MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MobileVet | 2025-06-28 18:04:28+00:00
I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source.

Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-28 18:04:32+00:00
Adding another datapoint:

We're down to just three Windows boxes (four if you count the Xbox Series X) in our household, and are likely to winnow that down further following the resounding success of a Linux gaming box on old Sandy Bridge CPU + GTX 970 GPU + HDD. The eldest gamer in the household is so sick of Microsoft's nonsense that the only reason they're not fully on Linux already is because their production box is reliant upon Intel RST, which makes dual-booting a dangerous game.

Including the rest of my family, we have but one other Windows box amongst an extended family of ~dozen folks. Everyone else has moved to macOS or Linux.

Speaking from an IT perspective, I've also seen more organizations court macOS as a standard machine in lieu of Win11, especially with Microsoft's shift to InTune and away from Group Policy. Microsoft thought inertia would carry their customers into the cloud, but the costs involved posed enough of a speed bump that customers are reconsidering their Microsoft estate, provided they weren't already in Azure and/or didn't have M365 E5.

It's a bloodbath. Microsoft extending free support is tacit acknowledgement they s*t the bed and have no other gameplan ready to go right now.
by asim | 2025-06-28 18:05:00+00:00
Honestly it always comes back to, we need a healthier relationship with our tools. The phone, social media, etc. It's all a tool. And yes it can be highly addictive but so are drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. all easily accessible and how we deal with it comes down to ourselves. It's what environment you put yourself in, and if that environment is one that includes a lot of screens then there's a sliding scale as to how corrupted you'll become by it. If you're at places where theres alcohol and cigarettes I mean it's highly likely you're going to smoke and drink. The only things that really beat all of this is a way of life that recognises that it can or is poisonous and many things must be avoided e.g get off social media. It was built to be addictive, that's not going to change.

As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
by throw627004 | 2025-06-28 18:05:21+00:00
As a German, I think you should cut your colleague some slack.

There's 8 billion people in the world who aren't German. If there's one topic that Germans don't chip in on, it won't move the needle.

Whatever we as Germans say on Israel/Palestine will be taken the wrong way by someone. Critical of Israel? Still an antisemite! Supportive of Israel? Pathological guilt!

It super sucks, but I too will leave it to others to voice strong opinions in this matter. And there's no shortage of that.
by necovek | 2025-06-28 18:05:44+00:00
> After all, if 51% of the population can handle it, is it really a societal problem worth bothering with? (They can’t, and it is.)

But you are making assumptions just like that: what makes you say 51% of the population can't handle particular types of trauma better than others?

Lots of things we are talking about are really "learned" and have no basis in biology, for instance: society itself is a human construct, and relationship to people around us are clearly built in that context. That does not mean they are not real, just that they can be learned even in a different way, and they surely are.

The reason we should take individual approach is because we can't know in advance who can "handle" a particular stressor in their current situation and who can't (and this is never black or white, all experiences — good and bad — shape us into persons we are). The onus is on those providing the help to provide just enough so we can deal with the situation in a reasonable manner.
by latexr | 2025-06-28 18:05:53+00:00
> I didn't mean to imply (…) but prevent the need for either of us to have to keep doing it...

Alright, fair! Thank you for clarifying.

> I never claimed to know what's best for them (…) I was speaking from a position of what I think's best for human knowledge

Even rereading your original post, it still feels like some parts are a direct prescription for the author. But I believe you if you say that wasn’t your intention. I guess my argument would then be that I still support the author in their deletion, for several reasons, including but not limited to:

* We don’t actually know what was “lost”. Let’s be real: most of what any of us writes is irrelevant and inconsequential and wouldn’t truly contribute to human knowledge as a whole.

* I don’t think it’s fair for the author to suffer in any way, even if it’s “just” anxiety, for the dubious benefit of human knowledge. Even if they did have valuable insights in their texts, they are still their texts and they should have the final say regarding what happens to them. If they want to burn them and doing so will help them get their life back on track, they should. I would argue that without that purge, they could actually be doing more harm to human knowledge in the long run, by not letting them “get back on their feet” and be free for all the new and more valuable insights they’ll have but wouldn’t otherwise.

> Fundamentally, if you agree burning books - metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you agree deleting second brains instead of just archiving is a bad thing.

