MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esalman | 2026-01-28 19:16:15+00:00
My wife is a PhD in recycled asphalt materials and pioneered the use of such materials in New Mexico.

Under her PhD supervisor she directly worked with the NM department of transportation as a consultant. She did all that as an international student besides her graduate studies while being paid at 50% FTE (+tuition).

It takes between $10m (rural) to $100m (urban) to build a mile of interstate. Recycled materials can reduce the cost by 15-50% while still being equally as sustainable for decades.

Fortunately she is no longer at risk (or minimal risk) job/immigration wise. But others are not as fortunate. Just yesterday I learned that a PhD student from my alma mater was turned back from port of entry and his student visa denied. Reason? He traveled with his University provided laptop without written authorization. I understand that there are embargos and sanctions and trade restrictions, but really?
by kelnos | 2026-01-28 19:16:16+00:00
I enjoy cool features like this, but as usual, I'm wary of the consequences.

Android is becoming more and more locked down like iOS. Even if it weren't, it's still always been more locked down than a standard desktop or laptop machine running an operating system of the user's choice.

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, already I see non- and semi-technical users often dropping their laptop or desktop and just using their phone or tablet. (I know people who don't even have a laptop/desktop anymore.)

Android having a full desktop interface will just add fuel to this fire, and further normalize running a locked-down OS and device that users don't truly own or control as their only computing platform.
by observationist | 2026-01-28 19:16:24+00:00
I think it's probably just apparent to a small set of people; we're usually the ones yelling at the stupid cloud technologies that are ravaging online privacy and liberty, anyway. I was expecting some sort of OpenAI automated user data handling program, with the recent venture into adtech, but since it's a science project and nothing to do with surveillance and user data, I think it's fine.

If it was part of their adtech systems and them dipping their toe into the enshittification pool, it would have been a legendarily tone deaf project name, but as it is, I think it's fine.
by cess11 | 2026-01-28 19:16:35+00:00
"All major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have native Linux builds. Full support. No compromises."

This is kind of true. It depends on whether you're doing Serious Stuff on MICROS~1 365 and probably other similar services, because if you for example want to do a download of email or files or whatever from an account in the compliance portal, then they force you to use Edge on Windows. There's a browser module that can only run in that context, probably due to some deep and obscene integration between Edge for Windows and the operating system, plus they get users.

Other than that I agree with the article. Windows has been way suckier than mainstream Linux distributions for a long, long time. Yes, there might be some driver or configuration issues sometimes, but it doesn't crash, it doesn't force system upgrade reboots, and Windows still has driver issues.

Once set up a Linux system tends to just tick along for years, unless you do something weird, which is more likely under Linux because you'll probably let curiosity bring you around more than it easily can under Windows and you'll learn to do stuff that carries more risk than what a regular user can under Windows.

And the nice part is that it is very rare that you actually, terminally brick your Linux. There is almost always some forum thread that tells you the steps to bring it back up again, whereas MICROS~1 support threads commonly consist of 'hello, did you try to reboot? if it didn't work, try reinstalling'.
by hadlock | 2026-01-28 19:16:51+00:00
> Do social marketing services maintain armies of bot accounts that just build up credibility by doing normal-ish comments, so they can called on later like sleeper cells for marketing?

Russia and Israel are known to run full time operations doing this for well over a decade. Twitter by their own account, 25% of users are/were bots back in 2015 (their peak user year). Even here on HN if you go look at the most trafficked Israel/Palestine threads, there are lots of people complaining about getting modded into oblivion, turning the conversation into neutral/pro israel, and silencing negative comments via a ghost army of modders.
Show HN: PaperMETAR – An E-Paper Aviation Weather Display for Pilots
by thebitguru | 2026-01-28 19:16:52+00:00
Hi HN!

I created an ESP32 driven weather display for pilots that looks like a cockpit instrument. The goal was to move METAR off the phone screen and onto the desk where it is always visible. It’s a dedicated, "always-on" desk accessory that fetches real-time aviation weather and renders it onto a high-contrast e-paper display. It also has a quiz mode to help student pilots learn and test METAR decoding.

Jumpseaters: Adding Personality to the Data
Raw METARs can be dry, so I implemented a feature called Jumpseaters. These are selectable personality profiles that transform the device into an opinionated flight crew.

Instead of just seeing "OVC001," you might get a report from Downwind Donnie, who sarcastically judges your "personal minimums," or Checkride Charlie, a virtual DPE who delivers weather updates with the uncomfortable silence. It was a fun to map these "personalities" to specific weather triggers in the firmware.

----

The Technical Details

Controller: ESP32-S3. I chose this for the native USB support and the power efficiency needed for long-term deep sleep.

