MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Why are scheduling tools still so frustrating?
by chetansorted | 2025-05-12 04:28:10+00:00
I've tried pretty much every scheduling app out there — Calendly, SavvyCal, you name it. They're great until you want something simple and client-friendly and designed around how actual freelancers work (like needing paid sessions, multiple meeting types, or booking without making people feel like they're filling out a form).

The tools either try to do too much or assume you're part of a big team. I’ve even started collecting examples of use-case-specific booking pages (for coaches, tutors, consultants, pet sitters, etc.) that actually convert.

Curious:

What are you using if you run solo or with a tiny team? Have you found any tools that don’t feel like overkill? Anyone here built a scheduling tool or integrated Stripe for bookings?
by rashunain | 2025-05-12 04:28:15+00:00
Daily current affairs updates are available in English, including news headlines, GK questions, and answers. Overall, the Current Affairs 12 May 2025 covers a range of topics, including national and international news, sports, education, and daily current affairs quizzes. It is essential to stay updated with the latest news and developments to remain informed and prepared for competitive exams and other challenges.
by ploxiln | 2025-05-12 04:28:39+00:00
Well, consider, you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't.

I'm not blaming you, I initially thought a VW ID.4 was a cool option. It just wasn't clear to the marketplace how bad the software was, and it's easy to assume "it's fine, I don't need fancy stuff" until you live with it and see how fundamentally bad the software is. How is the market to know? If it takes a couple years to figure it out, it makes sense for the hardware company managers to just make the hardware specs at the competitive price, and software is ... just whatever needed to get it out the door.

I worked for a few years at a sub-division of Samsung, and I've thought for a while about why "hardware" companies can be so bad at "software" ... in many cases, it's just that the leadership chain doesn't know what good software is and who is good at it. Managers don't really know what a good programmer is or does. Division heads don't know what managers are good at managing software teams and projects. And so on.

So at some point 2 years after the car is released, the CTO drives it and realizes that the software systems are fundamentally crap and can't be fixed, and it was not close or in-progress or anything, but he should have realized it 3+ years ago if he had good software sense, long before the car was released. And that's what happened with the VW ID.4
by poincaredisk | 2025-05-12 04:28:50+00:00
>But this has been the norm for a while, no? I can't remember the last time I didn't utilize credit at a restaurant or retail store.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I want to highlight that this is US specific. I'm in Europe, in my 30s and I never owned a credit card. The same goes for all my friends. Even ones who had to get a credit card for a trip to US, or got one from their bank without asking, don't use them.
by cma | 2025-05-12 04:28:54+00:00
I have a feeling iPod's popularity had more tondo with buying up exclusive access to mini harddrives than the industrial design. Same harddrive maker deals extended to the smaller drives on the iPod mini. iPhone typically gets exclusive access to TSMC's latest nodes a year ahead of competitors. Same with airpods, getting the power draw to that level about a year before most others using their exclusive access to a TSMC node.

Having a big enough brand that buying out exclusive access to new tech isn't a huge risk is key, though they probably got the iPod HD exclusivity very cheap and weren't so big then. Then having the exclusive access builds on the quality and mystique of the brand and makes it less risky to buy in again on the next wave of exclusivity.
by bbkane | 2025-05-12 04:34:54+00:00
In fact, I've gone the opposite way- my work has an internal cafe with a menu website that takes a lot of clicks to see everything.

I originally planned to scrape the data and make my own website with better (imo) controls, but v0 turned into pumping the data into a Google sheet.

I've never needed v1. The Google sheets "UI" solves filtering (i.e., breakfast vs lunch), access control, and basic analytics (~7 other colleagues also use this daily).
by seszett | 2025-05-12 04:35:07+00:00
Why did you think you'd "never again" use anything like Android Auto?

My own car is too old for Android Auto, but I sometimes drive a car that's from 2017 or so, and Android Auto works just fine on it, it's a pleasure to use (with the caveat that the phone has to be plugged in the USB port, wireless came later). So to me it seems like it always worked well.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-05-12 04:36:16+00:00
GenAI absolutely brings something new to the table! These models should be perceived as human-like intelligence when it's time to bring value to shareholders, but are designed to provide just enough non-determinism to avoid responsibilities.

All problems are human and nothing will ever change that. Just imagine the effects anyone is facing when being affected by something like the British Post Office scandal[0], only this time it's impossible to comprehend any faults in the software system.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
by nurettin | 2025-05-12 04:36:55+00:00
LLMs emulate language by following intricate links between tokens. This is not meant to emulate memory or imagination, just transforming a list of tokens into another list of tokens, generating language. And language is a huge part of the intelligence puzzle so it looks smart to people despite being quite mechanical.

