MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lordleft | 2026-01-15 16:09:05+00:00
I love Linux and use it daily, but this paragraph gave me pause:

"I’ve spent dozens of hours combing through Reddit threads, analyzing old Stack Overflow solutions, and, in times of true desperation, asking AI chatbots like Mistral’s Le Chat and Anthropic’s Claude for help deciphering error messages. Luckily, the Linux community is also very supportive. If you’re willing to ask for help, or at least do a little troubleshooting, you’ll be able to work out any problems that come your way."

There are many people -- like my Mom or Dad, for example -- who will never find this appealing and are likely to dig themselves into deeper holes trying to fix system issues on the command line. That's why Steve Jobs was on the money when he talked about a computer that was as intuitive as an appliance -- it has to "just work" for most normies. While I'm as frustrated with Windows as the next person, I'd probably just hand the average person a Mac mini instead of popping a linux distro on their machine if they needed a new computer (though if all they are doing is just browsing the web and reading emails, a ubuntu install is probably fine).
by cube00 | 2026-01-15 16:09:13+00:00
On Jan 1 2026

> Given how badly my 2025 predictions aged I'm probably going to sit that one out! [1]

Seven days later you appear on the same podcast you appeared on in 2025 to share your LLM predictions for 2026.

What changed?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46450269
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-15 16:09:14+00:00
I edited the post with a speculation, but it's just a guess, really. In the training data, different units are going to share near-identical grammatical roles and positions in sentences. Unless some care is taken to force the embedding vectors for units like "pounds" and "kilograms" to point in different directions, their tokens may end up being sampled more or less interchangeably.

Gas-law calculations were where I first encountered this bit of scariness. It was quite a while ago, and I imagine the behavior has been RLHF'ed or otherwise tweaked to be less of a problem by now. Still, worth watching out for.
by taeric | 2026-01-15 16:09:17+00:00
Linux doesn't really require you to think about it, necessarily. More that odds are high if you have tinkered with something recently, you are more likely to do so again. Think of it as a reverse lindy number. (And this can be frustrating for folks with automated marketing that feel that they are too dumb. They are, but the dumb approach works rather well.)

To that end, the last time I tinkered with what linux distro I'm using is over a decade ago.
by amluto | 2026-01-15 16:09:33+00:00
This is amazing.

Once upon a time, OpenSSL was the place to go for crypto
primitives that were hardware specific and well optimized, and you would pay the price of using a nasty API. Now it’s an even nastier API and it’s not even fast anymore?

SHA256 is almost the prototype of a pure function. There should not be concepts like “EVP”. Output sizes should be static. Failure should be entirely impossible unless I opt in to using an async interface for an async accelerator. The only complexity should be the hidden part that selects the best synchronous implementation.
by cheald | 2026-01-15 16:09:41+00:00
Arc Raiders runs great. ProtonDB is the right thing to check to find out if any given game is gonna run on Linux. Fortunately, the success of the Steam Deck has more and more devs playing ball.

You could just buy another SSD and install Linux on that. Then, you have your Windows drive left untouched and pristine so you can swap back if you want, or you can pull data over as needed.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-15 16:10:04+00:00
Irony:

The author of the personal blog post claimed he works for Google, who has arguably the world's most complete web archive and uses it for commercial purposes

This archive used to be publicly accessible, at least in part, at webcache.googleusercontent.com^1

The blog post compares the size of archive.today with archive.org (about 1:40, according to the author)

But it does not include a comparison to cache.googleusercontent.com

1. Bing, another Google competitor, also offered part of their own archive at cc.bingj.com during that time
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-01-15 16:10:08+00:00
Designing CPUs also wasn't their core business and they did it anyway. Apple probably won't care that much about price hikes but if they ever feel TSMC can't guarantee steady supply then all bets are off.

I wonder what will happen in future when we get closer to the physical "wall". Will it allow other fabs to catch up or the opposite will happen, and even small improvements will be values by customers?
by Permit | 2026-01-15 16:10:09+00:00
It's possible that different people flag the discussions you're referring to. That said, it looks like there have been ~7 threads with over 100 points on Iran in the last week alone: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

If anything, it appears that Minnesota/Minneapolis are under-discussed relative to Iran, no?
by tim-tday | 2026-01-15 16:10:13+00:00
The projects seem to go well and then union bosses threaten to shut the whole thing down.