I agree burning books is bad on principle, but disagree that what the author did was comparable. They didn’t take away from human knowledge, like book burning does. They deleted personal notes no one else was ever probably going to read anyway. The difference is massive.

> Pretending that me having a different view is "absurd"

To be perfectly clear, the only thing I found absurd what that specific quote in relation to what the author did. I.e. I found it to be hyperbolic beyond the realm of reasonable argument. Everything else I found reasonable as a personal opinion as long as it’s not prescribed as the solution for everyone.

> That you are unable to understand that I have different needs and ways of approaching life is - apparently - a problem

Again, that is perfectly fine and valid. But in your original posts you explicitly asked for everyone to act a certain way and my primary goal as to point out that no, I don’t think that should apply to everyone. Many people, sure, but there is definitely a large section of the population for whom I don’t think it would be the right approach. For their own sake, which in this situation trumps “human knowledge”.
by cpgxiii | 2025-06-28 18:05:57+00:00
> For that same matter, maybe that's part of what went wrong with the aircraft manufacturing business in America. The market really should not have been allowed to consolidate that much ...

Consolidation was an inevitable result of the end of the Cold War and massive cuts to defense spending. The defense industry was _encouraged_ to consolidate because the alternative would have been bankruptcy. Obviously, time has shown that this consolidation was bad for the industry and the government, but a lot has happened in the last 35 years that would not have been foreseen then.

> to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle

The type rating structure really has quite little to do with aerospace industry consolidation (if anything, the industry is too fractured to allow for more generic type ratings). Aircraft, their systems, and their flight dynamics are different enough that trying to create a more general type rating would really be impossible. What you do see are families of aircraft which either completely share a type rating or require very limited additional training to maintain a rating for multiple family types (e.g. all 737s, 757/767, 777/787, A32x/A33x/A35x).

Single piston GA aircraft are really the exception, not because they all share the same behavior (there is a truly wild range of flight dynamics and avionics), but because the GA community (particularly in the US) is so large and established that requiring more training/experience is politically impossible. So long as GA accidents don't kill too many bystanders, this will remain the case.
by achierius | 2025-06-28 18:06:24+00:00
What you fail to understand is that the vast majority of non-hoarders are still happy to get those "brief moments" of joy, memory, nostalgia -- connections to the past that could otherwise be totally gone. The cost is so low, the benefits -- perhaps not life-changing, but of a particular and hard-to-replicate quality that I think makes them worth it nevertheless.
by Narciss | 2025-06-28 18:06:30+00:00
My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering. That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?
by hypercube33 | 2025-06-28 18:06:48+00:00
I have one laptop I got used to be able to daily drive Linux and for now am on Zorin Pro. A lot of people don't like paying for support, or Linux, and v17 definitely has some problems but so far I'm impressed how well it runs win32 stuff out of the box and looks great. Support is pretty awesome so far too.

Also yeah, I could do without paying just fine and work as basically a Windows engineer so I can Google stuff but I'm just over trying to deal with getting Linux working.

I do also have a steam deck and gaming is stellar on Proton but you still need Windows for DRM triple a games.
by lukasb | 2025-06-28 18:06:56+00:00
Helpful context: https://x.com/peligrietzer/status/1938979993666695207

"both the English and Hebrew are the only usage-standard constructions for when the verb is shooting and the object is a crowd"

"you can read the Hebrew Wikipedia page about, like, 2017 Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock and see that is says Paddock 'ירה לעבר' the crowd"
by Spivak | 2025-06-28 18:06:57+00:00
There's two main claims that you see when it comes to the ACLU losing its way. The first one is that they don't really do second amendment cases. Some of the motivation is genuinely the conscience of the people who work there, but the much much bigger factor, because the ACLU takes on lots of conscience testing cases, is that the NRA is extremely well funded and will fight the case anyway. There's already an organization laser focused on that issue and is legislatively successful, they don't need the ACLU lawyers' help. More broadly people see the ACLU taking on more "left wing" cases, and this is largely for the same reason. If you have limited resources then you end up having to focus on the cases where there aren't other organizations with legal expertise to step in. And despite what conservative media will tell you, there aren't actually all that many people defending, say, the lgbt. Lots of organizations will show their disapproval of these laws and make a lot of unproductive noise about them, but when it comes time to actually put up money and lawyers to fight them, all the hands stay down.

