+00:00
Old thread, but I just realized this domain was registered on 2025-12-27 11:49:33 UTC. Some DNS servers (e.g. nextDNS) block recently created domains, to curb spam and malware.

Also, for some reason Google Safe Browser thinks some pages on this site are unsafe [1]. It may well be a false positive, but it further contributes to the blocking. So it wasn't the slashdot effect after all.

[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?u...
by christoph123 | 2026-01-11 17:55:46+00:00
A Substack for 80/20 life advice that gets repeated every year. We all know what to do, the idea of this is to remind us every week of one aspect of life and what best practices are for that area.

https://euzoia.substack.com
The concept: https://euzoia.org

Tried to do this as low tech as possible, so website is just an off the shelf notion wrapper
by poolnoodle | 2026-01-11 17:55:58+00:00
I dislike what Microsoft is doing to Windows as much as the next guy but if you get Windows Pro and disable all the icky stuff it is a rock solid OS that just works. Sure, once a year an update might add some new icky stuff but then you just spend 10 minutes to find out how to disable that and go about your business. It. Just. Works.
by BuddyPickett | 2026-01-11 17:56:03+00:00
Linux doesn't have all the features that Windows has, features that I use daily. It also doesn't work with all of my games and software so it's a non starter for me still. Tried it several times but it always falls short of what I need. I do have it sandboxed in Windows but it's rare that it is needed for how I use a computer.
by leptons | 2026-01-11 17:56:11+00:00
Frustrating UX? Nope. Slow? Nope. Constant hardware problems? Just no.

I've already switched to Linux, but this was not at all my experience of Windows. The only reason I switched was because Windows is going towards an "AI" focused OS which I do not want, as well as the cost of the Pro version - I run many VMs and not shelling out for Pro for all of them.
by garciasn | 2026-01-11 17:56:12+00:00
Overcome for history? Yes; absolutely.

Overcome as desktop OSs continue to advance and let Linux catchup? Probably not.

History has shown that Linux IS getting better for general use and has been for the last 25y but we’re still not in the year of the Linux desktop and while I’d like to see a different outcome; I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon.
by johnfn | 2026-01-11 17:56:27+00:00
Yes, viewing relationships transactionally is not good for either participant. But I think you have taken a rather distorted view of the article - and there’s a more charitable way to view this than a brutal utility optimization:

> someone comes with a question and leaves feeling small, they’ll stop asking. If they bring you a hard problem and you meet it with curiosity, you’ll get more of those. If you always solve things for people, they’ll outsource their judgment. If you always critique, they’ll start hiding the work.

I take this as a reminder that my off-hand remarks to people can really make a difference. I don’t think that is “impoverished” at all.
by SkyPuncher | 2026-01-11 17:56:28+00:00
Your argument seems to be missing the fact that methadone clinics are serving people with an existing addiction. They didn’t create that addiction, but they can fill the desire created by that addiction in a safe manner.

The ideal situation is the client leverages methadone into a recovery/remission from addiction - but that can be incredibly hard for them to do.
by fsflover | 2026-01-11 17:57:16+00:00
> something that isn't guaranteed to be a usable daily-driver for most people

See my other reply concerning this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46569163

> hardware isn't quite worth the price tag in-and-of-itself

https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
by osigurdson | 2026-01-11 17:57:51+00:00
>> They just completely turn off their laptops anytime they want to move somewhere

Fine but that attitude isn't going to increase Linux adoption. Arch does work in this regard today but it does require some BIOS tweaks to get it to work flawlessly. Compare this to a MacBook where closing the lid always does the right thing and seems to use basically no power at all in this state. For me, I'll accept the trade-off as I don't want to use macOS (makes no sense for development imo) but some aspects of the experience are clearly superior.
by modeless | 2026-01-11 17:57:59+00:00
HTML becomes pretty delightful for prototyping when you embrace this. You can open up an empy file and start typing tags with zero boilerplate. Drop in a script tag and forget about getElementById(); every id attribute already defines a JavaScript variable name directly, so go to town. Today the specs guarantee consistent behavior so this doesn't introduce compatiblity issues like it did in the bad old days of IE6.
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2026-01-11 17:58:22+00:00
You're all too generous. The first time Netflix didn't display past 720p in Firefox, I immediately cancelled my subscription (which was paying for the whole family) and redirected everyone to Bitsearch[0] to pirate everything instead. I don't agree the moral or ethical arguments against it either.

[0] Bitsearch uses a distributed hash table (DHT)[1] to find all public tracker content

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
by bearjaws | 2026-01-11 17:58:31+00:00
Dell needs to admit they're in deep shit.

I just bought our entire G&A team Macbook Air 15" for the same price as our Dell Premium laptops.