Display: 4.2" E-Paper. It uses an open-source library https://github.com/martinberlin/CalEPD

Power: Deep sleep cycles keep the current draw low, allowing it to run for weeks on a small LiPo. I am continuing to optimize the power usage because I feel I can get it to last many months even after the daily screen refreshes.

Tech Stack: ESP-IDF/C++ for the microcontroller. Flutter/Dart for the iOS/Android mobile apps. Nextjs for the website and API.

---

I have learned a lot about hardware devices during this process. It has been fun programming for the E-paper display. It has it's own unique challenges because of the nature of the technology (seconds for each refresh vs. refreshes/second for traditional screens). I really enjoy when it refreshes.

The Kickstarter is live and 38% funded with 15-days to go. One thing I wish I had done a lot more of is prelaunch marketing. Ads now have had good conversion driving to the Kickstarter page, but the volume takes time.

On the same prelaunch theme, the other major lesson learned is that I wish I had asked for more feedback publicly (I do have early testers, but all local) and shared more before working on the Kickstarter. Once you say Kickstarter, all the mods put it in the commercial category and don't allow posting ANYTHING related to it.

Check it out at https://papermetar.com or https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/charlie29r/papermetar
by claytonjy | 2026-01-28 19:17:39+00:00
Even before LLMs, Data Science was being replaced by more specialization, IME.

Data Engineers took over the plumbing once they moved on from Scala and Spark. ML Engineers took over the modeling (and LLMs are now killing this job too, as it’s rare to need model training outside of big labs). Data analysts have to know SQL and python these days, and most DS are now just this, but with a nicer title and higher pay.

Once upon a time I thought DS would be much more about deeper statistics and causal inference, but those have proven to be rare, niche needs outside soft science academia.
by runarberg | 2026-01-28 19:18:04+00:00
If this resembles the feeling you had when you first used the internet, it is drastically different from when I used the internet.

When I first used the internet, it was not about doing things faster, it was about doing things which were previously simply unavailable to me. A 12 year old me was never gonna fax my previous classmate who moved to Australia, but I certainly emailed her.

We are not talking about a creator nor an accelerator, we are talking about an avenue (or a road if you will). When I use the internet, I am the creator, and the internet is the road that gets me there.

When I use an LLM it is doing something I can already do, but now I can do it without using my brain. So the feeling is much closer to doomscrolling on social media where previously I could just read a book or meet my pals at the pub. Doomscrolling facebook is certainly faster then reading a book, or socializing at the pub. But it is a poor replacement for either.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-28 19:18:12+00:00
The more the world can do to normalize good personal security & privacy, the harder it is going to be for regimes.

Iran has had to turn off the internet for good to maintain their vicious violent theocratic totalitarianism. They had to basically give up technology, pull the plug. Sure that demonstrates them "winning", them having control, but also, they couldn't monitor everyone, they couldn't control technology, and their nation will be immensely poorer and worse generally, in remarkably huge ways, because they lost so hard & had no choice.

The declaration of Independence of cyberspace was over the top & ridiculous, but it's right. These states have extremely limited power, and are smaller, much smaller, than the noosphere that surrounds them. With extreme injury states can secluded themselves, like a North Korea, to maintain control. But humankind comes from man the tool maker, homo erectus, and that has been and will keep being our better side. Giving the bastards up above hell, building liberatory, private systems isn't nearly as pointless and hopeless and useless as your 100% all negative don't even try view would indicate, we do have power, especially if we work broadly to improve the general footing, rather than building just exceptional war-time tooling.
by dmix | 2026-01-28 19:18:21+00:00
I've been using node for a decade now and I've had to update NPM libraries a number of times as Node itself upgraded. I have a feeling it will get a lot more stable with ESM and the maturity of the language but if you're writing something you need to run 5-10yrs from now I wouldn't touch a library unless it's simple and has few of it's own dependencies.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 19:18:22+00:00
There's lineageOS for outdated pixel device, but I think you loose device attestation if you flash that, so your banking, payment and digital-ID apps won't work anymore which is kind of important features for a lot of people.

I still think separating a phone for phone apps and a PC for productivity, is the best choice even if that PC is a 20 year old rustbucket from the dumpster, it will still do more tasks than a phone. You can't learn photoshop on a phone.
by zerd | 2026-01-28 19:18:45+00:00
Had the same issue with slow file explorer in Windows 10. A couple of things helped a bit, such as disabling "Show recently used files" and "Show frequently used folders". I also cleaned up the Quick access list. For some reason if you have a network share there it makes browsing local dirs slower, go figure. It's still not instant but a lot faster than the 3+ second delay.

