MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-05-11 01:28:27+00:00
I disagree. Curing and preventing disease brings in a pretty large paycheck for drug companies. Semaglutide is extremely effective and has made nordisk billions.

Curing cancers also will remain a particularly lucrative trade. Particularly because cancer is a million different diseases which everyone gets if they live long enough.

There is never just one person that gets a disease.

That said, it's definitely true that pharma will never spend research dollars to see if a disease can be treated with a generic drug. Universities and the NIH can and do.
by brookst | 2025-05-11 01:28:50+00:00
This is an incredibly hyperbolic take.

Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.

It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.

From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-11 01:29:50+00:00
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who completely misunderstand the value of friction, and those who depend on friction too heavily; GP clearly falls into the former group.

This feature provides value because it increases friction. It won't stop really determined and motivated users from leaking, but it'll make leaks, especially accidental leaks / those due to hacks, a lot less common.

The same applies to DRM, "security by obscurity", social media post editing / deletion, dark patterns, loss leaders, promotions and coupons, the list is endless.

If your user is a perfectly rational being with infinite time and infinite tech savviness, the proverbial "spherical cow", those features make 0 sense. Just like spherical cows, though, those users don't actually exist, and so friction matters.

That doesn't mean friction is infinite, though. It's too easy to overestimate it and fall into the trap of thinking that "users won't bother doing this, it doesn't matter if this combination of actions loses us money, it's too bothersome", and then get very surprised very quickly.
by aaplok | 2025-05-11 01:30:15+00:00
That Linux is less accessible than windows or MacOS may be true (I personally agree with you about windows, less so about macOS), but if an argument is not acceptable about windows, it can't be accepted about Linux either. If both OSs seem to suffer from difficult-to-fix issues when turning monitors on and off, that can't be the reason why Windows is more non-tech friendly.

I think that this is the bulk of the argument here.
by josephg | 2025-05-11 01:30:52+00:00
One of the best rules I ever heard of was told to me by a cop here in Australia. She told me every time they unholster their firearm, they have to fill out about 3 pages of paperwork. I think that’s so genius.

Think about it - if you’re in a life or death situation, you won’t hesitate. Your gun is right there, and it’s there so you can use it. But if the situation doesn’t feel dangerous, the image of having to fill out 3 pages of paperwork justifying your actions is enough to make you hesitate. It’s weaponised bureaucracy. It’s like - there’s an ideal amount of friction for some actions to have. Pulling your gun out should have some friction to it. The choice should have weight.

I see this in just the same way. If the presenter doesn’t want their presentation recorded, there should be some friction to recording it anyway. It shouldn’t be impossible to record. But it shouldn’t be as easy as just taking a screenshot in windows.

Just like that cop with a gun, there should be the right amount of friction for recording a meeting against the wishes of the presenter. How many pages did the cop have to fill out? 3 pages. Not zero. Not 100 pages. How hard is it to record a meeting despite this protection? It’s doable - you need an hdmi capture card, or a camera out of shot, or something else. You probably need to set it all up before the meeting. And so on. It’s not impossible. But it’s not trivial either. That sounds just right to me.
by another_poster | 2025-05-11 01:31:08+00:00
I used to have similar concerns as you — how can anyone truly know what other people are like? Unless we’re doing research with the scientific method, we can only speculate unscientifically, right? Without science, what we say is just our belief, not established fact.

But how do you explain people who intuitively understand things? Mathematicians, for example, intuitively understand math. Psychologists and experienced authors intuitively understand people. We gain intuition through education and experience, which in turn improve our understanding and sensitivity towards the truth. Expert mathematicians, for example, _can_ have a good sense of whether a theorem is true before they prove it. And in general, people who possess scientific knowledge can intuitively know things.

I do agree with your intent, though — we need to possess humility about the accuracy of our beliefs. The author can’t factually know what other people feel and think without asking them.

But we also owe some deference to wisdom. Being wise is like being an expert darts players: you’re better able to throw darts into the bulls-eye than most people. If we develop a wisdom worth trusting, we should trust it.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-11 01:32:15+00:00
I suggest you explore alternatives and their usability compared to whatever Google offers. For example Google Docs word processing part is astonishingly bad. Gmail really sucks for when you have a lot of e-mail and also has a high chance of locking you out at some point, which can be really bad,if you relied on it too much. YouTube? Ahaaahhaaha! Rarely used anything that is so annoying to use and so extremely bloated and buggy. They are the prime example btw. for the back button no longer working.

