MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonplackett | 2025-04-24 14:17:12+00:00
There’s a podcast I love called Real Dictators.

It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.

What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.

Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.

They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-04-24 14:17:15+00:00
Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.

Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-24 14:17:27+00:00
The OP here specifically wasn't including any auth features, which I was pretty sure would mean backtracks and comments aren't supported but maybe that's wring. It is possible with ActivityPub, but I'd personally be hesitant to run my own OAuth server just for a microblog.

Regardless, my underlying point really is about what I expect of a microblog. If I'm hosting it myself I just want it to be my little corner of the internet, not a full fledged social media site that I have to maintain. That doesn't mean I'm right or that others don't expect more.
by Bayart | 2025-04-24 14:17:44+00:00
> You might argue that the EU is a sprawling, wasteful bureaucracy and you would not be wrong, per se, but they made a lot of useful laws that just simply make the world a better place.

The EU bureaucracy itself is significantly lighter and more purposeful than any of the underlying individual states' bureaucracy, though that might simply be a function of youth and restricted scope.
by Someone | 2025-04-24 14:17:58+00:00
> I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country

I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm:

“Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship

With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online”

Germany has (https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/deutsche-pos...):

“You simply need to open the app, select the appropriate postage service, tick “Code for labelling” (Code zum Beschriften), and pay with PayPal. You will then immediately receive a code, consisting of the letters #PORTO and an eight-digit string, which you must write in pen in the top right-hand corner of the envelope or postcard. Then, just pop it in the post box, and you’re done! The code is valid for 14 days and can only be used for Germany-bound mail.”

That 14-day limit may not be a good idea for this use case.
by daft_pink | 2025-04-24 14:18:00+00:00
I have a couple questions about this case: 1. If you read conservative media, they consider this a win, because the supreme court 9-0 watered down the order down to facilitation, which they feel means the executive branch doesn’t need to do much on this case as the executive branch can’t force El Salvador to give up their citizen. Liberal media considers it a win for them, because the supreme court agrees 9-0 they must facilitate. Which take is correct? 2. Most of the legal analysis discusses other topics, but to me ultimate legal question is: Does the deportation of an individual by the United States government to a foreign country which may or may not be where they are citizens and where they are likely to face life imprisonment, violate their basic human rights to Due Process? => Or to put it in simpler english can you imprison someone for life by proxy by deporting them there?
by shapmeans | 2025-04-24 14:18:28+00:00
same here, until I closed our startup ~6 months ago and decided to do nothing after 19 years of working hard and pushing upwards. I lived with my partner so I wasn't paying rent, and now I changed my mind about retiring - I can't wait. I still got to dabble, I helped a founder friend with her core tech, I visited friends, played a bunch of video games, spent more time with my partner, and I loved it. Time felt comfy, I purposefully was not looking for work, my stress levels went down, I walked my dog at least an hour a day. I'm now going back to work, even harder problems and responsibilities, and while I'm likely to enjoy that, I am now looking forward to when I don't have to (assuming that happens)
Ask HN: What's Everyone Using These Days for a Desktop Chat App?
by chasebank | 2025-04-24 14:18:33+00:00
My business partner and I might be among the last remaining users of Skype. Despite its bloated design and mediocre UI, it’s worked reliably for us over the years.

We’ve always used chat apps strictly for business and relied on iMessage for personal conversations. A key feature we value is online presence status—something we noticed is missing in otherwise strong contenders like Telegram and Signal.

We’ve trialed quite a few alternatives without much luck:

Trillian

Telegram

Signal

Element

Rocket.Chat

Discord

Microsoft Teams

...and probably a few others we've since forgotten.

Discord showed some promise but its UI is cluttered with ads, store links, and persistent upsells for Nitro, which we find distracting and unprofessional for our use case.

We're looking for a clean, business-friendly chat app that supports online status visibility and ideally has a lightweight, focused interface. Would love to hear what others are using these days for small-team or partnership chat workflows.

Any suggestions?
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-24 14:18:41+00:00
Your company doesn’t care about how you got to the end, they just care about did you get there and meet all of the functional and non functional requirements.

