MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why are dating apps so bad? Why hasn't anyone made a good one?
by 1270018080 | 2025-06-01 22:19:02+00:00
Almost all dating apps that have achieved the exponentially growing network effect have been acquired and subsequently enshittified by Match Group. The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money. I think Bumble is the only large scale independent app but they've managed to enshittify themselves too.

So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

Definition of a good dating app: An app with no dark patterns where you can find dates and relationships.

Ideas:

- By internet standards, the market is so mature people aren't motivated to download another app. You're never going to get enough of a positive feedback loop from the network effect.

- No one has made a good app yet.

- A majority of humans aren't compatible with online dating for one reason or another. Maybe they prefer dating in person. Maybe they're unattractive (physically or personality wise), bad at selecting partners, egotistical, selfish, lazy etc. So even if the app itself is good, the users aren't, and maybe the app isn't going to be able to fix the above issues.
by ghusbands | 2025-06-01 22:19:07+00:00
Stereo 14-bit sound didn't really happen until the 1990s and needs quite a lot of CPU time and careful hacking, as Amiga sound chips are 8-bit, 4-channel. 4096 colors via weird hold-and-modify modes was never useful outside of demos and vanishingly few games. Nobody used 640x400 because interlacing was far too flickery, and such resolutions certainly didn't support 4096 colors.

The Amiga was ahead of its time in many ways, and the pre-emptive multitasking was fantastic, but claiming it was some paragon doesn't help anyone. If you wanted a fun home machine attached to a TV, it was great. Even a fun home machine attached to a monitor. If you wanted a business machine with a monitor, it wasn't the safest or best choice, if only due to a lack of software.
by Teever | 2025-06-01 22:19:27+00:00
Imagine an assassination that is done with a drone mailed internationally to a PO Box. Send a gig driver to pick up a small box and drop it off at an abandoned lot.

The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.

Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
by api | 2025-06-01 22:19:50+00:00
Is this guy actually a fan of disposable rockets? Because that sounds like what he’s hinting. People still think that?

That doesn’t mean there’s no issues with the Starship design. I am still scratching my head a little about stainless steel, which is heavy, and given that the supposed advantage of not needing heat tiles seems to have been proven a mirage so far.

I am also skeptical that they’ll make second stage reusability work. First stage, sure. They are almost there. Just like F9 the math works fine, and reusing that is a big win. Second stage reuse is so much harder.

What I would do is scrap it in favor of a whole different way of looking at Starship.

The upper stage is a spaceship. It belongs in space. It’s never coming home.

That would let you drop so much complexity, structural mass, heat tiles, etc.

It could probably land and take off from the Moon or Mars, maybe with a much smaller booster for the latter, since those bodies have a lot less gravity. Or maybe it lands on the Moon or Mars and never leaves, becoming habitat and being stripped for materials. I could see that for the first dozen or two.

A reusable fuel tanker version that is literally nothing but a cone shaped fuel can with a rocket on it is possibly doable, so maybe there’s that. At least until we can make methane and liquid oxygen on the Moon.

The most logical way forward to get to multi planetary civilization is to build a moon base. Then use that as a factory and staging ground to build and launch huge spacecraft for Mars. In 1/6 gravity and no atmosphere you could manufacture and launch things way larger than anything that could be sent up from Earth without nuclear rockets.

You could also launch nuclear rockets from the Moon, come to think of it, since the Moon has no biosphere and its surface is already bathed in radiation. Even something like Orion (a.k.a. the devil’s pogo stick) could go up from there, though from the far side to avoid EMPing satellites in the Earth-Moon system.

With a Moon first plan the upper stage could become a Moon ship made to fly to the Moon, land, and be habitat or materials. Mars stuff gets built on the Moon where you get to play with big boy toys like LANTR or Orion, which lets you launch the kinds of spacecraft you’d actually want to take to Mars.