A next step could be to create a mind, with a piece that works similar to the paretial lobe to give it a sense of self or temporal existence.
by Swizec | 2025-05-12 04:37:11+00:00
> To me that reeks of badly structured code, with bad abstraction layers, perhaps stuffing too much stuff into a single module or, if the language is still backward and doesn't have modules, a file

Yes and that’s normal. Big ball of mud is the worlds most popular software architecture.

Original: http://www.laputan.org/mud/

My modern take based on the original: https://swizec.com/blog/big-ball-of-mud-the-worlds-most-popu...

> Well ... put it in "menu.js". Will it affect 50 other pages? No, it will affect the menu

MVC frameworks, used traditionally, don’t support this super well. If you want some dynamic value in the menu supplied by the backend, every view has to make sure it passes that value into the template layer. Change the menu, gotta go around changing every view to supply that new value.
by babyent | 2025-05-12 04:37:21+00:00
Well there you go. Sharing it makes it simpler but also not very ideal unless you’re a really young person or single and don’t mind sharing.

I have cats so I need my own place and they need their own spaces :3

Getting rid of the car has been an awesome change though.

I’m so cheap now it’s crazy. Only spend money on food and cat stuff haha.
by wlesieutre | 2025-05-12 04:38:37+00:00
Halfway through reading this comment I was thinking “Yup that’s why I like my Mazda3.”

Fingers crossed that they can keep it up with an EV transition. In the MX-30 they did an HVAC touchscreen, but perhaps the years long gap between that and their next EV will be an opportunity to reflect on how stupid that was. (Ignoring Chinese joint ventures that just use someone else’s platform)
by strogonoff | 2025-05-12 04:39:12+00:00
From my understanding, Paper and the like are good for Minecraft servers focused around specific mini-games (rather than freedorm building), and are the only sensible choice for servers with many people (or not that many people, but really underpowered hardware).

However, they may be a problem if players are sensitive to possible non-vanilla behaviour (as you mentioned, and it’s not limited to cheaty duping). Thankfully, spinning up a server with a selection of performance mods is very easy these days. Various tricks like pre-generating chunks in advance also help.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-12 04:40:34+00:00
I thought the strategy of skimming titles, mocking them, and then pretending that makes the political killing of research that has been approved by actual scientific bodies through a highly competitive process was discredited and thrown to the bin when it turned out Ozempic was dependent on one of these studies an earlier elected numbnut had publicly mocked in Congress.

I guess I was wrong.

But let’s ignore the idea that random commenter or random politico has a deeper understanding of what makes good research than the highly effective bodies with experts setup to do this. Let’s click the link for the study you actually complained about.

So here’s the first thing I see.

Start Date: Sep 1, 2019 End Date: Aug 31, 2025 Termination Date: May 9, 2025

Assuming equal outlays, you’re saving 4/60 * 2.8mm, so less than about $200k. Well, I guess 200k is a tiny fraction of $2.8mm but I guess that’s still a saving.

Oh wait, what’s this…there’s a link to USASpending.gov which is an official govt site that shows the actual outlays. Thats cool! And I can use the grant ID to see exactly what was done here. Nice!

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_1906595_4900

Oh, so that’s weird. Why does this show an end date of:

Aug 31, 2024!

That was last year!

I’m sure that was a mistake in the official website and the propaganda tool you linked to that supposedly gets its data from here somehow magically corrected that info, so let’s not be hasty and assume they made a chump of you by outright lying to you.

But what’s this. It gives actual amounts.

> Outlayed Amount $1,795,710.00 Obligated Amount $2,821,709.00

Oh, so it’s not $2.8mm in savings. It’s about $1mm in savings.

But what’s this…we can see the actual transactions.

Of the 4 outlays, the last outlay was made in Aug 2022, and there were no outlays in 2023 or 2024 despite the grant schedule showing all the $2.8mm should have been given out by Aug 2022.

It’s almost like the research, which completed in Aug 2024, didn’t need the entire $2.8mm that was allocated to it, and being legitimate researchers rather than liars and charlatans, only took the money they needed and left the $1mm for the government to use elsewhere.

Looks like the liars and charlatans are the people who created that table to make it look like they saved $2.8mm when in reality they saved $0, and the researches or this study you criticize actually saved the govt $1mm.

There’s no easier chump than someone who wants to be a chump.
by babyent | 2025-05-12 04:40:37+00:00
Wasn’t that my point? Innovation is mostly dead there, and it makes sense why people who want to build feel like they need to leave.

Innovation is alive and thriving outside of FANG. And honestly after my experience I don’t get why anyone would work there.