They are 2x as fast, have 3x the battery life, and 8 more gb of RAM.

We had done an initial batch of Dell Premium 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h it's over $1350 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team.

Initial reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, about 50% of them are new to Macs and have figured it out, additionally they all love the battery life and performance (most are switching from 11th and 12th gen).
by uhoh-itsmaciek | 2026-01-11 17:59:08+00:00
The problem is having to look in a different file for styling a component, and having to come up with a name for (at least one) CSS class per component. In traditional CSS, classes are intended to be reusable. You write a class definition once, and then use it in a bunch of different elements.

When working with a component-based UI (like in React), the components are typically the unit of reuse. Those CSS classes are used in one place: the component they're defined for. It's annoying to have to come up with a name for them, and to have to work in a separate file, especially if I just want `padding-inline: 4px` or `display: flex`.

Some argue separation of concerns, but CSS is inherently tightly coupled to the structure of your HTML: there's no getting around that. `.foo > ul` breaks if you replace that `ul` child with an `ol`.

I do agree that more intricate styling is harder to read with Tailwind, and I have some other gripes, too, but in general it's a good trade-off for component-based UIs.
by xedrac | 2026-01-11 17:59:56+00:00
> The current Linux desktop didn't get us there, but we believe that what was made, can be unmade.

This is a strange thing for them to say when they are pretty much a clone of Fedora Silverblue, with a few minor tweaks.

If Bluefin works for you, great. But I find their marketing rather pretentious.
by fathermarz | 2026-01-11 17:59:59+00:00
There are two sides of this coin.

The first is that yes, you can make it harder for the frontier makers to make progress because they will forever be stuck in a cat and mouse game.

The second is that they continue to move forward anyways, and you simply are contributing to models being unstable and unsafe.

I do not see a path that the frontier makers “call it a day” cause they were defeated.
by dan-robertson | 2026-01-11 18:00:08+00:00
I suspect a lot of the complication here is ultimately due to what the hardware allows, but it’s unfortunate that everything is so underdocumented (or requires reverse engineering).

An amazing performance tool is the ‘Processor Trace’ instrument. It’s M4 only unfortunately, I think due to hardware capability. It allows a detailed timeline of which functions were called in which order and how long they took. This can reveal all sorts of things that statistical profilers cannot – sometimes a call is much faster than other times; sometimes you do something slow and stupid between two steps when you would rather they run together; sometimes you are calling the same function again and again instead of caching its result. Unlike older methods, this is low overhead and doesn’t require recombination or knowing which functions are ‘interesting’. It is similar to intel processor trace and I think based on Arm CoreSight (both IPT and coresight tracing are supported by perf on Linux; not sure about asahi on Apple silicon).
by randycupertino | 2026-01-11 18:01:17+00:00
In a first for the U.S., Utah is letting artificial intelligence - not a doctor - renew certain medical prescriptions. No human involved.

The state has launched a pilot program with health-tech startup Doctronic that allows an AI system to handle routine prescription renewals for patients with chronic conditions. The initiative, which kicked off quietly last month, is a high-stakes test of whether AI can safely take on one of health care’s most sensitive tasks and how far that could spread beyond one AI-friendly red state.

Looks like the AI is carrying malpractice insurance and will be charging $4 per renewal.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information...
by walterbell | 2026-01-11 18:02:07+00:00
Dell XPS 14 starts at $2,050, while the 16-inch model will demand $2,200 starting Jan. 6. If you think that’s high, that’s because Dell revised its price point from $1,650 and $1,850, respectively.

25% / ~$400 laptop price increase due to market price increases for 16GB RAM?
by xpe | 2026-01-11 18:02:34+00:00
Please stop sneering at people here. You've been doing it a lot. [1] [2] [3] Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46552144
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526287
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213915
by crawfordcomeaux | 2026-01-11 18:04:19+00:00
I hope to one day contribute to a geoglyph of asphalt from torn up roads, if that's what's regenerative for the land I'm with/on/of/from/being and what the stewards of the land we gave back identify as needed. Would contribute to a geoglyph of anything else, too.

I want to build community through making visible-from-space-sized art projects with those from all around. And then go back to the plague pod I live in that's large enough to meet everyone's needs while keeping population density low enough to get rid of the plagues or make them a much smaller threat.
by walterbell | 2026-01-11 18:04:27+00:00
Apple has kept prices stable for existing models, but is rumored to be paying 50% more for DRAM in 2026, which may impact pricing of new Apple devices that will be launched in 2026.

edit: https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...

> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
by jennyholzer6 | 2026-01-11 18:05:11+00:00
> They could even use an LLM to detect if the data has been poisoned.

