MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tonyww | 2026-01-28 19:39:47+00:00
Absolutely agree on the compounding error point - that’s exactly what pushed us toward verification.

On “verification wrong”: we try hard to keep predicates grounded and re-evaluated, not “check a cached handle”. Assertions do re-snapshot / re-query during each retry, and we scope them to signals that should change (URL, existence/state of an element, text/value).

If the page is flaky/stale, the assertion just won’t prove the condition within the retry window and we fail with artifacts such as frames of clip (if ffmpeg available) rather than claiming success.

There are still edge cases (virtualized DOM, optimistic UI, async updates), but in those cases the goal is the same: make the failure explicit and debuggable with artifacts and time-travel traces, not silently drift.
by Gracana | 2026-01-28 19:40:00+00:00
This is a surprising opinion to encounter, given my experience with scaling on Windows, where simple things like taking my laptop off its dock (going from desktop monitors to laptop screen) causes applications to become blurry, and they stay blurry even when I've returned the laptop to the dock. Or how scaling causes some maximized window edges to show up on the adjacent screen. Or all manner of subtle positioning and size bugs crop up.

Is this more of an aspirational thing, like Windows supports "doing it right", and with time and effort by the right people, more and more applications may be able to be drawn correctly?

[edit] I guess so, I see your comment about setting registry keys to make stuff work in Microsoft's own programs. That aligns more closely with my experience.
by palata | 2026-01-28 19:40:01+00:00
In a way I don't know what I think about them preventing me from modifying "their" certified OS. Many products do that (if I buy a Marshall smartspeaker, it's not like if I can modify the software, is it?).

What I want is to be able to properly install an alternative OS (just like I don't care about what Windows or macOS do, as long as I can install Linux), and that goes with the bootloader unlocking/locking.
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-28 19:40:11+00:00
I read the "not people" comment not as describing the general population but rather the collection of camera-seeking characters roaming around the POTUS. Obviously they are human beings but they do demonstrate a remarkable lack of personality and agency.

All administrations have toadies, but cabinet members and proxies now snap to the latest tweet without even a fig-leaf attempt to bridge obvious 180 degree shifts. Sometimes in the same sentence.

Part of what it shows is that traditional DC has debate-club graduates from a culture than prizes verbal fluency, and when you hire based on other criteria, the messaging is incredibly clunky.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 19:40:17+00:00
I just watched a Ken Thompson interview when he's 80 years old.

My god jolly, I feel like Ken's the person you might be referring to.

Wozniak is great as well. Perhaps we (or people?) might affiliate him more with Hackernews given he was co-founder of a company which many founders within HN might want to achieve (or replicate?)

But the other way I view HN is a place of curiosity, a place of tinkering. I saw the interview of Ken Thompson and I don't know about you guys, but Ken Thompson talked in his interview about how when he was in between houses at a hotel when he was in high school, and there were girls who he used to wave at so he was half-way through to making essentially a pixelated device through which he could write letters (from what I remember from his interview)

I personally have done something similar although from a software side and not with a hardware side. But I feel like after 70 years, the transition from hardware to software is one which is understandable :)

I mean... Ken's 80 year old and really sharp. I only saw him thinking about things literally 70 year old just once almost like loading things into his mind at the start of interview and he was effortless afterwards talking about it.

I don't know enough about wozniak to qualify him for this

But what I can say was that today I was watching the Ken Thompson interview and literally after 15-30 minutes of the 4 hour interview. I was like, this belongs on hackernews and submitted it here. (Not sure if this counts as promotion but seriously everyone just watch this interview of Ken Thompson!)

