MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by frabonacci | 2026-01-19 01:53:47+00:00
Both use Apple's Virtualization Framework, so core VM performance is similar. Main differences are around agent-first design (HTTP API, MCP server), unattended setup via VNC + OCR, and registry support for VM images.

We've also built a broader ecosystem on top - the Cua computer and agent framework for building computer-use agents: https://cua.ai/docs

We went through the comparison with Tart, Lima etc here: https://github.com/trycua/cua/issues/10
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-19 01:54:07+00:00
To extend what 'viccis' said above, the meaning of "social media" has changed and is now basically meaningless because it's been used by enough old media organisations who lack the ability to discern the difference between social media and a forum or a bulletin-board or chat site/app or even just a plain website that allows comments.

Social Media is become the internet and/or vice-versa.

Also, I think you're objectively wrong in this statement:

"the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd"

Which I don't think was the actual function of (original) social media either.
by garciasn | 2026-01-19 01:55:34+00:00
This is such an off-brand comment for HN. It’s inflammatory and degrading; I wonder if the intent is just to troll in order to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I haven’t used Reddit in years; but, I have always felt as if HN was full of strong and varied commentary and continues to be well above the AVERAGE Reddit quality. Not once have I wondered if the site has devolved into Dead Internet LLM-driven fantasy.

This is entirely disheartening to see here.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-01-19 01:56:09+00:00
Wow thanks for the enlightenment. I dug into this a bit and found out:

Hyphen (-) — the one on your keyboard. For compound words like “well-known.”

En dash (–) — medium length, for ranges like 2020–2024. Mac: Option + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0150.

Em dash (—) — the long one, for breaks in thought. Mac: Option + Shift + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0151.

And now I also understand why having plenty of actual em-dashes (not double hyphens) is an “AI tell”.
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-19 01:57:03+00:00
These subs are dying out. Reddit has losts its gatekeepy culture a long time ago and now subs are getting burnt out by waves of low effort posters treating the site like its instagram. Going through new posts on any practical subreddit the response to 99% of them should be "please provide more information on what your issue is and what you have tried to resolve it".

I cant do reddit anymore, it does my head in. Lemmy has been far more pleasant as there is still good posting etiquette.
by celsius1414 | 2026-01-19 01:57:25+00:00
On a Mac keyboard, Option-Shift-hyphen gives an em-dash. It’s muscle memory now after decades. For the true connoisseurs, Option-hyphen does an en-dash, mostly used for number ranges (e.g. 2000–2022). On iOS, double-hyphens can auto-correct to em-dashes.

I’ve definitely been reducing my day-to-day use of em-dashes the last year due to the negative AI association, but also because I decided I was overusing them even before that emerged.

This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.
by dbcurtis | 2026-01-19 01:57:34+00:00
> If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture,

Woah, back up a bit. In the article, it looks like the blue screen is a 0x0 (iopr) exception, likely a wild jump into the weeds. But back in the day, the majority of blue screens were 0xE exceptions -- page fault in the kernel. Why? Buggy driver that didn't wire down a page and it got swapped out from under the driver. Not under Microsofts direct control... BUT... they had a great example in OS/2. In WinNT, there are 2 security rings, kernel and user space. But x86 supports 4 rings. OS/2 used ring 1 for drivers, so that the kernel could both blame the correct driver and also stay alive. So simple. (Of course, it means it is hard to port to hardware with only 2 security rings.) WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare -- and the lowest bidding Asian contractor that is writing your driver for your el-cheapo peripheral rarely signs up for that nightmare.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-19 01:58:16+00:00
>Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist

Not true. I use a high-DPI (~250) MacBook with a non-high-DPI (~100) external monitor and the transition between the two is seamless. Windows are identically sized when dragging from one screen to another. The same holds true when I use the laptop with a mid-DPI (~150) monitor.

I could not say the same was true a few years ago when I tried a high-DPI Windows 10 laptop with a non-high-DPI external monitor; Windows assumed the monitor had the same DPI as the laptop display. Perhaps this has since been fixed.
by protocolture | 2026-01-19 01:59:19+00:00
>If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture

Article did hang a lantern on that. Big issue is that, it doesnt matter how good the Kernel is if you cant use it. I think dropping Windows is more likely than fixing windows. Windows 11 is more than just the usual Headache Edition of Windows like ME, Vista, 8 or what have you. Its definitely a new strategy.

