MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by florkbork | 2026-01-28 15:23:02+00:00
One of the problems is the fundamentals of their tech works "just enough".

IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8

- semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database.

- feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm

- push to human operators

You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken!

But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction?

When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem.

To take a non US example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

Debt calculations were flat out wrong

The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover)

It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions.

It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it.

No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this

Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions.

If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-28 15:23:51+00:00
I'm basically developing on Linux despite running windows. I just set the terminal emulator to open wsl by default, and have VSCode connect to the WSL instance. This also gives you the "native docker" the author mentions, just ignore Docker for Windows exists and install docker in your wsl.

This does have downsides, and the author lists many. It also has some marginal upsides. For example running multiple distros for testing is trivial, and while the Windows file Explorer might be a shitshow that reached its peak over two decades ago it somehow seems to still be leagues ahead of the options in linux gui land. And of course the situation in gaming and content creation used to be way worse just a couple years ago, so for many switching only became viable relatively recently
by throwaw111 | 2026-01-28 15:24:07+00:00
You can cache icons on the server, you do not need to send them over a network, that is it. With video, I'm saying it is a case where wayland is not better, it is just the same.

So you say compression of said icons, etc, is better than caching them on the server? No.. You've mentioned web, but no one does that on the web.
by gyomu | 2026-01-28 15:24:13+00:00
> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble

This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments.

Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business.

They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless with tech (99% of the population, which can’t even figure out the settings app on their phone), and solid distribution/marketing is how you reach those users and can’t really be trivially hacked because everyone is trying to hack it.

Or they stay in business because they offer some sort of guarantee (whether legal, technical, or other) that the users don’t want to burden themselves with because they have other, more important stuff to worry about.
by VirgilShelton | 2026-01-28 15:25:06+00:00
Yeah Windows 2000 had countless software test engineers, I was one of them and on my team there were 5000 of us. I stared in tech support in 97 and moved into QA and always filed bugs on behalf of the customer, sadly everyone must code and customers must test. It's just not working out but Microsoft really only cares about Corporate America and Windows running on all the main languages. It's great to have alternatives and I've moved to MacOS after using Windows since 1.0.
by franga2000 | 2026-01-28 15:25:49+00:00
DKIM isn't an antispam measure, it's an anti-impersonation measure. With DKIM, you can't impersonate a domain, which means you can trust that any email you get from an email provider was sent in accordance with that provider's security policy. In most cases, that policy is "one user owns one localpart and they can only send from it if they have their password". In cases where it's not, this is intentional and known by their users.

If you as a user can't trust your email server, you've already lost, no matter if something is authorized by an outbound email or a click on an inbound link. If your mail server is evil or hacked, it can steal your OTP token or activation link just as easily as it can send an email in your name.

Yes, end to end authentication is definitely better, but this isn't what people are discussing here. With enforced DKIM, "send me an email" has a nearly identical security profile to "I've emailed you a link, click on it". Both are inferior to end-to-end crypto.
by bpodgursky | 2026-01-28 15:26:10+00:00
Sort of. There's a distinction between "managing" and "using people as resources" in many tech companies.

Many senior ICs at tech companies DO have teams assigned to them for technical tasks, but they don't have to deal with giving feedback, managing compensation, giving bonuses, hiring, etc etc. Basically they get assigned extra hands and arms to do their tasks but aren't responsible for their growth or happiness.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-28 15:27:30+00:00
The reality is that once you reach a high enough level, your worth can be justified in smaller windows of time. The higher your role, the more impact your decisions have, and the more money small (but important) decisions can generate.

Think of a dev paid $250k/yr that comes up with a clever database scheme that saves the company $5m/yr in cloud costs. If nothing else, the company is in the green for years on that investment in that dev even if the dev just piddle paddles along with small fixes 99% of the time.

The part that sucks though is the general optics of these positions. Humans just instinctively want to correlate high pay with high busy work load, rather than high pay with high impact, which is how it actually works.
by Bender | 2026-01-28 15:27:38+00:00
Is Security Just Busywork?

