MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jen20 | 2025-06-17 11:13:16+00:00
I've managed to go a very long time - living in both the UK and the US - using only iMessage and (as of around 2017) Signal.

I finally had to install WhatsApp on a trip recently for group coordination, but ensured it didn't get things like contact access, and removed it afterwards.

Kids school may well be an outlier (US), but they send formal communication by email (with an SMS notification or call for emergencies), and the parent group is all on iMessage.
by weiliddat | 2025-06-17 11:13:44+00:00
> I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively

Been living in Munich for the past 9 years, with the exception of the S-Bahn, it's still very good. I've never felt the need to own a car (only the occasional rental for moving or trips to more remote areas). Anecdotally, I know colleagues and friends who also make do without one, even those with kids.

Only city I've experienced better is Singapore (where I lived for ~7 years), though people complain all the same :D
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-06-17 11:13:54+00:00
This feels a bit too optimistic, in practice it often gets stuck going down a rabbit hole (and burning up your requests / tokens doing it!).

Like even when I tested it on a clean assessment (albeit with Cursor in this case) - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ - it did very well in agent mode, but the questions it got wrong were worrying because they're the sort of things that a human might not notice either.

That said I do think you could get a lot more accuracy between the agent checking and running its own answers, and then also sending its diff to a very strong LLM like o3 or Gemini Pro 2.5 to review it - it's just a bit expensive to do that atm.

The main issue on real projects is that just having enough context to even approach problems, and build and run tests is very difficult when you have 100k+ lines of code and it takes 15 minutes to clean build and run tests. And it feels like we're still years away from having all of the above, plus a large enough context window that this is a non-issue, for a reasonable price.
by squircle | 2025-06-17 11:14:00+00:00
Eh, one man's trash is another man's treasure. I agree with you, I think, that the grass is always greener...

Having a child similarly changed my life. (My father died when I was 7, so I understand intimately what it would mean to her if I was gone. By now I have outlived him and have zero correlates for navigating life, except what I've observed in others paired with the narrow and provincial life experience gathered trying to survive.)

Here's the rub though... if there was a threat to your son's life, or anyone you care about really, would you have the aptitude to put yourself in harms way, take a bullet or otherwise lay down your life so they might live to see another day? If your family was starving in the middle of winter, would/could you adeptly brave the elements to keep them alive or, all else lost, allow yourself to die so they could eat your flesh and live another day? Rather dark, I know. But, modernity with all its trappings does not prepare us for the unknown. Yet the unknown is part of our individual and collective evolution.

The downside of surviving and returning to a safe and comfortable existence is anhedonia. Everything is grey. Every day feels like a slow death. There is nothing important to do because the first world problems and mild activity of daily life are now incomparable and inconsequential. And the vast majority of people you meet have never had to make truly hard decisions. This is an observation, not a judgement. It is a lonely feeling.
by ta12653421 | 2025-06-17 11:15:20+00:00
jahahaha, you should have also mentioned that zwei Stammstrecke will make it horrible long to switch from platform 1 to platform 2, through elevators 40m up + down on each side, forcing you to go completely upwards, and then going down again. Apart from fire security, most people will just hate it :-)

(Source: Projektplan / SZ.de)
by mjburgess | 2025-06-17 11:15:25+00:00
Well if you want a rant about academia, I have many well prepared.

I think in the cases you describe the "thinking" was already purely performative, and what LLMs are doing is a kind of accelerationist project of undermining the performance by automating it.

I'm somewhat optimistic about this kind of self-destructive LLM use:

There are a few institutions where these purely-performative pseudo-thinking processes exist, ones insensitive to "existential feedback loops" which otherwise burn them down. I'm hopefully LLMs become a wildfire of destruction in these institutions and, absent external pressures, they return to actual thinking over the performative.
by sebastiennight | 2025-06-17 11:15:31+00:00
Option 1 mostly. I think it's also worth taking into consideration one thing.

People on Signal tend to have much less volume of overall messages and groups. For someone on WhatsApp to forward you the invite is a hassle for them, sure, but it is an infinitesimal unnoticeable increment on how many in/out messages they deal with in a day.

As I mention in another thread, people will complain that they "have too many apps" if you pitch Signal as a privacy app. They would install it instantly if you told them the emojis are funnier or whatever. Because they already installed 300+ apps and one more is actually .3% increment ; whereas for your typical GrapheneOS F-droid person, adding whatsapp would be a +15% increase of apps on their homepage.