Then the essential skilled personnel can’t come train people because the visa process was created by and is operated by the equivalent of four year olds with learning disabilities. Sometimes companies say fuck it we’re doing it anyway and then ice raids their facility and shuts it down.

I’d post the news articles about th above, but your googling thumbs work as well as mine.
by ranger207 | 2026-01-15 16:10:14+00:00
One common complaint with the idea of the year if the Linux desktop is that Linux simply doesn't "just work" in the way MacOS and even Windows do. I think that's becoming less and less a barrier though for both the fact that Linux is getting closer to "just working" (especially as Windows and MacOS get further away), but also because more and more of the people still using Windows are power users and aren't as intimidated by the command line or manually resolving library dependencies or whatever. Like, there's a lot of PC gamers that'll happily spend hours on messing with their system to eke out another 5 FPS, or doing manual dependency resolution to get 200 SkyDome mods to play nicely together. "Doesn't just work" isn't as big a deal to power users that are more likely to be annoyed by Windows and MacOS's trajectory anyway
by pjc50 | 2026-01-15 16:10:28+00:00
I'm too old for this: not only am I not going to get called up, I also remember the Cold War, where everyone really did think there was a significant risk of a nuclear exchange at any time.

Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.

We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
by eulers_secret | 2026-01-15 16:10:42+00:00
I know this is a dead thread, but...

How do so many people justify buying the new redesign? I mean it came out after the CEO went in front of the world and gave two nazi-like salutes, then did DOGE!

Do they buy his 'autistic' defense? Do they just not care about what the CEO does and support him with their money anyways? Do they actively support his ideology?

I suspect it's likely a mix of these depending on the person, and probably more that I can't think of.

I mean they're good cars, no doubt, and it's a damn shame many decent engineers and workers put in so much effort to have it all tainted by such nasty politics.

But I cannot ignore those salutes, nor the myriad other slights starting with calling those Thai cave-diving heroes pedophiles. Tesla is dead to me, a victim of this insane time and its CEO.
by rvnx | 2026-01-15 16:10:47+00:00
Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.

From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today.

It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you.

If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject.

EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics.

Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is.

There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars).

Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc.

This is why you need to use different sources.
by elevation | 2026-01-15 16:10:55+00:00
A plausible fake is otherwise known as a honeypot; they way others interact with your creation tells you their role in the system.

I can't comment on the authenticity of JPMHC. But it's interesting to think about who might benefit from creating a similar fake and observing how the world reacts to it. Will job candidates fraudulently list it on their resumes? If people publish articles claiming to have attended, what are their incentives? If you promote the conference ahead of time, will real researchers pitch talk ideas to you?
by no-dr-onboard | 2026-01-15 16:11:05+00:00
That's a pretty broad generalization, but OK I'll bite.

- I think Yarvin has a lot of good points. No one should be ashamed to admit the truth of a matter. I can't stand his voice, I think he has annoying mannerisms, but nonetheless the man has a point and I'm not ashamed (especially by unknown and strange online personas) to say so.

- Palantir is objectively a profitable job. I've learned a lot here and the people I work with are brilliant.

- I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.

Let's be honest, simply conjecturing that someone ascribes to a political view isn't discourse. It's a potshot. You're assuming that anyone who reads your comment and leans in your direction is going to agree and vote with you. This is literally the lowest and cheapest form of engagement. It's also the most self serving. It does nothing to advance the conversation or prove your point.

Most importantly, this is the exact type of behavior that is furthering political polarization and discouraging actual discourse.

Really shows the state of things right now tbh.
by tock | 2026-01-15 16:11:10+00:00
1. The life I want to live doesn't involve optimising for a salary. I want to fish for fun. Not fish for a living.

2. High earning SV engineers can easily build a substantial corpus in under 10 years.

3. Most people don't know what they want to do. That means experimenting till you find it.

4. Its the safest way of figuring out and following your dreams I can think of. Of course you may die before 30 but thats statistically less probable. I am optimising for the case where I do live to the median age. Optimising for the worse case scenario seems too pessimistic.
by FiveOhThree | 2026-01-15 16:11:20+00:00
The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.

Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.
by DetectDefect | 2026-01-15 16:11:36+00:00
Palantir does not work in a vacuum - it requires other technology, platforms and systems to operate and succeed - many of which are designed and maintained by the users of Hacker News.

