MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chuckadams | 2026-01-01 21:29:41+00:00
Just recently started using the desktop machine (under my desk, as opposed to my laptop which sits on my desktop) and put NixOS on it, and found myself pleasantly surprised. There's certainly still some parts of NixOS that require some expertise and getting your head around its package model, but overall I was surprised at how idiotproof it was to install and use. I mostly play games on it with Steam, which also Just Works.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 21:31:41+00:00
> why is it so hard to say "killing tens of thousands of civilians is barbaric"??

Because it’s not true unless we’re just saying war is barbaric. Which I agree with. But it’s not useful when trying to delineate justified versus excessive force.

I agree Israel is using excessive force in Gaza. I also think Hamas is a terrorist organisation that seems committed to continuing to do terrorism. I genuinely haven’t figured out how to balance thsr equation, though I think discussing it without calling someone engaging in good faith a monster/genocider/anti-Semite is a good start.
by kaylynb | 2026-01-01 21:32:25+00:00
Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.

Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
by lamontcg | 2026-01-01 21:32:43+00:00
The more I write code in other languages where I think hard about ownership ("does this method ultimately grab the object and throw a ref onto some long-lived data structure somewhere? Then it owns it, so I better clone it") the more robust my code in other languages generally gets. Same with mutation. Generally better to make a copy of something and then mess with it and throw it away than to try to mutate-then-unmutate or something like that, even though it might in principle be nanoseconds faster. Eliminate loads of spooky-action-a-distance bugs where things are getting mutated in one spot and used in another spot, when there should have been a copy in there somewhere.
by poly2it | 2026-01-01 21:32:45+00:00
> With this knowledge, we’ve come to appreciate that our universe is fine-tuned for life to an infinitesimally improbable degree, but science has not been able to offer us the reason why.

Great! An YC alumn has rediscovered the Intelligent Design (ID) "hypothesis".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
by howdyhowdy123 | 2026-01-01 21:33:14+00:00
Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP.

Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?

Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)

On Windows all of this just works.
by johnfn | 2026-01-01 21:33:31+00:00
I do think unhealthy is the way to put it. I think that being asocial is kind of like being overweight, in that they have similarly negative effects on health[1]. Of course, being in good health is multifactorial, and just as you can find many overweight people who are otherwise in fine health, you can find many people (like yourself) who eschew social situations but are otherwise perfectly happy.

Though I do think, if you extend the metaphor, that saying that socializing is a dull chore is a bit like saying exercising is a dull chore.

[1] https://www.ssmhealth.com/newsroom/blogs/ssm-health-matters/...
by jacquesm | 2026-01-01 21:33:35+00:00
Narva is a bad spot, from there it would be a long trek South. Doing it just North of the Polish town of Suwalki would allow a pincer movement that cuts off 3 EU countries in one go from a land bridge. That's also why it is right now one of the heaviest militarized zones in Europe.

Narva is much less interesting in that sense.
by Rodeoclash | 2026-01-01 21:33:50+00:00
I'm a great lover of going to places with no real plan and just wandering the streets finding stuff. Hong Kong is a great city for this. Have a general plan, e.g. visit the memorial to the walled city, but get distracted along the way.

Also watch Ghost in the Shell which is vaguely set in Hong Kong then feel the vibe when you're there.
by leptons | 2026-01-01 21:33:53+00:00
I included that link not as "research" but as proof that I am not the only one calling Safari "the new IE". It's been written about ad nauseum, and just because you think a google search is pointless doesn't mean my argument lacks merit - and if you were to do your own "research", I'd bet you would start with a google search. Thousands of people have written about it, so go see what they have to say, I am not the only one claiming it.

>Hard disagree on safari being even in the same ballpark as IE;

It's a crap browser, and Apple implements things the way they want to, especially around touch interactions. So I have to have a real iPhone to debug problems with Apple's implementations. Safari fucking sucks, it just does, and your trolling comment doesn't disprove it.

>what’s your alternative, Google owns the entirety of the browser space?

I don't care if they do or if they don't. All I want is an alternative to Safari on iOS. Is that really so bad??

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
by sfn42 | 2026-01-01 21:34:01+00:00
You're still ignoring the fact that there is an absolutely unfathomably insane amount of water on the planet.