No. They build a thing and expect money. Customers do not have a binding contract with most of these vendors and there is no expectation that they will make any effort to protect you or your family thus it is currently on the consumer to protect themselves from their internet connected devices. Strict legislation in every country with serious consequences would be required to change this. That or cutting on trade with countries that harm consumers and that is a high bar to meet. Not likely to happen.
by dabaja | 2026-01-28 15:27:42+00:00
Honestly, it's empirical. We started with what was easiest to measure: human correction rate. If I had to step in and fix something, that's a clear signal the agent took a bad path.
Iterations and reverts turned out to be noisier -- sometimes high iteration count means the task was genuinely hard, not that the agent made a mistake. So we downweighted those.
The meta-answer is: pick the metric that most directly captures "I wish the agent hadn't done that." For us that's human intervention. For a team with better test coverage, it might be test failures after commit. For infra work, maybe rollback frequency.
There's no universal loss function — it depends on where your pain actually is. We just made it explicit and started logging it. The logging alone forced clarity.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-28 15:28:08+00:00
Yeah the main reason to dislike Nvidia drivers on Linux these days from a regular user point of view (I am not a Wayland developer so I don’t have to deal with whatever technical annoyance there is there) is just the philosophical/potential-privacy annoyance of running closed source code on my open source system. This doesn’t give the entirely closed source OS any points.
by al_borland | 2026-01-28 15:28:26+00:00
My microwave and dishwasher don’t need updates because they don’t connect to the internet and they are also very simple machines. They essentially run pre-programmed processes centered around a timer.

Internet connected computers have complexity that is several orders of magnitude greater than those simple appliances. This is much harder to get right and test every possibility. The internet allows access for people to exploit those untested or unhandled possibilities.

On top of that, the very ability to update remotely lets companies prioritize release dates over completeness, because they can ship it and update it later if anything is found. It becomes a cost benefit analysis. How much will a security incident cost vs the cost of delaying the product? What are the odds a vulnerability gets exploited before they can find and patch it?

Internet connected appliances create busywork, imo. They don’t need those features, so the initial design takes more time, adds complexity, and then creates perpetual maintenance to keep things secure and working with the supporting backend services. All of this feels like needless theater to give customers something most don’t even want. I’ve never seen anyone excited about their biweekly TV update prompt.
by bilekas | 2026-01-28 15:28:26+00:00
Iv'e switched all but my work laptop because of well work, but the push came after they seemed to 'dumb' down the OS.

The disjointed WebView mixed with old winforms for navigating simple things is infuriating alone. I've had a problem where the webview wouldn't render any of the display settings so my machine was stuck at a certain resolution and scale.

Simple things like accessing Environment Variables now is atrocious and hidden in the most obscure unintuitive way. That's to say nothing to the crashing. Linux desktop environments have come such a long way it's really any wonder anyone would put up with Windows anymore.

But then again, Microslop don't seem to care about the customer market much anymore anyway.
by levkk | 2026-01-28 15:28:32+00:00
Ok so Arch apparently has an install script that does everything[0]. I tried it the other day and it's pretty flawless, albeit terminal-based so not for everyone I guess.

Pacman is _amazing_. Apt broke dependencies for me every few months & a major version Ubuntu upgrade was always a reformat. Plus, obviously, the Arch wiki is something else. I would go as far as to say you'll have an overall better Linux experience on Arch than Ubuntu and friends, even as a beginner.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
by Zambyte | 2026-01-28 15:28:39+00:00
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.

So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
by andrew-w | 2026-01-28 15:28:51+00:00
Haha, I kind of get that reaction. Convincing the world "this was hard to do" is generally not easy. Re: user uploads, we're operating in good faith at the moment (no built-in IP moderation). This hasn't been an issue so far. Current pricing reflects our operating costs. Each end-user gets a dedicated GPU for the duration of a call, which is expensive. Advancements on the model-side should eventually allow us to parallelize this.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-28 15:28:54+00:00
As a regular linux user for the last 20 years, who had used windows for games for about 25 of the last 30 years. When I had gotten a macbook pro for work in a company that was all apple there were three things that stood out: The M processors are amazing, the apple hardware is really good, and mac os is absolutely awful. I have no idea how people use mac.
by forinti | 2026-01-28 15:28:58+00:00
I had a beeb B+ with 128KB of RAM.

Then a 286 with 1MB.

Then a 386 with 4MB, then a 486DX with 8MB, then a P166 with 64MB (that was awesome), then a P4 with 1GB (hot and the first to burn the Motherboard), then an i3 with 4GB, gradually upgraded to 16GB.

And so on and so forth...
by kaitai | 2026-01-28 15:29:19+00:00
I just find this so fascinating!

Some people say "he was a protestor and protestors who bring a gun to a protest deserve to be shot (FAFO)".

You say he's not a protestor, so as an observer he deserves to be shot because somehow he was interfering.

And your characterization of citizens forming "military squads" is also fascinating. What does that mean to you, in detail? Does it mean... uniforms? central coordination? simulated exercises? None of those are the case here.

Who are the out of state agitators?

Why do you think the governor is involved? I think you've been watching a lot of Cam Higby & friends. This is their rhetoric. And I know some ppl who've changed their name to Tim on Signal to troll you back.