It's kind of the same with those WhatsApp groups. There will be 1,000 messages in the group this week/month. 3 of those are the actual invite you need, and if you have actual human connections with folks, someone will send you those.
by retrac | 2025-06-17 11:17:00+00:00
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today

The gold standard 30 years ago was PGP. RSA 1024 or 2048 for key exchange. IDEA symmetric cipher.

This combination is, as far as I am aware, still practically cryptographically secure. Though maybe not in another 10 or 20 years. (RSA 1024 is not that far from brute forcing with classical machines.)
by b112 | 2025-06-17 11:17:30+00:00
I'll concede your point re: current status of some encryption. However there are loads that were comprised.

How do you tell which will fall, and which will succeed in 30 years?

All this said, I just think proper mental framing helps. Considering the value of encrypted data, in 30 years, if it is broken.

In many cases... who cares. In others, it could be unpleasant.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-06-17 11:17:57+00:00
> Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.

I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.

"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.

"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.

Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.

I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-17 11:18:09+00:00
>Micromanagement, lack of vision, poor communication, poor planning, zero support, full package. About half the team share similar view. The other half seems like just playing along.

For me, micromanagement is alone a deal breaker.

>What would you do in my shoes to make the best of the situation?

Ive been there and legit the correct decision is to exit. The micromanager will never change and your life will be hell.

The point of micromanagement is to take credit for your work when it goes well and shift the blame to you when it doesnt go well. You can never feel like you won at anything.
by weiliddat | 2025-06-17 11:19:03+00:00
I guess if we interpreted it charitably, maybe every time there's a decision to be made, it just forked itself and ran with possible inputs it expects?

I would say that's how some devs operate too. Instead of waiting for the product/customer to come back, let's predict how they might think and make a couple of possible solutions and iterate over them. Some might be dead ends, we can effectively prune them, some might lead to more forks, some might lead down linear paths. But we can essentially get more coverage before really needing some input.

We might argue that it already does that in its chain-of-thought, or agent mode, but having a dedicated "forked" checkpoint lets us humans then check and rewind time in that sense.
by leereeves | 2025-06-17 11:19:28+00:00
> Moreover, an advantage of standard fNIRS is the high spatial specificity, and it is not clear how to actually translate the light intensity data in their case to brain activation (and probably it is going to be very noisy) as the light transverses all the head.

The X-rays in CT scans also transverse all the head. Would it be possible to use the same algorithms as CT to construct a 3D image with this tech?
by pt_PT_guy | 2025-06-17 11:20:21+00:00
My wish is to have Telegram clients and user experience (both mobile and in Linux desktop versions) with Signal security and whatsapp adoption.

Signal is a cool 2nd alternative to WhatsApp, but their desktop client is absolute garbage, their videocall echo cancelling is non-existent and sending media over slow connections absolutely sucks (it keeps on resending and resending the files)
by Terretta | 2025-06-17 11:20:54+00:00
>> GP: I prefer the larger colorspace and to get it choose HDR, even if it's not really HDR; the reason is not HDR itself.

> P: But that larger colorspace doesn't require HDR, HDR sucks. I prefer UHD and to get it also choose HDR, even though that's not really HDR; the reason is not HDR itself.

To each their own, indeed.
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-06-17 11:21:01+00:00
> The better approach is to tell the AI “write a script to rename PersonRecord to Person, and then run that script.”

Cursor will do that conversion for you automatically via tool use (e.g. grep in this case).

This a great article though - I find being forced to write the requirements clearly and having an LLM review your final work, etc. can really help you to write better code in a sort of rubber duck debugging way too.
by ho_schi | 2025-06-17 11:22:20+00:00
btw.

Rendering images or movies on the TTY is common.

fbida: https://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/

mpv: https://mpv.io/

Fbida sometimes need the -d option pointing to /dev/drm/something, when using screen or tmux.

MPV required for years -vo=drm on the TTY but since some months it always works. Nice improvement :)

A display server is not needed.
by sebastiennight | 2025-06-17 11:23:39+00:00
Are you still on WhatsApp? If yes, then that's the reason. Trying to move a whole group over when you're willing to compromise is a recipe for failure because everybody would get inconvenienced for something that's only somewhat important to you.

It's like: should we all go to a vegan restaurant instead of the usual steakhouse because you decided you want to "try" being vegan this Friday night, of all nights. Just try it out another day and let us have our fun, Fred.

If you were not on WhatsApp at all, then it becomes a balance of : tiny per-person inconvenience versus 100% clear-cut decision on your part. Oh you've converted to whatever religion and can't have pork anymore? Now we have a choice between not inviting you at all, or trying the restaurant next door.
by rvnx | 2025-06-17 11:24:25+00:00
Many of the complainers don't know how to use them and how to write prompts, and then blame the LLMs.

