MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roryirvine | 2026-01-11 17:36:23+00:00
As I understand it, the studies done with mice suggest that microgravity prevents normal embryo development. The ISS should therefore be regarded as a teratogenic environment, and I'd be shocked if women of childbearing age weren't prescribed highly-effective contraceptives (ie. IUD/IUS or implant) before, during, and after spaceflight.
by andrewaylett | 2026-01-11 17:36:43+00:00
Let me see if I can understand this properly:

There's a linear buffer of pages, most of which come from the pool. It's not clear to me under what conditions these are returned to the pool? Is it when the specific session terminates?

When a non-standard page reaches the point of being recycled, it'll instead be re-added to the list but with a standard size. That effectively leaks the extra space above the standard size. But when the buffer is released (because the session ends?) the pool is also released, which releases all the standard sized pages but leaks the custom-sized ones?

Which suggests that the issue may be even rarer than it initially looked to me: I tend to open a small number of sessions and then use them continuously, rather than starting new sessions during the lifetime of the process. If I never terminated a session, I would never fully leak the memory?
by GlacierFox | 2026-01-11 17:36:54+00:00
So this logic is essentially: Look at all these ways you're already getting ripped off. What's one more?! You should be grateful they're siphoning off all your work!

You've got a convert here. I don't think I'll publish my next book. I might just email it straight to Open AI.

And Cory Doctorow - I've attempted a few of his books. Felt like I was reading young adult fiction. He's pretty much the '2 prescient statements and a few average books' guy.
by toast0 | 2026-01-11 17:37:01+00:00
WhatsApp on iPhone was initially $1 to download, but had frequent sales. WhatsApp on other platforms was free to download woth a $1/year subscription... But subscription enforcement was uneven.

I started in 2011, and the subscription language was present, but there was no mechanism for payment. Then we put payment into Android, but frequently would extend all subscriptions. At some point the iPhone model flipped to match the rest, but if you had registered with iPhone before the switch, your account was set to lifetime.

I don't know the timeline, but towards the end there was a small list of countries where we would actually enforce loss of service for about a week when the subscription ended. After a week, we'd extend the subscription for a while anyway, because it was probably hard to pay (we tried to pick subscription enforcement countries where payment was readily accessible, but lots of people don't have a compatible mode of payment even if they have the means to pay)

We were told the company was cash flow positive, the public GAAP numbers look bad, but a large part of that is stock based compensation; a small part is accounting treatment for the lifetime accounts.

Also, it's important to note that the acquisition happened before real time voice and video calling launched and running servers for that was expected to be expensive.
by koolba | 2026-01-11 17:37:30+00:00
The two word description for iceberg lettuce is “crunchy water”. Works great when you want the crunch and nothing else. So perfect for sandwiches or a classic wedge salad where you are tasting the bacon and blue cheese.

People who think it can be used for a “real” salad are usually same ones that think that tomatoes are supposed to be tasteless too.
by jcheng | 2026-01-11 17:37:35+00:00
> For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them.

Anecdotally, I’ve had a few coworkers go from putting themselves firmly in this category to saying “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career” in the last two months. The recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.
by bitbasher | 2026-01-11 17:38:42+00:00
I never understood move semantics until I learned Rust. Everything is move by default and the compiler makes sure you never leave things in an unusable state.

This was a difficult mental hurdle to get over with Rust, but once you do, move semantics make a lot more sense.

edit: When I said everything is move by default, I mean everything that isn't "Copy", such as integers, floats, etc.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-11 17:39:22+00:00
Imagine if you were authoring and/or editing prose directly in html, as opposed to using some CMS. You're using your writing brain, not your coding brain. You don't want to think about code.

It's still a little annoying to put <p> before each paragraph, but not by that much. By contrast, once you start adding closing tags, you're much closer to computer code.

I'm not sure if that makes sense but it's the way I think about it.
by arendtio | 2026-01-11 17:40:29+00:00
Some people are not allowed to use Linux.

At work, I got a fancy MacBook, and as much as I admire the hardware, I despise the MacOS window management. IMHO, it is broken by design, and I wonder how anybody at Apple considers this a good system. There is still a small chance that I didn't understand a crucial concept, but until now, nobody was able to explain to me, how it is supposed to work.

I have reached the point where I believe that it must be something historical, like Steve wrote it himself, or else, and now nobody dares to reform it.
by WD-42 | 2026-01-11 17:41:46+00:00
I’m not shifting any goal posts. I’m just tired of these posts from people saying that Linux is unstable, has quirks, etc but when you dig into it, all of the “quirks” are actually the result of strange decisions made by the author.