I tried OneCommander and they're super fast, so it's not something slowing down disk IO, it's purely File Explorer.

Now I'm still struggling with closing chrome tabs being super slow sometimes.
by augusteo | 2026-01-28 19:18:56+00:00
The shift from "click and hope" to explicit post-conditions is the right framing.

We've been building agent-based automation and the reliability problem is brutal. An agent can be 95% accurate on each step, but chain ten steps together and you're at 60% success rate. That's not usable.

Curious about the failure modes though. What happens when the verification itself is wrong? Like, the cart shows updated on screen but the verification layer checks a stale element?
by hintymad | 2026-01-28 19:19:30+00:00
People may have forgotten what happened back in early 2000s. Outsourcing was all the rage, and people in the US were really concerned. And then it came the explosive growth of internet, of mobile, of cloud, of social network, and etc. And then discussion died or at least dwindled enough that we stopped paying attention.

It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of time for them to own more R&D.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-28 19:19:56+00:00
I think the 'more than one user' alternative to a 'single EXE on a single computer' isn't the multilayered pie of things that KronisLV mentioned, but a PHP script[0] on an apache server[0] you access via a web browser. You don't even need a dedicated DB server as SQLite will do perfectly fine.

[0] or similarly easy to get running equivalent
by SamBam | 2026-01-28 19:20:05+00:00
Ah, hunting the serial number led me to discover that the clock is part of a centrally-synchronized wireless clock system. The company is discontinued, so who knows how old these are. So I'm going to hunt down a wireless transmitter somewhere in the building that is setting my clock four minutes fast... Oh well, I don't get to try out OP's cool tech!
by jermberj | 2026-01-28 19:20:14+00:00
> The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic.

Does this not undercut everything going on here. Like, what?
by weinzierl | 2026-01-28 19:20:31+00:00
Sure, but that's beside the point.

Text based graphics with fancy or custom fonts is just crazy efficient. That is exactly how we got the amazing graphics of The Last Ninja or Turrican on machines with less than 64KiB useable RAM.

Same for more modern embedded devices. If you constrain yourself to text you increase both runtime performance and your developer productivity.
by augusteo | 2026-01-28 19:20:44+00:00
The trajectory export feature is smart. Evaluation and training data collection in the same tool.

I'm curious how the benchmarks handle non-determinism. Real GUIs have loading states, animations, popups that appear sometimes but not always. Does cuabench control for that, or is variance just part of the measurement?

Also interested in what "Windows Arena" tests specifically. Windows has so many edge cases - UAC prompts, driver install dialogs, random update notifications. Those feel like the hard mode for computer-use agents.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-28 19:20:58+00:00
> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.

Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.

Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.

And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.
by tonyww | 2026-01-28 19:21:09+00:00
Totally agree - hybrid approaches can work well, especially on messy pages. We’ve seen the same tradeoff.

On the verification side though, dynamic pages are exactly the reason why we scope assertions narrowly (specific predicates, bounded retries using eventually() function) instead of diffing the whole page. If the expected condition can’t be proven within that window, we fail fast rather than guessing.
by egorfine | 2026-01-28 19:21:14+00:00
> there's no reason that remote attestation can't be used in the opposite direction

There is: corporate will fund this project and enforce its usage for their users not for the sake of the users and not for the sake of doing any good.

What it will be used for is to bring you a walled garden into Linux and then slowly incentivize all software vendors to only support that variety of Linux.

LP has a vast, vast experience in locking down users' freedom and locking down Linux.
Prusa Sponsored the FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook
by AleksanderS | 2026-01-28 19:21:26+00:00
Handing over the FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook to Prusa

Today, Marcel Ehlers from Prusa Research was at my place in Sankt Augustin, Germany, to personally take delivery of their own copy of the FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook, including a handwritten dedication to the Prusa-team and to Josef Prusa personally.

Prusa has sponsored the FreeCAD Beginner's Handbook to further support the maker community and to embrace inventions in mechanical engineering. By combining a Prusa 3D-printer and FreeCAD, one can design and manufacture prototypes of their invention at home and within just one day.

Marcel left his Prusa CORE One+ for me to print out the Mars Rover from the book and to play around with it. We discussed the recent developments in and around manufacturing and what that future means for us.

Next, the book will be shown around at the Prusa HQ. I promised to send more copies in the upcoming weeks, so that more Prusa employees can get their hands on them and get started with FreeCAD.

Let's move open-source software in mechanical engineering forward, keep our data private and bring our ideas to life.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-28 19:22:23+00:00
Cheating was solved before any of this rootkit level malware horseshit.