Feel free to listen to the actual speeches of Mayors Kaohly Her and Jacob Frey. They have consistently urged staying peaceful and resisting the provocations to violence of both the agents and outside provocateurs. They know we're under the knife of the Insurrection Act and everything is under a microscope. We know it too.

The incredulity that people like you have about the level of organization points to your lack of involvement in your own communities. Have you ever organized a PTA fundraiser to raise $25,000 for school activities? Have you ever had to sign up three children across one daycare, an elementary school, and a middle school for summer camp activities, six months in advance, coordinating all the different schedules? Let me tell you -- doing these things develops a lot of skills that then carry over very easily into organizing a patrol at pick-up and drop-off at the Spanish immersion daycare. That's the "military force" you're up against. In my neighborhood an old lady organized her senior building to send people over to stand around the Spanish immersion daycare daily, because ICE/CBP keep showing up even though all the employees have work authorization and have been background checked.

You're right: it's not protesting. It's just showing up for your neighbors. Bearing witness, even in a Christian sense.
by moralestapia | 2026-01-28 15:29:32+00:00
Hey, that's a pretty great article! Thanks for sharing.

(I hope you don't get downvoted by Chichanowski's fanboys. Sad to see people being against innovation, on this site of all places.)

I think it's only a matter of time, AI history has been a cycle of "yeah, but it will never do this", then literal weeks later it does it, lol.

We should think about how each part of the iteration cycle you describe can be improved. This is definitely a problem that can be solved!
by consp | 2026-01-28 15:29:37+00:00
Ah, the Microsoft "updates".

After the last "update" the setting for turning windows "game optimization" on and off doesn't work anymore and made factorio unplayable (it MUST be off, otherwise it optimized lag and stuttering and it automatically turns on after every larger update). Since games was the only reason I still had a pc with windows it was time to move. For funzies it tried installing some updates on the last shutdown (it got wiped afterwards).

The only pc I now have with windows on it is a early 00's pc with 98SE on it.
by Markoff | 2026-01-28 15:29:41+00:00
My experience is more like:

"I'll switch when Linux supports X."

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Okay, but how about my X?"

Linux still doesn't supports X.

"Well, X is still missing..."

Trados Studio, good luck finding equivalent, I tried, and the alternatives are horrendous and I'm not gonna run it in VM.

Also I tried at least for son on his old computer live distro Mint from USB drive, everything works fine (unlike Zorin, which had problem with sound I think), but when I try to install it of course it doesn't detect Windows, same with wife's laptop.

So I have 3 computers:
son's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

wife's old laptop where I could install Mint - Linux Mint doesn't detect Windows

my daily driver where my work SW requires Windows and there is no point installing Mint - Linux Mint detects Windows

I will have look at it during CNY holidays, if I will be able to install it alongside Windows (I need there Windows in case something would happen with my daily driver laptop).

I also plan to switch my father's old desktop to Linux Mint, but somehow I already know what will be most likely Windows detection status over there as well after son's and wife's laptop experiences. It works where it's not needed and it doesn't work, where I could actually install it.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-28 15:29:49+00:00
They didn't but keep in mind that the app is currently 170MiB. The standard library shouldn't have added more than a few hundred kilobytes. They already likely pay similar costs for c++, but it's more worthwhile as they have a lot more c++ code total.

Also note that if you statically link to the rust std library, lto will excise the majority of it anyways, no need to rebuild it.
by alimbada | 2026-01-28 15:29:51+00:00
> Now, the reason why it won't work on Linux is that the Linux kernel and Linux distros both leave that unified memory capability up to the GPU driver to implement. Which Nvidia hasn't done yet. You can code it somewhat into source code, but it's still super unstable and flaky from what I've read.

So it should work with an AMD GPU?
Show HN: We built a type-safe Python ORM for RedisGraph/FalkorDB
by hello-tmst | 2026-01-28 15:29:53+00:00
We were tired of writing raw Cypher — escaping quotes, zero autocomplete, refactoring nightmares — so we built GraphORM: a type-safe Python ORM for RedisGraph/FalkorDB using pure Python objects.

