MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maldev | 2026-01-28 17:40:00+00:00
Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows side that anyone working with them can see. It started a couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and someone who thinks linux is crap.
by speedylight | 2026-01-28 17:40:05+00:00
I’ve been using a Mac for a about three years now, but every once in a while I use my old gaming laptop to play some games and every time I am reminded of how insufferable windows has become, using it feels I’m dumpster diving and the dumpster is asking me to sign into my Microsoft account. Apple gets a lot of shit for how they do things, but no one can deny that once you’re properly established in their ecosystem, it’s a phenomenal experience.
by qq-niklas | 2026-01-28 17:40:20+00:00
Thank you for the feedback, very much appreciated.

I agree with most of your comments, the shop is indeed the only place that really allows for some strategy right now. Here is the plan: after rebalancing the drops, I intend to introduce draft rewards. I will also consider ways to make the reroll a mechanic with more strategic depth.

Also, thanks for letting me know about the bug.
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-28 17:40:22+00:00
> The confiscated gun went off

Do you have any source for this? If that was the case, the DHS would have reported it as it would support their narrative.

> Alex put hands on the officers first so there was an apparent reason.

This not true! Alex moved in front of the ICE officer who just violently pushed the woman to the ground. He had this cell phone in his right hand and he raised his left hand in a protective manner. He does not even appear to touch the agent at any moment. This is when he got peppersprayed in the face. Then he tried to help the woman up. This is when an agent grapples him from behind and Alex gets wrestled to the ground. At no point did he behave in a threatening manner! You can clearly see this in the videos.

For example: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/minute-minute-timeline-fatal...
by danans | 2026-01-28 17:40:24+00:00
> That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC

I doubt that.

As software has grown to solving simple personal computing problems (write a document, create a spreadsheet) to solving organizational problems (sharing and communication within and without the organization), it has necessarily spread beyond the .exe file and local storage.

That doesn't give a pass to overly complex applications doing a simple thing - that's a real issue - but to think most modern company problems could be solved with just a local executable program seems off.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-28 17:40:36+00:00
A hardware token would not suffice. When you login with a hardware token it will generate some sort of token or cookie for further requests. This is where malware can steal that key and use it for whatever it wants. There is a benefit it knowing there is a high chance that the such a key is protected by the operating system's sandboxing technology. Without remote attestation you don't know if the sandbox is actually active or not.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-28 17:40:48+00:00
If the user's device isn't compromised then everything is fine regardless of whether or not it can pass attestation. If the user's device is compromised, the device doesn't need to pass attestation to run a fake bank app and steal the user's credentials. Once the attacker has the user's credentials they can use them to transfer money regardless of whether or not they have to use a different device that can pass attestation.

It doesn't really provide any security.

On top of that, there are tons of devices that can pass attestation that have known vulnerabilities, so the attacker could just use one of those (or extract the keys from it) if they had any reason to. But in the mobile banking threat model they don't actually need to.
by chankstein38 | 2026-01-28 17:40:48+00:00
If that's the case I feel like you couldn't actually be using them or paying attention. I'm a big proponent and use LLMs for code and hardware projects constantly but Gemini Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 are both probably the worst state we've seen. 6 months ago I was worried but at this point I have started finding other ways to find answers to things. Going back to the stone tablets of googling and looking at Stackoverflow or reddit.

I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.
by doodlebugging | 2026-01-28 17:40:51+00:00
I still have my Mac 128k with external disk drive and printer. Bought new in Jan 1985 or late Dec 1984. I paid the exorbitant price to upgrade it to 512k during the first year I owned it. I think the RAM needed to be desoldered and new chips soldered in place so it needed to be returned to the store where I bought it.

Shout out to the author of the blog for writing an engaging post that accurately the MS experience. For me, switching is still a work in progress since I am the family troubleshooter and there are lots of things to mess with. It will happen because so far, the ones I have switched have no complaints.
by jimt1234 | 2026-01-28 17:41:01+00:00
Sounds like me back in the early 80s when I used to war dial, and people used to share "active" prefixes. I learned all about the 911 prefix when I set my dialer and went to sleep. About 20 minutes later the cops were banging on my front door. True story; I was in 6th grade, got arrested for it.
by ahepp | 2026-01-28 17:41:17+00:00
I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles to providing a graphical installer in something like an initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell it to)

I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.
by reddalo | 2026-01-28 17:41:18+00:00
>many apps now just use CSD

If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).

If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.
by harikb | 2026-01-28 17:41:18+00:00
As a developer, I tried building an app that needs to use Whatsapp for communication. Unfortunately my phone number got blocked by the second test message. No Spam. Not marketing, just a test message to my own number. Along with it, they blocked my entire business, my LLC, and anything tied to it.

