MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kalkin | 2026-01-21 19:29:15+00:00
This book (from a philosophy professor AFAIK unaffiliated with any AI company) makes what I find a pretty compelling case that it's correct to be uncertain today about what if anything an AI might experience: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousn...

From the folks who think this is obviously ridiculous, I'd like to hear where Schwitzgebel is missing something obvious.
by veqz | 2026-01-21 19:29:24+00:00
Feels like we do these rather often? Tons of people can comment with whatever they're using which they feel are great, and others can tell of their experiences with using the same and not being impressed. It's a rather endless list...

But to answer seriously: Have you tried KDE Plasma as a desktop environment? I think Fedora's KDE spin is among the better options for a distro: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download

I personally think it's the best desktop experience, and always miss it when having to use Windows at work. I've never really worked with Macs.
by tick_tock_tick | 2026-01-21 19:29:26+00:00
> The prevailing idea here is that the US is best at everything and its model will always win. But in reality it's been in decline for a long time and it's become a pretty toxic society I don't want to see here in Europe.

If the USA is in decline you must consider Europe a failed state at this point then? Nearly every wealth inequality issue is worse in Europe then the USA. Youth unemployment has become a permanent fixture of society, your housing affordability crisis makes the USA look really good, most of your nations can't afford to keep social services at current levels and will be cutting them over the next decade, and you need to actually spend on military now that's just going to happen faster.

It's kinda funny by trying to avoid "late stage capitalism" the EU is going to force themselves into it as quality of life and global relevance continue to fade.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-21 19:29:27+00:00
> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.

Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff on your own machine.

I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin other machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.
by Closi | 2026-01-21 19:29:35+00:00
I used to work for a large Amazon Seller (>$100m per year revenue) who got automatically deactivated with no warning and it took them a week to get re-activated.

We are talking a very minor infraction - It was something like one of their marketing copywriters putting 'refills can be purchased on our website' on one of their thousands of listings, and Amazon delisting their entire account on the basis that this was moving customers off their platform. No warning - permenant ban that took over a week to remove - c$2m revenue loss (I've changed the details here significantly to avoid disclosing the company)

They had an account manager, but Amazon is so automated and huge that even at that scale it was a nightmare to resolve. It seemed like account managers couldn't automatically reactivate accounts or anything, they can just fill in forms internally but it seemed like they were getting automated responses back, or it was going to faceless teams etc.
by forgeforward | 2026-01-21 19:30:21+00:00
Wayne Kirkman here. I wrote "The AI Subscription Tax" a few weeks back about paying $200/month to beta test unreliable AI. The response was: okay, so what's the fix?
This is the fix. I built ASCERTAIN — a governance layer with seven validation gates, mandatory citation requirements, and bias detection. Every response passes through FORGEGATE before delivery. No unsourced assertions allowed.
The unicorn test case in the article shows it working: the AI tried to assert "unicorns are legendary creatures" without citation. The SOURCE gate caught it, penalized the quality score, and forced the model to provide Wikipedia and Science.org sources instead.
If one developer can build this as a side project, the $200/month vendors have no excuse.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the Five Pillars framework.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-01-21 19:30:38+00:00
I'm an occasional Mac user, whenever their hardware and software align to be useful.

Right now the m4 airs are a delight in regards to form factor, battery life, performance, and generally they look nice.

I have a powerful processor, enough ram, and a battery to drive it and damnit I want to do work on it.

Right now the world of laptops is dark. Any non-mac laptop running linux will have terrible standby battery life because OEMs have removed classic sleep modes for always-on mac-like sleeps, but without the polish and no way to re-enable the legacy sleep modes.

In a couple years, maybe the AI boom will die down and people will be able to afford RAM again, and maybe non-mac laptops will be nice to use again.
by wahnfrieden | 2026-01-21 19:30:56+00:00
I don’t open source my iOS apps that provide my living because there are many examples already of others using this to release identical apps without credit or sharing their work back (even with AGPL), which would remove my source of income that enables me to work on it in the first place. I haven’t found a way to make a living off open source yet for the type of products I produce.

I’m not independently wealthy to be able to afford to work for free. If I release my work for free, then I will have to live on the streets or in a cell, or take a job and lose the time I have to produce my work in the first place.
by fnoef | 2026-01-21 19:31:13+00:00
Thank you.

