MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 11:18:34+00:00
> “When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I’ll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved.”

I saw a Reddit thread the other day on r/startups or r/entrepreneur where the OP was talking about how they'll be working until the day he or she dies.

I immediately wondered if this individual had a family, friends. Had this person already seen the world and its many sights and wonders? Had they already experienced everything good there is to experience in this one lifetime that they were so bored of it that they would prefer to work instead? Had they already swam with whales, explored dense Amazonian jungles, climbed snowy mountains, explored the countless alleys and backstreets of Tokyo, etc.

I completely get the drive to create; I have various side projects I make for fun and to learn. But I would never want to work for the rest of my life. Life is too short and the world is too big.
by yanis_t | 2025-04-24 11:19:09+00:00
Vim is great. Several years ago I noticed the lack of books focused on the development experience, e.g. how to build an IDE-like experience in the era of language servers, and wrote a book about it[1]

A sad thing is that many people still believe that Vim is something mosty outdated and it’s hard to make it as useful as VS Code. But in fact it’s pretty much the opposite. I also think that the infamous steep curve is not so steep in reality.

[1] https://yanis-t.gumroad.com/l/vim4devs
by rs186 | 2025-04-24 11:19:52+00:00
If your attitude is just "I'm not going to use abc because too many people say it's good", without even just trying that out first hand to verify those claims, I don't think you can go very far in your technical skills.

The best engineers I know are open to everything and played with almost every tool/language/whatever to form (sorry) informed opinions about them. They often know what they are talking about, and they choose the best tool for the job.
by danielpetrica | 2025-04-24 11:19:55+00:00
Thank you — that’s genuinely useful advice. You clearly have experience in this space, and I really appreciate the thoughtful insights. I’ll definitely share them with my team.

> People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.

We tried to apply some of that in the limited time we had — for instance, we avoided presenting the idea directly and focused on questions that revealed whether people had faced similar problems before.

> And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now. We're not actively seeking investment at the moment, but your point about AI in mid-size companies is very relevant — it's something we’ll keep in mind as we evolve.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-04-24 11:20:09+00:00
There IS a big difference: The USA is able to make the most advanced AI. And that is the one thing that will count.

Out of the 4 neccessary ingredients (photolithography, wafers, LLMs, energy) the USA already has LLMs and energy. And is pushing hard to bring photolithography and wafer production inhouse too.

No other country currently has a good shot at it.
by netsharc | 2025-04-24 11:20:09+00:00
But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it? ;-)

I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta serve them more of them!".

I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the app before making me do the whole process again.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-24 11:21:14+00:00
> And there are consistent talking point among the GCP sales reps about how they "help deliver you customers" and you "shouldn't fund a competitor".

I wonder how much of it is Google asking them to do that, versus quotas and incentives that make anything else untenable.

The latter is a well-known phenomenon, if your sales reps are under enough pressure, they will eventually resort to illegal tactics that make your company look bad, even if they're never explicitly told to do so.

Another way to look at this is through an evolutionary lens; the salesmen that do the right thing can't possibly perform as well as those that don't, so they're fired / never promoted. It's not that all salesmen are evil, it's that, in such an environment, only the evil ones have a chance, all without managements knowledge or approval.

HSBC is the most famous example where this happened, to the point of their bank employees knowingly assisting gangs and cartels in laundering money.
by lkuty | 2025-04-24 11:21:18+00:00
Yes, the default. That's why, although I am french speaking, I switched a few years ago from azerty to qwerty keyboard just to be using the keyboard used by the people who programmed the default in editors like vim and emacs. Otherwise it is just a PITA. Should have done that from the very beginning I was programming. With Karabiner and Goku I have been able to configure some key combinations to get accented letters like righr alt+e for é, right shift+right alt+e for è, ...
by testing22321 | 2025-04-24 11:21:28+00:00
I’m very curious about your setup and have a few questions.

If the big one hits, do you think you’ll be able to drive anywhere, or will the roads be so destroyed and traffic so bad you’ll just get gridlocked in?

Where do you plan to drive to?

Once you run out of food, water and gas what are your plans?