Join a series A-C unicorn track startup and stay like 5 years til IPO. Your vested shares will 10-30x and gg.
by viraptor | 2025-05-12 04:40:37+00:00
> this is not important research

Why do you think so? Have you read the details? Do you think that collaboration on creating science museums and similar experiences that target kids from specific areas/culture are not important? Or you think that $2.8M (which is basically a few months of funds for the team of 7 in this project) does not convert into higher economic growth down the line from more STEM engagement? Or some other reason?

So far the downvotes were quick, but elaborations on the topic not so much...
by walterbell | 2025-05-12 04:40:51+00:00
(reposting dead comment from Zoethink, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959658)

This piece beautifully reframes friction not as a nuisance to be eliminated, but as a signal—of value, of effort, of systemic health. What strikes me most is the inversion: friction has not disappeared; it’s just been redistributed—offscreen, outsourced, or monetized. In the digital realm, we’re nudged, streamlined, simulated. In the physical world, friction accumulates in deferred maintenance and human fatigue. In curated spaces, it becomes something you pay to suppress. Maybe the real question isn't how much friction exists, but who bears it—and what happens when we forget it's still there.
by raziel2701 | 2025-05-12 04:41:01+00:00
I was a post doc and applied to an LDRD. It's not a free for all, they, the institution, already knows what topics want to fund and you write your proposal to cater to that. Very similar to tacking "AI" to your pitch these days.

It's an illusion that no-strings-attached funding exists. The government has an agenda and you're free to research anything you want, as long as it is one of the pre-determined topics. It's a very political process.
by WilliamCranna | 2025-05-12 04:41:02+00:00
You're right I have no coding skill. But testing out Lovable and bringing my idea to reality made me realize this is something I want to learn so I've already began taking a course learning how to code softwares of my own.

People should't be "scared" of these LLM's it's just a tool that shows coding to a wider audience.
by addaon | 2025-05-12 04:41:09+00:00
Reddit has about 500 million users. That's about 7500 million non-users, or 850 million English-speaking non-users. (Assuming all reddit users are english-speaking? Don't know if the site supports other languages.) Just looking at those numbers, I'm confident there's plenty of other people like me who looked at the site once or twice, found it unpleasant to use and with a low level of discourse, and never bothered actively going back; and these days stumbling upon it in web search is indeed actively unpleasant because of performance and UI issues.
by babyent | 2025-05-12 04:42:22+00:00
I have a lot of friends who went to elite schools (top 5-10 in the world) for CS and some of them have gotten PIP’d or laid off.

It’s not that hard to do well academically. Especially for kumon types.

There’s builder types (rare af) and there’s worker types (plenty aka literally everyone else).

And getting into tech isn’t hard. A principal staff or something like that? Impressive. Senior or staff is not that impressive anymore. Personally I prefer to work with people way, way smarter than me.

I’ve worked with ex-FANG people and they’re robots. They came in after IPO and made me quit lol.
by pseudony | 2025-05-12 04:43:18+00:00
The thing about not having loads of syntax is that at some point, there is not much to do aside from polishing.

I don't know why it would feel comforting to people that languages like python/c++/rust keep piling on syntax and features like the people in Rammstein's keine lust, who keep stuffing themselves in spite of their grotesque size.

Haven't looked at jank, but given it looks like lisp, it would be the same thing. No news is actually good news in some cases
by nine_k | 2025-05-12 04:43:43+00:00
Art is materially different from science and technology. Great art is known to emerge from limitations. Art is full of limitations that are self-imposed for that purpose, like the meter and rhyme in poetry, geometry and color in painting, etc. Art is primarily about processing and evoking emotions.

Science requires much more concentration on abstract thinking, loading a much larger context, if you will. It's counterproductive to do it while busy with something else. It overworks you all right, and it demands much more rigor than art.

All revolutionary new technology is initially inefficient, and requires spending a lot of time and money on finding efficient solutions. First electronic computers were terribly unwieldy, expensive, and unreliable. This equally applies to first printing presses, first steam engines, first aircraft, first jet engines, first lasers, first LLMs (arguably still applies). It's really hard to advance technology without spending large amounts of resources without any profit, or a guarantee thereof, for years and years. This requires a large cache of such resources, prepared to be burnt on R&D.

It's investment into far future vs predictable present, VC vs day trading.
by jedbrown | 2025-05-12 04:44:41+00:00
The colloquial definitions have always been more cultural than technical, but it's become more acute recently.

> I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai
by FlyingSnake | 2025-05-12 04:44:53+00:00
> Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher and poet from Gadara whose ethical teachings emphasise the pursuit of pleasure as central to a good life. He argued against rigid logic and formal rhetoric, believing that philosophy should serve practical human happiness rather than abstract intellectual debate.

