MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greenavocado | 2026-01-10 16:53:33+00:00
If you need Windows these days just install virt-manager and load the version of Windows you need.

It's really fast and lightweight (my laptop stays cold at idle while running the Windows VMs) with all the HV enlightenments for good computational efficiency.

Installing and using the virtio drivers is key for many useful features such as memory ballooning, fast networking with low computational overhead, and virtiofs which is used to mount a virtual drive in the Windows guest in a way that it's not a "network" drive.
by arter45 | 2026-01-10 16:53:53+00:00
Of course, new technology usually allows to do stuff that wasn't possible before, or maybe do stuff faster.

The point is how we use technology.

Without going to WW2 technology extremes, think about AI systems generating pictures of naked people from a regular picture. Regardless of the fact that this was already more or less possible using Photoshop or other tools (as I said before, technology is not always about new things, maybe it's about faster workflows), is there a clear net benefit to society when comparing pros and cons?

This doesn't mean that you should forbid all kinds of innovation, but if you're running a service (people keep interacting with you, they don't just buy stuff and use that at home) and a data-driven one at that (you know how people use your service because that's part of how you make money), some degree of responsibility should be expected.

If I buy a coconut and I use it to hurt someone, the original seller doesn't know it, but if I keep renting cars to hide bodies and the rental company has cameras inside the car as part of their business model, at some point the company could say "hey, what about this guy? What should we do about him?". And if for some reason it turns out that most customers rent cars for that reason, I would hope at some point someone would think "hey, how did we get to this situation? What should we do?".
by fipar | 2026-01-10 16:54:04+00:00
I use org a lot, in fact, it's my daily driver. I also have to deal with MySQL, and, if using the vertical output (what you get if you finish a query with '\G' instead of ';' it makes pasting into an org file a pain.

Sure, not a big pain, I just wrapped it in a function paste-from-mysql that appends the whitespace, but then I need to take out the whitespace of I want to paste that somewhere else. It would be nice to have org support some sort of 'do not interpret what comes next' block markers. I guess someone with enough time and skills could make this change but, alas, that's not me.
by ramoz | 2026-01-10 16:54:54+00:00
Yea, I'm in a particular health community. A lot of anxious individuals, for good reason, end up posting a lot of nonsense they derived from self-influenced chatgpt conversations.

That said, when used as a tool you have power over - ChatGPT has also freed up some of my on anxiety. I've learned a ton thanks to ChatGPT as well. It's often been more helpful than the doctors and offers itself as an always available counsel.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-10 16:54:55+00:00
As if any company that did that is a company I would want to work for.

For instance back when I was interviewing at startups and other companies where I was going to be a strategic hire, I would casually mention how much I enjoyed spending time on my hobbies and with my family on the weekend so companies wouldn’t even extend an offer if they wanted someone “passionate” who would work 60 hours a week and be on call.
by lisper | 2026-01-10 16:54:58+00:00
> The Michelson–Morley experiment was indeed very important, but it has not proved in any way the non-existence of ether. It has just proved that the ether does not behave as it was previously supposed, i.e. like the materials with which humans are familiar.

That's kind of like saying that our failure to observe invisible pink unicorns does not prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns, it just proves that invisible pink unicorns don't behave the way you expect them to.

Luminiferous ether was a specific hypothesis about how light works. It made a prediction, which turned out to be wrong, which falsified the theory. Whether you want to attach the description "proves the ether does not exist" or "proves the ether does not have the properties ascribed to it by the theory" is completely irrelevant.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-10 16:55:01+00:00
Fun fact, people suffering from loss of quality of life issues don't lack motivation. Lots of these people are in great pain, constantly, every day. My mother had a hip issue where the pain could instantly shoot up so bad she couldn't move (from just the normal, constant, almost in tears pain). She couldn't risk going somewhere to exercise, she would be stuck. She couldn't risk exercising on days where she needed to work the next day. Some days she would break down crying going to the grocery store because she had gotten stuck there the previous time she went.

A LOT of quiet unassuming people are INSPIRINGLY motivated to push through INCREDIBLE pain and obstacles, every day. Many that prevent them from 'just exercising until life gets better'. It is bullshit to say they lack motivation/character/willpower.
by greenavocado | 2026-01-10 16:55:03+00:00
Besides the 12+ hour battery life which is only achievable with ARM processors, everything described can be accomplished easily for the typical slightly above average computer user with Kubuntu today.

I installed latest Kubuntu on my old 2015 MacBook Pro and it runs ice cold now when playing YouTube videos with Firefox whereas before it ran hot even with a Mac fan control app
by idiotsecant | 2026-01-10 16:55:12+00:00
This is dumb, I've lost count of how many times I've hauled multiple motorcycles somewhere and you know how I do it? A trailer. It's easier and safer to load and unload, which is why almost everyone else does that as well.