The second claim is their handling of covid. And the thing is this is an interesting case study for the ACLU. One of the things that people expect from organizations is devotion to a set of principles, and that the organization will die on any hill involving them. And Covid was a situation in which they had to ask themselves whether or not dying on their hill was the right thing to do even if they were wrong. Not wrong in sense that they are defending the "bad people," they do that all the time, but that this is a situation that is genuinely exceptional and that the health and safety of the nation is more important than people's individual civil liberties. And if you turn up the severity of the pandemic I personally think it is fairly obvious that this would be the right choice. It's a hard thing to look at ideals that you have dedicated your life and career to and weigh them against people's lives. Where the controversy lies is how severe you think covid was and whether that severity crossed the threshold. And if you didn't the ACLU's actions look like an arbitrary betrayal of their core principles.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-28 18:07:18+00:00
> Cost is irrelevant

I agree with your overall point, but I think the person you replied to has a point as well. The cost of developing F9 is ridiculously low (considering the industry), so it should have been possible to do by any country / group of countries if the cost was the only problem...

> "According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX's development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately $390 million in total."
by aghastnj | 2025-06-28 18:07:22+00:00
I had never encountered the word 'Pomological' in my life until this article. My brain scanned it as starting with P-o-r-n, because that made more sense in context.

At this point, I've made my choice. I'm not going to look up the word. (I've lived more than 50 years, it's not likely to add much value for me now.) I'm not going to read the article. (It could only disappoint...)

I think less of parkerhiggins.net for tricking me with this article title. I think less of fanf2 for submitting this tricky article title. I resent even the time I've spent writing this. Bleah!
by goranmoomin | 2025-06-28 18:07:39+00:00
Just for people who are reading this and leading to believe that this might be true, the link that this user is providing[0] is produced by a group called KCPAC[1], a blatantly Korean alt-right group.

Rebutting fake news takes so much more time than spreading them.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/live/p508Q66_zCU

[1]: https://www.cpackorea.com/
by pavel_lishin | 2025-06-28 18:08:25+00:00
We're currently (very slowly) working to deprecate our Elixir codebase.

I wasn't around when it was adopted, but it definitely felt like someone joined the company, evangelized Elixir, hired maybe half a dozen people who were really good at it, and then left.

Eventually, our Elixir experts evaporated, leaving maybe two people who truly understand it and can do difficult work in it. That's not sustainable.

Someone else in the comments here said that a good developer can be productive in any language, and that's true - but why hobble people? It's like saying a good surgeon can be productive with a butterknife and a pot of boiling water, or a good artist can be productive with a charred stick.
by neandrake | 2025-06-28 18:08:37+00:00
If your only professional experience is OCaml and you want to look elsewhere for work then your opportunities shrink noticeably. Especially if you're looking for a position that requires experience. It's much more digestible for a company to hire someone out of college and invest in training on tooling. But many companies won't get past the resume if a senior developer has to take more time to on-board.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-06-28 18:09:00+00:00
This is exactly the problem. Talking to an LLM is like putting on a very realistic VR helmet - so realistic that you can't tell the difference from reality, but everything you're seeing is just a simulation of the real world. In a similar way, an LLM is a human simulator. Go ask around and 99%+ of people have no idea this is the case, and that's by design. After all, it was coined "artificial intelligence" even though there is no intelligence involved. The illusion is very much the intention, as that illusion generates hype and therefore investments and paying customers.
by achierius | 2025-06-28 18:09:23+00:00
I want my parent's hoard :)

Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
by leptons | 2025-06-28 18:09:42+00:00
The "bad copy of your competition" is probably in relation to the Windows 11 program launcher that resembles the centered design of the MacOS launcher.

But that can be easily removed using tools like Explorer Patcher and Open Shell.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

The thing that made me switch to Linux is Microsoft's pushing AI into everything. I do not want their AI constantly looking over my shoulder.
by jhbadger | 2025-06-28 18:10:29+00:00
I have an archive of all my email going back to 1992. (Granted, this is more accessible prior to 2000 or so when things went unnecessarily to HTML). It is a wonderful resource, not only for practical reasons but also it's like my own personal Pepys diary -- I can tell you what I was doing in 1992 and later on any date. I love reading it, even if I encounter sad messages from mentors who have since passed or significant others decades since the breakup.
by sarchertech | 2025-06-28 18:10:53+00:00
In that example something simple like log the errors, or log the first error of the same type per 5 minute block had some percent chance of solving 100% of the problem.

