MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeFantome | 2026-01-11 12:20:41+00:00
The FreeBSD Foundatioin is based in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

OpenBSD is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

NetBSD is a non-profit based out of Deleware, USA

I am not sure exactly what you mean by "US-focused" though. I do not think the US government has much direct influence in practice. Both governance and engineering contributions in BSD are highly distributed internationally.

That said, FreeBSD in particular has quite a lot of corporate contribution. Netflix is a heavy user of and contributor to FreeBSD for example. And the recent $750,000 laptop push in FreeBSD is being driven by Quantum Leap Research out of Virginia.

The fact that the BSD systems have less coporate reliance does not necessarily offer more protection though. There is less corporate "control" simply because the BSD systems are less important economically.

You could fork Linux anytime you like and your fork would than have as little corporate control as NetBSD. And just like NetBSD, not taking US corporate contributions would mean less engineering investmetn overall and potentially having to do more yourself.

I mean, it would probably be easier for the EU or China to fork Linux than it would be for them to migrate to OpenBSD if they wanted independence from US exposure.
by fennecbutt | 2026-01-11 12:21:05+00:00
Lmao as a kiwi living in UK it's definitely a bad thing. Can't go on a night out in London without half dozen dudes trying to sell you coke. Same dudes who are waiting in alleys waiting to mug people when they get the chance.

If you ever see >1 person just standing around and not walking somewhere in London early in the morning just stay the fuck away from them. And if they start heading your way, run.
by simonw | 2026-01-11 12:21:11+00:00
Which thing was that?

(If you need help finding it try visiting https://tools.simonwillison.net/hn-comments-for-user and searching for simonw - you can then search my 1,000 most recent comments in one place.)

If my tests are green then it tells me a LOT about what the software is capable of, even if I haven't reviewed every line of the implementation.

The next step is to actually start using it for real problems. That should very quickly shake out any significant or minor issues that sneaked past the automated tests.

I've started thinking about this by comparing it to work I've done within larger companies. My team would make use of code written by other teams without reviewing everything those other teams had written. If their tests passed we would build against their stuff, and if their stuff turned out not to work we would let them know or help debug and fix it ourselves.
by nullify88 | 2026-01-11 12:21:15+00:00
The game also had support for mods. After the first playthrough I've always played the game with the kongfu mod enabling wallrunning, kicks, additional weapons such as Sticks, and various other action orientated changes.

Additionally, I believe Rockstar gave the go-ahead for work on a remake for 1 & 2. Hopefully they have James Perry McCaffrey's voice work in good enough quality. RIP.
by KarlVoit | 2026-01-11 12:21:17+00:00
One of the arguments of the article is that there is a fundamental difference: Markdown was created as a small subset of syntax elements. Therefore, there was a high demand on syntax extensions that were added in a chaotic fashion.

Orgdown already comes with more syntax elements that Markdown probably will ever get. So I do see a clear argument for the case that "unstandardized additions" to orgdown are less likely in addition to the fact that there aren't any.
by Jackknife9 | 2026-01-11 12:22:37+00:00
I tried to leave Windows 11 for Linux - it just didn't work for me. I installed EndeavourOS onto my main gaming desktop. It worked great for a while and ran all the games I played with my friends. However, one night when I went on to play a game I ran a system update and it seemed to completely break my nvidea drivers - I tried reinstalling them and also using the open source driver. This meant I just couldn't play any games that night and was simply diagnosing linux issues.

I probably chose the wrong distro for this but I really just want the PC to work for playing games without any issues. I don't use it for anything other than playing games so for my time I just went back to Windows 10 and will use that until apps stop working.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-11 12:22:50+00:00
> We will see how this turns out in the long run though.

Rust 1.0 was in 2015. This is the long run. And I disagree that safety culture is a "weak argument". It's foundational, this is where you must start, adding it afterwards is a Herculean task, so no surprise that people aren't really trying.
by arter45 | 2026-01-11 12:24:56+00:00
I admit I’m not a heavy LLM user but AFAIK LLMs don’t recall past interactions, which is something we usually expect from people (including devs).

How meaningful can this be?
For example:
- LLM generates code for a web api but initially ignores security concerns and some other requirements
- you notice this and prompt the LLM to improve the code
- the LLM takes security into account
- the day after, you give another task to the LLM and it again ignores security practices you mentioned earlier. And so on.

If an intern were to do this, you would take them aside and strongly recommend to learn from past experiences and suggestion, but this doesn’t seem possible with LLMs.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-11 12:25:31+00:00
> It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.

What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?

I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.

Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.