Lots of ways to get around full second stage reusability without throwing away the second stage if your goal is a real human presence in space.
by hagbard_c | 2025-06-01 22:19:54+00:00
No, this is fine for what this is, essentially a library catalogue. I prefer this over the pushy this is what others are reading type of interface as I tend to access these catalogues knowing what I'm looking for. If I want to know what others are reading/listening to I'll go to a book recommendation site or forum and take it from there. Library catalogues should be neutral, just show what is on offer and leave the popularity contest to others.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-01 22:20:38+00:00
Mass surveillance is the problem, whether or not she got an abortion. Abortion is not the real issue with this.

You could do car pooling to make it somewhat more difficult to be tracked by the license plate (the car can be tracked but you may be in someone else's car) (and car pooling can have other benefits as well if done well rather than badly), but that won't solve it. Reducing the mass surveillance is what should be done to solve it (regardless of your opinions about abortion).
by faizshah | 2025-06-01 22:21:03+00:00
I have some thoughts on this (in the context of modern SaaS companies).

The most expensive parts of fixing a bug are discovering/diagnosing/triaging the bug, cleaning up corrupted records, and customer communication. If you discover a bug in development or even better while you are coding the function or during a code review you get to bypass triaging, customer calls, escalations, RCAs, etc. At a SaaS company with enterprise customers each of those steps involves multiple meetings with your Support, Account Manager, Senior Engineer, Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Department Manager, sometimes Legal or a Security Engineer and then finally the actual coder. So of course if you can resolve an issue (at a modern SaaS company) during development it can be 10-100x less expensive just because of how much bureaucracy is involved in running a large scale enterprise SaaS company.

It also brings up the interesting side effect of companies adopting non-deterministic coding (AI Code) in that now bugs that could have been discovered during design/development by a human engineer while writing the code can now leak all the way into prod.
by somethingsome | 2025-06-01 22:21:07+00:00
Mostly because I can't personally compare, I wasn't comparing in the first place, I just didn't agree with one point of the article.

I don't use much the Healthcare system in Europe, but I knew someone that had a very rare disease, and in that case there were absolutely no reimbursements, again only one data point.

It's nice and well to say that everyone has 'access' to Healthcare in europe, but if the quality is very low, I'm not sure it's a win. But that's just my opinion.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-01 22:21:42+00:00
But you already have a search box and alphabetical list if that's what gets you excited. What about the rest of us?

Building a featured or popular section is basic UX and creates a nice call to action to let the visitor see what they can expect without browsing to see if the site has any books they want.

Even my local library puts more work into their homepage with a featured reads section. So disappointing when nobody cares about UX or holds minority HNer views like "a featured list on the homepage is bad and pushy–I quite like alphabetical lists myself".
by tomhow | 2025-06-01 22:22:15+00:00
You can't comment like this on Hacker News. Please read the guidelines and observe them in future, particularly these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by nickpsecurity | 2025-06-01 22:24:19+00:00
God's Word said all have sinned, there is none that does good [apart from God], and even Christians are at war with their flesh (sinful nature). Then, Christ and the Apostles constantly call out sin in the church. They also say many identify as Christians but are wolves in sheep's clothing.

With all that, I dont know why any of you say things like that given the Bible clearly predicts it. If anything, the atrocities of false Christians and atheists confirms the Bible's assessement of humanity. Whereas, people actually obeying God and loving others dont commit atrocities because it violates His law.

However, atheism, evolutionism, feminism, CRT, capitalism... these all allow many forms of atrocious behavior by design. Atheism combined with Darwinism can justify any evil since there's (a) no objective morals and (b) nothing matters in the long run. Communists torturing Christians used to point that out, too.
by aerospades | 2025-06-01 22:24:25+00:00
The Falcon architecture is objectively the best rocket that has been designed and flown (most launches, most successes, cheapest). Either that is roughly most the optimal rocket architecture that is possible within known physics, materials, and Earth gravity, or there is something better. Those are the only two options.

Starship is SpaceX's bid for the next best thing to obsolete Falcon. It might not succeed, but the alternative is what? SpaceX just sits around, mirco-optimizes Falcon forever? At least they are trying. The potential is there, and the iteration is what smokes out issues in complex systems much better than analysis paralysis.