People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.
by actinium226 | 2025-05-11 01:32:17+00:00
I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available?

Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.

And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.

And don't even get me started on gmail!
by jdietrich | 2025-05-11 01:32:24+00:00
"Psychologist" is not a protected title and anyone can use it. "Clinical psychologist" is a protected title, and one that requires an extremely high level of training and very strict professional standards. I imagine that the overwhelming majority of the population are completely oblivious to this distinction.

The BACP's standards really aren't very high, as you can qualify for membership after a one-year part-time course and a few weeks of work experience. Their disciplinary procedures are, in my opinion, almost entirely ineffectual. They undertake no meaningful monitoring of accredited members, relying solely on complaints from members of the public. Out of tens of thousands of registered members, only a single-digit number are subject to disciplinary action every year. The findings of the few disciplinary hearings they do actually conduct suggest to me that they are perfectly happy to allow lazy, feckless and incompetent practitioners to remain on their register, with only a perfunctory slap on the wrist.

BACP membership is of course entirely voluntary and in no way necessary in order to practice as a counsellor or psychotherapist.

https://www.hcpc-uk.org/news-and-events/blog/2023/understand...

https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-us/protecting-the-public/profes...
by throwaway519 | 2025-05-11 01:32:55+00:00
Teams.

Chat is not chat. Office Communicator and Skype for Business were chat apps. Teams is not. Not on desktop and doubly not on mobile.

Collaborative sites. SharePoint was a collaborative workspace. Teams' schizophrenic frankenstein of uninteroperable 'apps' from 'Lists' unaware of members of a Team to 3rd party *ware that has regressed in function, collaboration and interoperability from SharePoint so much a two decade old install of Joomla does a better job, is not.
by throwanem | 2025-05-11 01:33:54+00:00
By "jellybean" I meant the sort of small signal diodes one might use to prevent aliasing in a keyboard matrix. I know where I'd have gone to get those in my twenties, but not really how I'd have afforded that many for one project, even at the (very) small discount they might have given me on an order of that size.

Unfortunately, now that I've finally reached a point of being able to really effectively use such a resource as that store, in its place now stands a Sonic drive-in. So it goes.
by cgio | 2025-05-11 01:34:25+00:00
It is at best reading a humanistic call, no spiritual content at all. I wonder how the reference to Nature works as an argument for the law of the strongest essentially but not e.g. for homosexuality. Why is the argument that we have to be better than our nature not applicable in the context of economics? These are the things that would give depth to a position. I am as reductionist as he himself when he argues with the straw man of “socialists are coming to take your houses”. We all see in the Western world who came for our houses after all. I would dedicate more time to a position that is substantial even if not agreeable. Full disclosure, I am a believer, one though who has also seen socialist economic structures applied in practice in monasteries. This is not a spiritual position I am reading, it is a second class political manifesto with Latin dressage for impressionability.
by Rochus | 2025-05-11 01:34:48+00:00
I don't think the term "asynchronous" adequately covers the situation. Even asynchronous messages are sent to specific objects in OO. In biological systems, senders and receivers do not know each other, or are not even aware of each other's existence. A model from computer science that corresponds better to biological systems is that of the untyped queue. But in biology, information is encoded not only in the type, but e.g. also in concentration of molecules; there is also no message order, but communication is subject to stochastic processes.
by bloaf | 2025-05-11 01:35:23+00:00
I did elaborate, in that very post.

I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.

(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)
by OJFord | 2025-05-11 01:35:46+00:00
I don't think so, because it's a description of a system which does work.

But it's more like an HTTP API, writing or requesting some data, getting a response, doing something else with that, etc. - whereas typically with stdin/stdout you're doing something more like `generate-data | transform | transform2 | store`, manipulating an initial input, not decision-making and providing more input based on the output of early input. Not to say you can't, but it does seem a bit weird to me too.

(To be fair I suppose a shell is an obvious counter-example. Or anything that launches an interactive prompt or interpreter.)
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-11 01:36:14+00:00
> the contents of the picture definitely existed

No it didn't, according to the article, 3 year olds weren't chimney sweeps and the tools the child carries are not the appropriate size.

It is as much as a reenactment as a kid in a cow-boy costume today. Having a kid dress up like their daddy at work is cute, and I am sure that that's how people saw it.