Take a look at Palantir's trust center: https://palantir.safebase.us

Schellman did their audit and compliance - do they have blood on their hands?

How about AWS, GCP, Azure cloud resources used by Palantir - are they stained, too?
by GeekyBear | 2026-01-15 16:11:39+00:00
This piece provides a fair bit of insight:

> Apple-TSMC: The Partnership That Built Modern Semiconductors

In 2013, TSMC made a $10 billion bet on a single customer. Morris Chang committed to building 20nm capacity with uncertain economics on the promise that Apple would fill those fabs. “I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” Chang later said. He was right. Apple’s A8 chip launched in 2014, and TSMC never looked back.

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
by lokar | 2026-01-15 16:11:50+00:00
Current ICE/Homeland Security actions are unambiguously illegal.

The problem is that without an independent congress the US system is able to descend into authoritarianism. The court has (reasonably) decided that on many broad issues regarding presidential actions and abuse of authority only congress (via impeachment and removal) is able to constrain the president.

The current congressional majority has, for now, decided to allow the president to do almost anything he wants, regardless of the law and constitution.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-15 16:11:51+00:00
There's no reasonable debate about whether the US has the capability to capture Greenland. Obviously they do. It's in their backyard in an area the US military has been patrolling for decades, with (admittedly decrepit) US bases already present.

The question is whether the US is willing to pay the costs to do so. Sending European troops is attempting to raise the costs of invasion so that any rational actor would decide against it. Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if all the parties involved were rational actors.
by ayeeye1careers | 2026-01-15 16:12:05+00:00
We’re building a local-AI camera OS:
SigmaStar cameras → RTSP → HDMI Node → on-device AI → zero cloud.

Think Android for CCTV, not another mobile app.

We need engineers who know:
• Linux video pipelines (V4L2, GStreamer, FFmpeg)
• RTSP / ONVIF
• Edge AI (YOLO, NCNN, TFLite, OpenVINO)

This is founder-level work — small team, big system.

Email: michaeljbrown844@gmail.com
by mindcrash | 2026-01-15 16:12:12+00:00
I've seen a lot of people switch from Windows to Bazzite and they are super happy with it.

The only thing you'll have to decide is if you want a desktop which looks more similar to MacOS (GNOME) or Windows (KDE). For now they don't even care about even more advantages or disadvantages, like the fact that KDE is customizable to the point things can get a little crazy.

Graphical desktop and Steam support (with a little pinch of Lutris added on top), and that's good enough.
by dgacmu | 2026-01-15 16:12:14+00:00
I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.
by jleyank | 2026-01-15 16:12:14+00:00
From Tuchman's The Guns of August:
A question that [Brigadier General Henry] Wilson asked of [General Ferdinand] Foch during his second visit in January 1910, evoked an answer which expressed in one sentence the problem of the alliance with England, as the French saw it. “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?” Wilson asked. Like a rapier flash came Foch’s reply, “A single British soldier—and we will see to it that he is killed.”

People's attitudes often change when their sons and daughters are on the line.
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-15 16:12:24+00:00
As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.

To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
by dale_glass | 2026-01-15 16:12:24+00:00
I went for the uber-nerd approach to gaming.

Whatever's possible, local on Linux. If it's not, one of my servers has a GPU that I pass through to a Windows VM, and run the games there and displayed by streaming. Also works for VR.

Not a setup for everyone and a tad technically complex to set up, but it works well enough for my needs.

It does run into some trouble with games that don't like virtual machines, but since I'm a very casual gamer I just play things that don't complain about that.

> Can someone be the Steam for Excel, please? :)

You can actually add anything you want to Steam, so you can use Steam Link to run Excel remotely.
by amrocha | 2026-01-15 16:12:24+00:00
I maybe get where you’re coming from, but what’s the solution to the issue you’re proposing? Screening everyone’s resume before allowing them to comment? What about people who work at companies that deal with Palantir at completely different departments (Microsoft and Xbox)? It’s obviously untenable

It is true that some users here spew vile ideology while hiding behind HN intellectual rhetoric. Then posts that understandably react strongly to that get flagged, and users get banned. I wish it was different, but I’ve made peace with that being a significant percent of the user base here.