>with the notable exception of Vista, and I still maintain that Vista was OK; its problems were due to Intel strong-arming MS into certifying a broken version of Vista for its sub-par integrated GPUs of the time

Agreed honestly. The reason it bricked my wifes computer was because HP dragged its feet adopting the new driver model. The reason it stuffed my laptop was that Asus refused to release a supported laptop lid driver for my hardware. Games for Windows live was comorbid with Vista which pissed off gamers.

>Windows 11 control panel sort-of gone? There's still the god-mode menu introduced in Vista. Right-click menu gone, or too much Copilot? Go to Group Policy editor, switch off what you don't need; revert what you can. People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'. Also not true, that feature is a fundamental part of Windows and probably won't ever be removed. There are workarounds. Any Windows user or sysadmin worth their salt will have a GPE fleet-wide policy, and registry settings.

I mean, we have the AI stuff blocked at a policy level, they just started ignoring that policy and its everywhere. They have done the same with a few other feature deployments. Group Policy has really turned into "Do you want to enable the grace period for the new thing we are pushing". Windows App, hilariously, just got boned by a windows 11 update except the older Remote Desktop App (Support ending in march) still works, and the Mac version of the App still works fine too.

>Why would anyone want to replace their core product with something that a) they cannot control, and b) does not satisfy their business and customer needs?

Control is a deep topic. But the biggest issue is Business needs. Linux is currently only 50% of the way into being anywhere decent in a Microsoft shop. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint however, is growing like a cancer and is starting to look like a testbed for bringing a lot of Microsoft command and control into a linux environment. This guys making a prediction now, but really theres nothing in Windows that cannot be ported officially by Microsoft to Linux given enough time. Honestly I think the bigger question is "When Microsoft inevitably does this will the FLOSS community get anything out of it".
by TurnItOffAndOn0 | 2026-01-19 01:59:39+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. Kirkify is indeed a project born from observing a specific trend on Google Trends. My goal was to build a highly optimized, low-latency pipeline to serve this niche at a sustainable price point. While specific memes have a shelf life, this is just the first iteration. I’m currently leveraging the latest AI image and video generation technologies to build a broader suite of tools for creative and 'just-for-fun' scenarios.
by darthcircuit | 2026-01-19 01:59:53+00:00
Check out GameImage!

https://github.com/gameimage/gameimage

This started out with bundling wine in appimages, but is expanded a lot. The author created a new appimage alternative that adds some stuff to make games work more reliably. I’ve used this several times to create portable versions of old windows games for my Steam Deck. It’s awesome!
by bschwindHN | 2026-01-19 02:00:05+00:00
You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.

The default experience of using windows is downright user-hostile and it reveals the thinking of the corporation behind it. Yeah, you _can_ do all that to make it somewhat usable, but when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-19 02:01:42+00:00
One key difference is that the equivalent to kernel syscalls on *nix generally involves userland-provided services, and this applies to a lot more than just ordinary file access. The equivalent to arbitrary "containerization/namespacing" and "sandboxing" are just natively available and inherent to how the system works. You can't do this out of the box on *nix where every syscall directly involves kernel facilities, so the kernel must have special provisions to containerize, sandbox, delegate specific things to userland services etc.
by TheRoque | 2026-01-19 02:01:52+00:00
At the moment I'm just using "sops". I have my env var files encrypted uth AGE encryption. Then I run whatever I want to run with "sops exec-env ...", it's basically forwarding the secrets to your program.

I like it because it's pretty easy to use, however it's not fool-proof: if the editor which you use for editing the env vars is crashing or killed suddently, it will leave a "temp" file with the decrypted vars on your computer. Also, if this same editor has AI features in it, it may read the decrypted vars anyways.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-19 02:02:00+00:00
I’ve found wading through SEO spam is one of the best use cases of AI.

Perplexity, Google, Brave, and DDG have really good AI search results.

Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.

I remember asking, “Can I park overnight on the street in ${county} without getting a ticket?” And instead of having to fish through government websites, AI just spit out the right answer and the links it used.