I’ve driven through some of the least developed and most dangerous countries on earth (DRC, Sudan, Mali, etc) in my personal vehicles and I’m always curious if people have really thought it through, or just surface level

i.e. everyone says gas vehicles are better than EVs in a disaster, because you don’t rely on the power grid. I’ve waited days in a line to buy gasoline because there was no power to pump it out of the ground.
by tmtvl | 2025-04-24 11:22:01+00:00
I used Vim for 5-ish years and I kinda got into that mindset, but on occasion I would fail to switch to insert mode (I think by not hitting the i or a key properly, but when in the flow I don't really pay attention to what my hands are doing) and stuff would go haywire. After 5 years of that happening intermittently I got really fed up with it and I started trying various alternatives.

I have been using Emacs for about 6 years now and when I fail to engage a modifier key properly all that happens is that I type some text in the active buffer. If I really manage to do a silly mistype, I can just hit C-h l to show my recent keystrokes to find out what I did.
by seydor | 2025-04-24 11:22:05+00:00
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram

Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference.

> Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage,

So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube, and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?
by d3Xt3r | 2025-04-24 11:22:33+00:00
For completeness sake, here are a couple of other decent alternatives to the FuriPhone:

1. The Volla Phone Quintus, with Ubuntu Touch: https://volla.online/de/shop/volla-phone-quintus/

2. Jolla C2 (or any other supported Xperia device), with SailfishOS: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/Jolla-community-phone
by avs733 | 2025-04-24 11:22:41+00:00
No, the two sides live in different information spheres.

This story will percolate up to many democrats who will be furious that Russia is “helping” “doge”.

Separately, it won’t (or will be dismissed as “overreacting” or “lying”) by republicans. They will see the democrats as overreacting and having trump derangement syndrome.

Meanwhile, the next doge encounter with an agency now brings greater fear of illicit acts for internal IT people and more controls for doge to demand are turned off creating more conflict within government function.

The sides believe in the evil and stupidity of the other will be further ossified. Meanwhile, Russia is effectively able to do espionage in a way where getting caught doesn’t diminish the value of the espionage work they are engaged in.
by sorenjan | 2025-04-24 11:23:27+00:00
BMW has a page describing the use of UWB (Ultra Wide Bandwidth) radio in key fobs and how it helps against relay attacks. In short it's because the wide bandwidth allows for very short pulses which lets them measure the distance between the car and the key, and using a relay will inevitably add distance and therefore time between the signal is sent and the reply is received.

https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/bmw-digital-key-plus-ultra...
by skrebbel | 2025-04-24 11:23:49+00:00
The idea of a bar (ie a place people go to get drunk) with a dedicated parking lot strikes me as particularly bad for road safety. I'm baffled that this is not only encouraged, but mandated.

How do people do this in practice? Just drink and drive and hope they don't crash / get fined? Or does everybody bring 1 friend who sips colas the whole night?
by lloeki | 2025-04-24 11:23:53+00:00
> Take, for example, writing a for loop. I might type:

> for (int

> Then, say, I pause briefly to think about the variable name. If you happened to look over my shoulder at that moment, you would find me in normal mode.

I personally wouldn't but that's only because even in the case above I think in the same way as you mentioned next:

> I just see it as a single action in normal mode that includes the key sequence "i a b c ESC".

in the sense that I will ESC only after I have instered a "semantic-ish unit", which would include the variable name.

So I'd probably enter:

i for (int foo; foo < 42; foo++) ESC :?foo nnn cw

and think there (and finalise with ESC N . N .)
by schnitzelstoat | 2025-04-24 11:23:58+00:00
Without the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum.

In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else.

The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend.

Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.
by sayamqazi | 2025-04-24 11:24:07+00:00
> The actual documentation needs to be by humans for humans.

This is true for producing the documentation but if there is an LLM that can take said documentation and answer questions about it is a great tool. I think I get the answer far quicker with LLM than sifting through documentation when looking for existence of a function in a library or a property on an object.
by chongli | 2025-04-24 11:24:13+00:00
Yes, vim is not intuitive. It doesn’t teach itself to you. It takes hard work. I bought the O’Reilly vi/vim book [1] and read it cover to cover. I practiced a lot of things and was very deliberate about it.

