The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top.

I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.

Has anyone noticed an increased of one-liner controversial commentary, usually assertions, with a bunch of replies, sometimes, "No and no" or something like "this is the right answer" or a bunch of greyed comments?

HN is not Reddit, and that's a Reddit pattern. It's an anti-intellectual pattern because it's a popularity/anger contest and there's nothing of substance.

I'd love to hear the pros and cons and even likelihood of Linux in government, but I'm having trouble finding the smart commentary from the grey noise.

Help!

The amount of money and time wasted because people want to run Windows is staggering. There are organizations and governments running tens of thousands of machines, having highly sensitive data stolen, and much worse and paying for that "privilege."

That's bad enough, but then you get to play the "tick tock" release game of a normal quality release, followed by whatever bizarre experiment comes after. Vista, Metro, and now 11. Features come and go, layers of complexity are added, abandoned, etc. You and your organization are a helpless passenger in a drunk drivers car.

But hey, they'll throw you a few credits sometimes or introduce you to a new predatory side hustle of theirs with a rebranded flavor of vendor lock-in. Maybe they'll help you take something you own and lease it back to you via a subscription.

Yes, I'm the Linux person. Yes, I've been saying these same things for decades. Yes, our system has flaws and could be better. But, what I have been learning that is new over the last few years is that when centralized and crappy systems are a combination of cheap and simple, people don't care about alternatives. Then once people are dug into a hole that only gets deeper it begins to be a much easier sell to just be at ground level looking down asking "You okay there buddy?"

Virtually every problem I read about or hear people complaining about has a direct and simple solution that we in the FOSS community are already doing. Use free and open source software from the repository. Use sandboxing techniques like Flatpak. If you have the need, use something like Qubes. For most cases qemu is so good you can run a separate VM per task! KVM is very good. There are so many solutions and the landscape is wide open.

Isn't it cheaper to cool a datacenter in a more temperate/cool region than one that has a 9-month-long summer?

Why would anyone want to go to Texas to build a datacenter and worry about the cooling, when they could pick any other state?

Because the other big expense in a datacenter: electricity. Texas has really cheap electricity compared to the rest of the country, sitting at second cheapest after North Dakota.

Long summers = tx actually has lots more Solar, but also biz friendly laws, biz friendly taxes, lots of corp HQ, cheap land, own power grid (for better or worse), cost of labor, etc.

People in New York City don't talk as often about how difficult building is because of NIMBYism. Generally it's a combination of red tape that's meant to act as a protection from things like fires and bad construction, which is good, environmental regulations which is so-so (some of them drive up housing costs), because of progressive policies (demanding a certain percentage of units be for lower income people), a scarcity of land, high wages, and a political class tied to unions (the latest tax breaks are tied to 50 dollar min wage for new construction of 99 units or more).

It's very very complicated. And new construction makes rents go up here because it's all luxury - it has to be, or developers won't bother to build.

It's so complicated that I'm sick of reading the West Coasters hot take on housing problems - that it's 100 percent due to single family homes and zoning and other very very California problems.

Guys, we're not all in California.

I can't type on a smartphone. Even as I wrote this, c became a space, the word space started each time with an a, etc.

But on a keyboard I type hella fast.

Now, I also hate creating account after account, having all these applications needing to be installed with ads in them that I can't block or some permissions that I don't think it needs. F that.

Here's an idea. Shoot down an idea if:

Your boss is presenting something that affects you, or someone adjacent is presenting an idea for something that will affect you.

Or if someone asks what you think.

Doesn't that solve most of the complaints about productivity in this thread?

There's unfortunately someone who is posting some HN articles in a hackernews subreddit. I think that's contributed to the rise of Mr. Hot Take One-Liner Mic Drop, that posts something with 20 one liner replies, always at the top. If that continues happening I'm out.

One interesting factoid, since I can remember on HN, if you ever likened a conversation to Reddit they'd downvote you to grey. There are two ways to read that - Reddit is fine, don't criticize it; Reddit is embarrassing, don't diminish the conversation by comparing us to it.

Is there an English translation for those not in the latest influencer language trends?

Ricing = making your linux desktop look pretty. arch = a 'techy' flavour of linux.

ahh... Now I'm connecting it to the 1990's car culture, where people modified Hondas and Toyotas... That's the term we used. I didn't really remember it, especially since political correctness wasn't prevalent back then.

That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.

Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.

Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.

But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?

And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.

I had the same experience! Not looking back at all.

The opposite of what Oracle used to do (arguably successfully). Break up useful components of middleware or database servers so you have to add a litany of expensive features, similar to trying to pick a trim on the BMW website.