It’s only a matter of time until everyone figures out how to SEO spam AI, but until then, I’m a big fan.
by codezero | 2026-01-19 02:02:48+00:00
you link to a page with convicted police numbering in the tens in a nation of 340 million people, with a police force on the order of a million. I wouldn't believe you in a second if you said that the police commit crimes at a rate of 0.0001 per capita. That's absurd. You're basically verifying the claim that the police are not held accountable for breaking the law. Great work. If that was your intent, please do more than post a link, and elucidate your opinion in the future please, if it wasn't your intent, well, next time just please don't post, it's not a useful contribution to the discussion in this forum.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-19 02:03:03+00:00
> WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare

I think one could say the same for any platform; in general, developing drivers is just difficult, full stop. That driver quality for peripherals can be bad is not the fault of the platform. I'm sure I could find dodgy drivers in the Linux tree that were merged in only because 'shrug it makes PineappleCorp's device work, who cares if it is littered with UB'.
by drcxd | 2026-01-19 02:03:14+00:00
But the dashboard is not important at all, because everyone can have the same dashboard the same way you have it. It's like you are generating a static website using Hugo and apply a theme provided on it. The end product you get is something built by a streamline. No taste, no soul, no effort. (Of course, the effort is behind the design and produce of the streamline, but not the product produced by the streamline.)

Now, if you want to use the dashboard do something else really brilliant, it is good enough for means. Just make sure the dashboard is not the end.
by kcplate | 2026-01-19 02:04:56+00:00
> “If you don’t want door-to-door, cooperate” is basically saying federal agencies get to punish jurisdictions for lawful policy choices by switching to more coercive tactics.

If you make any level noncooperation law against federal law enforcement, you are effectively creating the requirement that for the feds to enforce the law the federal government has to change their tactics. That’s not punishment, it’s just the effect of the decision you made.

> That’s not normal enforcement; it’s politicized leverage.

It’s not normal enforcement, but neither is noncooperation. Sanctuary cities are not the norm. It’s a form of political leverage too.

> And once you normalize that logic, it won’t stay confined to immigration.

Right…and you could also say the same thing about sanctuary policies too. So what if a city or area decided that they were going to be a sanctuary for people who violate the civil rights act? Would the federal government be justified in using different tactics in its enforcement of that law?

There are threads here you don’t want to accidentally pull because they will unravel whole sections of cloth that you want to keep intact.
by hunterpayne | 2026-01-19 02:06:16+00:00
An aggregation is less work than a join. You are segmenting the data in basically the same way in ideal conditions for a join as you are in an aggregation. Think of an aggregation as an inner join against a table of buckets (plus updating a single value instead of keeping a number of copies around). In practice this holds with aggregation being a linear amount faster than a join over the same data. That delta is the extra work the join needs to do to keep around a list of rows rather than a single value being updated (and in cache) repeatedly. Depending on the data this delta might be quite small. But without a very obtuse aggregation function (maybe ketosis perhaps), the aggregation will be faster. Its updating a single value vs appending to a list with the extra memory overhead this introduces.
by wackget | 2026-01-19 02:06:22+00:00
My experience of Linux (and Mac OS) has been the opposite; they are extremely painful to make usable.

Yes, I have to disable a lot of stuff to get Windows the way I like it. But that's still exponentially easier than having to add, install, or perhaps even buy a lot of stuff to maybe get Linux/Mac to behave kind of how I want it to.
by bobjordan | 2026-01-19 02:06:31+00:00
yeah, I generally view the install script (for both this and almost everything else now since it's trivial with claude code) and then ensure I have a sane install for my system needs. But, I'm on the latest beads 0.47.1 and what I did to tame it is, I just walked through creating SKILLS with claude and codex, and frankly I've found a lot of value add to the features added so far. I especially love the --claim which keeps the agents from checking out beads that are already checked out. And after I added SKILLS, the agents do an awesome job networking the dependencies together, which helps keep multi-agent workflows on track. Overall, I'm not feeling any reason to switch from beads right now, but I will also be upgrading more thoughtfully, so I don't break my current workflow.
by adithyassekhar | 2026-01-19 02:06:39+00:00
This could be a bait. I was going to comment how wrong you are. How much better and advanced the windows model is compared to linux and how making products that co-operate with other companies (read: people with products they want to get paid for, when did that started being a bad thing?) instead of being "gatekeepy" over ideologies will always have an upper edge.

But seeing how companies have worked in the past, you might be right, some middle manager there might just axe the most valuable part of their product.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-01-19 02:06:49+00:00
My point was that the article is logically flawed. The user mode of the OS sucks, so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel? What?

I don't care about configuration. I've had to do plenty of configuration on Linux as well; it's just different. I'm not sure I can list all the Arch Linux wiki articles I've read trying to get one driver or another feature working.