My entire management chain - manager, director and CTO - are all technical and my CTO was a senior dev at BigTech less then two years ago. But when I have a conversation with any of them, they mostly care about whether the project I’m working on/leading is done on time/within budget/meets requirements.

As long as those three goals are met, money appears in my account.

One of the most renown producers in hip hop - Dr. Dre - made a career in reusing old melodies. Are (were) his protégés - Easy-E, Tupac, Snoop, Eminem, 50 cent, Kendrick Lamar, etc - not real musicians?
by conductr | 2025-04-24 14:19:01+00:00
Im in Texas, lots of oil, and have seen market for such barrels when shopping for shipping containers and IBC totes in the past. Usually I find sellers of these things near distribution hubs.

The barrels never had been used for crude oil when I’ve inquired. Sometimes a refined oil product likely used as a raw material for a manufacturing process, but never crude. I think it’s never transported in such small quantities to make sense of using actual barrels. It’s more so a unit of measure, probably with some valid historical context.

My understanding is it’s most likely transported from a well via a pipeline and may need a short trip in a truck or train (tanker style) to get to the pipeline from the well. The well itself usually has a collection reservoir to allow for 24/7 extraction.

I don’t know exactly I’ve just been vaguely around oil industry and engineers my whole life due to where I live.
by skydhash | 2025-04-24 14:19:50+00:00
> it's a collosal waste of my time

> LLM can do it faster, better, and cost me near nothing.

And this is one the thing I'm skeptical about. The above use case is a symptom of all code and no design. It is a waste of time because you're putting yourself in a corner, architecture wise. Kinda like building on a crooked foundation.

I've never done refactoring where I'm writing a lot of code, it's mostly just copy-paste and rebuilding the connection between modules (functions, classes, files, packages,...). And if the previous connections were well understood and you have a clear plan for the new design, then it's a no-brainer to get there. Same when adapting code, I'm mostly deleting lines and renaming variables (regex is nice).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, but unless it's for small scripts or very common project types, I haven't seen the supposed productivity gain compared to traditional tooling.
by douglasisshiny | 2025-04-24 14:19:56+00:00
I'm in the same boat. I've largely stopped using these tools other than asking questions about a language that I'm less familiar with or a complex type in typescript for which it can be helpful (sometimes). Otherwise, I felt like I was just wasting my time and becoming lazier/worse as a developer. I do wonder whether LLMs have hit a wall and we're in a hype cycle.
by aitchnyu | 2025-04-24 14:20:27+00:00
I'm taking immunotherapy drops (SLIT) for dust mites for more than 6 years and having less sinus infections and stuffy nose. After a second skin test, wheals for both dust mite and mold have shrunk. I hope we get more products that desensitize us to multiple allergens, and its dirt cheap and OTC for children and dont need refrigeration.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-04-24 14:20:31+00:00
Nothing in this article talks about her family owning multiple brownstones. At all. Nothing about land records.

This article talks about her dad's Bronx condo that she lived in, or claimed to live in. No offense to the people of the Bronx, but that is not a "rich" part of NYC. Units for sale in the building mentioned are rather cheap for NYC, in fact.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-24 14:20:56+00:00
Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility

Which changes as times change.

In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.

Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.

But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.

In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.

Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!

Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
by no_wizard | 2025-04-24 14:21:07+00:00
Not everyone finds 'the work' to be an interrupt either, to be fair. Sometimes the work is the fulfilling part of life, its not having more traditional societal roles. Not to say family and friends aren't important, they absolutely are, but the way I think of it is this way:

When I started working on my own independent venture, I was worried about time. I'm not in a position to quit my job, and I don't think its going to be a VC thing. So I was struggling to find time, so I timed everything I did in a day.

When I did that, I found time I used to idle (IE, not simply relaxing or taking needed down time) with TV watching to be a few hours a day. Didn't even realize it was something I did, it was simply baked into the nightly routine.

Once I replaced that time with working time, I was able to get alot farther along. I suspect if my idea ever takes off, I can examine things more closely and find and shift more time like this.

This is all to say, that you can still enjoy working, prioritize work, but not leave family and friends completely in the lurch at the same time.

All that said: IMO, if you're putting in the hours, do it for yourself, unless you're either moving up to an executive role (or equivalent) at a company where you can cash out big, you're unfortunately a cog in the machine. The best course of action if you really love your work, is to find a sustainable way to work for yourself.
by ksec | 2025-04-24 14:21:38+00:00
>?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app.

