MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NalNezumi | 2025-06-17 14:44:17+00:00
Things I can think of:

- you can now video call to the other side of the world. This makes it possible for example, old people to be able to see and interact with their grandkids without traveling.

- Disabled people can live a social life. You can for example watch the ibelin documentary on Netflix if you want to see a touching side of this [1]

- Remote work as an viable career. Claudia Goldin identified that one contributing factor to pay disparity between gender is inflexible work schedule. This disproportionately affect mothers, having to juggle child rearing and inflexible job. The fact that remote work is possible, can (and is) contributing to more equality being possible.

- dramatically lowering the cost, and increasing the access to learning material. Eager but poor and unlucky kids have never had the opportunity they have now when it comes to learning.

- "equality of opportunity driven better meritocratic filtering". My own pet theory, but the raise of internet have increased inequality by giving equal opportunities. Kids from poor family, but raised with good values and curiosity, discipline can now excel in life. Meanwhile, average kids from background of good wealth only sustained by generational factors have it a bit trickier now; they'll get stuck on the useless attention attrition side of internet (TikTok, reddit, etc) and get dragged down. By no means perfect, but you can find many "lifted by equal opportunity presented by internet" life stories on HN/tech world.

- Efficient data transfer. I don't have the numbers but I'd imagine physically sending CDs and books probably wouldn't be as efficient as sending data.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-47064773
by fennecfoxy | 2025-06-17 14:44:24+00:00
I've never seen a LED streetlight turn people where I live. Sounds like bad light design and the LED is perhaps getting too hot.

Though that said, just go and replace them as they would have had to for sodium vapour lamps they had before? And this time replace them with something that runs them at a lower temperature, especially if the environment during a summer could be hot from external temperature.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-06-17 14:44:33+00:00
It happened with someone I know. He tried psychedelics in a weekend at the beach house scenario for the first time as a middle aged man. He liked the experience and then started reading about LSD microdosing, so he decided to try that.

Over the course of a few weeks he began to slide into what was clearly schizophrenic delusions. He became obsessed with what he presumed was a vast conspiracy to murder him and take his money, interpreting ordinary events like someone cutting him off on the highway as being part of this.

Thankfully he's got a good partner and support network, got into therapy, and now is doing fine.

I have a pretty live and let live attitude over psychedelics, but I do hate when aficionados pretend there aren't risks or downsides.

On a less dramatic scale I know people who've tried it and hated it, and that's very much a possible outcome as well. It's crappy when aficionados flip that around into somehow being a square or whatever.
by wolrah | 2025-06-17 14:44:51+00:00
> You may be thinking of HDMI vs DisplayPort over USB-C, because otherwise they couldn't be more different.

No, I'm referring to how HDMI 2.1 changed basically everything but the connector to become a multi-lane packet based protocol like DisplayPort instead of being a direct descendant of DVI, which itself was basically digital VGA.

I realize the licensing situation is a disaster.
by reify | 2025-06-17 14:45:03+00:00
It is true!

The rich do not leave any country if taxes are targeted at them.

I cant remember the names of the UK millionaries who claimed they would leave the UK.

That mouthy London Plumber and they bloke who makes vacuum cleaners and offshores all his work.

They are still here enjoying the benfits of being extemely rich in the UK.

The mega wealthy are not going to sell up their multi million pound mansions and their childrens private education and move abroad just because they have to pay more tax. paying more tax means nothing to the rich.

In fact loads of rich people want to pay more tax to support society, pay for the NHS etc.

I remember when the UK had a tax rate of 96% for millionaires. Thats 96p in the pound tax.

I think the beatles were going to leave the UK because of the amount of tax they paid. Poor bastards.

Those same people are still rich and still living in the UK.

Greedy bastards comes to mind.

I say "Pay your fair share son"
by jazzyjackson | 2025-06-17 14:45:13+00:00
Article skips consideration for shared wifi such as cafes where, IME, a lot of students do their work. Consumer wifi routers might have a cap of ~24 clients, and kind of rotate which clients they're serving, so not only is your 100Mbit link carved up, but you periodically get kicked off and have to renew your connection. I cringe when I see people trying to use slack or office365 in this environment.