The world's largest pump (according to a quick search) can pump 60,000 liters per second. The oceans contain over 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water. One cubic kilometer is a trillion liters. It would take this pump - the largest pump in the world - 192 days to move one cubic kilometer of water.

Let's be charitable and say we can make a noticeable dent in ocean CO2 if we could only process 1% of the ocean's water per year. That's about 13 million cubic kilometers. Let's be generous and say one of these pumps can do 2 cubic kilometers a year even though it's a bit less. So we'd need 7.5 million of these pumps - and of course we'd also need each of them to be connected to a facility that's capable of processing all the water as quickly as the pump can supply it.

This is the problem with carbon capture. We can't build many/large enough capture facilities to make a difference.
by Pxtl | 2026-01-01 21:34:02+00:00
I've been giving Linux a go as a daily driver for a few months.

I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo.

I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier.

Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it.

Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.
by wmf | 2026-01-01 21:34:07+00:00
Usually orbits are reserved years in advance. AFAIK this kind of move is unprecedented (although everything about Starlink is unprecedented since it's the first megaconstellation).

Two weeks ago, a Starlink satellite exploded. SpaceX believes it wasn't caused by a collision which means the explosion was probably caused by a malfunction in the satellite itself. Now 4,400 Starlink satellites are moving to a lower orbit for "safety". Is this an emergency change to account for a design flaw that they just discovered?
by Tiktaalik | 2026-01-01 21:34:13+00:00
> - The upcoming EREV (mostly electric extended range hybrid) F-150 truck? This is expected to have ~700 mile range, and of course no charging hassles. Its main advantage over the now defunct Lightning will be towing range.

Interesting question. Maybe this is the niche where existing auto makers can thrive though if China automakers have a blind spot to outdoors enthusiasts where range is more important.

The problem is that no one really needs or wants this outside of NA, Australia, maybe Russia and Africa? But there is a market.

Range anxiety and towing is a niche problem and companies will get rich selling the next Toyota Camry/VW Golf for the median consumer.

EREV is niche on niche and that's sort of where I expect the NA market to be going under the NA auto makers. We're going to have this protectionist wall where we have these bizarre (increasingly ICE dominated) market while the rest of the world moves on.
by PaulCarrack | 2026-01-01 21:34:15+00:00
Just to be clear -- It's an aspirational research project, much like (Galen's) Azure Sphere from 8 or so years ago. This is NOT Microsoft's official stance.

Galen is a super smart guy, but he's not a decision maker. I have yet to hear that this is actually the official direction Microsoft as a whole is taking, across any of their business segments.
by bragh | 2026-01-01 21:34:42+00:00
> For example, studies have shown that men who decide to isolate themselves to be "family men" die earlier at age 58.

Yes, but isn't it a benefit to society as a whole though? All the prime working years are gone by then and there is no need to pay pension to those men or for expensive medical treatments. And younger generations can be happy for there being one less cishet white male boomer in the world.

I mean, it sure sucks for the individual not being able to enjoy their retirement, but for the society it seems that it will be a benefit.
by abetusk | 2026-01-01 21:34:49+00:00
From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:

1. Start small

2. Reduce friction to publishing

3. Don't worry about design

4. Use the IndieWeb

5. Join us in sharing what you've made
by araes | 2026-01-01 21:34:54+00:00
Needs verification on the normal user side of the experience. Like noted, unclear whether the ads are completely deleted, or just deleted from what regulators would return in search results.

Later part makes it sounds like the ads were at least deleted from the Japanese / Taiwan results areas completely, and then just redistributed to other geographic areas.

"If an unverified advertiser is blocked from showing ads in Taiwan, for example, Meta will show those ads more frequently to users elsewhere, creating a whack-a-mole dynamic in which scam ads prohibited in one jurisdiction pop up in another."

However, still difficult to tell from the story what the experience of "normal" Japanese / Taiwan users is relative to what regulators view.