Or simply use LLMs that struggle at writing good code (GPT, Gemini Pro, etc).

You need to be in the shoes of a product owner, and be able to express your requirements clearly and drive the LLM in your direction, and this requires to learn new skills (like kids learn how to use search engines).
by christophilus | 2025-06-17 11:24:36+00:00
> This is a system for substituting thinking itself with non-thinking

I haven’t personally felt this to be the case. It feels more like going from thinking about nitty gritty details to thinking more like the manager of unreasoning savants. I still do a lot of thinking— about organization, phrasing (of the code), and architecture. Conversations with AI agents help me tease out my thinking, but they aren’t a substitute for actual thought.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-17 11:24:49+00:00
Right. I think it's a different conception of being interesting or dull. It's probably the distinction between people-oriented and thing-oriented people.

When some people say that a person can make a dull topic be interesting, they mean that the person can craft and narrate engaging human stories around the activity or topic. The payoff is not really learning or discussing the details of the topic itself but human failure, overcoming of struggle, human connections forming, or betrayal and so on. It just happens in the context of that hobby.

On the other hand, thing-oriented people like two car guys or computer guys will just discuss that topic itself down to the tiny detail, and an outsider truly has very little gain from this. I've sat in bars discussing CS, programming language features, algorithms, math etc. deep into the night over beers with pals throughout college, and I'm aware that this is deeply off putting to most people-oriented people and would find it extremely dull. But as you say, it works the same way backwards. For me it's like, okay thanks for telling me what happened in the last days, you went to a party where normal party things happened, sure, but when do we get to the part where we talk about eternal themes that aren't bound to the here and now of whatever happened recently? Tall tales, one upmanship and namedropping things for street cred just feels so dull. Why not talk some substance?
by heavenlyblue | 2025-06-17 11:24:50+00:00
With MDMA if you have 150 mg of powder, you have 150mg of powder, i.e. this is the upper bound on how much substance you will take (be it MDMA or not), i.e. there can't be MORE than 150 mg.

With LSD it's always a solution (either in paper or in liquid), so you can only trust the producer.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-17 11:24:54+00:00
Yeah, it's like RSS: a solution that requires every single operator to implement something you need is quite a bad solution. For you who needs it and for every operator who has to implement it.

Instead, it's superior if you didn't need RSS at all to generate and consume feeds of website because your software did it for you.

Same for screen readers and accessibility. The superior solution is for software to derive the UX just like a sighted person can.

It will be nice when we get the tech for this so that accessibility convos don't just get stuck in these weird shaming rituals where you're supposed to feel guilty that you never tried your website with macOS VoiceOver when you're not even sure if your business will exist in a year.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-17 11:25:33+00:00
Absolutely agreed, but where does it take us in regard to division of labor in general? Obviously by not growing my own food or making my own clothes, I'm degrading a lot of skills I could potentially have. To what extent should I strive to develop skills that I don't "care" to exercise?

"Essay Writing" in particular, at least in an academic context, is almost by definition an entirely useless activity, as both the writer and the reader don't care much about the essay as an artifact. It's a proxy for communication skills, that we've had to use for lack of a better alternative, but my hope is that now that it's become useless as a proxy, our education system can somehow switch to actually helping learners communicate better, rather than continuing to play pretend.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-06-17 11:27:08+00:00
> London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.

The London underground is indeed a redundant spiderweb. But the article focuses more on mainline trains, which are much more constrained.

The only way right through central London for these trains was north-to-south, the Snow Hill tunnel: Kings Cross -> Farringdon -> City Thameslink -> Blackfriars -> South of the river. This can only be a bottleneck.

But now there is the Elizabeth line east-to-west as well.
by resource_waste | 2025-06-17 11:27:48+00:00
People have no idea how much cars benefited the lower and created the middle class.

Instead of having an hour commute to move a few miles, you could have a half hour commute to move 30 miles.

This made land ownership possible for this group of people. Low value land that was too far from work was now usable for those same jobs.

Whenever I see propositions of removing lanes from freeways, I think how that benefits only rich people and landlords. I can afford to live near my company because I'm well-off, but I know plenty of people making 40-60k/yr that have plots of land 30-60 minutes from their jobs. They would otherwise be renting apartments 1/3 of the size of their home.
by dcminter | 2025-06-17 11:28:14+00:00
I'm on Signal ... somewhat. I like it in principle, but the usability is poor and my connections on it are people who are either already ideologically aligned with it or sympathetic to my reluctance to use the Meta stuff (so my wife and a couple of friends).