I have been trying to get hold of anyone or anything at Whatsapp. I've spent 6 months trying to navigate the bureaucracy. Facebook support claims they can't touch WhatsApp; WhatsApp support ignores the Facebook side. If you're building on WA, have a backup plan.
by ChicagoDave | 2026-01-28 17:41:26+00:00
I’m getting closer and closer to making the same decision.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 that won’t enable the AI cruft so I got somewhat lucky there.

But the copilot business is AAF.

And now that I use Claude Code in WSL or my Ubuntu server, I’m pretty much done with visual studio development.

Not sure what’s left.

Satya Nadala will have single-handedly destroyed the Windows ecosystem.
by rvnx | 2026-01-28 17:41:30+00:00
> When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim.

Well, that statement can only resolve to true.

These requests of data collection are perfectly legal.
FBI DITU gives an order: give me all chats from *@banana.com and they receive banana.com.

From there, two choices from the perspective of a tech provider:

a) You accept. You get paid.

You can always claim you had been coerced / are a victim, and that everything has been done by the law.

b) You refuse. It's a crime.

You take the risk to lose over 250K per day (!) in fines, some other court scandals that will come to you, some shady private stuff (what if we learn about your secret jacuzzi ?), harassement of the team, be publicly shamed that you supported terrorists who caused actual death of Americans, etc.

In addition, nobody will know that you are the privacy hero and you are not even sure that the data is not exfiltrated another way.

To this day, Apple, Facebook, Google still deny participating in illegal requests. They claim these were lawful requests, that have been carefully looked one-by-one.

Yes, we looked carefully and decided we won't enjoy losing 100M USD and go to jail.

The trick is that the identifier / wildcard can be very vague and wide. Or there can be multiple of them, each of them are narrow, but put one of top of the other they are super wide.
by jcgl | 2026-01-28 17:41:50+00:00
Standardizing that approach is one thing that the systemd project has been working on. They've built various components to help with that, including writing specifications (via the UAPI group) on how that should all fit together.

ParticleOS[0] gives a look at how this can all fit together, in case you want to see some of it in action.

[0] https://github.com/systemd/particleos
by drysine | 2026-01-28 17:42:05+00:00
>Russian leadership's willingness to take massive casualties of their own with little if any political fallout

All Russians joining the war after partial mobilization of the autumn of 2022 are doing this voluntarily. The West and Ukrainians managed to really piss off many Russians. It isn't Putin's war anymore and it isn't even the war of the whole Russia yet.
by simoncion | 2026-01-28 17:42:15+00:00
With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to purchase a new computer.

Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.
by tolerance | 2026-01-28 17:42:31+00:00
In order to be taken serious I feel like statements like this need to be qualified with who the claimant is imagining to be responsible for generating the anticipated output. The ‘A’ in AI isn’t for ‘autonomous’.

Bartosz Ciechanowski could generate an explainer like this using Claude today if he wanted to. But would he? If someone like him had the mind to do it then they could instead. But where’s it at? These types may hold themselves to a standard above this method. No shame in that.
by dheera | 2026-01-28 17:42:31+00:00
> I won't talk about other fields, but American devs (regardless of race) tend to be much more passionate about computer science and (perhaps as a result) tend to be much better at their job than those from the big-name outsourcing countries.

Then why are half the websites I use broken? Why is my hospital's billing estimate system broken? Why did my FSA provider send a request of documentation to the wrong e-mail address? Why is my bank's website always broken? Why did Equifax leak data? Why did Doordash mis-charge me?

> Indian recruiting firms

There's your problem. Most top talent doesn't find jobs via recruiting firms.
Show HN: Rtipc – real-time, zero-copy IPC for Linux
by mausys | 2026-01-28 17:42:48+00:00
I built a small IPC library for Linux aimed at real-time and low-latency data exchange between processes.

At its core is a zero-copy, wait-free, single-producer / single-consumer circular message queue living in shared memory. The design avoids locks and minimizes synchronization overhead, making it suitable for real-time or near-real-time workloads.

Key features:
- Zero-copy message passing via shared memory
- Wait-free SPSC queue (no locks, no blocking in the fast path)
- force_push mode: when the queue is full, the oldest message that hasn’t been consumed yet is dropped to make room for new data (useful when freshness > completeness, e.g. sensor streams)
- Uses optional eventfds for efficient notifications
- Small, dependency-free C implementation (a few thousand lines of code)

This is not meant to replace general-purpose IPC systems like D-Bus. Instead, it’s designed to complement them for high-frequency or real-time data paths, while something like D-Bus handles control and configuration.