And it’s not just this specific problem. I don’t think letting an LLM handle edge cases is really ever an appropriate use case in production.

I’d much rather the system just fail so that someone will fix it. Imagine a world where at every level instead of failing and halting, everything error just got bubbled up to an LLM that tried to do something reasonable.

Talk about emergent behavior, or more likely catastrophic cascading failures.

I can kind of see your point if you’re talking about a truly hopeless scenario. Like some imaginary autonomous spacecraft that is going to crash into the sun, so in a last ditch effort the autopilot turns over the controls to an LLM.

But even in that scenario we have to have some way of knowing that we truly are in a hopeless scenario. Maybe it just appears that way and the LLM makes it worse.

Or maybe the LLM decides to pilot it into another spacecraft to reduce velocity.

My point is there aren’t many scenarios where “do something reasonable 90% of the time, but do something insane the other 10% of the time” is better than do nothing.

I’ve been using LLMs at work and my gut feeling saying I’m getting some productivity boost, but I’m not even certain of that because I have also spent time chasing subtle bugs that I wouldn’t have introduced myself. I think I’m going to need to see the results of some large well designed studies and several years of output before I really feel confident saying one way or the other.
by achierius | 2025-06-28 18:11:13+00:00
> And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Data size != memory size, and even memory size != binary size. It's totally fair to rail against the program text, and associated application data, that have to be loaded onto your machine in order for you to do something as simple as send a message on Slack -- RAM, unlike cold storage space, has not grown quite so exponentially, and wasting that space is expensive. And of course, the larger the binary, the slower the program, and the worse your programs will interface with other ones on the system.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-06-28 18:12:28+00:00
> Most want it replaced with a secular state where everyone has equal rights.

I believe that this is true of most of the people you've worked with. However, polling in the West Bank and Gaza finds that to be a fairly unpopular position. Quoting https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/what-do-... :

> These numbers are not the same as popular support for a single state “from the river to the sea” with equal rights accorded to Arab and Jewish citizens, as in recent international proposals. In 2020 polls, only about 10 percent of West Bank and Gazan respondents favored this option over either a Palestinian state or two states. Notably, a theological premise underpins the one-state preference: A majority of the Palestinian respondents believe that “eventually, the Palestinians will control almost all of Palestine, because God is on their side”—that is, not because Palestinian control will flow from demographic changes or from a joint arrangement with Israel.

I agree with you that it's not accurate to say that the entirety of Jordan or Egypt want Israelis dead. However, if we're trading anecdote for anecdote: I know someone who grew up in Saudi, and he told me that when he was growing up it was completely normal to insult someone by calling them a jew (especially someone you perceive as being stingy, scammy, or reneging on a deal). He said it was so normalized that when he came to North America, he had an awkward adjustment period before he realized that was considered unacceptable here.

Now, there's a big difference between calling someone a jew as an insult and wanting all jews dead, but I have no trouble believing that antisemitism is very common within the middle east. Don't forget that it wasn't so long ago that there was a mass exodus of jews from the Middle East and North Africa to Israel, which can only be explained by some degree of "push factor" pushing them away from those countries. So while "wants them dead" is probably an exaggeration, you have to empathize a bit with the fact that almost every other middle eastern country was quite hostile towards jews in the past 100 years, and there's not an especially good guarantee that they would not be hostile again.
by actinium226 | 2025-06-28 18:12:30+00:00
Bloomberg did a similar thing decades ago, where they had their own database and their own take on TCP/IP. But this was done out of necessity since they started in the 80's and the database landscape looked very different than it does today.

They continued with their own db for decades out of inertia and also it worked fine. I think they've long since switched to TCP/IP and the public internet (for a time there was a Bloomberg network parallel to the public internet).
by siliconc0w | 2025-06-28 18:12:45+00:00
There are about a zillion examples of them citing a principal like, 'states rights' and then immediately abandoning it when it suits them for things like gun control, abortion access, seizing control of a state's national guard, gender affirming care, etc.

The problem is that they are directionally correct in that it would be bad to have a patch work of laws around AI but the alternative is we leave it to congress which has consistently shown an inability to thoughtfully regulate or reform anything - just pass mega spending bills and increase the debt limit.