MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2026-01-17 12:26:39+00:00
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.

Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!

At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.

But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
by vander_elst | 2026-01-17 12:27:09+00:00
> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.

Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
by viraptor | 2026-01-17 12:27:45+00:00
Not that I don't believe you, but something feels off...

> conversion to Word 2003 format

That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.

> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.

Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?

> not until office for Mac reached feature parity

It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.
by Faizan711 | 2026-01-17 12:27:57+00:00
Hey folks, check out my weekend project Git Gandalf, this is your code reviewer which helps you detect issues in your commits before they get actually committed and breaks your project. It uses local LLMs which you can setup from apps like LM Studio but you can also use your paid LLM APIs. Check this out and let me know how is it, and how can i make it better?
Show HN: Chatbot with Let's Encrypt Community support database
by dc352 | 2026-01-17 12:29:26+00:00
Hey, I'm building similar things for internal enterprise incident management and this was my initial demo. I've pre-processed 3+ years of discussions of Let's Encrypt Community.

I've put $50 against the LLM - hence the login page, but you can use guest:account to log in and try it.

(the brand is my own LLC)
by zahlman | 2026-01-17 12:29:57+00:00
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.

Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.

Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
Show HN: Cyber+ – a security-focused programming language
by CzaxTanmay | 2026-01-17 12:30:00+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m the creator of Cyber+, a programming language focused on cybersecurity and system-level tooling.
Cyber+ started as an experimental project, but it has now reached a stable stage with a defined syntax, runtime, and standard commands. It is designed for tasks like security scripting, hashing, scanning, and automation, while keeping the language simple and readable.
Example code for Hello World
-----------------------------
Compute("Hello World");
-----------------------------
I bet Cyber+ will feel even easier than Python or Go.
-----------------------------
The language is implemented in Go, and the full source code, documentation, and installer are available on GitHub via the website.
I’d really appreciate feedback on the language design, syntax choices, and real-world use cases where this could be improved or simplified.
Thanks for taking a look.
by pembrook | 2026-01-17 12:30:16+00:00
Then we'll finally be getting the world we deserve.

Decades of VC cash has trained developers to never pay for anything that powers their entire career like dev tools. The assumption is you can always squeeze some rich business customer that employs the dev.

If AI kills hiring of software engineers, then there's less devs inside businesses to sell to. So we can either pay for the products we use directly, or not have them at all.

It will take a decade to shift penny pinching behavioral habits of devs but slowly over time the market will correct itself. Chefs have always had to buy their own knives. This is good imo.
by hehe23 | 2026-01-17 12:31:07+00:00
Hi! I generated a map as well, but indeed, the map is squeezed horizontally.
I have here a screenshot from a map and the poster: https://photos.diffop.be/apps/photos/public/h6JKMJImLZCXutcT...

I have tried adjusting -d, but it only affects the scale.

Here is the command I used: python create_map_poster.py --city Leuven --country Belgium --distance 4000 --theme sunset
by riedel | 2026-01-17 12:32:03+00:00
I personally already was hesitant downloading an app that is health/disability related from the Google play store, but you triggered me. Actually my brain lacking impulse control, however, the deinstalled the app again after getting towards the account creation dialog ( the question answer thing was good to grab my attention). I moved on, because I was already thinking about pricing and whatever: quickest thing was running away and continue procrastinating on hacker news...
by slfreference | 2026-01-17 12:32:11+00:00
But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"

German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM
by zigzag312 | 2026-01-17 12:32:12+00:00
> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.

> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...

> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.

> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

UBI fixes that issue how exactly?
by palata | 2026-01-17 12:32:23+00:00
Yes. I've done it. That's why there is an "approve and run" button when the PR comes from another repo. So that the maintainers can check if the PR is trying to exfiltrate secrets... or do other bad things of course.

The whole point of the github action secrets is that they are accessible by the CI when needed. Which means they are accessible. It's just a convenient way to store the secret in such a way that it is not completely public. But you still have to trust github and your maintainers.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-01-17 12:32:39+00:00
Dr Raoult was very vocal in France about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid 19.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult

It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.

> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 12:34:06+00:00
If this is quite widespread, it should be fairly straightforward to point to an example of a page that's being defaced with misinformation, which would include an edit history and perhaps a Talk page documenting whatever sides to the debate there is that's preventing consensus.

I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
by graemep | 2026-01-17 12:35:30+00:00
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.

It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.

The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).
by michaelt | 2026-01-17 12:35:40+00:00
> But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it.

At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.