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=309siTvApbY

Hackernews discussion I submitted (Currently zero response after 8 hours tho) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793919] Kenneth Lane Thompson, 1983 ACM Turing Award Recipient (Video Interview)

SO I don't know if there's a particular reason why my HN submission about got literally 0 response after 8 hours or if because of it, Ken Thompson wouldn't qualify for it. But I am gonna be honest and say that in my mind, Ken Thompson's the legend which really embodies the HN spirit. Not sure if other parts of HN community also feel so but I still feel that they do even though there was no response on the HN post (could just be the timing at what I posted and many other things) but yea.

I highly recommend everyone to go watch the interview if you have 4-5 hours of free time right now.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-28 19:40:18+00:00
I'm a Trump supporter, generally. I see a lot of comments at the bottom of threads by people who I assume also are. The reason you don't often hear this admission when you're in a forum with downvotes like this one is twofold. One, obviously, the person gets immediately downvoted, so those posts are harder to find. Two, if a person admits to it in a post, that often functions as a thought terminating trigger for everyone else involved, and it doesn't matter what point he was trying to make; the interlocutor just calls him a racist or something and moves on.

Actually, I like using HN because I find it has a much higher proportion of right wing or centrist thinkers than Reddit, or at least less downvote propensity towards those groups. And crucially, I won't get banned from HN just for voting for Trump, unlike a terribly large number of subreddits. This userbase is definitely more right-leaning than Reddit, of that I'm sure.
by curt15 | 2026-01-28 19:40:25+00:00
> At the end of the day, as long as the owner of the hardware gets to control the keys, this seems like fantastic tech.

The problem is that there are powerful corporate and government interests who would love nothing more than to prevent users from controlling the keys for their own computers, and they can make their dream come true simply by passing a law.

It may be the case that certain users want to ensure that their computers are only running their code. But the same technologies can also used to ensure that their computers are only running someone else's code, locking users out from their own devices.
by DSMan195276 | 2026-01-28 19:40:32+00:00
I would add, I've always felt the addition of the 3D screen also held it back because the touch screen became relegated to always being secondary (so that the main display of the game could be 3D). Many games that were sequels to touch-focused DS games did this, they had you touching the bottom screen to interact with something on the top screen and made those games feel a lot worse to me.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-28 19:40:38+00:00
Phi is conceptually defined like so:

Suppose you have a rectangle whose side length ratio is ϕ. You draw a line across the rectangle which divides it into a square and another rectangle, maximizing the size of the square you can achieve by doing this.

Then the side length ratio of the new, smaller rectangle is also ϕ.

The diagram is straightforward to set up:

a b
+-----+--------+
| | |
| ϕa-| |
| | |-b
| | |
+-----+--------+
\ /
----- -----
\/
ϕb

This gives us a system of two equations:

ϕa = b
ϕb = a + b

If you substitute b = φa into the other one, you get

ϕ(ϕa) = a + ϕa

And since a is just an arbitrary scaling factor, we have no problem dividing it out:

ϕ² = 1 + ϕ

Since we defined φ by reference to the length of a line, we know that it is the positive solution to this equation and not the negative solution.

(Side note: there are two styles of lowercase phi, fancy φ and plain ϕ. They have their own Unicode points.

HN's text input panel displays ϕ as fancy and φ as plain. This is reversed in ordinary text display (a published comment, as opposed to a comment you are currently composing). And it's reversed again in the monospace formatting. (Which matches the input display.)

The ordinary text display appears to be incorrect, going by the third usage note at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%95 )
by ori_b | 2026-01-28 19:40:47+00:00
For what human leverage of AGI may look like, look at the relationship between a mother and a toddler.

As you said: There's an infinite number of things a toddler may find worth doing, and they offload most of the execution to the mother. The mother doesn't escape the ambiguity, but has more experience and context.

Of course, this all assumes AGI is coming and super intelligent.
by solaris2007 | 2026-01-28 19:40:50+00:00
> But the moment two sites share the same address range, you have an ambiguity that IP routing cannot resolve.

Writing PF or nft rules to NAT these hyper-legacy subnets on the local side of the layer3 tunnel is actually super trivial, like 20 seconds of effort to reason about and write in a config manifest.