Grateful for the blog w/ nice data tho TY
by dkarl | 2025-06-17 14:45:30+00:00
> But if you take as “performance” the duty cycle of the machine’s various components, little will prevent you from ending up with a design in which the major part of your performance goal is reached by internal housekeeping activities of doubtful necessity

JITs have taken this to an even higher level — people don't just argue that the machine is fast enough to run their convoluted code with countless unnecessary layers, they argue that their code as they've written it won't be run at all: the JIT will reduce it to a simpler form that can be handled efficiently.

But they can't explain why their poor coworkers who have to read and maintain the code don't deserve the same consideration as the machine!
by madeofpalk | 2025-06-17 14:45:40+00:00
> What if that person is on a slow link? If you've never had bad internet access, maybe think of this as plane wifi

Loads of people are on "a slow link" or iffy internet that would otherwise have a fast internet. Like... plane wifi! Or driving through less populated areas (or the UK outside of london) and have spotty phone reception.
by bitsandboots | 2025-06-17 14:45:46+00:00
Over time I went from 0 doc, 0 automation to putting a lot of thought into both. Projects become a bit of a circus to maintain, and nobody can help you out of it if nothing is documented, and good luck when you forget.

Devs aren't the only problem here. In the few large companies I've been in, the assigned doc writers haven't made a net positive. It always takes me so much effort to walk them through what to write about and how it should be written to match how the users actually read and understand content that I end up writing it myself during such meetings. It's a bit of a living rubber duck exercise at times. I've grown to be a high paid doc writer that writes code too.
by emushack | 2025-06-17 14:45:51+00:00
Have you ever suffered from water scarcity? Because I've lived it. This is a facile argument. Data centers are standing on the backs of so many others while at the same time using their piles of cash to force them to do more with less. And their argument about why is because the technology is so life changing and amazing.

It's so sad that money and power blind people when there are viable technological alternatives available.
by antonchekhov | 2025-06-17 14:45:57+00:00
I don't understand why, if the recipient of the initial detached "hello" is annoyed at the communication tax of having to acknowledge it before the querier gets to the real point of the convo, why in the "preferred" example, he/she responds to their gratitude ("ta") with a "np"? That seems like just as much pointless communication noise, only at the other end of the chat. When I say thanks to anyone in real-life verbal communication, their (usually a grunt) "no problem" adds nothing.
by pier25 | 2025-06-17 14:46:12+00:00
I was thinking more of this other movie:

"In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m."
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-17 14:46:19+00:00
If I were going to build out bare-metal k8s, I would first try Swarm instead. I would not use k3s or an alternative. The biggest problem with k8s (any version of it) is its overall cost in expertise and maintenance is incredibly high (if you're doing it right; many people are completely ignorant to how terribly they're maintaining it and assume their cost is low). Swarm's cost is going to be significantly smaller, both in the short and long term.
by nonethewiser | 2025-06-17 14:46:26+00:00
This has been my experience too. It's largely about breaking things down into smaller problems. LLMs just stop being effective when the scope gets too large.

Architecture documentation are helpful too, as you mentioned. They are basically a set of rules and intentions. It's kind of a compressed version of your codebase.

Of course, this means the programmer still has to do all the real work.
by karencarits | 2025-06-17 14:46:32+00:00
Getting backups right _is_ difficult and can easily be quite stressful. Yes, having some external drives here and there with files would of course be helpful. But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft? Where to keep them in case of fire? What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files? I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy
by ryandrake | 2025-06-17 14:46:53+00:00
To you and OP, as the movie goes: "Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man."

My opinion is that we could use fewer "web applications" and more web pages that simply provide structured semantic data and then get out of the way and let the User Agent (and user himself) control the presentation of that data. Sure, some things have to be a web application. I'll grit my teeth and admit that. But many, many sites we visit could easily be raw HTML and maybe some CSS (which the User Agent is free to cherry-pick through or ignore). They would be fast, functional, accessible, (probably) more secure, (probably) more private, free of telemetry, and would better serve the user's interests over the web company's interests.

Instead we get JavaScript "instructions" from the web site, which require the User Agent to faithfully execute, often removing the user's direct access to the actual content and enforcing the web developer's opinion on how it should be presented.

If we had more use of standard controls and light markup, and less JavaSludge, maybe browsers would devote more time towards fixing and improving their standard controls.

Just another random person's opinion, but this has been a terrible direction for the web.
by zeinhajjali | 2025-06-17 14:46:58+00:00
This reminds me of a project I worked on for a grad school data science course here in Canada. We tried to map this "digital divide" using public data.

