Apple's worst release in years (maybe ever), Microsoft's worst release in years (maybe ever), meanwhile mainstream Linux UX has been taking baby steps forward on a nearly-daily basis for a decade straight.
I wouldn't call Omarchy "mainstream". Yes it's very popular among developers but that's about it and under the hood it uses some pretty non-mainstream components like Hyplrand WM.
I would argue the OS closest to "mainstream Linux" is Ubuntu or Fedora with Gnome DE. Gnome has many many faults but it's probably the closest DE you're going to get to what Windows and MacOS have.
I'll give one of the more mainstream ones a try when I have a free afternoon, frustrating thing was it wasn't underpowered at all this was with a RTX3090 so very concerning investing in that, perhaps wrongly assumed Wayland etc would have been a similar feel to Mac Quartz Composer fluidity by now.
Oh God you fell for the hype and used DHH's juiced up distro. I encourage you to try a properly maintained distro e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, or Leap instead of a racist narcissist's hobby project.
Linux’s value proposition would have to be “Everything’s different learning curve yada yada but it’s so clean and well done users will see the light” Meanwhile run ps on an Ubuntu desktop. The same process bloat and shit that ruined Windows and macOS. Linux is a mess, almost by design.
One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.
Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.
To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story.
The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.
All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.
This mirrors my experience. Most stuff you do on Windows "just works" on Linux nowadays, and when it doesn't, there are low-friction alternatives.
The one pain point for me is film and book scanning. AFAICT there are exactly zero Linux software packages that will play nice with my Epson V800 or my Fujitsu SV600. I keep a Windows laptop around (second-gen ThinkPad X1 since you asked) and its only job is to talk to those devices. Firewall doesn't let it get on the internet, its only network access is to move scans onto my NAS.
For film scanning (which I do only very rarely) I've resorted to just using my digital camera with a light box to illuminate the film and a nice macro lens to focus on the frame.
> I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru
Yeah, I get this is tongue-in-cheek but if you're going to try to convince Americans of this idea, you need to use units we understand, and a car we've heard of.
I love Craigslist! It's like FB Marketplace, but better. The search tools are more powerful, and you don't get a barrage of "is this still available?" messages followed by crickets. I've found it much easier to both buy and sell things on CL.
More people in my social circle are using CL again after AI moderation/anti-fraud issues at Facebook. A few examples:
A colleague listed his son’s high school archery equipment. Facebook banned him from marketplace for life for violating weapons policy. He still has social network access.
I helped an elderly widow create her first FB account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of authenticity. But after she added five relatives within half an hour, her account was locked, and Facebook closed it permanently on appeal.
Another acquaintance was brigaded by people reporting his comments. Troll or not, he lost access to Facebook/Marketplace and has to satiate his used electronics habit elsewhere.
You can lose access to FBm suddenly and with no recourse. And when that happens, Craigslist is still there to help you sell stuff you can’t eBay, like your old lawnmower, or find a CRT television for your Super Nintendo.
I just looooove (read: hate) the ratings system on FB Marketplace. We bought a house semi-recently and it conveyed a front-loader washer dryer set. Wife wanted to get rid of it after about 6 months. I list it for an incredibly reasonable rate based on local past sales, eg a standalone washer routinely sells for $200 so I sold a set for $200.
Then come the low-ballers, they want to offer only $50 or $100 for my set. I click through into their profiles and see that they are resellers of washers and dryers in bulk so they want to buy and flip my set. I decline.
Well, after only 3 messages a “buyer” can rate you as a seller so I have a stack of 1-star reviews from resellers angry that I politely declined to sell to them when I had a queue of asking-price buyers lined up to buy same-day.
CL right now is like the best and worst place. Theres some good deals, from honest people; unfortunately, you have to wade through the scams sometimes though. Itd be great if there was better moderation, and we could find ways to bring it back to life that dont involve the awful things other companies do to survive
It's always been that way, and Markeplace is the same too. At least you can actually use search filters on CL, and it doesn't just show you whatever it thinks you want to see.
Bingo. Nobody uses ChatGPT because it's AI. They use it because it does their homework, or it helps them write emails, or whatever else. The story can't just be "AI PC." It has to be "hey look, it's ChatGPT but you don't have to pay a subscription fee."
This is fascinating stuff, especially the per-subsystem data. I've worked with CAN in several different professional and amateur settings, I'm not surprised to see it near the bottom of this list. That's not a dig against the kernel or the folks who work on it... more of a heavy sigh about the state of the industries that use CAN.