I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on Android or iPhone.

They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.

And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in contact especially those not in close group via Social Media aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.

Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.
by geodel | 2025-04-24 14:21:54+00:00
After reading a bit if history on travel/tourism I understood that this whole travel thing itself used to be luxury, upperclass thing. Most people would work and live where they are born, visit a few times in life outside for religious purpose or to attend important/relative's wedding etc. And that's about it.

For myself I didn't travel much for leisure when I was young, I am not traveling when I am middle aged and have more money and I do not plan to when I am old/retired. Even when I did whatever little travel, my memories are just about fight, arguments, or endless waiting for admission to a sight which finally after visiting is "What's the fuss was all about?".

On food the less I say the better. It was either over-hyped, over-priced. To top it all, concluding fine dining dinner of the trip when people after ordering table full of meal didn't eat a thing because they are far too drunk by then.

Overtime I have come to conclusion the people with sensibilities and resources to travel and enjoy are far fewer than people actually travel due to exhorting by incessant marketing of travel.
by cesarb | 2025-04-24 14:22:01+00:00
> I don't know his exact job, but if it involves programming, or even scripting, he is faking his way with AI, not understanding what he's doing. That is frightening.

That could be considered malpractice. I know our profession currently doesn't have professional standards, but it's just a side effect of it being very new and not yet solidified; it won't be long until some duty of care becomes required, and we're already starting to see some movement in that direction, with things like the EU CRA.
by gwd | 2025-04-24 14:22:23+00:00
...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group. When I take a cute photo of my son doing something, I have to share it with the family group for my side, and that of my wife; and none of my friends or random extended family get to see it. If my wife's fam shares a photo of my son that I think my fam wants to see, I have to manually port it over. Back in Facebook's heyday, I could just share it; or if my wife's fam tagged me in the photo, my family & friends would see it as well.

And, of course, in group chat, your different friend groups never interact. One of the coolest thing about Facebook in its heyday was when two of your friends who didn't know each other had a cool conversation on your wall and then became friends themselves.

Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a proper replacement -- BlueSky and Mastodon are replacements for Twitter, not Facebook. Group chats aren't as good, but they're the closest thing going.
by larsga | 2025-04-24 14:22:24+00:00
> the claim is not against people drinking beer or water, it is against doing so out of some general fear of drinking water.

Okay, if that's the claim I would say the state of research at the moment is not 100% clear. It's quite possible that it's not why people did it.

> Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.

Accepted!

> If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it?

Good question. One answer might be: because some people were forced to drink it even though it was unsafe, so making it even more unsafe was considered criminal. It's worth looking into, though.

> Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities?

I wonder how that worked out -- once there's a town around it the spring must become less safe. Do you have references on this? Doesn't need to be scholarly, just something specific.

> Why was disease so strongly associated with the presence of armies if people weren't consuming the water that forms the natural vector for transmission?

You can get diseases from food that's not properly washed, from your hands, etc. Many diseases also are transmitted via lice etc.

My claim is not that people never drank water. We know they did. But we also know they tried to stick to better things when they could. An army on the march is a classic case of people who would have a hard time consistently getting alcoholic drink because of poor logistics. So you'd expect at least parts of the army to be forced to drinking substandard stuff quite often.

> Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.

Oh, there absolutely is. What's more, people knew there were differing degrees of safety. Linné says exactly that in his 1749 pamphlet on beer (quoted in my blog post). Max Nelson also has a paper discussing how people made these distinctions in antiquity.

> My concern is [...] with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water.

We're in agreement on that. They did drink water. They also very clearly preferred not to, but were often forced to. Why did they prefer not to? Not clear. Was the water unsafe? Yes. At least quite a lot of it. Did they know that? To some extent they clearly did. In summary form, that's basically as far as I've gotten.
by stavros | 2025-04-24 14:23:01+00:00
If you say "look, the stuff they're doing there is risky, you should <do thing>", and they don't do it, how can they blame you? If they do do it, then mission accomplished, no?