But a long time have passed, and it is easy to imagine people of the past as some kind of barbarians. Sure, they did some things that are unacceptable now, but we are missing a lot of nuance.
by josephg | 2025-05-11 01:37:07+00:00
I’ve worked there. They certainly aren’t all geniuses. But there are a huge number of brilliant engineers there - many of whom spend their lives schleping protobufs around for a fat paycheck.

It’s not the whiteboard interviews that makes that possible. It’s the prestige (especially from a few years ago), job security and salary. And the opportunity to work with other smart people. Google has an excellent talent pool.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-05-11 01:37:09+00:00
Oh that’s interesting.

With mailbox.org I am in complete darkness if some mail was dropped after or before my mail client and mailbox.org support is well mailbox.org support. So I don’t really know what happened.

So if an email was dropped even from spam - there’s some log display interface for my account where I can see all this?

Or if something I was sending was dropped — I can see that as well in there? (Assuming neither were shown as a failure email in my mailbox)
by neilv | 2025-05-11 01:38:16+00:00
Do you think you might've been able to find a sincere, non-manipulative way of doing it?

For example, if you could quickly intuit whether and how much the person naturally would want and be able to donate, and you connect with them on the basis of that, and they might or might not pick up on that themselves, but no mind tricks of either of you?

One appealing thing about this is that it's using some of the strongest potential for manipulation, to try to avoid manipulating.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-11 01:38:29+00:00
> This encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is unnatural

It...does not. It follows the basic structure:

1. There's a problem with the present condition under industrial capitalism 2. Socialism is the wrong solution. (There are lots of problems with this part, including that it makes the very common error of misinterpreting the socialist opposition to private property—ownership of the non-financial means of production separated from the workers whose labor is applied to those means of production—as an opposition to individual human property generally; the latter may be a feature of some schools of socialism but is not a general feature of socialism.) 3. Laying out what Leo XIII saw as the Catholic solution.

The first part takes 3 paragraphs. (1-3) The second part takes 17 paragraphs. (4-20) The third part takes 43 paragraphs. (21-63)

It is simply wrong to take the second section is the main focus, and it is equally incorrect to describe the solution taking up the vast majority of the document as nothing more than "let the rich get richer, let's just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church."
by LadyCailin | 2025-05-11 01:38:32+00:00
This got me down a rabbit hole. ICANN has a form where you can report a name collision, and if it causes harm to life, they apparently will take action to remove an entry from DNS. I wonder if this has ever been exercised, and if so, I would be curious to hear the story.

> ICANN will initiate an emergency response for name collision reports only where there is a reasonable belief that the name collision presents a clear and present danger to human life.
by dangus | 2025-05-11 01:38:35+00:00
I’m glad Peter Thiel was brought up because he keeps coming up as this Bond villain type of dude when really he was just lucky twice with investments in PayPal and Facebook.

After those payouts plus a bunch of time in the markets, a huge chunk of his net worth is basically just those two jackpots plus not a whole lot more gains than throwing the proceeds into some index funds, maybe just something more aggressive than that because he got to work with enough money where it can be risked more than the average person’s 401k.

My submission to the world is that Peter Thiel is a really average dude in terms of talent and Palantir is more like a boring government contractor with mediocre but specialized software versus the Bond villain spy agency we all take it to be.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 01:38:57+00:00
> the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man

No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties. It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons.

> as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect

I didn't realize the members and minds of the Catholic Church were so united in motive!

> anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created)

Come on, you know the Catholic Church has never taught this.

> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding--

He's one Catholic theologian, even if eminent, out of hundreds who are just as eminent. Why single him out? Where does the Bible say Aquinas is infallible? What a strange strawman.
by zahlman | 2025-05-11 01:39:26+00:00
Indeed says that therapists in Toronto, Canada make about CAD $55/hour. That's not FAANG level nor what you'd expect for an MD, but it's not what I'd call low, either.

That said, I certainly don't see therapists as profiteering, in the sense of trying to convince people to pay for therapy they don't need. They might plausibly feel threatened by AI, but they'd absolutely be justified in calling out examples like those in TFA.
by aristofun | 2025-05-11 01:39:57+00:00
Whatsapp.

Overpromise, underdelivery.

Virtually every major function was broken at least once for me. Poor featerset, annoying and dumb ui. One of those app like skype before - you keep it only because of your grandma and few other important contacts who don’t know any better.