The library includes a lightweight handshake protocol over Unix domain sockets to exchange shared memory file descriptors, eventfds, and channel configuration.

If you prefer, you can also use an external IPC mechanism just for the handshake phase.

Ecosystem:

There’s also a pure Rust implementation of the same protocol and queue design:
https://github.com/mausys/rtipc-rust

And an example in Rust of using zbus and Tokio to perform the handshake over D-Bus while using this library for the real-time data channel:
https://github.com/mausys/rtipc-zbus
by shagie | 2026-01-28 17:42:56+00:00
That wouldn't fail though. It was called only once with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. The second time it was called with [2, 4, 6, 8, 10].

Likewise, if some_call returned [2, 4, 6, 8, 10] instead, it should only be called with [2, 4, 6, 8, 10] once then.

However, the purpose of this test then becomes questionable. Why are you testing implementation details rather than observable? Is there anything that you could observe that depended on the filter being called once or twice with the same filter function?
by hypeatei | 2026-01-28 17:42:59+00:00
> "economists" expected major inflation

Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)

> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong

Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
by 0dayz | 2026-01-28 17:43:05+00:00
I am thankful that so far Microsoft hasn't removed local admin capabilities of Windows, but I dread the day that happens (mainly because it remains the most consistent ways one can deny windows updates).

Because forcing updates down people's throat creates this, and boy do I hate Microsoft's insistence on doing this for drivers, where you get such fun things like Microsoft installing a different AMD GPU driver than the one that AMD gives out (this to be fair is partially to be blamed on AMD for not having just 1 versioning system) so then you have to go into safe mode, DDU, disconnect the internet, install the drivers, turn off automatic driver update in an obscure setting.

Meanwhile on Linux it's literally 1 version that exists in the kernel.

Ever since Wayland added support for changing mouse scroll speed & changing/customizing middle click behavior that is a lot more consistent, I've used Linux to daily drive, especially with immutable distros ensuring even IF an update breaks my system I can rollback.
by dcsommer | 2026-01-28 17:43:07+00:00
We invested a lot into build system optimizations to bring this number down over time, although we did accept on the order of 200 KiB size overhead initially for the stdlib. We initially launched using a Gradle + CMake + Cargo with static linking of the stdlib and some basic linker optimizations. Transitioning WhatsApp Android to Buck2 has helped tremendously to bring the size down, for instance by improving LTO and getting the latest clang toolchain optimizations. Buck2 also hugely improved build times.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-28 17:43:20+00:00
You’re right to call out consumer use is what’s eating all the tokens. I suppose what was behind my way of putting it is: I haven’t seen much in the way of truly transformative products with LLMs in the consumer space. Sure, there’s a few power users doing some cool things, and lots of promises along the lines of “AI will plan and book you a whole vacation!”, but basically for the median consumer we have an “improved search”, and “fun image generation”, with people using it a couple times a week. So what is the product that changes the world and makes 500M people pay $100 a month? I don’t think it’s really here yet. This feels a bit like we’re in 1996 where people are still trying to figure out what the internet is for, and we don’t know if OpenAI will be 1996’s Amazon, or its AOL.

None of this is to deny how remarkable the underling LLM tech is. I never expected to see something like this in my lifetime; it feels far far more strange and new than when the iPhone came along. I use a coding agent daily and it’s dramatically changed how I work. But I still think we’re in a bubble here.
by roryirvine | 2026-01-28 17:43:26+00:00
It was a similar story with Pulseaudio - it caused pain for early adopters but, by the time that Debian stable switched to it by default, almost all of the issues and corner cases had long since been worked out and it was almost completely trouble-free.

Mind you, the libc5 -> glibc2 upgrade was pretty horrible in Debian land, so they didn't always get it right in the early days...
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-28 17:43:55+00:00
I agree re: the fundamental difference when it comes to compiled languages. I wrote rashly and out of frustration without thinking about it too deeply.

re: interpreted languages, though, I think it's still a shit show. I don't want to run "composer" or "npm" or whatever the Ruby and Python equivalents are on my production environment. I just want packages analogous to binaries that I can cleanly deploy / remove with OS package management functionality.
by drecked | 2026-01-28 17:44:05+00:00
You’re ignoring the part where FAANG massively overhired in the years preceding.

Meta and Amazon doubled their headcount in the 2-3 years of the pandemic.

Others like Google increased by 60+%.

You’re also forgetting about this little thing popularly called AI that happened in the intervening years.