The only features I can think of are:

- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either

- Unicode support

- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)

The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.
by senko | 2026-01-11 12:25:47+00:00
I agree with what you said, but I think we might be talking about slightly different things. Let me give a few examples in an attempt to better explain myself:

A company I worked with a while ago had a microservices architecture, and have decided to not use one of a few standard API serialization/deserialization options, but write their own, because was going to be more performant, easier to maintain, better fit for their use case. A few years on, after having grown organically to support all the edge cases, it's more convoluted, slower, and buggy than if they went with the boring option that ostensibly had "a bit more boilerplate" from the start.

A second example is from a friend, whose coworker decided to write a backend-agnostic, purpose-agnostic, data-agnostic message broker/routing library. They spent a few months of this, delivered a beautifully architected solution in a few dozen k lines of code. The problem is the solution solves many problems the company didnt and wouldn't have, and will be a maintenance drag from then forevermore. Meanwhile, they could have done it in a few hundred lines of code that would be coupled to the problem domain, but still farily decend from most people's point of view.

These two are from real projects. But you can also notice that in general people are often picking a fancy solution over a boring one, ostensibly because it has something "out of the box". The price of the "out of the box"-ness (aside from potential SaaS/infra costs and vendor lock in), is that you now need to adapt your own code to work with the mental model (domain) of the fancy solution.

Or to harp on something trivial, you end up depending on left-pad because writing it yourself was boring.

> fix the system such that it doesn't require boilerplate any more.

I think perhaps I used a more broad meaning for "boilerplate" than you had in mind. If we're talking about boilerplate as enumerating all the exceptions a Java method may raise, or whatever unholy sad thing we have to do in C to use GTK/GObject, then I agree.

But I also meant something more closer to "glue code that isn't the primary carrier of value of the project", or to misuse financial language in this context, the code that's a cost center, not a profit center.
by globalnode | 2026-01-11 12:26:28+00:00
recently had need to run a legacy win32 game on linux. the game works fine but the updater is in some windows specific java that i just could not get to work, which is kind of ironic since its the "run anywhere" java that wouldnt work but the C++ game would. anyway -- i run the updater in a windows vm that has shared access to the game files, close the vm then run the game through wine. works.
by arexxbifs | 2026-01-11 12:27:04+00:00
A shame it can't be viewed anymore, it has all the makings of a cult classic.

The guy who coded the actual Nohzdyve game (that runs on real ZX Spectrum hardware) is Matt Westcott aka Gasman. He's a demoscener and has made some brilliant speccie demos. https://demozoo.org/sceners/5879/
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-11 12:27:12+00:00
Do CachyOS optimizations actually make any difference whatsoever? I know they enable certain optimization flags whenever building software, but that doesn't directly equate to performance improvements unless you're actually benchmarking and testing it. I've seen some benchmarks in games and it seems there is literally zero performance difference (sometimes it loses to Fedora, even).

I'd always recommend upstream distributions with corporate backing for novice users: Ubuntu or Fedora. If they're coming from Windows: Linux Mint. There's also a clear upgrade path for users who enjoy Mint or Ubuntu: Debian testing.

Arch Linux is awesome, don't get me wrong. I just believe it's borderline unethical to recommend someone installing anything related to Arch on their workstation. It's just not what a beginner should choose at all. CachyOS included, it even makes you choose your bootloader at install (any user-friendly distro would simply never bother you with that and go with GRUB right away).

A user's first distro can make or break their Linux experience. Think hard before recommending new users the flavor of the month or an Arch derivative.
by everdrive | 2026-01-11 12:27:16+00:00
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint remain great recommendations; good stability, community support, etc. (even for Ubuntu, a regular user might not actually care that much about snaps so long as everything works)

I just moved to CachyOS, (from Fedora, and earlier from Ubuntu -- I've been on Linux for a while) and I've been very, very happy. The gaming performance is legitimately better than what I was getting on Fedora, and I've just enjoyed the OS and KDE much more than Gnome Shell. I haven't had any real showstoppers with CachyOS, and it really has felt like a user-friendly version of Arch finally exists.
by clappski | 2026-01-11 12:27:19+00:00
The mistake is that you did a system update when you wanted to use the computer. Not implying that system updates should be a dangerous thing to do, but just something learnt from experience - I’ve had similar issues, especially with Nvidea drivers and kernel versions getting updated at the same time. The take away is keep the updates to when you have an hour to debug or get comfortable rolling back updates.
by dkdcio | 2026-01-11 12:27:23+00:00
you could find tons of API keys on GitHub before these “agentic” tools too. that was my point, one screenshot from twitter vs one anecdote from me. I don’t think either proves the point, but posting a screenshot from twitter like it’s proof of some widespread problem is what I was responding to (N=2, 1 vs 1)

my point is more “skill issue” than “trust me this never happens”

my point on CPUs is people who don’t understand LLMs talk like “hallucinations” are a real thing — LLMs are “deciding” to make stuff up rather than just predicting the next token. yes it’s probabilistic, so is practically everything else at scale. yet it works and here we are. can you really explain in detail how everything you use works? I’m guessing I can explain failure modes of agentic systems (and how to avoid them so you don’t look silly on twitter/github) and how neural networks work better than most people can explain the technology they use every day
by Unfunkyufo | 2026-01-11 12:27:44+00:00
This is also my problem. I am currently using my docked Macbook instead of my much more powerful desktop running Linux, even though I also want to use Linux more.