A particular interaction I had comes to mind. A user here boldly and openly proclaimed he discriminated in interviews against people that look different from him, or that are neurodivergent. Actual illegal behaviour that will get you sued in many countries. I reacted strongly and my post got flagged and I received a comment from the moderation team.

I don’t envy the moderation team though, it’s a tough job.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2026-01-15 16:12:52+00:00
Hitler's regime didn't start out making death camps for Jews. The initial plan was to deport them, with camps for holding and processing. That was unrealistic given the volume of people to process, which led to the detention and work camps converting to death camps.

This is relevant to mention because the number of people in ICE detention right now is spiking: https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/detention.htm...

Just saying, similar outcomes could occur here. It's happened before. Their goals being unrealistic doesn't mean they'll stop, and may be part of their justification for doing even worse things than they're already doing.
by entontoent | 2026-01-15 16:13:18+00:00
Was anyone else confused by this title?

I thought it was saying "a letter to those who fired tech writers because they were caught using AI," not "a letter to those who fired tech writers to replace them with AI."

The whole article felt imprecise with language. To be honest, it made me feel LESS confident in human writers, not more.

I was having flashbacks to all of the confusing docs I've encountered over the years, tightly controlled by teams of bad writers promoted from random positions within the company, or coming from outside but having a poor understanding of our tech or how to write well.

I'm writing this as someone who majored in English Lit and CS, taught writing to PhD candidates for several years, and maintains most of my own company's documentation.
by Sean-Der | 2026-01-15 16:13:19+00:00
Yes! I maintain https://github.com/glimesh/broadcast-box for this.

You can try it out at https://b.siobud.com to see if you like it first. It if fits your needs then go for the self host :) I run my instance on Hetzner

I want to add more features to it, but I have been focused on OBS mostly lately. If you have any ideas/needs that would make it work for you and your friends I would love to hear! Join the discord and would love to chat.

What I want to do next is make a 're-broadcast feature'. So friends can stream to it + hang out. When they are ready they hit a button and then goes to Twitch/YouTube etc...
by retsibsi | 2026-01-15 16:13:20+00:00
> Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing

This is fair enough, but they don't make it too hard -- there's an About page, where the first line mentions England and Wales and the rest of the page makes it clear that the issue is about rate increases. Googling something like "england pub rate increases" will get you the rest of the way if you're interested.

(I think us non-Americans sometimes go a bit far with the whole "finally you're tasting some of your own medicine, Yanks!" thing, and I'm sorry some people are being aggressive. But I don't think this site is as opaque as you're suggesting, nor that it makes any more assumptions about its audience than lots of US-based sites do. They're targeting locals, and I think it's fine for a home page to start talking to its intended audience immediately rather than wasting space on an introduction for outsiders.)
by tjnaylor | 2026-01-15 16:13:20+00:00
Honduras leading up to the 2021 elections was able to oust an authoritarian president Juan Orlando Hernandez (the same recently pardoned by Trump) through peaceful protests - mostly targeted at blocking major roadways between cities with burning tires. This was a sustained campaign over months, I don't see US citizens as prepared for something like that honestly, but logistically that's a recent example that came to mind.
by br121 | 2026-01-15 16:13:21+00:00
In the article is mentioned gambling, and how the rules are more stringent to children, but rules exists for both, and were put in place together. It seems to me (but I don't have social media, don't watch TV, and am not from UK, so I may just have missed that, so please correct me if that's the case) that the current discourse on social media is all about ban for under 16, but with no consideration on damage control for adults, so it's the "do somethings, but not to voters" situation. To your second point, we don't have research indicating social media is good for adults as well, so shouldn't the same precautionary principle apply for both (maybe with different level of precaution)?
by raffael_de | 2026-01-15 16:13:24+00:00
For a German none of those photos are particularly remarkable or impressive.

Especially wind mills - they are all over the place. Outside of cities and forests it would be difficult to not see at least one ... and they like to flock.

For example:

- https://www.google.com/maps/place/Energiepark+Witznitz+MOVE+...

- https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/energieversorger/stadtwer...

- https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/energieversorger/stadtwer...
by roughly | 2026-01-15 16:13:26+00:00
This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though, is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia’s 2025 revenues. Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively, which I’m sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting slow-growth story compared to new upstarts.

I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.