Let's check back in on this take in 10 years.
by dlcarrier | 2025-06-01 22:25:44+00:00
I once couldn't find the audiobook of a book that my book club was reading, and it was a long book at I didn't have time to set aside to solely reading. It turned out that there weren't any commercially produced audiobooks of it, but it was public domain, and I found it on LibriVox.

The book was long and boring, but at least the narrating was good.
by duxup | 2025-06-01 22:26:48+00:00
I think the US is seen as a generally more violent place, but they don't have the hooligan system with sports.

A lot of US sports leagues (not all) are highly structured as far as player unions and restrictions on payrolls go. A teams ability to simply outspend the competition is not available in many leagues. Meanwhile European soccer is generally less restricted.
by chrismcb | 2025-06-01 22:28:02+00:00
Why do you think the platform is a net negative? You claim it is a net negative for humanity. Yet most how tos are in you tube. Plus there are tons of learning materials. Seems like a positive to me. Creativity? Seems like there is a lot of creative content as well. So I'm not sure why you think that is also a negative. Yes it sucks when the framework wants to make money. But the framework is expensive. Now maybe more needs to go to the content creates. But the underlying framework deserves to make money as well.
by Mic92 | 2025-06-01 22:29:43+00:00
One of the nixos-anywhere maintainer here. I am currently debugging the digitalocean cloud-init for the nixos-anywhere-examples repository. Has someone contact to digitalocean regarding that? There is a shebang that could be easily fixed to run on NixOS (/var/lib/cloud/scripts/per-instance/machine_id.sh).
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-06-01 22:30:08+00:00
The star wars clone wars shorts are just amazing animation. The way he caught the essence of the characters in animation that was superior to the human portrayals was a testament to his talent.

It made the cgi clone wars look so amateurish.

The best sam jack imo is the light vs dark. My jaw dropped at that.

He's definitely one of the few creators where I can feel him tickling my mind, overwhelming me with creativity.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-01 22:30:27+00:00
Similar experiences. I figured there's no way they wouldn't take me to the next round given my background. Answered GPA question honestly and got the auto rejected email in minutes.

Really weird as someone who's worked at a staff+ level at multiple FAANGs with over 20 years experience. Apparently my GPA from over 20 years ago isn't high enough for Canonical.
by grep_name | 2025-06-01 22:31:20+00:00
I tried doing it for awhile but wasn't able to ever get it to work for the main project I was trying to build, which was a VR project called LÖVR. I could have made and submitted a package using one of their appimage releases, but was doing it as an exercise to see how far I could push things.

I also went through a phase where I had AI write a lot of simpler flakes, but they turned out surprisingly different from each other, enough so that I wasn't able to learn a pattern as a base to grok what was happening. At some point I'll try again from first principles, but for some reason the AI flakes hindered more than helping
by vilunov | 2025-06-01 22:31:21+00:00
Usually FE and BE are developed by different people or even teams. It's helpful to decouple release cycles of both components, or else a bug on one component could block deployment of a different component. It's important not to decouple deployments of two components when doing so would save up significant resources, but here decoupling could be achieved by deploying a separate nginx server with static files – this is incredibly cheap, as there is very little static overhead, and performance is comparable.
by 1shooner | 2025-06-01 22:31:27+00:00
I'm just saying administrators would not take these measures if they didn't see less risk in taking them than in not.

Anecdotally, I see Xennial/Millennial 'helicopter' parents expect universities to take broad, often intrusive measures for the well-being of their children, and their (legally) adult children tend to go along with that expectation.
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-06-01 22:31:27+00:00
> For an example of how invasive this is for the average user, this person discovered Tailscale trying to collect ~18000 data points per week about their network usage based on the number of blocked DNS requests for `log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326

18000 data points per week seems IMHO pretty low (only 1.7 requests per minute for a whole network? Unlikely, even my Android phone does way more that 1.7 requests per minute just to ad networks, nevermind everything else on the network summed), it's probably way more.

18000 data points is also a lie, that's a different issue - the issue of UDP DNS sucking in general so your average application/OS keeps reissuing requests if they think the UDP packet got dropped.
by modeless | 2025-06-01 22:31:51+00:00
The advantage of steel is the tiles don't have to be as thick and heavy. I don't think they ever claimed it doesn't need a heat shield.