Like written the article, a device on the customer site is required. At that point you might as well deploy a router that has a supportable software stack and where possible sober IP instead of legacy IP.

.

I have been running IPv6-only networks since 2005 and have been deploying IPv6-only networks since 2009. When I encountered a small implementation gap in my favorite BSD, I wrote and submitted a patch.

Anyone who complained about their favorite open source OS having an IPv6 implementation gap or was using proprietary software (and then also dumb enough to complain about it), should be ashamed of themselves for doing so on any forum with "hacker" in the name. But we all know they aren't ashamed of themselves because the competency crisis is very real and the coddle culture let's such disease fester.

There is no excuse to not deploy at minimum a dual-stack network if not an IPv6-only network. If you deploy an IPv4-only network you are incompetent, you are shitting up the internet for everyone else, and it would be better for all of humanity if you kept any and all enthusiasm you have for computers entirely to yourself (not a single utterance).
by mft_ | 2026-01-28 19:40:52+00:00
I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.

Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.
by godelski | 2026-01-28 19:40:53+00:00
And it's worth noting that CS2 is still the most played game on Steam. It has double the players of the second most played game, Dota 2, which also works on Linux. And that has double the player base of the number 3 game, Arc Raiders, which also works great on Linux.

The idea that you'll be missing out is ill founded. Yes, there are some games that won't work. PUBG, Bongo Cat, Rust[0], and EA Sports FC 26 are the ones on the top 10 multiplayer list. But it's also not like you don't have plenty of massively popular games to choose from.

I'll even say don't switch to Linux, just stop playing these abusive games. Honestly, if you're unwilling to change OSes but willing to do this then people that want to jump ship can. We all win from this behavior. Even you as it discourages Windows from shoving in more junk and discourages publishers like EA from shoving in massive security vulnerabilities like rootkits. I mean we've all seen how glitchy many AAA games are, you really think their other software isn't going to be just as unpolished and bug ridden?

[0] Apparently works with Linux servers? https://www.protondb.com/app/252490

P.S. If anyone wants to check for yourself:

- Steam Multiplayer by rankings: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=3859
- Proton Support: https://www.protondb.com/
by charcircuit | 2026-01-28 19:41:00+00:00
>are origin bound.

This is assuming the user's device is not compromised.

>How does that work?

Priviledge escalation on an old OS version allows an attacker to get root access. Then with that they can bypass any sandboxing. Or they could get access to some android permission intended for system apps that they should not have access to and use that to do malicous things.

I don't closely follow malware outbreaks for android so I can't point to specific examples, but malware does exist.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-28 19:41:07+00:00
> the GDPR penalty is a highish percentage of the company's total revenue which gives the laws a good amount of "teeth"

Under 2% of GDPR complaints even result in fines. And that would require there to be grounds for a complaint - there's no way for an external user to tell whether the delete is actually done, and the DPA won't force them to submit to a third-party source code audit.

The GDPR has zero teeth. But don't take it from me, these guys have a bit more expertise than I do on this subject: https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-day-5-misconceptions-abou...
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-28 19:41:13+00:00
1. The audience is mostly kids. They can't buy any premium games easily (and is the lens for the rest of my points)

2. Network effects. Works as well on them as any of us. Especially in a world that makes it more and more hostile to have them meet IRL.

3. It's a generation raised on "forever games". They are used to games they pick up and will continually play for years. Games that will always provide new stuff for them. They fundamentally have different habits from Millenials.