Notably, from a different article about fake accounts, and how much they cost, Japan's regulation seems to be working (at least somewhat). [1] Fake Accounts for Facebook Available (US, 157,401, @$0.13/account; Japan, 16, @$3.00/account, Dec 31st, 2025 data)

[1] https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=fb
by the_af | 2026-01-01 21:35:12+00:00
What amazes me is that on Steam they no longer make the distinction (in the standard library view) between Windows and Linux: every game is assumed to launch in Linux, using Proton behind the scenes it needed. There's still a "Linux games" toggle but now every game appears ungrayed by default.

And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work.

As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-01 21:35:12+00:00
Considering the fact that ramflation happened, and we assume the cost of hardware to be spread between 5 years, someone please run the numbers again.

It would be interesting to see the scale of basecamp. I just saw right now that hetzner offers 1024 GB of ram for around 500$

Um 37signals spent around 700k$ I think on servers so if someone has this much amount of money floating around, perhaps.

Yea I looked at their numbers and they mentioned a 1300$/month for just hardware for 1.3 TB and so hetzner might still make economically more sense somehow.

I think the problem for some of these is that they go too hard on the managed services and those are good sometimes as well but like, there are cheaper managed cloud than aws etc. as well (upcloud,ovh etc.) but at the end of the day, it's good to remember that if it bothers you financially, you can migrate.

Honestly do whatever you want. Start however you want because like these things definitely interest me (which is why I am here) but I think most compute providers have really gone the path of the bottom.

The problem usually feels to me when you are worried that you might break the term of service or anything similar if you are at scale or anything, not that this stops exactly being a problem with colo but that still brings more freedom

I think if one wants freedom, they can always contact some compute providers and find what can support their use case the best while still being economical. And then choose the best option from the multitude of available options.

Also vertical scaling is a beast.

I really went into learning a lot about cloud prices recently etc. so I want to ask a question but can you tell me more about the servers that 37signals brought or any other company you know of, I can probably create a list when it makes sense and when it doesn't perhaps and the best options available in markets.
by throw10920 | 2026-01-01 21:35:28+00:00
Your response that contains only ad-hominem character attacks and fails to address even the weakest of my statements conclusively proves that your points are indefensible.

Neither is my comment particularly offensive. You seem to have trouble differentiating between refuting someone's points and attacking their character.

Maybe that's why you attacked me, because you wanted to argue with my points but can't tell the difference between the two?
by dinobones | 2026-01-01 21:36:07+00:00
I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.

And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.

While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.

Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.

This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.

So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.

No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.

Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.

The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-01 21:36:10+00:00
Nothing stops anyone from doing this, except that it's ineffective. See comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454978

This guy's impractical homebrew rig gets "20 to 30 miles per day" when unfolded and the car is not in motion. That unfolding is necessary as there just isn't enough surface area on a car roof to make it worthwhile.

https://www.dartsolar.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes...
by xp84 | 2026-01-01 21:36:17+00:00
Are the Chrome features useful? Are they open? If it’s bad for users (e.g. some new ad tracking) or if it’s proprietary and thus expensive to license or reverse engineer that’s one thing, but if it’s not that, then refusing to ever adopt those standards (or to provide their own alternatives) is either foolish NIH syndrome on Apple’s part or it’s greed.
by arn3n | 2026-01-01 21:37:00+00:00
Especially with Apple, I often see people scared that if they open up their ecosystem, then users will lose one of the most consumer friendly tech companies out there. It’s not just “if apple allows alternative browsers then Chrome will win”, which is (probably) true. It’s:

* If Apple allows alternative app stores then the whole ios ecosystem will rot and be foooded with malware, brough up during the Apple vs. Epic cases

* If Apple can’t control the data on their user’s phones, then privacy rights will disappear, a common talking point during the Apple vs. Facebook case for opt-in data collection.

And like, these points are correct — Apple kind of acts like a “benevolent dictator” when it comes to their ecosystem. But shouldn’t there be alternatives between “Apple can control all software on the hardware they sell” and “the moment Apple doesn’t have control of their user’s experience then it’ll be far worse”? Like, we should have more tech companies, more options to pick from between these two extremes. The market needs to be more competitive, and if that isn’t possible shouldn’t there be regulation to protect users and devs better? This constantly feels like a “pick your poison“ kind of deal, where we can only pick between a company locking down their hardware or abuse of users via. software. If Microsoft banned alternative browser engines there’d be riots in these comments. Apple is just better to its users.