E.g. "the way that team builds software isn't robust enough, you should replace the leader or we'll have an incident", how can you be blamed for the incident when it happens?
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-24 14:23:10+00:00
It's just not bothersome enough to deviate from the standard.

If they did this, nobody would use it. They do lots of more useful things that people don't use because it's not portable.

There's a sibling comment about temporal databases. Those solve a very bothersome problem, so a few people use them. That means that there's a chance soft deletes get adopted as a side effect of a much more complex standard.
by latexr | 2025-04-24 14:23:19+00:00
> that's so you can enter a newline, but agreed, could use a ⌘↵ shortcut or similar.

⌘↩ is the wrong shortcut. On macOS both ⌥↩ and ⇧↩ are the standard shortcuts to add new lines on fields where ↩ would cause an action. If you want to keep ↩ to add a new line, then ⌘↩ would send the message.

Can’t speak for the convention on other OSs, though.
by esperent | 2025-04-24 14:23:31+00:00
It's because everyone moved over to using Whatsapp groups instead, for the actual social stuff, and TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for the gratuitous lusting after other people's perfect lives stuff. It used to be that we looked at the perfect shared moments from our friends lives, but this didn't make us feel bad enough so we outsourced it to models backed by teams of experts so that we can compare ourselves to impossible highs and thusly feel only the most exquisite of lows when comparing our own real and therefore often shitty lives.
SnapCode Java 11 IDE in the browser
by jeffreportmill1 | 2025-04-24 14:23:32+00:00
The latest version of SnapCode supports Java 11 in the browser (the download version supports Java 21). SnapCode offers real native Java Client graphics in the browser and desktop.

SnapCode is free and uses the CheerpJ browser JVM to run real Java in the browser. CheerpJ is moving quickly this year to support the latest versions of Java. Java 11 this month, Java 17 this summer, and hopefully release parity soon after.

SnapCode: https://reportmill.com/SnapCode/

CheerpJ: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/cheerpj-4.0
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-24 14:23:49+00:00
You can't maintain that if the primary "consumers" of those exports are not actual allies.

Yes, all the more reason why attacking our allies is pure insanity.

A lot of the countries we just attacked in the "trade war" are the same ones who buy our Treasury bonds.

"Tariff Man" failed to make this obvious connection until after it was demonstrated to him. T-Bill yields jumped half a percent in a week after he made a complete fool of himself with "Liberation Day" in the WH rose garden. With one act of utter stupidity, "Tariff Man" cost the country more than DOGE has saved.
by dismalaf | 2025-04-24 14:24:08+00:00
I'd personally take Gnome Shell over both Windows and OSX. It's minimal, gets out of your way, has better touchpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts for navigating, and looks great. So I think Linux is there.

But this is kind of a personal thing. My wife likes Windows with a super cluttered desktop and I absolutely hate the idea of any desktop icons and I like everything hidden. I have a colleague who has OSX with again, a ton of desktop icons and like 20 things open at any given time, just looking at his screen gives me anxiety.
by gessha | 2025-04-24 14:24:27+00:00
I just checked the el. prices for Germany on [1] and [2] and I see something like 9-12 euro ct/kWh which is $0.10/kWh. In NY state [3], where I live, the prices right now are $0.25/kWh so 250% more. Average salaries for Germany are $57,198 [4] and $61,984 [5] for US. Maybe I'm missing some details about it but I don't it's about affordability and energy cost. My take is it's a lot more about top-down politics.

[1] https://www.energyprices.eu/electricity/germany

[2] https://spotprices.eu/de/spotprice/de1

[3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/Energy-Prices/Electricity/Monthly...

[4] https://www.learngermanonline.org/salaries-and-living-costs-...

[5] https://www.demandsage.com/average-us-income/
by stetrain | 2025-04-24 14:25:19+00:00
There are options other than working to the exclusion of other fulfillment right up until a specific age cutoff and then having zero work.

Honestly saving all of that until retirement is not a great idea when you look at how many people die in their 60s and 70s and that if you have children and raise a family that's going to happen well before retirement as well.

You can also find routine, mental challenges, and socialization across the generations without "working" in the traditional sense of a full time job for an employer or your own business.

There are lots of ways to balance these things out, and to find that balance along the way instead of hoping you'll find it in some theoretical future retirement.