As a layman admirer of Epicurean thought, I’m so glad that even after so many wars, destruction and tragedy over the centuries, such wonderful works have survived.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-12 04:45:52+00:00
Median household income is household income, not personal income. Median personal income in the US for all people with an income is (as of 2022) $47,960. [1] For those in full time year-long employment, it's $60,070. And note because that is for all employed persons, that's including people with years of experience in their respective fields.

Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-12 04:47:14+00:00
Surely that averages out with people switching the other way during the save-up period?

Perhaps for an individual shop right now, in a world where Klarna exists but not universally, yes, there's a benefit to using it to lock in that particular customer right now.

It's less obvious to me, in the long run, that widespread Klarnification results in benefits to any particular shop. As mentioned earlier, having Klarna sapping up to double-digit percentages of the portion of customers' money (it's "zero interest" until it very much isn't, and they're in the "subprime" market) they were spending on possible-Klarnables and a few percent of yours on top as fees is easily a bigger impact that the average losses, if any, from the delta between switch-away and -to.

It's a bit of a prisoners' dilemma: you stand to gain money by defecting (to using Klarna) unilaterally, but if everyone does that, you all, plus the customer, collectively lose money (to Klarna).
by philocalyst | 2025-05-12 04:47:18+00:00
Wondering if you would be interested in plugging into my

https://github.com/philocalyst/lang-config

Which contains comment tokens, block and line, common language servers, special pairs, recognized shebangs, root scopes, etc.

It's mostly for use in one of my other projects, although you can see some of its higher aspirations one day in the README. Would love to collaborate with you and make it useful for a real use-case outside my own! If any of the information contained there could be useful! Reach out through an issue or through an email (linked in my github profile) if you're keen
by cyberax | 2025-05-12 04:47:30+00:00
> That statement is factually inconsistent.

It's not. It just stores the last speed/wheel position/brake state data that it receives when the "collision imminent" condition activates. In some cars this can be literally the same signal that deploys the airbags.

> Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked

Pretty much. It's just a normal LTE radio, that is normally inactive. It technically is hackable, but I'm not aware of any hacks of baseband firmware of this severity.
by jawon | 2025-05-12 04:48:30+00:00
This is a standard book copyright notice:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

“Reproduced” and “electronic” are the relevant terms here.

I remember when gpt-3 came out and you could get it to spit out chunks of Harry Potter and I wondered why no-one was being sued.

The models are built on copyright infringement. Authors and publishers of any kind should be able to opt out of being included in training data and ideally opt-in should be the default.

And I hope one day someone trains a model without the use of works of fiction and we find a qualitative difference in their performance. Does a coding model really need to encode the customs, mores and concerns of Victorian era fictional characters to write a python function?
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-12 04:49:10+00:00
>Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

When an employer or occupation provides a fully respectable career for life, that's your job and it's fully respectable to have that be your life's work from that point onward, plus information theory doesn't represent the full 1% of what Shannon had to offer anyway :)
by babyent | 2025-05-12 04:49:22+00:00
LLMs will give you what you ask.

Case in point I asked LLM to generate some code for me. It didn’t use generics (a language feature) and gave me some shit code.

I had to prompt it several more times to give me generic code with better typings.

I think it would be helpful for a total nooblet to get a hang of the basics but I think if they rely on the LLM too much beyond a certain point they will face diminishing returns.

Think about it. There is so much knowledge in the world. Anyone can do anything to a satisfactory degree pretty quickly. But to really understand something takes experience and self-discovery. And I’m not speaking about master. Just expertise.
by chii | 2025-05-12 04:49:45+00:00
The fear is that by delegating to an ai, there's no recourse if the outcome for the person is undesirable (correctly or not).

What is needed from the AI is a trace/line-of-reasoning to which a decision is derived. Like a court judgement, which has explanations attached. This should be available (or be made as part of the decision documentation).
by petesergeant | 2025-05-12 04:49:47+00:00
But sadly also a lot of not-stupid people who sometimes need to (or would benefit to) borrow on short notice, and it's better that they're doing that on a credit card with protections and that they can pay off. I've been both: easy credit in my youth ended up with me racking up a lot of silly debt that I had to spend several years living frugally to pay off, but also now that I'm much more financially secure, having some credit cards that work as a very cheap line of credit if I'm having a liquidity crunch is also very useful.
by WilliamCranna | 2025-05-12 04:50:46+00:00
Thanks for checking out my app, even if you showed support or really hated it, all feeback is needed.

Lot's of people were questioning my credibility on wether I was 16 or not and many other things, if this is such a concern to you I post on Twitter @willcranna where there's a demo video of my product.

Once again thank you, and I hope to post here again. Hopefully next time majority enjoy the product, lol.