Turns out, it's really tough to do accurately. The main reason is that the public datasets are a mess. For example, the internet availability data is in neat hexagons, while the census demographic data is in weird, irregular shapes that don't line up. Trying to merge them is a nightmare and you lose a ton of detail.

So our main takeaway, rather than just being a pretty map, was that our public data is too broken to even see the problem clearly.

I wrote up our experience here if anyone's curious: https://zeinh.ca/projects/mapping-digital-divide/
by bobbiechen | 2025-06-17 14:47:17+00:00
I am less optimistic. Even paid products like Netflix or the Amazon Kindle are ad-monetized now.

I think the current useful state of consumer LLMs is a temporary subsidy, and the incentives to add ads are too large. And that will change everything, even tools that should work for the user. I recently wrote a blog post on this: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-lifestyle-subsidy-is-go...
by zxcholmes | 2025-06-17 14:47:38+00:00
Hey HN! I built this after watching too many friends struggle with the "should I tell them?" dilemma.

The concept is simple: you enter your name, get an anonymous link to send to your crush. They see a message saying someone likes them and need to guess who. If they guess your name correctly, you both get notified of the match. If they guess wrong, they never know it was you.

Tech stack: Flask + SQLite, with Google OAuth for notifications. The tricky part was designing the UX to feel safe and non-creepy while maintaining complete anonymity until there's mutual interest.

Some interesting challenges I solved: - Preventing spam/abuse while keeping it anonymous - Designing the guess mechanism to avoid awkwardness - Making sure failed guesses truly stay private

It's completely free and I'm not collecting any personal data beyond what's needed for the matching. Would love feedback from the community on the concept and execution!

Live at: https://secretcrush.im/
by evanelias | 2025-06-17 14:48:34+00:00
> Even American cities that existed then are drastically different and larger than they were back then.

Another major issue is the way transit authorities tend to be governed and funded in the US. They're often prone to political disagreements between cities and suburbs, or between city and state governments, or between multiple states. The two-party system doesn't exactly lead to coalition-building.

Take Philly for example: SEPTA regional rail has been through-running since the mid 80s, which is great, and the network is fairly well-aligned with population centers and employment centers. But year after year, SEPTA is consistently in a state of utter crisis, typically due to lack of funding.
by perrygeo | 2025-06-17 14:48:57+00:00
> Getting answers to those question is learning, regardless of where the answer comes from.

Sort of. The process of working through the question is what drives learning. If you just receive the answer with zero effort, you are explicitly bypassing the brain's learning mechanism.

There's huge difference between your workflow and fully Agentic AIs though.

Asking an AI for the answer in the way you describe isn't exactly zero effort. You need to formulate the question and mold the prompt to get your response, and integrate the response back into the project. And in doing so you're learning! So YOUR workflow has learning built in, because you actually use your brain before and after the prompt.

But not so with vibe coding and Agentic LLMs. When you hit submit and get the tokens automatically dumped into your files, there is no learning happening. Considering AI agents are effectively trying to remove any pre-work (ie automating prompt eng) and post-work (ie automating debugging, integrating), we can see Agentic AI as explicitly anti-learning.

Here's my recent vibe coding anecdote to back this up. I was working on an app for an e-ink tablet dashboard and the tech stack of least resistance was C++ with QT SDK and their QML markup language with embedded javascript. Yikes, lots of unfamiliar tech. So I tossed the entire problem at Claude and vibe coded my way to a working application. It works! But could I write a C++/QT/QML app again today - absolutely not. I learned almost nothing. But I got working software!
by geye1234 | 2025-06-17 14:50:08+00:00
> there are two methods of implementation: either it's done in a supernatural way that defies physics and logic; or it's done in a way that accords with the structure of reality (as in, chemically.)

Why not both?

Everyone agrees that brain chemistry-stuff happens when you have a supernatural experience, just as brain chemistry-stuff happens when you eat a steak. The disagreement is whether that's all that's happening. Pointing to the existence of brain chemistry-stuff as an argument against the existence of the supernatural is like pointing to it as an argument against the existence of the steak.