There may be an argument that H1B isn’t fit to purpose in a post AI world (although that argument is also false if we think software engineering will remain a viable job going forward, but that’s a different topic).

But it’s much harder to argue that H1B hurt US employers when thr industry they hired the majority of H1B employees in the first 2 decades of the 2000s, also saw some of the highest growth in jobs while simultaneously posting the highest growth in salaries (there may have been certain minor industries hiring a few thousand people, like Oceanographer that had a slightly higher increase, but even that was likely not true because BLS data doesn’t factor compensation in the form of stock options which disproportionally provided wealth for SW engineers relative to other workers).
by rustyhancock | 2026-01-28 17:44:24+00:00
There's that, but I actually think LLMs are becoming very good at not making the bad simple choice.

What they're worse at is the bits I can't easily see.

An example is that I recently was working on a project building a library with Claude. The code in pieces all looked excellent.

When I wrote some code making use of it several similar functions which were conceptually similar had signatures that were subtly mismatched.

Different programmers might have picked each patterns. And probably consistently made similar rules for the various projects they worked on.

To an LLM they are just happenstances and feel no friction.

A real project with real humans writing the code would notice the mismatch. Even if they aren't working on those parts at the same time just from working on it across say a weekend.

But how many more decisions do we make convenient only for us meat bags that a LLM doesn't notice?
by ufmace | 2026-01-28 17:44:30+00:00
I'm in the exact same boat. I was a little unhappy with the ads etc in Windows, but perfectly willing to give Windows 11 a try. But Microsoft decreed that my admittedly a bit old but perfectly workable CPU was incompatible, due to not having a feature I wasn't interested in. I'd need to replace most of my existing hardware to switch. So why not try Linux? It certainly seems reasonable when Windows apparently needs more command-line hackery to maybe work for a while than Linux.

So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. All of the software I want to use installed easily and works, via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found annoying in Windows.

It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome, but what can you do.
by lxgr | 2026-01-28 17:44:37+00:00
I find scanning QR codes at the POS hugely inconvenient compared to paying with my watch. The discount has to be substantial for me to ever scan them.

Retailer apps are often surprisingly (expectably?) bad at dealing with spotty/no connectivity, and even if they aren't, getting my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it, opening the right app, getting to the right screen in it (oh, did it just log me out?) etc. takes about 10x as long as arming my smartwatch in a convenient moment and tapping it once the terminal asks for it. It doesn't even require a free hand, since the range of mine is much better than that of passive contactless cards.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-28 17:44:42+00:00
"Linux" is really a family of operating systems, so people need to be more specific. It might run perfectly out of the box on consumer/gamer focused operating systems like Bazzite or SteamOS while perhaps requiring more work on something like Red Hat or NixOS. Those different operating systems all have wildly different approaches to how the OS actually works despite generally being able to run a largely overlapping set of programs.

It's like saying something works on "laptop" without specifying whether it's a Thinkpad or a Chromebook or a Macbook.
by hedgehog | 2026-01-28 17:44:44+00:00
Amazing. I think if I were taking on the build-a-browser project I would pair that with the WhatWG HTML spec to come up with a task list (based on the spec line-by-line) linked to specific tests associated with each task. Then of course need an overall architecture and behavioral spec for how the browser part behaves beyond just rendering. A developer steering process full time might be able to get within 80% parity of existing browsers in a month. It would be an interesting experiment.
by georgemcbay | 2026-01-28 17:44:47+00:00
My experience aligns strongly with yours (self-declared 'independents' being almost universally conservative leaning) but anecdotally I also think a significant part of the growing number of people who identify as "independents" recently may be left leaning folks who are simply fed up with Democratic party leadership (or lack thereof) and the inability of the party to act as a true opposition party as our democracy falls apart.
by mperham | 2026-01-28 17:44:50+00:00
I wrote Sidekiq, which Oban is based on. Congratulations to Shannon and Parker on shipping this!

I had to make this same decision years ago: do I focus on Ruby or do I bring Sidekiq to other languages? What I realized is that I couldn't be an expert in every language, Sidekiq.js, Sidekiq.py, etc. I decided to go a different direction and built Faktory[0] instead, which flips the architecture and provides a central server which knows how to implement the queue lifecycle internally. The language-specific clients become much simpler and can be maintained by the open source community for each language, e.g. faktory-rs[1]. The drawback is that Faktory is not focused on any one community and it's hard for me to provide idiomatic examples in a given language.

It's a different direction but by focusing on a single community, you may have better outcomes, time will tell!

[0]: https://github.com/contribsys/faktory
[1]: https://github.com/jonhoo/faktory-rs