I am not here to convince anyone to stop using one platform or another. They're different tools that solve different problems, and I run all of them. I have a Linux laptop for work, a Windows laptop/desktop for personal use, a Proxmox hypervisor on my homelab running a variety of LXC containers, Linux and Windows Server guests.
by _blk | 2026-01-19 02:07:26+00:00
Nice variant to the otherwise sharper or edgier mono fonts (pardon my ignorance for terminology). Personally it feels too "girly" for my taste. Nothing wrong with that - just a personal preference. I'm sure others will like it.
Reminds me of wwii-era typewriter fonts and it also has a touch of "comic sans" to it.
Thanks for sharing.
by DaSHacka | 2026-01-19 02:07:49+00:00
> You seem to want a world in which gangs of untrained, unvetted thugs wearing facemasks and no identification can exit unmarked vehicles with guns drawn and demand that you do certain things or answer their questions on pain of being shot in the face. All while opaquely protected by the state.

And if they weren't wearing masks, you, and people like you, would be the first ones running to publicize their names and ruin or outright end their lives.

> I hope you get that world. I hope no innocent person has to live it with you.

Lol, I already experience it with TSA every time I want to fly, and somehow we all decided that was okay. This is no worse than that.

> You're exactly the reason free societies can successfully go down the path to dystopian authoritarianism.

Right, we all know free societies are defined by being completely lawless with no law enforcement whatsoever. Ask all those free societies in the Middle East what they think about living in the midst of a power vacuum! I'm sure they love it.

> I hate you.

uhh, cry about it, I guess? I don't particularly like people like you either, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to even consider it hate. I guess it's closest to some combination of 'pity' and 'annoyance'.

Also, you should take a moment to familiarize yourself with HN's rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 02:07:49+00:00
I actually agree with you on a lot of these things, I just think that they do relate to the technological shape.

To give you an example, Blacksky is in setting up their alternative server that is effectively forking the product, which gives them ability to make different moderation decisions (they've restored the account of a user that is banned from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...).

However, unlike Mastodon and such, anyone on the Blacksky server will continue living in the same "world" as the Bluesky users, it's effectively just a different "filter" on the global data.

Before AT, it was not possible to do that.

You couldn't "fork" moderation of an existing product. If you wanted different rules, you had to create an entire social network from scratch. All past data used to stay within the original product.

AT enables anyone motivated to spin up a whole new product that works with existing data, and to make different decisions on the product level about all of the things you mentioned people care about. How algorithms run, how moderation runs, what the standards are, what the platform affordances are.

What AT creates here is competition because normally you can't compete until you convince everyone to move. Whereas with AT, everybody is always "already there" so you can create or pick the best-run prism over the global data.

Does this make more sense? It's all in service of the things you're talking about. We just need to make it possible to try different things without always starting from scratch.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-01-19 02:08:21+00:00
> May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe".

I've been posting this idea for a while. We need a way to manufacture free computers at home, just like we can write free software at home. That's the only way we'll have a chance at winning the war on general purpose computing. Semiconductor fabs cost billions of dollars, they are single points of failure, easily controlled by governments and industry interests. We'll never be free as long as we depend on them for our machines.

If this continues, one day we'll not even be able to buy general purpose computers anymore. Computers are too subversive, too powerful for "mere citizens" to have access to. Give people free computers and they can make a mockery of things like copyright, they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy. Give people free computers and they have access to encryption which is capable of defeating police, judges, spies, militaries. They don't want us having unrestricted access to this powerful stuff. This is similar to the right to bear arms in the USA.

Normal people? They'll surrender all their power and freedom no questions asked. They'll give it all up with literally zero resistance. Corporations tell them they need to own their computers. They need it to stop malware, to stop cheating in video games, whatever. And they believe it. They believe it so much when you try to make a stand for freedom they come and they argue with you about it. They trade freedom for security and convenience every single time. It's so sad.
by _moof | 2026-01-19 02:09:35+00:00
I don't disagree with the overall point. I do want to say one thing though.

> As a professional programmer, I no longer consider Windows a viable option for serious work.

Please get over yourself. There's plenty of actually serious programming work being done on Windows.

> If you’re a programmer who’s used to Windows and you think I’m being overly harsh, I encourage you to spend a couple weeks in any other operating system.

For the record, I've spent decades in many other operating systems. It's interesting because the OS used to matter. Now 90% of the apps we use are either on the web or are web apps repackaged as desktop apps. Of course I can still tell when I switch between OSes, but it makes much, much, much less of a difference than it used to.
by singingbard | 2026-01-19 02:09:48+00:00
I think the underlying approach seems sensible.

The problem with Gas Town is how it was presented. The heavy metaphor and branding felt distracting.

It’s a bit like reading the Dune book, where you have to learn a whole vocabulary of new terms before you can get to the interesting mechanics, which is a tough ask in an already crowded AI space.