MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by el_nahual | 2026-01-28 18:28:33+00:00
Amazon stock is flat over the past year. The rest of the "magnificent seven":

- Google: +70%

- Nvidia: +49%
- Apple: +7%

- Meta: Flat

- SHOP (closest comp): +19.41%

- Mercado Libre (international comp): +20.73%

So basically, the "tech world" is dividing itself, in the eyes of investors, into two camps: companies that will benefit from AI tailwinds and companies that will not. And all the money is going to the companies that will.

Amazon is more and more considered to be part of the latter group.

This is especially concerning of Amazon because it seems like AWS--the cash cow--has somehow missed becoming the cloud provider for AI compute needs.

As such, Amazon needs to give investors some reason to hold amazon stock. If you're not part of a rising tide, the only reason left is "we are very profitable."

So yeah, Amazon will have to cut costs to show more profitability and become further investable.

So yes, the layoffs have to do with AI...but not the way they are spinning it.
by kelseyfrog | 2026-01-28 18:28:39+00:00
Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works.

The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium, and that's ok"?
by pregnenolone | 2026-01-28 18:28:41+00:00
My main machines have been running Linux for years now, but there are still some things that are really bothering me. For one, I think dealing with virtual machines are still somewhat painful on Linux. VM managers continue to be clunky (I believe KDE is working on a new one), and GPU acceleration, let alone partitioning, isn’t really a thing for Windows guests which is something that works out of the box on WSL. Another frustrating part is the lack of a proper alternative to Windows Hello that allows you to set up passkeys using TPMs.
by al_borland | 2026-01-28 18:28:42+00:00
I don’t think you can dismiss the maintenance required on buildings and bridges so easily. Bridges must be continuously repainted to avoid corrosion, for example. Nature will overtake buildings, bridges, and anything we make. Concrete cracks and plants grow through it. Our entire infrastructure is a never ending battle to control nature’s relentless push to expand.

Software, on the other hand, is durable. I can download and run software that was written 40 years ago and it still works exactly the same, with 0 maintenance. Leave a bridge or building alone for 40 years and see what happens.

With software, the battle isn’t against nature, it’s against humans with bad intent. Once something is no longer popular, it tends to not be much of a target anymore.

The constant updates are in part for security, as it’s a cat and mouse game. The updates are also to keep this feeling fresh and relevant, so people don’t move on to something new that seems to be getting better support… much like painting the bridge and changing the landscaping outside a building. This shows the people using it that it is cared for and keeps it feeling useful.

I maintained a simple website at work for 15 years. Had I not made little tweaks over time, people would have filled the gaps with other tools and it would have fallen into irrelevance. Because I made these little updates to keep it relevant, people kept using it and didn’t seek out other solutions to fill the gaps.

Some may see some of this as busy work, but it only truly becomes busy work if the system is perfect and they keep working on it to the point of making it worse, just to have something to do.
by brudgers | 2026-01-28 18:28:49+00:00
For what it’s worth, I use both Linux for older hardware and Windows for Windows things.

I have Ubuntu on two laptops (one also has Windows 10). Windows 11 on one laptop and Windows 10 with updates turned off for stability I use for creative work.

Of course the caveat is I don’t have a one-laptop-to-rule-them-all. But the same is true of my mobile devices (Android and iOS).

Separating my modes of computer use with hardware works for me…and before the inevitable it-must-be-nice comments…two of my four laptops were bought used, one is almost ten years old and the other is six (and my Android phone was NOS, but a flagship and my iOS devices were purchased when they were last-generation).

To put it another way, I limit my dependence on Windows, but also Linus and Apple because none of those ecosystems love me…e.g. Wayland.

But again that’s me, YMMV, TANSTAAFL, etc.
by augusteo | 2026-01-28 18:28:56+00:00
The Chrome Extensions support is the interesting part here. That's often the dealbreaker for using mobile devices as computer replacements.

Google's had this weird situation where Android and ChromeOS overlap more every year. At some point maintaining two operating systems with converging feature sets seems wasteful.

My guess: ChromeOS probably survives for the education market where manageability matters more than capabilities. But for consumers? Android on a big screen with keyboard and mouse might just be good enough.
by bunderbunder | 2026-01-28 18:28:56+00:00
It seems industry-wide these days.