If you want an 'image' purchase just own up to it. Your post hoc justifications don't really hold water.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-10 16:55:23+00:00
Been using KDE on a secondary machine for 15 years now. However they were always lacking in hardware compared to my main desktop.

I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.

I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.

There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
by baddie_twoshoes | 2026-01-10 16:55:33+00:00
As expected from an NPR article it did the buzzword bingo. "White supremacy", "Racism", "Misinformation", and of course writing "Immigrants" when they mean "Illegal Immigrants".

It's no wonder people don't trust news. NPR/NYT etc. used to be so good before they became obsessed with all the above garbage, now they are as ideological as FOX. Most likely due to the type of person that works there now. I'm happy to see the main news outlets die as their audience goes elsewhere.
by Groxx | 2026-01-10 16:55:34+00:00
I'll throw in a +1, afaik vendoring is a complete and reliable solution here.

Go's `mod`-related commands have had quite a large number of breaking changes in behavior through the years, so I won't say it's a stable solution (aside from completely disabling modules, that has always worked fine from my use). I've had to fix build scripts at least once or twice a year due to that, e.g. when they started validating that the vendor folder was unmodified (a very reasonable thing to do, but still breaking). But once that is overcome it has always worked fine.
by al_borland | 2026-01-10 16:55:44+00:00
LTT did a video on GrapheneOS recently[0]. The conclusion was basically that it’s a trade off between privacy and convenience. It will require more tinkering and things that don’t “just work”. While I haven’t used GrapheneOS, it doesn’t seem like something a non-technical user would have the patience for, unless they were into the idea of picking up a new hobby of managing their phone’s OS.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gDR6V5OdnYg
by BoingBoomTschak | 2026-01-10 16:55:49+00:00
I didn't write "belief" but "trust", which is a related but different thing. You'd be very naïve to think that the powers that be are automagically uninvolved in both the Scientific Truth^tm that trickles down to the layperson and the source research and studies (both due to funding, censorship and outright lies in some hot fields like sociology).

tl;dr: I'm ready to believe in the vaccine theory, not in the infrastructure; applied science doesn't live in a vacuum
by rvnx | 2026-01-10 16:56:02+00:00
Faster:

Put sanctions on Denmark, not like actual sanctions, just +10000% tariffs.

Open investigations for corruption, funding terrorism, release dirty secrets of the government.

Help migrants to go to Denmark.

Arrange with Russia little green men to come on the island or just make it fear that Russia is planning an attack. US to the rescue.

Offer lot of money to each inhabitants.

Spread information that Denmark abandoned the island for so many years.

Plenty of ideas.

Those in my list are somewhat debatable, but you can get creative and figure out good ones.

etc
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-10 16:56:03+00:00
There is nothing to understand about Trump, he's a know it all bully who enjoys bullying people and given the fact that he was born in privilege has always enjoyed the luxury to pick targets way below his stature as subjects of bullying. As bullys do. Picking on weaker people because they enjoy the process , and actually find it way more enjoyable than winning against equals or god forbid be the underdogs in a confrontation.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-10 16:56:35+00:00
OP here. I stuck with orgmode all these years /because/ of the interoperability.

If I'm writing in Org, I can tangle / detangle between other plaintext sources, including source code. As well as export to collaborate.

The proposition is "yes, and", not "either / or".

It's /fine/ to switch to the popular "team" standard and stay there when needed. Several of my workplace documents, including wiki entries start off as local org-mode drafts. Once I'm okay to share, I export to markdown or draft wiki page and solicit comments. After that, if the document is for shared maintenance, I let my org-text alone, and switch to the "team" format.

This is perfectly fine.

That and the many kinds of markdown. I've been bitten enough by having to look up yet another poorly maintained document on how to markdown for /this/ particular app or website or utility, that I'd rather pandoc translate between my (sane, well documented, fully extensible) org text and whatever I need to share with others, than learn edge cases of various markdowns.
by Flux159 | 2026-01-10 16:56:52+00:00
"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
by iwanttocomment | 2026-01-10 16:56:53+00:00
I hadn't run desktop Linux in several years now. (I've run it server-side for decades.)

Out of the increasingly loud outpouring of support for desktop Linux over the past year, I went ahead and installed some distros to get back in on the action. I came to four conclusions:

1) You can play games on desktop Linux now other than Tux Racer. Cool!

2) There's less weird X11-wrangling. Thank god.

3) It's otherwise still pretty much the desktop Linux I've always known and felt mildly annoyed by.

4) The current versions of Windows and macOS have gotten to be so unbelievably annoying for no good reason that a mildly improved desktop Linux now actually seems far less annoying than the mainstream options do.