It’s fine to be new to Linux, but please refrain from the sweeping generalizations until you are more familiar with how it works.
by autoexec | 2026-01-11 17:42:15+00:00
Much of the internet is copyright violations. If copyright were enforced as written the internet as you know it would stop existing. Our draconian copyright laws are designed to protect the power and profits of a small number of industries and unless they see profit in going after the countless violations that go on every single day they just look the other way while extorting easy targets with fat wallets. The last thing they want is to piss off enough powerful people that laws get changed and their racket gets disrupted.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-11 17:42:21+00:00
I’m sure they were prescribed, but it’s always possible for them to fail.

I’m curious at what point in the embryo’s development the zero-g becomes an issue, if its immediate vs long term thing. It’s very possible that if it was pregnancy, the embryo is already not viable but she still needs some procedures to ensure her own health (a DnC, etc) that are important but not enough for an emergency evac.
by drysart | 2026-01-11 17:42:32+00:00
That's absurd. The system should be able to update itself without fear that it's going to break anything. The user should not be expected to have to set aside time to babysit an update.

Windows isn't perfect in this respect by any means, but it sure seems like it handles updates a lot better than the distros that have been mentioned in this thread; in that Windows at least takes steps to examine your hardware first and to not apply updates where it's known something has fallen out of support.

Windows also, apparently unlike these mentioned distros, maintains a Last Known Good configuration so if an update does start causing failures, it can automatically roll itself back (or, at worst, can manually be rolled back). There are some distros that do similar, particularly immutable distros; but honestly this sort of thing should be table stakes to the point that if a distro doesn't do it, it should be laughed out of the room.

There is absolutely no acceptable excuse for any operating system to break itself in an update.
by tmtvl | 2026-01-11 17:43:02+00:00
When I switched back in 2012 I had used an Ubuntu live disk to rescue some files from my borked Windows 7 install. After reinstalling Windows 7 I was annoyed that it didn't have ethernet drivers so I decided to just install Ubuntu. When the Amazon lens controversy happened I started distro hopping and now I bounce between OpenSUSE and Arch. If I wasn't so insistent on cutting edge software I'd probably be using Mageia, which is stable as anything.
by worksonmine | 2026-01-11 17:43:16+00:00
> Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.

Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).

Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-11 17:43:25+00:00
> csv files. MS Excel can read some malformed csv files.

At work we have to parse CSV files which often have mixed encoding (Latin-1 with UTF-8 in random fields on random rows), occasionally have partial lines (remainder of line just missing) and other interesting errors.

We also have to parse fixed-width flat files where fields occasionally aren't fixed-width after all, with no discernible pattern. Customer can't fix the broken proprietary system that spits this out so we have to deal with it.

And of course, XML files with encoding mismatch (because that header is just a fixed string that bears no meaning on the rest of the content, right?) or even mixed encoding. That's just par for the course.

Just some examples of how fun parsing can be.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-11 17:43:25+00:00
The assumption throughout here seems to be that US troops are performing service that is of advantage to all Americans and thus their sacrifice is worth of respect. And you're recognizing this may not be the case for at least some non-Americans.

I'd go further: I am not convinced the actions of the US military -- which are primarily abroad -- are always advancing the interests for all Americans. In fact they sometimes are directly undermining the interests of some of the poorest members of society. The US's imperial interests abroad can suppress global labour prices, it can contribute to climate change (by advancing and encouraging more fossil fuel exploration), among other things. It can indirectly or even directly harm the interests of some working people in the United States. While at the same time recruiting directly from those people.

So while I feel for armed forces members individually as people, the product of their service in their forces I don't think is some universal good. In fact, for much of the 20th century outside of WWII it's been mostly malevolent and imperial. And I'd argue not just to the world outside the US, but to many of its own broader population.
by everdrive | 2026-01-11 17:44:04+00:00
I'm CPU-bound on one of the games I play, and cachy's scheduler may have made a difference for me. I was also fully on the closed-source NVIDIA drivers in Fedora, and had been totally out of the loop that that the kernel driver had been open sourced. And, cachy had me on a more recent version of the driver.

None of these things are truly unique to CachyOS, but nonetheless I do think I experienced a boost when I switched.
by ekrapivin | 2026-01-11 17:44:38+00:00
https://inSolitaire.com

I'm enjoying building a website with solitaire and puzzle games.

I am currently rewriting the engine for the fourth time and plan to add 400 games to the platform in the coming months, as well as social features such as daily challenges, awards and leaderboards.

My main goal, however, is to make this project the largest collection of free modern solitaire games available for mobile devices and desktop computers.