I peeked at the Vagrantfile, and I noticed that you rsync the working directory into the VM. I have two more questions.

1. Is it safe to assume that I am expected to develop inside the VM? How do run IDE/vim as well as using Claude code, while the true copy of the code lives in the VM?

2. What does yolo-cage provide on top of just running a VM? I mean, there is a lot of code in the GitHub. Is this the glue code to prepare the VM? Is this just QOL scripts to run/attach to the VM?
by da02 | 2026-01-21 19:31:34+00:00
I had good results with hyaluronic acid for knee osteoarthritis. Sometimes they sell it as Type II Collagen. "Source Naturals Hyaluronic Joint Complex" was the best for my relatives/friends' knee problems. I take it a few times a month (with resveratrol) for smooth skin. I have been taking it since 2008 without any negative result.
by snailmailman | 2026-01-21 19:31:35+00:00
The KDE plasma UI feels like all the best parts of windows 10 to me. The default taskbar+clock+system tray+start menu UI feels exactly like windows 10 to me. But you can also customize it very easily. The settings menu feels a bit more like MacOS than windows’ control panel though.

Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-21 19:31:54+00:00
LLMS still can’t troubleshoot. I have been thinking about how to solve it and I think an entirely new architecture is needed. Quants got replaced by quant bots the same way human calculators got replaced by electronic adding machines.

I haven’t met an AI who can think clearly in a systems setting. I’m guessing it might be a decade or two.
As an example, ask an LLM to do some 10th grade math. Inspect the thinking process. It can regurgitate the process and the rules but cannot perform them.

Same with troubleshooting.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-21 19:31:55+00:00
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into a count by future translations,” he said.

I think there’s a bit of unintentional humor in this line, like it belongs in “i am the walrus”. The researcher would _like_ to say something, which makes me think the sentence has an implied completion of “but I won’t say it”, which I already find kind of funny. And then of course the quote is tagged with “he said”, lol, almost like the author is mocking him. Maybe my brain is just broken, but that’s so funny to me
by hiddeninplain | 2026-01-21 19:31:56+00:00
> This technique allowed him to mass-produce images, echoing the consumer culture he sought to critique and celebrate.

Critique, yes. Celebrate, wat?

I tend to categorize Warhol as an artist that if you hate their work you should love it because the point is to coerce you to hating it to lead you to the realization that the arc of factory mass production bends toward lowering quality.

I highly doubt Warhol used his chosen soup brand because he felt it was the pinnacle of soup and represented how even mass produced quantities can have excellence in quality.

More likely he was saying this piece is to art as this brand's product is to soup.
by deng | 2026-01-21 19:32:14+00:00
I can only repeat myself: you are talking about the NAT module in the Linux netfilter. I, and the RFC, are talking about NAT as a concept: what behavior do you expect when you say "this device does NAT". Of course you can still have "pure NAT", but if someone tells you "set up a device that does NAT" and you omit that first line and later explain that this is historically and technically accurate, well, good luck with that.
by tapoxi | 2026-01-21 19:32:18+00:00
I've been running Bazzite exclusively for two years and, honestly, it works fine. It does work better than Windows for me, which refused to install on the same hardware.

I install everything from Flathub, I don't think I've ever installed an APK (is that a thing?)

I don't think the Linux distributions can really do anything better by themselves at this point. Most of the issues you run into are because you're trying to run Windows software (via Wine/Proton) that may have issues, the hardware support is subpar (Nvidia) or the Linux version of the app is poor.

It did finally cross the line for me where using Linux is more enjoyable than Windows or Linux, which I honestly never thought would happen when I started using it on and off ~20 years ago.
by rangestransform | 2026-01-21 19:32:35+00:00
Is it morally and ethically righteous toward the people of the rich countries? A country owes everything to its citizens and nothing to anyone else, and pretending otherwise led to resentment toward foreign aid including some realpolitik justified programs like USAID. When programs are sold to the people as being selfless while people are less fortunate than the social media influencers they watch every day, it’s only natural that they resent the government for seemingly giving resources away.
by paxys | 2026-01-21 19:32:54+00:00
Apple had a chance to break Google's search monopoly, but they chose to take billions from them instead.