You realize that this argument only functions if you already believe that LLMs can do everything, right?

I was under the impression that successful data poisoning is designed to be undetectable to LLM, traditional AI, or human scrutiny

Edit:

Highlighting don@donhopkins.com's psychotic response

> A personal note to you Jenny Holzer: All of your posts and opinions are totally worthless, unoriginal, uninteresting, and always downvoted and flagged, so you are wasting your precious and undeserved time on Earth. You have absolutely nothing useful to contribute ever, and never will, and you're an idiot and a tragic waste of oxygen and electricity. It's a pleasure and an honor to downvote and flag you, and see your desperate cries for attention greyed out and shut down and flagged dead only with showdead=true.

somebody tell this guy to see a therapist, preferably a human therapist and not an LLM
by __bb | 2026-01-11 18:06:03+00:00
Whenever I read about poisoning LLM inputs, I'm reminded of a bit in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where businesses poisoned the the internet by publishing bad data, which only their tools could filter out:

> So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum [internet] deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out.

When I'm in a tinfoil hat sort of mood, it feels like this is not too far away.

EDIT: There's more in the book talking about "bad crap", which might be random gibberish, and "good crap" which is an almost perfect document with one important error in it.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-11 18:06:27+00:00
> If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it"

That's what I mean, too difficult for the expected return.

> A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app

We're talking about, what, Android and iOS? Those are the only platforms where Netflix has been publishing games AFAIK. I'm not suggesting they maintain it on every platform with a Netflix app!

I just don't believe it would be much work. If it's an app, it doesn't even have to handle streaming, it can just play the local video file. Heck, we have a fan-made codebase we can use as a reference:

https://github.com/joric/bandersnatch/blob/master/bandersnat...

<500 lines of code, plus two json files which are admittedly much longer but look auto-generated. I assume they came from Netflix, which means they exist already.

Even acknowledging that an official version might necessitate more than this, it just shouldn't be a big lift, even relative to a very small number of users. If it is a big lift, then something else is very wrong inside Netflix.

Netflix must have spent millions of dollars producing Bandersnatch. It was critically acclaimed. I can understand not making more—but not doing a modicum of work to keep it in their catalog?
by malshe | 2026-01-11 18:06:30+00:00
This sounds more like problem of HP’s dock than a Mac. Just because they said it is officially compatible with Mac doesn’t mean it is. Also, compatible with which Mac- Intel or M series? I use three different docks on two Mac Mini (M4 Pro) and they all worked out of the box. I did my research before buying them by watching YouTube reviews.
by heelix | 2026-01-11 18:07:02+00:00
I had the 17" XPS, which was lovely. A nice 16:10 screen, which was the main thing I was looking for. Battery was easy to replace. Easy memory and M2 drive replacement. It was a pretty good laptop for x86. Main issue was heat/sound. Linux was pretty easy to get going on that hardware. You could get at the internals - so cleaning out the fan was doable. (order new screws, as they ship with silly soft metal on the orignals)

https://i.imgur.com/4SdAQu9.jpeg

When they released the 16" series, most of the updgrade features were gone. Memory was tied to the CPU, which puts you in the same position that Apples does. Not a fan. I swapped out the 17" for a 16" macbook. I doubt I'll look at an XPS again.
by branon | 2026-01-11 18:07:15+00:00
I've found a very comfortable home on Void Linux for nearly a decade at this point, and wouldn't consider any other distro for desktop use. I find Void to be rock-solid stable and relentlessly simple.

The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.

Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).

Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.

He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.

It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.

[0] https://voidlinux.org/packages/?arch=x86_64&q=broadcom
by tannhaeuser | 2026-01-11 18:07:30+00:00
I guess you're replying to my comment because you were triggered by my last sentence. I wasn't criticizing you specifically, but yeah, in another comment you're writing

> It probably didn't help that XHTML did not offer any new features over tag-soup HTML syntax.

which unfortunately reaks of exactly the kind of roundabout HTML criticism that is not so helpful IMO. We have to face the possibility that most HTML documents have already been written at this point, at least if you value text by humans.

The CVEs you're referencing are due to said historic blunders allowing inline JS or otherwise tunneling foreign syntax in markup constructs (mutation XSS are only triggered by serialising and reparsing HTML as part of bogus sanitizer libs anyways).

If you look at past comments of mine, you'll notice I'm staunchly criticizing inline JS and CSS (should always be placed in external "resources") and go as far as saying CSS or other ad-hoc item-value syntax should not even exist when attributes already serve this purpose.

The remaining CVE is made possible by Hickson's overly liberal rules for what's allowed or needs escaping in attributes vs SGML's much stricter rules.