Giving companies the power to lock down hardware they sell isn’t a solution that will work when Apple inevitably turns against its users, and is a horrible precedent to set legally. Lord knows John Deere and a million other predatory hardware companies are salivating at the idea of users of their hardware not having control over what they bought, and Meta and Microsoft love the idea of users not having control of the software they run and the data it collects. We can’t just picking between the least worst of two companies.
by fennecbutt | 2026-01-01 21:37:12+00:00
Because we reach a certain point where it's possible and reasonable to do so.

The ultimate goal of humanity should be UBI and all humans living a content, peaceful life in which they can pursue the things that interest them.

But because of evolutionary behaviours that result in things like capitalism, we'll never reach that goal. I'll say it now: humans are currently biologically incapable of sustaining a true utopia.
by Centigonal | 2026-01-01 21:37:15+00:00
Yeah, I agree with all of that. Extractive behemoths like Oracle couldn't exist without innovators like Oxide (well, not exactly Oxide since I doubt they'd sell to an Oracle, but you know what I mean).

There are plenty of customers that jump into deals with e.g. Oracle for a variety of reasons, and it's definitely worthwhile to spread the news far and wide about how difficult it is to work with these companies, doubly so if you're ideologically and economically competing with them.

I guess my point is that it's worthwhile to spend time understanding why this business model works in spite of all the shittiness, since the "hoping their poor treatment of customers will blow back on them" approach hasn't worked yet. I'm also fixating on the bad here, because I look at "both kind and nasty business models can succeed" and reflexively respond with "but why do the nasty ones succeed?"
by stmw | 2026-01-01 21:37:40+00:00
This is a good book. Also, any time this kind of book becomes available (be it a 100 year old one or a new one), it is worth looking into - great improvements in isnight and simplicity are possible above the "baseline" of US math education today.

So for example, I posit that the engineers or scientists you might admire from the 1950's didn't learn calculus or linear algebra the way you did.
by sireat | 2026-01-01 21:38:29+00:00
Interesting information but these are not hard numbers.

Surely the 100-char string information of 141 bytes is not correct as it would only apply to ASCII 100-char strings.

It would be more useful to know the overhead for unicode strings presumably utf-8 encoded. And again I would presume 100-Emoji string would take 441 bytes (just a hypothesis) and 100-umlaut chars string would take 241bytes.
by jaennaet | 2026-01-01 21:38:42+00:00
Do you understand that this has been going on for much longer than the US's Venezuelan murder spree, and longer than Trump has been president (this time around)?

Also, as I said, we have a crew of a Russian-operated ship on the record admitting to cutting a cable by dragging their anchor, and all the previous cases have also been traced to other Russian-operated ships (well, I think one was Chinese though) using AIS and radar data, and this has been done by OSINT folks in addition to the local authorities here around the Baltic. Are all of these people being controlled by NATO and the US?

Pro-Russian people like you assume that other countries will always just let the US or "NATO" do whatever they want and have absolutely zero autonomy at all, and you're absolute experts at ignoring everything that doesn't fit your insanely simplistic narrative that's predicated on the idea that Russia is just a perpetual victim and a spooky spooky NATO CIA USA cabal is actually doing everything bad that the Russians get up to.
by ptx | 2026-01-01 21:38:50+00:00
The survey asks whether people care about the headphone jack, though – it asks whether it's in the top three features they care about.

I care plenty about the headphone jack but still reluctantly bought a phone without one (which I regret) because I have more than three requirements to balance. I expect that the users who did include the headphone jack in their top three features still care that e.g. the screen, battery and radio are all in working order as well, despite not being in their top three.
by barrkel | 2026-01-01 21:39:29+00:00
> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.

Is it just me or is this just not true?

I remember vibes about childhood: long days of boredom, especially in school; summer days in fields and by the river; days of learning how to code, of reading loads of books. More than anything else, a lot of time to fill not otherwise spoken for.

But specific events I can recall, there are far more of them from adulthood. Amazing experiences, things that changed the way I live, they were adult events and decisions.