Why? Because as much as I want to get rid of my dependence on tech giants, Apple's products are just so damn good, and they Just Work^TM, especially with each other.

Having used Linux on/off for many years, I can say that it's definitely gotten better, but I am still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. It doesn't have to be as polished as my Mac, but I'd like to at least not have to fight with Bluetooth especially, and things like the dongle for my headset not working and other issues like that.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-11 12:27:44+00:00
Plenty of people will gladly give you their hard work for free if you promise you'll return the favor. Or if you promise not to take your work and make others pay for it when they could just get it for free. Basically, help the people that want to embrace the freedoms of open source, but not the ones that are just in it for the free labour. Or at the very, very least, include a little "thank you" note.

AI doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, so if you're in that mindset you now have to decide between going full hands-off like you or not doing any open source work at all.
by henryhale | 2026-01-11 12:27:52+00:00
>I don't get how this would be more "ai friendly" than other frameworks, that kind of propositions should be backed by more concrete proof.

Most if not all llms are producing Markdown instead of HTML as the primary output. Markdown has a simpler syntax that basically uses fewer tokens compared to HTML Similarly, Ripple appears to express a complex structure in simple terms compared to React or HTML or whatever. No wonder most AI dev tools operate in React with web previews abstracting away the setup process.

Higher abstractions appear to be cost efficient(both training & inference time - output generation). All that is required is to provide the model with a document containing rules about ripplejs(in this case) and go from there...more like llms.txt or agent.md or simply documentation. Any DSL would fit in a single file and easily consumed by a model.
by falloutx | 2026-01-11 12:28:17+00:00
In one of the scenarios programmers get replaced then the progress slows, thus saving jobs of writers, lawyers, marketing, scientists, artists. At this point I am okay with that scenario seeing how programmers have showed no solidarity while every other field has been rejecting AI. Lawyers have even started hiring junior lawyers back and Art industry has basically shoved AI into a bin of irrelevance.
by MonkeyClub | 2026-01-11 12:29:07+00:00
Nice coincidence, I was thinking about the sale yesterday.

IIRC, a while before the sale Whatsapp tried to introduce some meagre subscription, on the order of dozens of cents, which got a lot of backlash. Then, a bit after that, it got sold.

The servers don't pay for themselves, and if the user base wasn't going to pay for use, money had to be manifested in another way.
by simonw | 2026-01-11 12:29:15+00:00
At that point you change your attitude to the project and start treating it like something you care about, take control of the architecture, rewrite bits that don't make sense, etc.

Plus the size of project that an LLM can help maintain keeps growing. I actually think that size may no longer have any realistic limits at all now: the tricks Claude Code uses today with grep and sub-agents mean there's no longer a realistic upper limit to how much code it can help manage, even with Opus's relatively small (by today's standards) 200,000 token limit.
by TheDong | 2026-01-11 12:31:40+00:00
> Supported processors - M1 and M2, not M3 or M4

The M2 models came out in 2022. You can't buy them new anymore.

Asahi linux doesn't support any of the currently sold macbooks, so I think it's fair to say modern macbooks don't run linux.

This is also at Apple's mercy, if enough people do it there's a non-zero chance they lock things down further. They've done even more consumer-unfriendly things before.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-11 12:31:44+00:00
A common intention with opensource is to allow people, and AI tools they use, to reuse, recombine, etc. OSS code in any way they see fit. If that's not what you want, don't open source your work. It's not stealing if you gave it away and effectively told people "do whatever you want". Which is one way licenses such as the MIT license are often characterized.

It's very hard to prevent specific types of usage (like feeding code to an LLM) without throwing out the baby with the bathwater and also preventing all sorts of other valid usages. AGPLv3, which is what antirez and Redis use goes to far IMHO and still doesn't quite get the job done. It doesn't forbid people (or tools) to "look" at the code which is what AI training might be characterized as. That license creates lots of headaches for corporate legal departments. I switched to Valkey for that reason.

I actually prefer using MIT style licenses for my own contributions precisely because I don't want to constrain people or AI usage. Go for it. More power to you if you find my work useful. That's why I provide it for free. I think this is consistent with the original goals of open source developers. They wanted others to be able to use their stuff without having to worry about lawyers.

Anyway, AI progress won't stop because of any of this. As antirez says, that stuff is now part of our lives and it is a huge enabler if you are still interested in solving interesting problems. Which apparently he is. I can echo much of what he says. I've been able to solve larger and larger problems with AI tools. The last year has seen quite a bit of evolution in what is possible.