On a related note, I'm seeing a correlation between "level of hoopla" and a "level of attention/maintenance." While it's hard to distinguish that correlation from "level of use," the fact that CAN is so far down the list suggests to me that hoopla matters; it's everywhere but nobody talks about it. If a kernel bug takes down someone's datacenter, boy are we gonna hear about it. But if a kernel bug makes a DeviceNet widget freak out in a factory somewhere? Probably not going to make the front page of HN, let alone CNN.
There is a general rule on bugs is that the more devices they are on, the more apt they are to trigger.
A CAN with 10,000 machines total and relatively fixed applications is either going to trigger the bug right off the bat and then work around it, or trigger the bug so rarely it won't be recognized as a kernel issue.
General purpose systems running millions and millions of units with different workloads are an evolutionary breeding ground for finding bugs and exploits.
OP's classifiers make two assumptions that I'd bet strongly influence the result:
1. Binning skepticism with negativity.
2. Not allowing for a "neutral" category.
The comment I'm writing right now is critical, but is it "negative?" I certainly don't mean it that way.
It's cool that OP made this thing. The data is nicely presented, and the conclusion is articulated cleanly, and that's precisely why I'm able to build a criticism of it!
And I'm now realizing that I don't normally feel the need to disclaim my criticism by complimenting the OP's quality work. Maybe I should do that more. Or, maybe my engagement with the material implies that I found it engaging. Hmm.
OP here :)
On skepticism being lumped with negativity: partially true. The SST-2 training task treats critical evaluation as negative sentiment. I should clarify that "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile. HN's culture of substantive critique registers as negative by these metrics, but that's arguably a feature of technical discourse rather than toxicity.
On the neutral category: the model outputs continuous scores from 0 to 1, so neutrality does exist around 0.5. The bimodal distribution with peaks at roughly 0.0 and 0.95 reflects how HN users tend toward strong evaluative positions. Three-class models could provide additional perspective, and that's worth exploring in future work.
Also love your meta-observation. Imo your comment is critical, substantive, and engaging. By sentiment metrics it's "negative," but functionally it's high-quality discourse. But that's exactly how I read the data: HN's negativity is constructive critique that drives engagement, not hostility.
Is it “negative” though? I ran it through this model and it gave 99.9% positive. (You tell me if this model is substantively different from what you used.)
- "negative" here means evaluative or critical, not hostile.
this is so far from how people are interpreting your results that I'd say it's busted. your work might be high-quality, but if the semantic choices make it impossible to engage with then it's not really a success.
As a native born english speaker, I disagree completely. It's very obvious what he means. This is a severe reading comprehension problem, not a problem with the author.
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.
So the group synced a dumb bias. It must change. Not the author; they provided qualitative evidence that was not their intent. Update your opinion and perspective with that new evidence.
Imo it's on the individual members of the groupthinkers to realize a math term (negatives are a thing in math) applied to mathematical data is not a qualitative attack on anyone; they must accept the groupthink has lost the plot.
Consensus isn't always preferable. See religion.
The context is obviously a mathematical analysis and math comes with negatives.
If the critiques had actual substance to contribute to the world they wouldn't be so easily offended. Publishing low effort complaints that are little more than demands by far away randos to better to conform to their arbitrary standards is a laughable expectation. Internet randos can pound sand; they prop up nothing individually or collectively given most forums are a few thousand to tens of thousands of unique people with a platform but no real democratic power.
Social media hyper-normalizing sentiment is just empowering social bullying by pressuring people doing the necessary work to think include the bike-shedding of non-contributors. Whole bunch of farm animals want to eat bread while letting the rooster do the work.
> Consensus isn't always preferable. See religion.
Any examples where it's not preferable?
Wisdom-of-Crowds coin-jar experiment: independent guesses are noisy, but their average reliably approximates the true count, showing group aggregation beats most individuals.
I'm interested in seeing a plot of that percentual over the years. The past 3 or 4 years I've been seeing less and less tech savvy comments over here and this data seems a great way to find out if it's just placebo.
There's a lot of legitimate criticism, but they're also a noticeable amount of "reply guy"-ism (pedantry that can sometimes derail the conversation and bring nothing of substance) and "pet peeve syndrome" (people who'll always repeat the same criticisms of a product or company even if completely off-topic for a submission). It would probably be hard to classify them. And whenever I go on reddit I see that both are enormously worse on there.
are the "reply guy" and "pet peeve syndrome" considered bad? because i think they're a big part of the value i get in the HN comments.
my mental model of the comment section on any page is "let's get all the people interested in this article in the room and see what they talk about" rather than "here is a discussion about this article specific"
i also assume that <50% of the people in any comment section have actually read the original article and are just people hopping in to have a convo about something tangetially related to the headline.