So far, the project has been incredibly exciting, and I've learned so much!
by EmilStenstrom | 2026-01-11 17:45:08+00:00
To see the actual errors, just paste your HTML here and see: https://emilstenstrom.github.io/justhtml/playground/ - any parsing errors show up below the input box.

Some tags do require ending tags, others do not. Personally I find it hard to remember which ones, so I just close things out of caution. That way you’re always spec-correct.
by davidw | 2026-01-11 17:45:47+00:00
I used XPS laptops with Ubuntu for years and thought they were great. The last one I got, though, at the last place I worked, had that weird, 'seamless trackpad' or whatever they call it. I couldn't stand the thing. I much prefer the basic trackpad on the $250 Chromebook I use for personal email/browsing these days.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-11 17:46:33+00:00
> I learned HTML quite late, when HTML 5 was already all the rage, and I never understood why the more strict rules of XML for HTML never took off. They seem so much saner than whatever soup of special rules and exceptions we currently have.

XHTML came out at a time when Internet Explorer, the most popular browser, was essentially frozen apart from security fixes because Microsoft knew that if the web took off as a viable application platform it would threaten Windows' dominance. XHTML 1.1 Transitional was essentially HTML 4.01 except that if it wasn't also valid XML, the spec required the browser to display a yellow "parsing error" page rather than display the content. This meant that any "working" XHTML site might not display because the page author didn't test in your browser. It also meant that any XHTML site might break at any time because a content writer used a noncompliant browser like IE 6 to write an article, or because the developers missed an edge case that causes invalid syntax.

XHTML 2.0 was a far more radical design. Because IE 6 was frozen, XHTML 2.0 was written with the expectation that no current web browser would implement it, and instead was a ground-up redesign of the web written "the right way" that would eventually entirely replace all existing web browsers. For example, forms were gone, frames were gone, and all presentational elements like <b> and <i> were gone in favor of semantic elements like <strong> and <samp> that made it possible for a page to be reasoned about automatically by a program. This required different processing from existing HTML and XHTML documents, but there was no way to differentiate between "old" and "new" documents, meaning no thought was given to adding XHTML 2.0 support to browsers that supported existing web technologies. Even by the mid-2000s, asking everyone to restart the web from scratch was obviously unrealistic compared to incrementally improving it. See here for a good overview of XHTML 2.0's failure from a web browser implementor's perspective: https://dbaron.org/log/20090707-ex-html
by codingdave | 2026-01-11 17:47:30+00:00
My ancient background in Lotus Notes dev offers a different perspective than most. Yep, it is a hated platform now, but back in its heyday, it had similar business impact to what we are seeing from LLMs now. Non-tech folk could whip out basic CRUD apps in a few minutes without knowing how to code. And they did. Those apps worked well for trivial functions, when not scaled beyond a small userbase. Yet when people got one right that solved a real problem in an effective way, the userbase stated to scale, the warts in the apps became apparent, the original creator could not keep up with the changes needed, and those of us who were professionals would get called in to re-create the whole thing to a professional standard.

I really see the same thing at our current level of AI. People are whipping out basic apps that work for small problems that are solved by small solutions. And it works. But without professionals intervening and correcting all the small problems along the way, it doesn't scale. Professional software engineers still need to exist to be sure that the solutions being created are scalable.

Will we spend as much time typing out specific lines of code? Probably not. But will the jobs still be there? Absolutely. Perhaps even with more variety because we can focus more on the actual problems being solved. We will do more take-over work of apps that people got started but cannot finish. We'll refactor apps that got coded into corners, and spend more time talking directly to customers to understand what we are really trying to accomplish. It will be different work, but it will be there.
by a-dub | 2026-01-11 17:48:45+00:00
it's really good these days. nvidia finally fixed their drivers (i suppose all it took was becoming the richest company on earth), kde is really nicely polished and all the friction from the x11 to wayland transition is over (at least from my perspective of an end user of linux desktops).

it's remarkably stable and reliable and way less annoying than modern windows or macos. i'm looking forward to a panther lake thinkpad with robust linux support and incredible battery life.
by netsharc | 2026-01-11 17:48:50+00:00
I use Facebook with the email address that I use for many things, like online shops. Some years ago FB allowed "check what data we have on you" and I learnt that these online shops upload their customer data to FB, so they can target us in the ads they put on FB. Among others, it matches using email... so I'm guessing Zuck has my home address too.

But anyway, I have Instagram and WhatsApp on my phone. They probably can also see my location (or the SSID of networks around me) and figure out where I live.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-11 17:49:06+00:00
> I hear this a lot from Americans, that the percentage of Americans that align with the current right-wing party is actually low.