4. Mobile support. So many kids play on mobile. So they are even more isolated from the consple market.
by jsheard | 2026-01-28 19:41:23+00:00
> Looking at the most played multiplayer games on Steam

Note that this is skipping over some extremely popular games which aren't on Steam. Notably Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Valorant, and everything else from Riot Games, none of which work on Linux. From the Steam examples there's also some grey areas, GTA5 singleplayer works but multiplayer does not, and Counterstrike works on official servers but not on Faceit servers, where a lot of serious competitive play happens.
by eqvinox | 2026-01-28 19:41:38+00:00
They clearly haven't talked to a telco or network device vendor, they would've sold them a VRF/EVPN/L3VPN based solution… for a whole bunch of money :)

You can DIY that these days though, plain Linux software stack, with optional hardware offload on some specific things and devices. Basically, you have a traffic distinguisher (VXLAN tunnel, MPLS label, SRv6, heck even GRE tunnel), keep a whole bunch of VRFs (man ip-vrf) around, and have your end services (server side) bind into appropriate VRFs as needed.

Also, yeah, with IPv6 you wouldn't have this problem. Regardless of whether it's GUAs or ULAs.

Also-also, you can do IPv6 on the server side until the NAT (which is in the same place as in the article), and have that NAT be a NAT64 with distinct IPv6 prefixes for each customer.
by cpursley | 2026-01-28 19:42:10+00:00
Oban is cool but I really like the idea of pgflow.dev, which is based on pgmq (rust) doing the heavy lifting as it makes it language agnostic (all the important parts live in Postgres). I've started an Elixir adapter which really is just a DSL and poller, could do the same in Python, etc.

https://github.com/agoodway/pgflow
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-28 19:42:22+00:00
Like at my uni I can't visit any .xyz sites.

Note

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554624

https://www.spotvirtual.com/blog/the-perils-of-an-xyz-domain...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p-XimPhlNE
by antonvs | 2026-01-28 19:42:25+00:00
> Is it that HSBC has 0 competent people who could have ...

In the chain of command for a feature like this, that's quite possible.

> Or is it that everybody who mentioned this was overruled by middle/upper management because they know better?

Or just learned helplessness, they don't bother because they know it's not worth trying.
A Trillion Lost Games
by sirianth | 2026-01-28 19:42:27+00:00
You sit across from an old crone, her face a map of time itself.
The board between you is simple, the pieces familiar.
You play the game with passion, developing brilliant strategies, but she is the master.
With a gentle, knowing smile, she corners you.

Your child takes your seat.
The board is the same, but a new piece stands on the back rank—one that can see several moves ahead.
Your child plays, building on your gambits, and the game is longer, more complex.
Again, the crone wins, but as she takes the final piece, a single wrinkle on her face vanishes.

Your grandchild sits, and now the board has a piece that can link others together, morphing their shapes and capabilities.
The game is a dazzling web of strategy.
The very shape of the board itself seems somehow fundamentally to have changed.
The crone, looking younger still, takes hours for a single move.

Generation after generation takes their seat, each inheriting a more complex board and more powerful pieces forged from the losses of their ancestors.

After millennia, the crone is a radiant woman in her prime, her hair, a lustrous black.
Across from her sits her latest opponent—you, but not you.
It is a god-like being of light and thought, a descendant of a trillion lost games.

The board is now a shimmering, multi-dimensional cosmos.
The pieces are living concepts and fundamental forces.
The game has become so beautiful it is no longer about winning or losing.
The game is now about the elegance of play.

For the first time, the woman does not smile because she knows she will win, she smiles because she knows she is finally facing an equal.
by simoncion | 2026-01-28 19:43:00+00:00
> Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11... Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.

Weird. I don't use KDE's compositor, and -AFAIK- WindowMaker doesn't have one. When in either KDE or in WindowMaker I don't have stuttering with either fullscreen, borderless "fullscreen", or windowed games... everything is as smooth as it is in Windows. Having said that, I do know that -when using KDE- some fullscreen games get jittery as all shit if a notification pops up and remain that way until the notification disappears. I expect that that performance problem would go away if I was using the compositor... but I don't want to spend the VRAM on it.