Also, the 'supernatural' does not defy physics or logic; it is perfectly logical, and outside the scope of physics.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-06-17 14:50:13+00:00
This isn't completely true. Tolerance to psychedelics is a thing, and can often ve extremely long lasting. I have a friend that when given heroic doses of 2C-B(50mg or more, orally), hardly experienced more than threshold level effects. This was 2C-B tested and confirmed to have 95% purity, and it affected me exactly as expected. He was not on any drugs except hash, which is typically synergistic.

In his case, according to him he yad used 2C-B very heavily many years previously, and it seems he developed an extremely high level of tolerance which remained unchanged for many years of non-use.

In the cases discussed in the thread, it's possible that something similar was happening. Indeed, many antidepressants also alter serotonin receptor expression over time, and it's plausible that in some people, these effects could linger for a long time.
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by toutoulliou | 2025-06-17 14:50:18+00:00
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by rich_sasha | 2025-06-17 14:50:25+00:00
When I use IM at work, I basically end up using it like email half the time. Write "hello" at the top, then all what I want to know, all in a single message, so then it gets lengthy, so at the bottom I write something like "great, many thanks", and sign off for good measure.

Even when the convo turns interactive, half the time either me or the other guy has to drop off, often without warning. So after some waiting around, I'll write down, in async mode, all I want.

It always then feels like basically a different GUI/ API onto email. With more emojis and reactions and stickers and scented candles or whatnot.
by npteljes | 2025-06-17 14:50:51+00:00
Horrible stuff.

Data is far more important than society, regulation, individuals give it mind. Doubly so if the data is technically in another jurisdiction. And it's a classic insurance scenario too - redundant storage seems like money thrown in the fire, but after a disaster like OP's, lost data seems invaluable.

Service providers are at the very least part of the problem. For one, they project a lot of confidence for safety, but protect themselves well legally in case of any event - and automate away as much customer interaction as they can.

A nice improvement would be customer service that takes the issues seriously. But, I realize, that is far more complex and expensive than how it sounds.
by brtastic | 2025-06-17 14:50:52+00:00
Yes. Perl will give you incredible power and you will have a lot of fun in the process.

First and foremost, it is great for writing scripts. It is much more civilized and faster than bash. If your script does anything more than calling a couple programs, writing it in Perl is a good idea. It has almost instant startup time, unless you use some heavy modules.

Secondly, its one-liners are very capable and can efficiently solve problems you would normally solve by a mixture of bash, sed and awk. Once you learn regexes it can mung text more efficiently than any other tool.

Lastly, if you wish so, it can scale up so that you can write full-blown applications in it. It is good for all kinds of backend tasks with the help of CPAN modules. As a bonus, any application you write should last you for a very long time, since both the interpreter developers and the community in general take preserving backward compatibility seriously.

Please note that a bit older technologies like Perl don't generate as much noise to get excited about. There is no new language feature, library or framework announced every month. Instead you can start investing early into your future by writing personal programs in it that will likely last you a lifetime and will not require constant tweaking as the ecosystem changes. Perl interpreter is not a "moving target", and many established CPAN libraries aren't either. It's a solid platform to develop stable, useful software.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-17 14:51:05+00:00
I've read in multiple places that this "resetting" is something that is on a list of things to do, but is rarely done. I seriously doubt any person working at the rental place prepping the car for the next use does anything but the most basic/obvious of refreshing. I'm guessing after checking the fuel status and the mileage, they just don't care. I doubt that cars get vacuumed after each rental and only if it's obviously needed.

As the person that is entering their own personal information into a car that you do not own, you absolutely should be the one to remove that data. Do not depend on someone else doing their job. You took the time to add it, so take the time to remove it. It is the only way to be sure.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-17 14:52:14+00:00
You're reiterating my "UBI will be miserly" point. Yes, if taxes were set at 100% to support a $40k/year UBI, I would quit my six figure job to make $10/hour cutting grass under the table. OTOH, if my taxes went up 25% to support a $10K/year UBI, I wouldn't.
by cjs_ac | 2025-06-17 14:52:16+00:00
The first computer I ever used had a 56k modem, but I can empathise with greybeard stories about watching text appear one character at a time from 300 baud modems because of the task-tracking software my employer uses. I load it up in a browser tab in the morning, and watch as the various tasks appear one at a time. It's an impediment to productivity.

The rule I've come up with is one user action, one request, one response. By 'one response', I mean one HTTP response containing DOM data; if that response triggers further requests for CSS, images, fonts, or whatever, that's fine, but all the modifications to the DOM need to be in that first request.