What it does
Instead of fragile Cypher:

query = """
MATCH (a:User {user_id: 1})-[r1:FRIEND]->(b:User)-[r2:FRIEND]->(c:User)
WHERE c.user_id <> 1 AND b.active = true
WITH b, count(r2) as friend_count
WHERE friend_count > 5
RETURN c, friend_count
ORDER BY friend_count DESC
LIMIT 10
"""

You write type-safe Python:

stmt = select().match(
(UserA, FRIEND.alias("r1"), UserB),
(UserB, FRIEND.alias("r2"), UserC)
).where(
(UserA.user_id == 1) & (UserC.user_id != 1) & (UserB.active == True)
).with_(
UserB, count(FRIEND.alias("r2")).label("friend_count")
).where(
count(FRIEND.alias("r2")) > 5
).returns(
UserC, count(FRIEND.alias("r2")).label("friend_count")
).orderby(
count(FRIEND.alias("r2")).desc()
).limit(10)

Key features:
• Type-safe schema with Python type hints
• Fluent query builder (select().match().where().returns())
• Automatic batching (flush(batch_size=1000))
• Atomic transactions (with graph.transaction(): ...)
• Zero string escaping — O'Connor and "The Builder" just work

Target audience
• AI/LLM agent devs: store long-term memory as graphs (User → Message → ToolCall)
• Web crawler engineers: insert 10k pages + links in 12 lines vs 80 lines of Cypher
• Social network builders: query "friends of friends" with indegree()/outdegree()
• Data engineers: track lineage (Dataset → Transform → Output)
• Python devs new to graphs: avoid Cypher learning curve

Data insertion: the real game-changer

Raw Cypher nightmare:
queries = [
"""CREATE (:User {email: "alice@example.com", name: "Alice O\\'Connor"})""",
"""CREATE (:User {email: "bob@example.com", name: "Bob \\"The Builder\\""})"""
]
for q in queries:
graph.query(q) # No transaction safety!

GraphORM bliss:
alice = User(email="alice@example.com", name="Alice O'Connor")
bob = User(email="bob@example.com", name='Bob "The Builder"')
graph.add_node(alice)
graph.add_edge(Follows(alice, bob, since=1704067200))
graph.flush() # One network call, atomic transaction

Try it in 30 seconds
pip install graphorm

from graphorm import Node, Edge, Graph

class User(Node):
__primary_key__ = ["email"]
email: str
name: str

class Follows(Edge):
since: int

graph = Graph("social", host="localhost", port=6379)
graph.create()
alice = User(email="alice@example.com", name="Alice")
bob = User(email="bob@example.com", name="Bob")
graph.add_node(alice)
graph.add_edge(Follows(alice, bob, since=1704067200))
graph.flush()

GitHub: https://github.com/hello-tmst/graphorm

We'd love honest feedback:
• Does this solve a real pain point for you?
• What's missing for production use?
• Any API design suggestions?
by wmeredith | 2026-01-28 15:30:22+00:00
The value is in the same place: solving people's problems.

Now that the code is cheaper (not free quite yet) skills further up the abstraction chain become more valuable.

Programming and design skills are less valuable. However, you still have to know what to build: product and UX skills are more valuable. You still have to know how to build it: software architect skills are more valuable.
by burningChrome | 2026-01-28 15:30:34+00:00
This was one of the issues that killed it. They continually missed goals of reducing human involvement.

Training is part of any AI project, but it sounds like Amazon wasn’t making much progress, even after years of working on the project. “As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales,” the report said.

The report said Amazon’s team “repeatedly missed goals” to cut down on human reviews, and “the reliance on backup humans explains in part why it can take hours for customers to receive receipts.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-power...
by drorco | 2026-01-28 15:30:39+00:00
I'm not American. I did stay for months though in the US (SF, NY) and Europe (Italy, France, Greece, PT, DE, more) at times.

I think for competitive and talented people, US in general offers much more lucrative opportunities as long as you're OK with the US specific drawbacks.
For non-competitive people, living in Europe would probably be a more convenient.

I think the problem though is in the future, both the US and Europe has grave societal and economic issues but from the different angles. Europe lacks economical drive and seems to discourage change on a cultural level. The US on the other hand seems to be an extreme catalyst.

I'm not familiar enough with quantitative data to judge on the compound interest, nevertheless I think in the last few decades we have already been witness on the global level to major changes in wealth: empires like UK have shrank, giants like China have risen. This had been very different a few decades ago and is an anecdote at least that compound interest can only do so much for empires, in the face of major changes.
by PrismerAI | 2026-01-28 15:31:00+00:00
Prismer-AI team here. We’ve actually been building an open-source stack for this since early 2025. We were fed up with the fragmented paper-to-code workflow too. If you're looking for an open-source alternative to Prism that's already modular and ready to fork, check us out: https://github.com/Prismer-AI/Prismer
by m000 | 2026-01-28 15:31:22+00:00
A request not being served can happen for a multitude of reasons (many of them totally beyond your control) and the web architecture is designed around that premise.

So, if some of your pods fail a fraction of the requests they receive for a few seconds, this is not considered downtime for 99% of the use cases. The service never really stopped serving requests.

The problem is not unique to Django by any means. If you insist on being a purist, sure count it as downtime. But you will have a hard time even measuring it.