No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?

And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.

The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 12:36:21+00:00
> I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show.

I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.

If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-17 12:36:31+00:00
Nice blog post, gp serial entrepreneur founder bro -- what did your investors think of that?

http://www.mickdarling.com/2019/07/26/busy-summer/

An embedded page at landr-atlas.com says:

Attention!

MacOS Security Center has identified that your system is under threat.
Please scan your MacOS as soon as possible to avoid more damage.
Don't leave this page until you have undertaken all the suggested steps
by authorised Antivirus.

[OK]
by pprotas | 2026-01-17 12:36:52+00:00
Iterating on LLM agents involves testing on production(-like) data. The most accurate way to see whether your agent is performing well is to see it working on production.

You want to see the best results you can get from a prompt, so you use features like prompt management an A/B testing to see what version of your prompt performs better (i.e. is fit to the model you are using) on production.
by vander_elst | 2026-01-17 12:37:32+00:00
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 12:38:23+00:00
The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?
by mort96 | 2026-01-17 12:38:31+00:00
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).

Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.

And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.

Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.

Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
by idiotsecant | 2026-01-17 12:39:37+00:00
That is definitely not the bigger issue. If we had faster grid tie completions the problem would be even worse. If you don't believe me look at the very nearly daily negative power pricing inany areas of California.

We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-01-17 12:39:52+00:00
it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
by 673dfddnd | 2026-01-17 12:40:11+00:00
This is just in western economies. Eastern economies look to IA not as a work-force replacement infrastructure but as sophisticated complementary technology.

Yes, if there are not enough humans to do the job, robots will step in, moreover, they are already stepping in to lower production costs through increased finished product output (not through lowering wages costs, already low in Eastern economies).

Aside increasing industrial production output while lowering costs, the IA tech can increase human output in many fields, all are being live-tested in the East, chatbots are just a single tool in the toolbox, a big toolbox with thousands of tools.
by derangedHorse | 2026-01-17 12:40:14+00:00
> you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread

Who's to say that a loaf of bread will be that much more valuable? You acknowledge that bread is cheaper than it used to be, but baselessly assert that an automatic loom will accentuate the value differential rather than lessen or maintain it with the innovations in bread making.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-01-17 12:42:16+00:00
> We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.

Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas?
While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it.
Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.

Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems
and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
by rr808 | 2026-01-17 12:42:55+00:00
Just did a funding round. In a sign of the times clickhouse used to be an interesting DB product, but is now a "database software that companies can use as they develop AI agents "

<i>Database technology startup ClickHouse Inc. has raised $400 million in a new funding round that values the company at $15 billion — more than double its valuation less than a year ago. </i>

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-16/clickhous...
Show HN: KissMotion – AI kiss video generator from a single photo
by Yreminder | 2026-01-17 12:43:02+00:00
Hi HN,

I built KissMotion (https://aikissvideo.app) - an AI kiss video
generator that creates romantic animations from photos.

Tech stack:
- Next.js 15 with App Router
- Multiple AI providers (Replicate, Kling, FAL)
- Drizzle ORM with credit-based FIFO consumption
- Multi-deployment: Vercel + Cloudflare Workers (via OpenNext)
- i18n with 16 languages

The trickiest part was handling async AI generation with reliable
polling and automatic credit refunds when tasks fail.

Looking for feedback on generation quality and UX improvements.
by Garlef | 2026-01-17 12:43:36+00:00
> So how can you keep generating disposable software on this layer?

Well... If your "users" are paying customers of a XaaS Subscription service, then there's propably little need and/or room for disposable UI.

But if you're doing something for internal processes with maybe 2-3 users at max, then you might want to do something that does not result in launching an under-budgeted project that could be a full blown SaaS project on its own.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-17 12:43:39+00:00
Cost. Useful life.
I thought about an off grid system. Batteries are expensive. Also, unless you live in a dry place in the equator, You'll need to account for things like winter, long rainy spells, so either you add more batteries to account for multiple days (weeks? months?) of low generation, or you'll need a diesel/gas generator, or have a hybrid system instead, which basically means you're using the utilities gas generator instead.

Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%.

So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
by muzani | 2026-01-17 12:44:17+00:00
Seems like he's just quoting Adams himself. Adams was popular for his self-deprecating humor.

Adams used to tell people the secret to success was being in the top 25% at multiple things - he could draw and he could make corporate jokes, but he was not exceptional in either of those things. It's not really a pot shot, more of a tribute. He's still saying Adams was just below Leonardo da Vinci.