The percentage isn't low, you just aren’t going to find them here. And by here I mean hackernews, or the cities that people who are on hackernews live in. There are basically two Americas and they don’t really mix.

There are also moderates who see both sides as corrupt. I’m one of those, but unlike me some of them were disillusioned enough to vote for trump and didn’t know what they were getting into. If you actually look at those voters, they are really confused by this Greenland nonsense.
by tmerc | 2026-01-11 17:49:22+00:00
Didn't miss that making software costs money. The point is making it protected costs more money and mainly hurts independent repair shops and consumers. Afaik, manufactures can set obd2 codes outside the mandatory codes, but still compatible with the protocol. If they elect to not do this in favor of creating their own protocol, I think we can agree that it costs more but does not have any benefit other than to the manufacturer and dealer network.

I do agree that diagnostics need to be open. I discount security because at the end of the day, an engine is a bunch of metal. Put a haltec on it and all that security means nothing. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have immobilizers, strong encryption in our key fobs, etc. Security should be to keep the car and the contents from being stolen in the first place. But a flat bed bypasses all security as does a chop shop. So given that low value of bcm to ecu and similar "security" once a vehicle has been stolen, I'd rather be able to swap a good engine into a good body and keep a car on the road rather than in the junk yard.

Sorry for the hot take of bs. I own both of my cars outright and the industry trying to keep me from fixing what I own has me a bit upset. The security argument in the parent post sounds a lot like the "don't give our keys to China" propaganda.
by GarnetFloride | 2026-01-11 17:50:30+00:00
That does make a huge difference, though I have found you also need to divide by the audiences. There are usually two main audiences that need addressing:

1. The new user. They typically know nothing about the product, not even why it exists. The CTO/CIO bought it and now you have to use it. They need lots of hand-holding and needs concrete instruction. Tutorials and explanations are focused on them so they can build accurate mental models of how the software work.

2. The experienced user. They have a pretty good idea of how the product works, but business requirements have changed in some way and know needs to make adjustments to their processes. Or just needs reminders of less used features. Good how-tos and reference material is vital.

If you don't take care of these things the customer will abandon your product sooner than later.
by BenjiWiebe | 2026-01-11 17:51:08+00:00
Linux distributions do typically have the huge benefit of having a decent package manager.

Whereas on Windows, you are expected to download all your software from various websites, ridden with big green download button ads.

And as for updates, once again there is no uniform way of finding or installing updates, so your chance of using outdated (and maybe vulnerable) software is higher on Windows.
by seanwilson | 2026-01-11 17:51:14+00:00
Still working on my tool for creating custom Tailwind-style accessible color palettes for web and UI design:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

There's lots of tools that try to autogenerate colors for you using algorithms and AI, but they usually ignore WCAG accessible contrast requirements, don't let you customise the tints/shades, and the colors don't work on actual designs.

This tool is meant to make customising tints/shades intuitive and quick enough in a few clicks via a hue/saturation/lightness curve editing interface that you won't want to rely on autogeneration. There's also a live mockup showing how your palette looks on a UI design that checks pairings pass contrast requirements, to guide you as you tweak your colors and to teach you the WCAG rules.

You can then export your palette to regular CSS variables, Tailwind, Figma or Adobe for use in your designs.

Really open to any feedback on features that would be useful! I think the only way I can make it simpler to use is to make it more opinionated about how your palette should be designed so interested in any thoughts about that too.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-11 17:51:31+00:00
> adding accessibility is boring

I also think it's partly because adding accessibile interfaces is hard.

If you are not visually impaired then designing then when designing a visual interface for an application you are more-or-less designing for yourself. You know how to use visual interfaces, so it is relatively easy for you to evaluate whether you've done a good job.

Most people do not know how to use a screenreader, so if you're designing for a screenreader then it's going to be much harder for you to test the interface and evaluate whether it's actually usable by it's target audience.

I'd also love to see more educational resources on this topic. Not just "use this attribute/role for this use case", but "this is how using a screenreader works. This is an example of a good workflow . this is an example of bad workflow". There's tons of material out there for visual design, but I haven't come accross nearly so much for other interfaces.
by a456463 | 2026-01-11 17:52:16+00:00
I did the same for my media centers! Netflix and iQIYI refuse to work. I am cancelling Netflix. Been a member since 2010. I don't need 4k either. The 4k tax is losing ownership over your media. HDMI is closed source compared to display port.

My media center experience is so so much better. The apps on roku logout randomly, the nvidia shield remote craps out, windows firefox/chrome are slow and the logitech keyboard doesn't work. But the same keyboard and browser setup works like a charm on the same machine on linux.

Manufactured waste, fight against general purpose computing and ownership is what is at stake.