What I’ve seen as an older-than-average developer is that the Agile movement has made it increasingly difficult to make time for paying attention to some of the more subtle aspects of user experience such as performance. Because I can’t predict how much work it will be accurately enough to assign story points to the task, and that means that this kind of work frequently results in a black spot on our team performance metrics.

CD makes it even harder because this kind of work really does need some time to bake. Fast iterations don’t leave much time to verify that performance-oriented changes have the intended effect and no adverse side effects prior to release.
by simoncion | 2026-01-28 18:29:05+00:00
> The issue with X11 is that it's not dynamic.

No, it is. Maybe you're using an ancient (or misconfigured) Xorg? Or maybe you've never used a GTK program? One prereq is that you have a daemon running that speaks the ~20 year old XSETTINGS protocol (such as 'xsettingsd'). Another prereq is that you have a DE and GUI toolkit new enough to know how to react to scaling changes. [0]

Also, for some damn reason, QT and FLTK programs need to be restarted in order to render with the new screen scaling ratio, but GTK programs pick up the changes immediately. Based on my investigation, this is a deficiency in how QT and FLTK react to the information they're being provided with.

At least on my system, the KDE settings dialog that lets you adjust screen scaling only exposes a single slider that applies to the entire screen. However, I've bothered to look at (and play with) what's actually going on under the hood, and the underlying systems totally expose per-display scaling factors... but for some reason the KDE control widget doesn't bother to let you use them. Go figure.

[0] I don't know where the cutoff point is, but I know folks have reported to me that their Debian-delivered Xorg installs totally failed to do "non-integer" scaling (dynamic or otherwise), but I've been able to do this on my Gentoo Linux machines for quite some time.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-28 18:29:22+00:00
I am a devops engineer and understand your point. But there's a huge difference: legacy code doesn't change. Yeah occasionally something weird will happen and you've got to dig into it, but it's pretty rare, and usually something like an expired certificate, not a logic bug.

What we're entering, if this comes to fruition, is a whole new era where massive amounts of code changes that engineers are vaguely familiar with are going to be deployed at a much faster pace than anything we've ever seen before. That's a whole different ballgame than the management of a few legacy services.
by echelon | 2026-01-28 18:29:41+00:00
As Google's domination continues, the US and EU need to force mobile OS vendors to open up platforms for third party app installation without gatekeeping, deep menu toggles, or scare walls.

You already need a phone to pay for parking, order at residents, identify yourself with the government, etc. Two companies should not dictate essential life function interaction.

The monopoly grip on this is so tight that it's almost impossible to compete.
by throwway120385 | 2026-01-28 18:29:44+00:00
It's more likely network calls that are taking a long time or timing out. A lot of developers insert function calls that under the hood hit HTTP servers, and it can take a few hundred milliseconds to stand up a new TLS connection and then however long it takes to send the request and get the response. It's also probable that the endpoints form an accidental microservice architecture in which case everyone is always hitting a different set of connections. This creates a perfect storm of having to reconnect to everything you hit occasionally which can create little slowdowns all over the place all without actually using CPU so it doesn't show up in any resource monitors.

HTTPS calls should be treated as calls to sleep() with undefined timings.
by wpm | 2026-01-28 18:29:54+00:00
On macOS the feature is baked into the OS's APIs, the app developer just opts into using them. If they don't, quitting with unsaved work will prompt the user modally, and block the restart to the point where the OS will timeout the reboot process and give up. The only way to purposefully lose unsaved work in almsot every app I've ever used on macOS is to yank the power cable or hold the power button down.

Window locations and app state are written to plist files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume. I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened sometimes it all comes back the way it was.
by artingent | 2026-01-28 18:29:59+00:00
Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.

I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.
by srpablo | 2026-01-28 18:30:03+00:00
Ramp is mostly their Python monolith. They have a blog post about their use of Elixir for one service but it's really not their core stack.

Brex was a lot more all-in on Elixir, including being one of the languages "stars," but moved to a more conventional stack (IIRC Java/Drop wizard microservices with Kafka to talk between them).
by SimianSci | 2026-01-28 18:30:05+00:00
It really does look to be a rewrite of ChromeOS to make it a native Android experience with very few tweaks to the User experience that I can see.