To me, learning vim is like learning a musical instrument. You’re not going to get there without committing to it. For many people that’s just not going to happen: they have neither the time nor the inclination/energy to do it. That’s totally fine! There are loads of other tools for people to use and they get by just fine without vim!

I think my main complaint is that there aren’t a few more tools like vim. Almost all software is designed for people to be able to pick up casually and be able to get work done at a passable level of productivity without ever reaching mastery and flow state. Tools like that (easy to use but with no real incentive for mastery) are deeply unsatisfying to me for a lot of reasons.

I guess what I’m saying here is really just a restatement of “Worse is better” [2].

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-vi/1565924...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
by einpoklum | 2025-04-24 11:24:24+00:00
> "how to make STL implementation less embarassing".

The "STL" part of the standard library - containers especially but not just that - has an outdated interface, and suffers from ABI being stuck:

https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/

so it's embarrassing regardless.

> there still is no language support for e.g. debugging constexpr, or printing internal private state of objects in 3rd party code.

Actually, reflection might make it easier to do that. Supposedly, you should be able to get a member pointer to the private member you're interested in (or even do it dynamically by iterating over all members, and figuring out which one you like), from that and an actual object obtain a regular pointer, and finally dereference it.
by clbrmbr | 2025-04-24 11:24:34+00:00
I have actually had some really great flow evenings lately, the likes of which I have not enjoyed in many years, precisely because of AI-assisted coding. The trick is to break the task down in to components that are of moderate complexity so that the AI can handle them (Gemini 2.5 Pro one-shots), and keep your mind on the high-level design which today's AI cannot coordinate.

What helps me is to think of it like I'm a kid again, learning to code full of ideas but without any pre-conceived notions. Rather than the Microsoft QuickBasic manual in my hands, I've got Gemini & Claude Code. I would be gleefully coding up a storm of games, websites, dubious webcrawlers, robots, and lord knows what else. Plenty of flow to be had.
by lysp | 2025-04-24 11:25:14+00:00
> I agree with the script kiddies comment- which is basically what the reporting has shown... but in a way isn't that part of the point?

I agree, but for a different point.

Generalising, but under the age of 25, most people don't have enough experience (business/government) to understand things such as business ethics, the consequences, auditing practises, privacy concerns, etc.

With professional experience, you develop a better understanding and build up that depth of knowledge of how things impact the wider "world" rather than the immediate task at hand. Meaning, you gain a better understanding of the ethical implications of what you're doing.

As an example - in law, it'd be easier to manipulate a law graduate than a lawyer with 20+ years experience, who would think outside the direct question or task that was asked.
by Macha | 2025-04-24 11:25:29+00:00
I've been experimenting with Helix in the last month.

One thing that's slightly frustrating is the key binds are running interference in my brain with the vim keybinds. Especially the x/d swap. It might be because I still use vim keybindings in other programs, but I find I'm now also worse at vim than I was before I started helix.

The discoverability is definitely a big nice feature, I definitely use more e.g. tree-sitter motions because I can actually remember them unlike in my plugins in nvim.
by bspammer | 2025-04-24 11:25:38+00:00
Yes people who talk about vim being more efficient, are in my opinion, misguided. For me it's very little to do with efficiency, and much more to do with creating a more pleasant experience writing text, especially text with an exploitable structure (code).

I really enjoy precision, and that's what vim provides. It's the same reason I'd much rather play an FPS video game with a mouse and keyboard, than an analog control stick. And the same reason I hate doing anything important on a touch screen.
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-24 11:26:32+00:00
Systemically, there is a bias to find/retain employees that overcommit, and a bias for employers that will undercommit to the "relationship".

Rationally you can agree it is a purely transactional state. Working hours for compensation. Emotionally in tech many love the work itself, or the nerdy glamour of the industry, or the inherent intelectual bravadory and oneupmanship, and so are ripe for exploitation.

HR will draw you in, infecting your social life with company perks, values and "we are a family" messaging only to turn all process when it comes to an end.