It is much worse than for instance pigeon mail. Because your expectations from pigeon mail more or less align with reality. And you expect from a 21st century software some basic things like cross device synchronization or at least reliable messsge and status drlivery, but it fails you, sonetimes in most important moments of your life.

The only feature they implemented well is video calls. It feels like it was implemented by some other (10x better) team than the rest of the app.
by sweetjuly | 2025-05-11 01:40:28+00:00
The existence of a similar contradictory example does not disprove the original point. It's okay to be suspicious and cynical, but nuance is still important.

Assuming that anyone who has anything to gain by you believing them is out to get you is rash and leads you only to those who are more willing to lie about their motivations. Yes, doctors and Big Pharma (tm) are financially motivated to sell you cures, but the guy selling you a juice cleanse ""at cost"" for your cancer is still not trustworthy.
by z0r | 2025-05-11 01:41:02+00:00
I visited a relative last summer and tried on their Meta Quest 3 headset, the first time I ever tried a modern VR headset. I was blown away by the interface overlaying my vision. I tried a VR minigolf game (Walkabout mini golf? I'm not certain) and was amazed by how immersive it was.

Your comment has prompted my response because it reminded me that I thought Shazam was great too, and it made me think of what more recent incredible technological experiences I've had. I don't know if you've tried on a VR (or more accurately AR) headset recently but the engineering is really something.
by acroyear | 2025-05-11 01:41:10+00:00
shedding ppl in the USA, yes. bringing on hordes of cheap engineers from India and Malaysia at the same time though. labor arbitrage was probably MBA-think as well, to your point. (also, Intel was sued along with other big wheels for collusion, i.e. agreeing not to hire from one another in the US to keep salaries down - they settled this class action suit). managed demolition of a once great company.
by natmaka | 2025-05-11 01:41:26+00:00
> I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen

Fair point, same here (I was born in 1967), however fossil fuels are so effective and adequate as energy sources, as long as we ignored/neglected their dubious effect on the climate, that there was no real attempt to explore other ways.

> Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult

For the "gridpower backup" application there is no transport needed, and storage doesn't have to be compact nor mobile (those are a major challenge for hydrogen in transportation).

> dreadful energy density

This is not a show-stopper for the "gridpower backup" application. For huge volumes or very long-term (not sure this will be necessary) it may be stored in salt caverns ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Underground_h... )

> potent green house gas effects > dangerous

Granted, however we are used to store huge volumes of dangerous materials, some gaseous at ambiant pressure/temp (methane...), even into salt caverns, albeit when we began to do so (in the 1950's) it was quite a challenge.

> Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal

Various new ways to obtain H2 from electricity offer impressive yield in realistic conditions (check SOECs), and other advances are promising ( https://liten.cea.fr/cea-tech/liten/english/Pages/Strategic-... ).

> green methane makes a lot more sense

As does ammonia, in some contexts. There is no one-size-fits-all here!
by antihipocrat | 2025-05-11 01:42:02+00:00
Once the MBAs take over there is less incentive provided to staff to innovate and disrupt internal products and services.

The innovators in the company are likely correlated with doing more than 9-5. These people get frustrated that their ideas no longer get traction and leave the company.

Eventually what's left are the people happy to just deliver what their told without much extra thought. These people are probably more likely to just clock in the hours. Any remaining innovators now have another reason to become even more frustrated and leave.
by grapesodaaaaa | 2025-05-11 01:42:21+00:00
100% this. If I have something juicy I want to show my wife about how they’re messing up our 401k’s, etc. I take a phone picture so that there’s no record of it happening on the official device.

Microsoft doing this is a huge waste of time other than catching the bottom 5% of people doing something like that.

I just want to add that my company has our stuff so locked down, that it’s easier for me to take a phone pic, transcribe the code with ChatGPT, fix the issue on my personal machine, then type it back into the work laptop for some issues. It’s absurd how businesses want to control everything to such a degree that 1) there are now these crazy, leaky workarounds, and 2) it’s to the detriment of people actually getting stuff done for the business.
by skissane | 2025-05-11 01:42:22+00:00
Why does yoyoland need to use libc’s memcpy? Can’t you just use __builtin_memcpy?

On Linux, if all you need is syscalls, you can just write your own syscall wrapper-like Go does.

Doesn’t work on some other operating systems (e.g. Solaris/Illumos, OpenBSD, macOS, Windows) where the system call interface is private to the system shared libraries