Good job, Microsoft and Apple, for giving us the year of retreating in disgust to the Linux desktop.
Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books
by pmaze | 2026-01-10 16:56:55+00:00
I think LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper.

I built a system for Claude Code to browse 100 non-fiction books and find interesting connections between them.

I started out with a pipeline in stages, chaining together LLM calls to build up a context of the library.
I was mainly getting back the insight that I was baking into the prompts, and the results weren't particularly surprising.

On a whim, I gave CC access to my debug CLI tools and found that it wiped the floor with that approach.
It gave actually interesting results and required very little orchestration in comparison.

One of my favourite trail of excerpts goes from Jobs’ reality distortion field to Theranos’ fake demos, to Thiel on startup cults, to Hoffer on mass movement charlatans (https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/useful-lies/).
A fun tendency is that Claude kept getting distracted by topics of secrecy, conspiracy, and hidden systems - as if the task itself summoned a Foucault’s Pendulum mindset.

Details:

* The books are picked from HN’s favourites (which I collected before: https://hnbooks.pieterma.es/).

* Chunks are indexed by topic using Gemini Flash Lite. The whole library cost about £10.

* Topics are organised into a tree structure using recursive Leiden partitioning and LLM labels. This gives a high-level sense of the themes.

* There are several ways to browse. The most useful are embedding similarity, topic tree siblings, and topics cooccurring within a chunk window.

* Everything is stored in SQLite and manipulated using a set of CLI tools.

I wrote more about the process here: https://pieterma.es/syntopic-reading-claude/

I’m curious if this way of reading resonates for anyone else - LLM-mediated or not.
by rsynnott | 2026-01-10 16:57:14+00:00
The basilisk, clearly, will need somewhere discreet to run. Why _not_ TPUs in Dell laptops? It’s not like they’re going to be used for anything else.

(I mean, obviously there is no sinister robot god, but if there were you’d expect it to be keen on the production of wasteful/unlikely-to-be-used AI substrate.)
by vlod | 2026-01-10 16:57:22+00:00
My point is that it's tempting and irresistible (based on other comments in this thread) to move from basic attribute sorting, to basic CRUD, SQL queries, CSS/Tailwind, typescript error resolution then using it for Dijkstra, because why not?, it's so nice.

Then we're just puppetmasters pulling the strings (which some think this is the way the industry is going).
by nine_k | 2026-01-10 16:57:48+00:00
I see no reason to migrate to Win11 when Win10 hits hard EOL. I'm lucky, of course: I only have one game-oriented machine with Windows, and Steam / Proton is going to suffice.

Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
by oh_my_goodness | 2026-01-10 16:58:35+00:00
Please try to be fair. For Terry Tao this was apparently an interesting new result. On the other hand, for HN commenters, yes, it's clearly just a homework problem that belongs in an intro class. But Tao isn't a frequent commenter here. As a result of that, he is probably still trying to level up on math.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-10 16:58:41+00:00
Oh boy, here we go. Now they even adopted Russia's playbook word by word.

> The US officially took over greenland after denmark *allied* with nazi germany during ww2. People forget that the danes were nazi collaborators.

Was occupied, comrade, is the word you're looking for. They've forgot to put it in your metodichka.
What happens to an economy when AI makes most human labor optional
by raghavchamadiya | 2026-01-10 16:58:48+00:00
I keep seeing two extreme futures discussed around AI.

One is techno utopia: AI does everything, productivity explodes, humans are free to create and chill.

The other is collapse: AI replaces jobs, wealth concentrates, consumption dies, society implodes.

What I don’t see discussed enough is the mechanism between those states.

If AI systems genuinely outperform humans at most economically valuable tasks, wages are no longer the primary distribution mechanism. But capitalism today assumes wages are how demand exists. No wages means no buyers. No buyers means even the owners of AI have no customers.

That feels less like a social problem and more like a systems contradiction.

Historically, automation shifted labor rather than deleting it. But AI is different in that it targets cognition itself, not just muscle or repetition. If the marginal cost of intelligence trends toward zero, markets built on selling human time start to behave strangely.

Some questions I keep circling:

Who funds demand in a post labor economy
Is UBI enough, or does ownership of productive models need to be broader
Do we end up with state mediated consumption rather than market mediated consumption
Does GDP even remain a meaningful metric when production is decoupled from employment

I’m not arguing AI doom or AI salvation here. I’m trying to understand the transition dynamics. The part where things either adapt smoothly or break loudly.

Curious how others here model this in their heads, especially folks building or deploying these systems today.
by fpoling | 2026-01-10 16:58:54+00:00
EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and will for the next 10-20 years unless one is OK with a tiny battery. And heavy weight means more pollution from wheels that produce particles that ends up in lungs. Note brakes also pollutes with asbestos but EVs typically have regenerative braking so I think brakes pollutes roughly the same in a heavier EV as in ICE car.
by cornholio | 2026-01-10 16:59:03+00:00
Seems Greenlanders didn't get the memo, the vast, overwhelming majority still think of themselves as "not Americans".