Microsoft had a chance (well another chance, after they gave up IE's lead) to break up Google's browser monopoly, but they decided to use Chromium for free instead.

Ultimately all these decisions come down to what's more profitable, not what's in the best interests of the public. We have learned this lesson x1000000. Stop relying on corporations to uphold freedoms (software or otherwise), becuase that simply isn't going to happen.
by human_person | 2026-01-21 19:32:59+00:00
I think you've misunderstood the situation (and the article). Having the national guard get things under control means pitting them against ICE and likely actually triggering a civil war.

The problem is not Minnesotans or paid protestors rioting, the problem is a hostile occupying force is actively targeting Minnesotans and Walz is trying to balance protecting his constituents with not escalating the situation.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Minnesota have conflicting incentives delegate counts driving their bad judgement" or why you think its bad judgement to protest the murder of a community member.

But I dont disagree that as tensions ratchet up eventually someone will do something stupid, and ICE will threaten enough people that it sets off a conflict between ICE and the local law enforcement/national guard.
by jbstack | 2026-01-21 19:33:12+00:00
Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.

Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for that type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "what advantages does macOS have?" I qualified it with: "which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
by nikkwong | 2026-01-21 19:33:18+00:00
I live in Seattle, and in WA state that would put it beyond the limit for a small claims case. Idk, I tried to contact lawyers to take the case and they sent letters to Amazon which Amazon never responded to. I was also going through a pretty serious health battle at the time and so couldn't really devote full attention to it. Now that things are a bit better, I feel like it's so far in the past that I don't know if I would have a reasonable claim so I sort of just let it be.
by mtlynch | 2026-01-21 19:33:20+00:00
I used to sell on Amazon, and Walmart Marketplace reached out to me to convince me they could offer me a better seller experience than Amazon.

I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.

Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.

Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.

It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."
by amartiniuc | 2026-01-21 19:33:39+00:00
A full-screen CLI application for browsing Kubernetes clusters using a tree-based interface with vim-style navigation.

Features
Tree-based navigation through Kubernetes resources
⌨ Vim-style keybindings (h, j, k, l) and arrow keys
Browse namespaces → object types → objects → details
View object details (Describe view)
View pod logs with auto-scroll to bottom
Exec commands displayed in formatted boxes with clipboard copy (CTRL+1-4)
Works with your current kubeconfig context
Search/filter functionality with visual indicators
⌨ Help overlay (CTRL+B) with all keybindings
Dynamic column width adjustment
Cascading selection on startup for immediate data display
Async data loading with background workers for responsive UI
Loading states ("Loading data...") and empty states ("No items") with disabled columns
Non-blocking UI - navigation remains smooth even during data fetching
by sergiotapia | 2026-01-21 19:34:01+00:00
Windows 11 is so bad that I finally made the permanent jump to Linux. At the end of my time with Windows, it would HARD freeze about twice a week. I thought I was having hardware failures and got really scared.

When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.
by reorder9695 | 2026-01-21 19:34:12+00:00
Once you get it set up (which can be a pain) arch with KDE plasma is very good. KDE is very windows 10 like and intuitive. Arch gets rid of that issue of a mix of different installation methods, other than installing yay, I've never had to manually install something beyond "yay -S pkg", the aur and PKGBUILD files do really solve this issue of painful installations.
by M95D | 2026-01-21 19:34:28+00:00
Ethernet cable is a high quality cable usable for various other purposes. That includes low voltage power line, such as 12V from the car to phone charger in the house, solar panel wiring, basic tripwire alarms, command relays in the yard from the house, basic audio intercom with your neighbors when phone lines are down, etc.

Plus the obvious ethernet repairs: lines broken by fallen trees/branches in a storm, video camera cables cut by thieves, install new survillance cameras, move existing ones.

Self-supporting ethernet cable is also a decent clothesline when your dryer is not working.
Ask HN: How locked down are your work machines?
by donatj | 2026-01-21 19:34:50+00:00
I've been working as a Software Engineer for 20+ years.

Places I worked in the early years barely had an IT department at all. As a developer you were expected to be able to maintain your machine. We'd install whatever we want, experiment with different operating systems, etc. Total free rein, box was our tool to get work done with, they didn't care how you did it.

That went away a long time ago. Basic corporate spyware and rules came pretty early but still free rein over our tools.