But as the systemics are clear, each new generation will get drawn in. And tbh, often it can still be a good deal.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-24 11:26:33+00:00
This individualistic attitude is how we got to our current situation, and why we are perpetually stuck here. Everyone in any position of corporate power is a psychopath, because the system will replace them if they are not. Every purchase you make has the downstream effect of encouraging whoever you bought it from to continue doing what they are doing. And, what everyone is doing is "throwing everything possible (morally, ethically, and legally) under the bus to grow profits." Individuals don't get to dodge culpability just because we are only indirectly funding all this bad behavior.

Absent government will (which has been the reality for decades), we have no way of stopping this bad behavior than to stop funding it. But since nearly every company is engaging in bad behavior, "stop funding it" means becoming a hermit and not buying anything, which is also not feasible for enough people.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-24 11:26:34+00:00
The markets in particular, though, were willing to suspend disbelief far longer than most, with pricing early this year reflecting a future in which Trump simply didn't any of the stuff he had explicitly said he would on trade. They are still suspending some disbelief; current pricing does not reflect a view of the future in which Trump's tariffs hang around for long.

The markets in general have a bit of a 'nothing ever happens' bias; their response to the US president doing really weird insane stuff is, still, largely to go "oh, well, it'll probably all be undone next week", and in fairness he _does_ seem cowed by the (so far moderate) market response, and it has caused him to blink a few times.
by rs186 | 2025-04-24 11:28:30+00:00
Not true.

Many times, if I want to go from arbitrary point A to point B in NYC within 30 minutes due to time constraints, the only choice is taxi/Lyft/Uber. Subway/bus combined with walking easily take 1 hour.

Or when it's very late in the evening.

Of course, we are talking about NYC, which means that you can arrive at your destination, eventually. That doesn't mean you want to do that in many situations.
by detaro | 2025-04-24 11:28:39+00:00
Nothing "ostensible" about PC being an open platform.

Any PC will run any number of game stores. Steam is large despite not being the one owned by the platform maker and installed by default (Microsoft Store and the XBox app).

Steam does not prevent publishers from selling in other stores too, nor does it enforce pricing outside its store. (E.g. there are games that are cheaper on other stores, citing Steams larger cut as the reason)

It also allows publishers to force users to install the publishers store to play games sold on Steam. (See e.g. Ubisofts launcher, being required to install games and selling you additional subscriptions without a cut to Steam)

To a limited degree Steam even lets publishers use Steam infrastructure for sales outside Steam, for free. (Publishers can sell Steam keys for free on other platforms, but the number is limited and here pricing has to roughly match Steam pricing)

Even on Steam Deck, the only PC hardware where Steam is actually the preinstalled default store, running games from other stores is supported and the main inconvenience to it is that most stores don't have a supported version for it and you need to use third-party workarounds.

Being an open platform doesn't ensure a market doesn't have other weirdness going on (in this case, there being a strong consumer preference towards Steam, certainly in part due to Steams existing large position, but not only), but its a different thing and most of the usual competition law approaches don't apply. Steam is popular because Steam is popular, not because Steam is using its strong position in another business to push its app store business.
by piva00 | 2025-04-24 11:28:55+00:00
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.

Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.

To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
by bognition | 2025-04-24 11:29:11+00:00
Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well.

It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically.

The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.
by andraaspar | 2025-04-24 11:29:18+00:00
Solid has a different take (from React) on how to tackle application state. I love this. It is refreshingly simple. (Look ma, no keys! Deep state! No reducer!)

Yet, it is unpolished. It commandeers not only the `use`, but also the `create` prefix for no apparent reason. (We understand it works differently from React, but still... this just adds friction when porting.)

The community is unhelpful. Questions go unanswered. The docs are lacking. Dev tools are alpha / unusable. Every update happens in sync, so you get odd errors that React devs are not familiar with. Some parts of the API must be avoided, but you have to learn this the hard way: Suspense (don't ever introduce this and you'll be fine), createUniqueId (not very unique, not configurable), SolidStart routing (occasionally very slow, no workaround, no support).

Expect rough edges. Not a good fit for all teams. For a small team of experienced devs it can be a great DX improvement though.