I use AMD graphics cards, so it might be an Nvidia thing that you're seeing. It also might be a "Your Linux distro simply stopped shipping good xorg installs" thing. I'm running Gentoo Linux which continues to ship updated versions of xorg and supporting software. [0]

[0] I've heard people running Debian and Debian-derived distros report X11 behavior that absolutely does not match what I've been seeing for years... so some percentage of the "X11 can't do $THING" when it really, really can must be coming from distros that ship either dramatically out-of-date or severely crippled xorg installs.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-28 19:43:03+00:00
For quite a while I've found that the much easier answer is to have a physical drive per OS and make sure it's the only drive connected during install, or at least one for anything that doesn't play entirely nicely with multi-boot. Obviously there's downsides to that, buying another drive or you might be using something like a laptop which is less friendly to extra drives, dis/reconnecting M.2 drives isn't as trivial as SATA either.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-28 19:43:10+00:00
Freaked me out for a second and had to double check that my tablet comes with a stop watch without having to download an app WITH ADS!!!!! Does he earn money for displaying these ads in his video too? I find it hard to believe that a content creator with sponsors is forced to use an ad supported app. Something about it being a stopwatch really just adds the cherry on top
by superkuh | 2026-01-28 19:43:21+00:00
Right. The push based accessibility that is only supported by GNOME's compositor, mutter. I would very happy to hear about this this extension supported under other wayland compositors. Do you know of any?

Because you don't get the entire window tree, because you only get the single windows information when that application provides it, it is entirely incompatible with existing solutions. And beyond that, it is a "solution" that prevents me from controlling my own computer. I understand GNOME is targeting everyone not just power users. But as a power user it is incompatible with my use cases.

And the assertions that push is more performant than pull and full tree are being backed by specious arguments. GTK 4 broke this, not GTK 3. It's not a push versus pull thing. It's wayland architecture focused Gtk4 causing the problem when things are fine in X11 focused GTK 3. ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 a11y: No API for supporting a11y Selection interface , https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 a11y AT-SPI: get_child_count implementation iterating over all children causes freeze for objects with many a11y children
by rpcope1 | 2026-01-28 19:43:22+00:00
The suggested solution involves using the CGNAT /10 in conjunction with a VPN, but I've actually seen someone do this, and still have problems with certain end users where their next hop for routing also involves a router with an IPv4 address in the same space, so it's not really bulletproof either. We may as well consider doing other naughty things like co-opting DoD non-routable /8s or the test net in the RFCs you're not supposed to use, because basically anything you pick is going to have problems.
by hannasm | 2026-01-28 19:43:30+00:00
This article does a good job of calling attention to the pattern.

If you work in powershell you can start out in the terminal, then when you've got whatever you need working you can grab the history (get-history) and write it to a file, which I've always referred to as a `sample`. Then when it becomes important enough that other people ask me about it regularly I refactor the `sample` into a true production grade `script`. It often doesn't start out with a clear direction and creating a separate file is just unnecessary ceremony when you can just tinker and export later when the `up-enter' pattern actually appears.
by stackskipton | 2026-01-28 19:43:40+00:00
They might have competent people but most tech people working at a bank like are out of fucks to give.

At these massive, unable to go bankrupt companies, you quickly lose all fucks to give. No one cares about opinion of ICs or even direct managers, Senior Management makes the calls and you either execute quietly or replaced with someone who is. When I worked for $MegaUSBank, there was two types of people. Those who realized their "spark" was draining out of them and got a new job after a few years and those who were just "Whatever, I push buttons and get paycheck." and had been there for 15 years.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-28 19:43:43+00:00
Some of that is building "mobile-first". If every app needs to be easy to use on small screens with big touch targets first/foremost/always, then anything that takes time to develop and only makes sense for a demographic "desktop users with an ultrawide and effectively all the screen space in the world" gets deprioritized simply because it's a smaller audience; no real malice intended in such cases just over-prioritizing the "needs of the many" over "the desires of a privileged few".