I think it's a good idea on Google's part. The trend of consumers using mobiles as their one and only computing experience is still strong.
This will blend the experience consumers have between desktops and their primary computing platform.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-28 18:30:11+00:00
Exactly. Airfoil is an optimization. There is a common misconception that planes wouldn't get off the ground if you didn't have airfoil. No, most of the lift (depends on the plane but in the ballpark of 80-90%) comes from the overall shape of the wings. ~20% is from leading edge airfoil deflection dynamics.

And if, say, airfoil was never discovered, we'd probably design the whole wing slightly differently to compensate for it, so the actual difference wouldn't even be 20%.

Airfoil is about as important as winglets, and planes fly without winglets just fine. But nobody points to winglets and says that's the crucial bit that makes the whole thing work.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 18:30:17+00:00
>This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget. If you can just plug your phone into a screen you do not need to buy a separate laptop anymore.

Except that android phones with display output are mostly flagships with flagship prices.

But 50 Euros on the used market got me a retired corporate HP/Dell laptop with 1080p screen, intel 8th gen i5 quad core, 8GB RAM and 256GB NVME on which I put Linux. Way better for studying and productivity than my android phone hooked up to the TV.

It's a nice feature to have as a backup in case my laptop dies, but I wouldn't daily drive an android phone as a desktop computer.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-28 18:30:22+00:00
it's meant in the literal sense but with metaphorical hacksaws and duct tape.

Early on, some advanced LLM users noticed they could get better results by forcing insertion of a word like "Wait," or "Hang on," or "Actually," and then running the model for a few more paragraphs. This would increase the chance of a model noticing a mistake it made.

Reasoning is basically this.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-28 18:30:22+00:00
> Having been born in Königsberg in 1724, he never left the small German city, dying there in 1804 aged 79 never having once gone further than the city’s limits.

Totally false! Slander! He once went as far as the village of Jarnołtowo, a whole 60 miles from Königsberg![0]

But yeah. Maybe not one of history’s greatest travelers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarno%C5%82towo
by jimbob45 | 2026-01-28 18:30:30+00:00
Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).

Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.
Show HN: employkids – Hire your kids so they can retire millionaires (legally)
by jfeng5 | 2026-01-28 18:30:42+00:00
The IRS lets you hire and pay your kids for real work. That earned income can go into a Roth IRA and grow tax-free. $4k/year from age 10-18 becomes over $1M by retirement. The catch? Paperwork. Agreements, work logs, payment records. Most parents never bother because it's annoying. employkids makes it easy.
by buu700 | 2026-01-28 18:30:54+00:00
I'd also add that I just don't like the idea in principle that I should have to trust the agent not to act maliciously. If an agent can run rm -rf / in an extreme edge case, theoretically it could also execute a container escape.

Maybe vanishingly unlikely in practice, but it costs me almost nothing to use a VM just in case. It's not impossible that certain models turn out to be poorly behaved, that attackers successfully execute indirect prompt injection via malicious tutorials targeting coding agents, or that some shadowy figure runs a plausibly deniable attack against me through an LLM API.
by ATechGuy | 2026-01-28 18:30:59+00:00
What about VMs? They offer strong isolation, as they don't share kernels, and have long been a foundational piece for multi-tenant computing. Then, why would we put an extra layer on top and rebrand it as an AI agent sandboxing solution? I'm genuinely curious what pushes everyone to build their own and launch here Is it one of those tarpit ideas: driven by own need and easy to build?
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 18:31:09+00:00
I think he did have his hand(s) on the officer right after he raised it. To me this "protective raise of the hand" looked like taking his hands off of the officer. Also, while Alex may have had protectiveness as a thought in his head this may have not seemed so to the officers.

Regarding shooting, what seems clear that shooting started after the gun was taken from Alex. At the discovery of it an officer also shouted "gun", after this guns were drawn and then shots were fired. Which gun went off first doesn't appear from the videos, but after the first one did, I assume that the rest of the shooting was due to the first shot being interpreted as the victim starting shooting, as not all of the officers saw that the gun had already removed.

Still, don't bring a gun to a protest, don't engage in any physical activities with law enforcement, don't stop them from doing their work, don't walk and whistle along..
by Macha | 2026-01-28 18:31:24+00:00
MMOs are actually fine. WoW, FFXIV, RuneScape, all work great on Linux. They’re not really games that rely on hidden information, are not pvp first and need to simulate stuff on the server anyway, so can verify moves are valid there.