I've worked with the same company for close to a decade now, and they have been tightening and tightening the noose slowly but surely. We're purportedly a software company, but we lost admin rights, installable software went from a blocklist to an allowlist. Everything we install needs to get approved by IT, and that approval takes weeks.

Today they took our Chrome extensions away. They've got an allowlist of about 15 extensions we can install. Everything I submitted for approval got rejected.

I'm frustrated with this arrangement and am wondering how standard this is these days in this industry?

So I'm genuinely curious, Hacker News: How big of a company do you work for, what industry, and how locked down is your machine?
by jasode | 2026-01-21 19:35:02+00:00
>2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012.

Your comment is a little confusing since the author already mentioned Wine with the following sentence that's after the one you quoted: >"Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option."

Were you trying to disagree with the author and say it's not actually buggy?
by Fwirt | 2026-01-21 19:35:06+00:00
My high school computer science teacher (best one I ever had) once told us this anecdote when we were learning sorting algorithms:

He was brought in by the state to do some coaching for existing software devs back in the 90s. When he was going over the various different basic algorithms (insertion sort, selection sort, etc.) one of the devs in the back of the class piped up with, "why are you wasting our time? C++ has qsort built in."

When you're processing millions of records, many of which are probably already sorted, using an insertion sort to put a few new records into a sorted list, or using selection sort to grab the few records you need to the front of the queue, is going to be an order of magnitude faster than just calling qsort every time.

Turned out he worked for department of revenue. So my teacher roasted him with "oh, so you're the reason it takes us so long to get our tax returns back."

Thinking that you can just scoot by using the built-in version is how we get to the horrible state of optimization that we're in. Software has gotten slow because devs have gotten lazy and don't bother to understand the basics of programming anymore. We should be running a machine shop, not trying to build a jet engine out of Lego.
by edferda | 2026-01-21 19:35:13+00:00
I just switched to Linux because Windows is _really_ bad lately.

I recommend Linux Mint. It has the windows feel for sure. I am not exaggerating when I say it works better than Windows.

I didn’t customize anything. Just installed it and connected to WiFi.

Key things to consider:
- installing apps sometimes isn’t as easy as running an exe. But really you get the gist of .deb and .AppImage files really fast.
- I don’t game but I’ve heard GPU drivers just work these days.
- I am a heavy excel user. LibreOffice isn’t even close. However, for basic stuff it is usable. Excel is too bloated these days anyway so it is a pleasure to work with something that runs fast. YMMV.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-01-21 19:35:19+00:00
not OP, but in macOS, you can drag a file onto a dock icon and that program will open the file if possible. very handy - i use it with Xld, an audio transcoding app. it runs quietly in the background and whenever i need to convert a bunch of FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) i can just drag the folder to the icon and 10 seconds later everything is good to go, without ever really directly interacting with Xld.
by cyphax | 2026-01-21 19:35:24+00:00
KDE and Gnome are the most prominent and they "match" in the sense that they are mature environments that are quite usable. These have been in development for decades. For some reason, in the case of Windows, that doesn't mean much. I've never seen a Windows version with a buggy task bar but here comes Windows 11 with a task bar that forgets application icons (and replaces them with the generic application icon) and is generally sluggish to the feel, in my experience. Scrap my entire first sentence: it's Microsoft's turn to make an operating system as good as the competition.

There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.

It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.
by ejo4041 | 2026-01-21 19:35:26+00:00
Amazon Seller for 10 years here. I haven't had my account shutdown, but some tips that could help. At the top, your brand is listed as "Generic", this is because you do not have a brand registered. The way to have a brand registered with Amazon is to first get a Trademark for your brand. This will also help you fight against counterfeiters on Amazon that could try to sell their own version under your listing. In that case, they would need a signed letter from your brand. I don't know that it will help in your specific case, but it could give you more credibility with Amazon. It will cost a little money to get the TM, so that's a decision to make if it's worth it or not.

Have you tried just having a single trademarked brand in your title, rather than Airtag and Samsung or changing the wording at all? Something like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Samsung. How about targeting other popular brands like ... holder for Airtag, compatible with Apple TV?

Here's another brand that has a combination of the above suggestions:
https://www.amazon.com/AhaStyle-Protective-Silicone-Compatib...
They use "... for ... compatible with", and they also have a registered brand.