> Am I wrong to feel this?

I think your feelings are yours. But you might at least examine your own reasoning a bit more critically. Words like theft and stealing are big words. And I think your case for that is just very weak. And when you are coding yourself are you not standing on the shoulders of giants? Is that not theft?
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-11 12:31:53+00:00
Mint is one of the greatest distributions to get started with for users coming from Windows. I've been using Fedora full-time for more than four years now, but before that I used Linux Mint for about a year. It's a great, seamless experience.

Only problem I believe is the lack of customization options in Cinnamon compared to KDE and even Gnome with extensions. I guess that makes the user miss out on some of the cool parts of owning your software. Also, being stuck in X11 will start to become a problem in the next few years: I'm waiting to see what they come up with on that front.
Ask HN: Manus.im (Meta) left me hanging for 7 days – is this normal?
by ebikebilly | 2026-01-11 12:31:53+00:00
I've been building a mobile app on Manus.im (recently acquired by Meta). For the past 5+ days, my backend won't publish.

Support timeline:
- Days 1-2 (Jan 3-4): I submit detailed bug report with logs
- Day 3: Support responds, clearly didn't understand the issue
- Day 3: I re-explain, provide project access for testing
- Days 4-7: Complete silence. No test results, no updates.

Meanwhile I've lost the same work 4 times due to sandbox resets and wasted thousands in credits.

This has happened on MULTIPLE support tickets. They respond once, I provide what they ask for, then they ghost.

Is this normal for Manus? Should I cut my losses and migrate? Anyone else experienced this?

Stack: Next.js + React Native (Expo) + tRPC + PostgreSQL

Considering migrating to: Vercel + Railway + Supabase + Expo EAS

Any advice appreciated.
by d-yoda | 2026-01-11 12:32:09+00:00
I recently reviewed some code written by a non-engineer using Cursor's vibe coding. It was full of dead code and patchwork logic. Vibe coding can build a working prototype, but maintaining it? That's another story.

So I built a GitHub App that audits your Python codebase. It reviews PRs and runs weekly scans on the entire repo, catching complex functions, dead code, and duplicates. When it finds issues, it posts comments and Issues with concrete suggestions.

It's powered by pyscn (https://github.com/ludo-technologies/pyscn), a static analyzer I open-sourced a few months ago.

Happy to answer questions.
by DannyBee | 2026-01-11 12:34:14+00:00
I have fs.com armored cable installed for 10 years now. Different times and spools. It is all in perfect shape. They test all their cable. Something is almost certainly disintegrating your cable. If you have any spare old pvc pipe or something in the basement, hit it with a hammer and see if it is brittle (the hammer should bounce). If it is brittle, I would not hang out in the basement until you figure out what is going on.

One random guess other than gases of various sorts: If you have the lights on a lot, it's possible you have lighting that is not properly uv filtered somehow.

The fiber and even the armor itself looks fine in your pictures and I bet the error rate is zero. Outside of bending, i can't see how you could damage the fiber when the armor is in perfect shape. That armor will unwravel The speed thing is not how fiber works. It's hard to get marginal link enough to generate retries that degrade your speed by 10%. Most of the time either you have full speed link, no link, or so many errors speed is zero. The optics almost always have rx/TX signal strength DDM you can look at

Also did you say you direct buried it in cement? If so it's not rated for that. Direct burial and concrete tight/safe are not the same thing at all, not the least of reasons being concrete is highly alkaline (ph12-13) when poured
by Anamon | 2026-01-11 12:34:19+00:00
Same experience for me. Gemini generates by far the most usable code. Not "good code", obviously, but a decent enough foundation to build on. GPT in particular just spits out code for obsolete libraries, uses deprecated features, hallucinated methods etc. etc. It was a case for the trash bin every single time.

On the other hand, Gemini failed BADLY when I tried to give it a "summarize the data in this CSV" task. Every response was completely wrong. When pressed about which rows the answers were based on, 100% of the rows were made-up, not present in the source file (interestingly, after about 10 rounds of pointing this out, Gemini suddenly started using the actual data from the uploaded file). GPT's answers, on the other hand, matched manual verification with Excel.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-11 12:34:22+00:00
So far every new AI product and even model update has required me to relearn how to get decent results out of them. I'm honestly kind of sick of having to adjust my work flow every time.

The intuition just doesn't hold. The LLM gets trained and retrained by other LLM users so what works for me suddenly changes when the LLM models refresh.

LLMs have only gotten easier to learn and catch up on over the years. In fact, most LLM companies seem to optimise for getting started quickly over getting good results consistently. There may come a moment when the foundations solidify and not bothering with LLMs may put you behind the curve, but we're not there yet, and with the literally impossible funding and resources OpenAI is claiming they need, it may never come.