It’s the competitive progression shooters and ranked esports games that go in for the restrictive anti-cheat
by ben_w | 2026-01-28 18:31:26+00:00
There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay?

Social work, childcare, for now I agree:

My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.
by getmyclassdone | 2026-01-28 18:31:57+00:00
GetMyClassDone.com is a trusted academic support platform dedicated to helping students succeed in today’s demanding online learning environment. With the rapid growth of virtual education, many students struggle to balance coursework with full-time jobs, family responsibilities, and personal commitments. Our mission is to provide reliable, confidential, and high-quality academic assistance that allows students to stay on track and achieve their educational goals with confidence.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-28 18:31:57+00:00
Keep in mind that a truly clueless user will most likely be running in a stock configuration. So long as that doesn't permit apps to tamper with one another (as is currently the case) there should be no issue. Google could even provide a toggle to officially root the phone and so long as flipping it wiped the device the problem would remain 99.9% solved because a scammer would be unable to pull the job off in one go.

By the time you reach the point that the user is doggedly following harmful step by step instructions over the course of multiple callbacks there is nothing short of a padded cell that can protect him from himself.

Unless you mean to suggest somehow screening such calls? A local LLM? Literal wiretapping via realtime upload to the cloud? If facing such a route society would likely be better off institutionalizing anyone victimized in such a manner.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-28 18:32:04+00:00
"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO.

The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them.

All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-28 18:32:06+00:00
> It's possible to do NAT without firewalling in netfilter.

That's not the claim I was making, which is that if you have netfilter/pf you are using a full firewall (and if you have NAT on a home router you have netfilter/pf).

How you configure the firewall is up to you, including whether or not you do NAT with it or whether or not you have any deny rules, but there is no such thing as a home router which has a NAT backend without also shipping a FW backend to make the hardware cheaper as GP was arguing.
by gessha | 2026-01-28 18:32:15+00:00
It is interesting to consider the different developments happening with the big mobile orgs regarding the convergence computing paradigm:

- Samsung’s Dex has been out for a while
- independent devs have been working on Linux “as an app” for some time
- Android desktop interface in this article
- Apple developing video output on iPhones
- Apple working on a Macbook with a mobile chip

- another exciting thing is XR devices and mobile computing

- my concern is convergence computing will reduce the importance of desktop interfaces and the freedom we have to install whatever applications we want
by ufmace | 2026-01-28 18:32:17+00:00
I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".
by NewUser76312 | 2026-01-28 18:32:20+00:00
Here's what's actually different:

- This admin is deporting less than Obama was during his first year in office despite promises to the contrary,

- There is now organized harassment and resistance stopping federal agents from removing illegals that are also criminals from our country.

Ironically, you need to take your own advice.

One side is crazier, and it's not mine.
by gf000 | 2026-01-28 18:32:52+00:00
Because on the web we have a very very complex protocol(s) built up over decades to tell a client what to draw locally. That's html/css/js and its scope is far larger than of x draw commands (it's also an application model).

But again, GUI apps don't use X draw commands for the most part, so they are effectively a bitmap/video stream to X's eyes. And what's better to transport a video stream than a format designed for efficient transport of video streams.
by abustamam | 2026-01-28 18:33:38+00:00
I don't play a lot of online games anymore, but when I did, it wasn't just because friends were playing it. It was because it was fun, it was part of the cultural zeitgeist, it's popular, the community is fun, etc. You can't really replace something like that with just "another game," no matter how fun the other game is.
by wlesieutre | 2026-01-28 18:33:49+00:00
"Just get a bigger screen" is such a lame excuse, and it doesn't even work.

Here's what chatgpt.com looks like on an iPhone 17 Pro Max with the page zoom turned up: https://imgur.com/XXweCSj

It's such an absolutely pathetic use of the viewport space. And this is exactly that kind of thing that giving pages separate text scaling awareness instead of only page zoom will be able to improve. Most of the stuff using up the limited relative viewport size did not need to be enlarged.

Insisting that blind people should accept wasting left and right thirds of their screen space (seriously, look at the size of the chat bubble where you can see a tiny slice of it peeking through) on zooming in the white space and just buy bigger devices that don't even exist to accommodate this, all because uniformly blowing up all page elements is easier for developers is… I'll be polite and say it's not something I agree with.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-28 18:33:58+00:00
You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children.

The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.