It makes it hard to share contact details of a mutual friend (I didn't explore very far, but it wasn't obvious how if it was possible) so that alone will limit how fast it can grow versus other more viral options.

It's also a pain to keep the desktop version in sync with the mobile version - if you don't regularly login to the desktop version over some threshold time period it will stop syncing and you'll lose all conversation history from the interim.

I'd like it to thrive, but I just can't see it happening as it stands at the moment.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-17 11:28:31+00:00
Is this meant to say "I don't care because I'm not in USA"? Or "it's not a problem because it's only USA?" Or "don't speak of US-specific situations on this forum because it contains people of many nationalities?"

It's entirely possible for a world changing tech to be created and steered to match a unique problem inside one country, and for that to change job markets everywhere.
by thowier4342334 | 2025-06-17 11:29:55+00:00
Okay, but wasn't this expected ?

We all hate ads, but what did we expect ? That some rando will pay for all those server and personnel bills out of the goodness of his "heart" ? Please. I wish the culture of Silicon valley wasn't so full of bullshit that this'd have become obvious a long time back.

(For a more egregious eg. of ads, look at LINE which is all the rage in Japan. Or indeed Google, whose entire Android/Chrome business is made to subtly feed data back into its ads business).
by bsenftner | 2025-06-17 11:30:51+00:00
This entire thread of comments is all circling around but does not now how to articulate the omnipresent communication issues within tech, because the concept of effective communications is not taught in tech, not taught in the entire science, engineering, math and technology series. The only communications training people receive is how to sell, how to do lite presentations.

There absolutely is a great way to use LLMs when writing, but not to write! Have them critique what you wrote, but not write for you. Create a writing professor persona, create a writing critique, and make them offer Socratic advice where they draw you to make the connection, they don't think for you, but teach you.

There has been a massive disservice to the entire tech series of professions by ignoring the communications, interpersonal and group communication dynamics of technology development. It is not understood, and not respected. (Many developers will deny communication skills utility! They argue against being understood; "that is someone else's job") Fact of the matter: a quality communicator leads, simply because no one else conveys understanding; without the skills they leave a wake of confusion and disgruntled staff. Competent communicators know how to write to inform, know how to debate to shared understanding, and they know how to diffuse excited emotion, they know how to give bad news and be thanked for the insight.

Seriously, effective communications is a glaring hole in your tech stack.
by justforfunhere | 2025-06-17 11:31:13+00:00
This is a very interesting thread.

OP comes up with a problem that he is facing, only to be shown the other side of the story that he may have completely overlooked. It raises questions for OP and their organization.

This also shows that in such threads, on HN, people are more likely to empathize with the employee ( which seems quite fair in this case ).

Hopefully OP got some pointers that they can go ahead and work with.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-06-17 11:31:21+00:00
They kinda did. Before facebook brought them, the app cost $1/£1 per year (iirc your first year was free). Thing is back then MMS and/or texts across borders was expensive, so if you were regularly sending picture messages to people the $1/£1 sub was a no brainer.

Lets wave a magic wand and presume 50% of the user base thought it was also worth $1 a year and it grew just as well as it did (It was growing very well in the UK before the takeover just by word of mouth). That's still just a messaging app that would be raking in $1.5B per year today, and that's before you bolt on any paid cosmetics or upgrades (small things that users don't mind dropping a few more bucks on).
by LoganDark | 2025-06-17 11:31:40+00:00
My brain has the ability to claim anything it wants as truth. I prefer for my truth to either be consistent with an objective or empirical truth, or be measurably opposed to truths I disagree with (and to a known degree). I don't always achieve this and I'm not always the best at being open-minded but it is the goal, I would think.
by Philpax | 2025-06-17 11:33:01+00:00
> Those tasks can take hours, or at least long enough where multiple tasks are running in the background?

Maybe not hours, but extended periods of time, yes. Agents are very quick, so they can frequently complete tasks that would have taken me hours in minutes.

> The page says $17 per month. That's unlimited usage?

Each plan has a limited quota; the Pro plan offers you enough to get in and try out Claude Code, but not enough for serious use. The $100 and $200 plans still have quotas, but they're quite generous; people have been able to get orders of magnitude of API-cost-equivalents out of them [0].

> If so, it does seem that AI just replaced me at my job... don't let them know. A significant portion of my projects are writing small business tools.

Perhaps, but for now, you still need to have some degree of vague competence to know what to look out for and what works best. Might I suggest using the tools to get work done faster so that you can relax for the rest of the day? ;)

[0]: https://xcancel.com/HaasOnSaaS/status/1932713637371916341