This is the problem with historical narratives, history is not established fact but a continuous re-evaluation of the past. There is always that wako who will interpret some convenient or made up facts as proof that "Greenland is American in all but name".
by freedomben | 2026-01-10 16:59:31+00:00
If you get someone to help you with the installation, or buy a pre-installed Linux, then yes I believe this to be true. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. There has been one time in 5 years that he had to reach out for technical assistance. It turned out that he had been misled by a prompt to buy Ubuntu pro and had gotten into a weird state. I blame that one solely on canonical, not on Linux in general. After that I switched him to Fedora, and he's been running that now for a few years and didn't even realize I had changed his underlying OS. He is able to install anything he wants from the graphical storefront, and same with updates. In the early days we did have some trouble getting his printer to work, though once we switched him to Fedora everything on that printer worked out of the box. When my sister came over to his house with her MacBook, she had to mess with the Mac to get the printer working for over an hour, and it was still pretty hit or miss. It would lose half the jobs she tried to send to it. It truly is remarkable how usable Linux is for the average person now. For people that have to run software that only runs on Windows or Linux, excluding games of course since steam and other game managers handle those wonderfully now, there is definitely still a bit of pain. But for people who can get by with cloud-based or Linux friendly software, it's really quite good.
by rconti | 2026-01-10 16:59:33+00:00
It can be helpful, but also untrustworthy.

My mother-in-law has been struggling with some health challenges the past couple of months. My wife (her daughter) works in the medical field and has been a great advocate for her mother. This whole time I've also been peppering ChatGPT with questions, and in turn I discuss matters with my wife based on this.

I think it was generally correct in a lot of its assertions, but as time goes on and the situation does it improve, I occasionally revisit my chat and update it with the latest results and findings, and it keeps insisting we're at a turning point and this is exactly what we should expect to be happening.

6 weeks ago, I think its advice was generally spot on, but today it's just sounding more tone-deaf and optimistic. I'd hate to be _relying_ on this as my only source of advice and information.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-10 16:59:36+00:00
I take a drive through Detroit and I "notice" entirely different things which somehow your screed above is mostly blind to.

That's about as diplomatic as I can summon up as a reply to your comment, whose substance mostly proves my point about the bizarre exceptionalist world Americans seem to occupy in their heads. It really isn't "noticing"... what you're talking about. It's ideology.

Also GDP per capita is the kind of garbage metric I would expect someone frequent on this forum, and hopefully literate in statistics, to understand the ridiculousness of deploying in conversation.
by paodealho | 2026-01-10 16:59:42+00:00
The git and systemd ones create several aliases for frequent commands:

git commit -> gc

git status --short -b -> gsb

git checkout -> gco

systemctl --user restart -> scu-restart

Nothing that you couldn't come up with yourself, but I've been using for so long it has become a standard for me.

The fzf plugin enables a fuzzy finder when you hit ctrl+r or ctrl+t. You need fzf installed.
by xerox13ster | 2026-01-10 16:59:45+00:00
Given that this is your stance and demands for laptop hardware I have to assume that you have never once participated in the laptop market prior to the M1 releasing?

That’s the only way your unrealistic expectations make sense.

Of course, people have been parroting that about Linux on laptops for over a decade. I never understood it, since I’ve never had any significant issues with Linux on my laptops.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-10 16:59:57+00:00
This is advice that I would have rolled with pre-Generative AI.

Today, I'm not so sure. I'm actually way used to zim-wiki syntax because that's what I started off with; and already "moving it around" is becoming orders of magnitude easier given the ability to vibe-code tons of little scripts that make it work better with everything else -- and while this might seem a bit counter to the point -- I think one can reasonably rely on the idea of "market share isn't that important anymore compared to 'you, personally, should use the thing that works the best for you because translation will get orders of magnitude easier.'"
by layer8 | 2026-01-10 17:00:14+00:00
You can’t (easily) with PDF, because it uses an index of byte offsets into the file to locate the contained objects. This design is to enable random access to parts of the file. In other words, you also don’t have to load the whole file into memory to display individual pages. PDF viewers are able to display PDF files that are larger than the available memory.

For historical context, look at typical RAM sizes and disk speeds in the early nineties.
by fipar | 2026-01-10 17:00:20+00:00
I agree about the duct tape, which I also use often around the house, so maybe that's why I like org-babel :)

Just wanted to say that I share data between different blocks in different languages through files and env variables (I add :session shared to the src blocks that need to access this). That is useful also to have src blocks you can execute repeatedly and that depend on something like an aws identity being assumed (you just assume it in the first block that shares the session).

I agree it's messy, it's just a mess that works for me.