Community ran servers with community administration who actually cared about showing up and removing bad actors and cheaters.

Plenty of communities are still demonstrating this exact fact today.

Companies could 100% recreate this solution with fully hosted servers, with an actually staffed moderation department, but that slightly reduces profit margins so fuck you. Keep in mind community servers ran on donations most of the time. That's the level of profit they would lose.

Companies completely removed community servers as an option instead, because allowing you to run your own servers means you could possibly play the game with skins you haven't paid for!!! Oh no!!! Getting enjoyment without paying for it!!!

All software attempts at anti-cheat are impossible. Even fully attested consoles have had cheats and other ways of getting an advantage that you shouldn't have.

Cheating isn't defined by software. Cheating is a social problem that can only be solved socially. The status quo 20 years ago was better.
by josephg | 2026-01-28 19:22:24+00:00
“The current system” isn’t a thing across our whole industry. You’re speaking about some specific places you've worked.

Personally I’ve never felt blamed for bugs that made it into production. I’ve felt responsible for sure, but I’ve never been blamed by others in the business. And I have seen sales people utterly chewed out for selling features we haven’t implemented without asking engineering. It all really depends on where you work, and what the culture is like.

If you hate it there, you don’t have to stay. Not every job will be like that.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2026-01-28 19:22:35+00:00
I've seen this sentiment on the left. I think the author just phrased it a little oddly.

Sometimes called "pink capitalism" or "rainbow capitalism", where a company will show the rainbow pride flag for Pride Month, but not put any more substantial effort towards diversity, plurality, LGBTQ rights, etc.

I expect nothing from companies, and it's nice to see that virtue signal. If they're signalling, it means they think we haven't been exterminated yet. But I don't expect good works from anything for-profit. It's just business.

Edit: The author using the phrase "surveillance capitalism" is generally a left wing thing. I don't hear right-wingers rallying against capitalism (let's not even get into the weeds of defining "capitalism" the word) even when they happen to oppose surveillance
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-28 19:22:43+00:00
Steam now supports 1 click install of its entire library windows and Linux native and the majority work. The majority of printers either work or do not. It's not a reasonable expectation that all hardware will work but you won't need hours of work either.

MS is free to deprecate your work around any given Tuesday when you have work to do leaving you in the same spot with less time available to do anything about it.

You are wrongly assessing the value of the alternatives to boot if you think they were just too stupid to google. Based on the article they already viewed Windows negatively prior to this and thus already had a motivation to switch.
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-28 19:22:53+00:00
Copyright DRM tries to prevent unapproved recording, and has completely failed, with effectively every commercial release with any interest being available of peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Videogame anti-cheat measures try to prevent assistance in real-time games, and have created a cat-and-mouse game of alternately succeeding and failing. For a non-real-time games, detection would be far more difficult.

The best-case scenario for preventing the release of questions and the detection of cheating in an online test is that the questions will be released and you might sometimes detect some cheating.
by Telaneo | 2026-01-28 19:23:05+00:00
> a cheap Lenovo laptop with a Celeron dual core

Yeah, those things are born e-waste. I'm surprised Intel even bothers. Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration. A dual core from several years ago, assuming it's a proper i5 or i7, will do a lot better.

Windows 11 doesn't make things any better.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-28 19:23:09+00:00
> I'm not really seeing a reason why it would be impossible to open firewalls in that scenario.

Cheap ass ISP-managed routers. Got to be lucky for these rubbish bins to even somewhat reliably provide IPv6 connectivity to clients at all, or you run into bullshit like new /64's being assigned every 24 hours, or they may provide IPv6 but not provide any firewall control...
by Akranazon | 2026-01-28 19:23:15+00:00
> they’re runtime rules that kick in when assertions or ordinality constraints are explicit

So there a pre-defined list of rules - is it choosing which checks to care about from the set, or is there also a predefined binding between the task and the test?

If it's the former, then you have to ensure that the checks are sufficiently generic that there's a useful test for the given situation. Is an AI doing the choosing, over which of the checks to run?

If it's the ladder, I would assume that writing the tests would be the bottleneck, writing a test can be as flaky/time-consuming as implementing the actions by hand.
by forty | 2026-01-28 19:23:19+00:00
Microsoft asking to upgrade hardware reminds me of that old joke (from memory so excuse the bad story telling)

User: hello, my PC smokes and I would like to purchase an anti smoke software

Computer service: sorry it's not possible, you have to replace the hardware

User: no I really want an anti smoke software

(Later)

User: hello I would like to purchase a new computer

Service: see, I told you that an anti smoke software is not possible

User: wrong! I have purchased one from Microsoft. But apparently it's not compatible with my current hardware