It is bad. Its fine when you read the opinions for the first time, but after a while you notice over half of the discussion is just repeating the same off-topic talking points over and over and over again on every submission.
"Off topic but...", "The CSS on this site...", "Have you noticed this web page is 5/10/20MB...", "Why is the webpage making 20+ requests...", "Microsoft bla bla bla...", "Elon Musk bla bla bla...", "I havent used cryptocurrency at all and it is bad because..."
All of these on some post about a new library release or government policy or social commentary.
I was about to make a comment about skepticism, thank you for adding it. Its likely that its all bunched in together. Looking at material with a critical eye is a positive feature of HN not a negative - thats a very very nuanced thing to evaluate though and likely we do not have the technology
Hi, if you find the time, please reach out to the email in my bio with the methodology and dataset you used. Did you only test one post or a whole set? Would be interesting to compare the setup. Thanks!
There also is some conflict of interests. VC investors and marketeers obviously want to nurture optimism. And that is entirely understandable and very likely necessary for good ideas to be spread.
While engineers, especially those that like to share knowledge and open source solutions are far more critical of monetizing products.
Overall HN doesn't lack criticism, since there many technically minded people around. But I like the mix to be honest and agree that skepticism is often seen as simple negativity. Sure, you probably don't want to advertise your product as "pretty decent, but there are numerous better theoretical solutions".
HN is not the rest, it is not the majority. It's for a specific tech-savvy social category. This category does want skepticism and criticism because they tend to be perfectionists. This is not "negative sentiment" anything but very positive "evrika!" sentiment for members of the aforementioned category.
Would one say: nice attempt trying to tell people how they are supposed to feel around here?
You comment is very interesting observation. Its made me reconsider some things about sentiment analysis. You are right its not really that HN is negative its that sentiment analysis doesn't really have any way I can think of offhand to measure meaningful discourse rather than GOOD/BAD/NEUTRAL
I've never done any sentiment analysis outside of hobby tinkering. Maybe there is some HN experts that will chime in on how to deal with it?
Negative is negative, regardless of intent. Here's the llm positive way to write your post:
It’s a great exercise to reframe constructive feedback. Here is a more positive, affirming version of that post that maintains the original insight while shifting the tone to one of appreciation and partnership.
A Positive Reframing
ryukoposting 17 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: 65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment...
The OP has done a fantastic job putting this together! It’s such an interesting dataset that it really invites deeper exploration into how we categorize human speech. I think we can make this even more accurate by looking at two exciting opportunities:
* Celebrating Skepticism: We could distinguish between "negativity" and "healthy skepticism." Often, a critical eye is actually a sign of deep interest and a desire to refine a great idea.
* The Value of "Neutral": Adding a neutral category could highlight the balanced, objective discussions that happen here, showing just how nuanced the community’s input really is.
I’m writing this because I’m genuinely inspired by the quality of the presentation and how clearly the conclusions are articulated. It’s exactly that clarity that makes it so easy and fun to brainstorm improvements!
I’m realizing now how much I enjoy engaging with high-quality work like this. It’s a reminder that even when we’re being analytical, it’s because the original content is truly engaging. Kudos to the OP for sparking such a thoughtful conversation.
Key Changes Made:
* From "Assumptions" to "Opportunities": Instead of pointing out flaws in logic, it frames the points as ways to build upon an already strong foundation.
* Emphasis on Inspiration: It explicitly states that the criticism is a result of being impressed by the work, rather than just "not meaning to be negative."
* Active Appreciation: It turns the "Maybe I should do that more" realization into a proactive statement of gratitude for the OP’s effort.
Would you like me to try another version focused on a specific tone, like "professional" or "enthusiastic"?
...
Even if you hate it, the vibe of that is completely different.
Yes, the original post has the vibe of something a human wrote to express an idea, while your version has the vibe of meandering, insincere, sycophantic AI slop that obfuscates the original idea in service of congratulating everything.
Both express the same basic criticism; you've just replaced the neutral tone with something that's perhaps more effective as a vomitory than as a criticism.
Rather than AI slop the above comes across to me as genuine corpospeak. I guess the task wasn't so much generation as it was translation. I found myself simultaneously impressed and disgusted.
I wonder how well an automated tool to go in the reverse direction would work in practice? With an accompanying style transfer GAN to rewrite the Corporate Memphis hellscape.
I think you're on to something about bad categorization. Sentiment analysis as practiced is almost always pseudoscience. (And that's a hedge. I've never seen it done right but I'm not outright discounting the possibility.)
> Also am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy?
Yes. I think the post does well to make the point that "negativity" comes in two forms, critical and toxic. Lumping the two seems like an oversight, to me.
I'm not saying 2026 is the year, but...
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