HLS is the Starship that never re-enters you're asking for. The problem is it needs refueling in orbit after launch to get anywhere, with 10+ tanker launches required. For that to be practical you need reusable tankers. So you still need a reusable heat shield to get beyond Earth orbit even if your crew vehicle isn't coming back.

Also Starlink is the funding source for Starship, and Starlink will benefit a lot from second stage reusability for Earth launches as well.
by hashim | 2025-06-01 22:32:33+00:00
Someone parroting the far-right propaganda that British-Pakistanis are culturally serial rapists also believes the hasbara that Israel is a perpetual victim that was forced to convince (i.e. terrorise, via the Irgun and Haganah) the British into giving them a land in 1948 because their holy book said they were there 3000 years ago, and that this also justifies the tens of thousands of Palestinians they've killed since then. Colour me surprised.
by scotty79 | 2025-06-01 22:33:39+00:00
If you start with all possible pixel arrangements, generate numbers from them then all unique sets of number are puzzles uniquely solvable only with logic. Those that were generated from multiple arrangements of pixels have multiple solutions.

Logic has two modes, one is going forward and the other is "assuming conversely" and finding if it leads to contradiction to eliminate that possibility. Both are equally valid and logical. There's no guessing involved. You simply pick any option to eliminate, assume it and try to lead to contradiction. If you don't find the contradiction you don't keep your assumption and the following steps that ended in a state that is not a contradiction, instead you try to eliminate another option instead in the same manner. Only when you successfully eliminate at least one you come back to trying forward logic again. The ultimate trick is not to search the contradiction using only the forward logic, but recursively using the entire solver to find if you landed in a contradiction.

Those two modes are basically the only logic that math uses for bulk of its proofs.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-01 22:34:22+00:00
It would be perfectly fine for Falcon to be a workhorse in perpetuity while continuing to R&D Starship. You can only gamble so many times before chance of failure catches up if you keep betting the farm repeatedly.

It is a fallacy to think humans must drive towards multi planetary civilization space vehicle systems for the commercial space industry to be successful. SpaceX continuing to inexpensively and reliably haul to space would not be failure. That’s what most businesses do; happy customers, happy, engaged employees, reasonable, healthy profits, improvement when possible and reasonable without pushing the enterprise as a system towards failure.

Disclosure: I own a small amount of SpaceX stock, enough for sentimental reasons, but fine if it goes to zero. I also pay for service on more than one StarLink dish.
by AlexeyBrin | 2025-06-01 22:35:20+00:00
I will certainly do my best not to be on the West’s side, and I can say the same thing about lots of fellow Romanian men of military age

Are you suggesting that Romania should bend the knee to Russia ? This is a disgusting suggestion taking into account the history of what Russians military did every time when they were on Romanian soil.

It is disturbing to see so many smart people repeating Russian lies. There is no way in which Romania can remain neutral politically and be better from this story. Political neutrality will only help Russia and if Russia wins, who do you think will be next ? The countries from the ex Eastern Block. Romania has no interest to have a border with an imperial Russia, this is why it must do anything it can to support Ukraine with armament and logistics.
by Belsonsan | 2025-06-01 22:35:30+00:00
Hey folks — I'm Henri, a solo dev and product enthusiast based in Europe. I built this mostly for myself at first, as a way to train my product intuition and avoid falling in love with my own startup ideas too quickly. I’ve made some bad bets in the past (who hasn’t?), and I realized how easy it is to assume we know what works just because something sounds smart. I wanted a fun way to challenge that — to learn from real examples without reading 50 postmortems.

Would love to hear what you think, especially if you’ve built something or are in the early stages of a project.
by Nextgrid | 2025-06-01 22:36:24+00:00
In his scenario I don't understand where he'd send the transaction to begin with?

In a typical scenario my understanding is that you get the terminal from your acquirer - this is your broker to the card networks. When the terminal makes a transaction, it does some crypto magic using its own keys (that identify it to the acquirer), sends that to the card which does more crypto magic using its own keys, and finally the result of that is sent to the acquirer.

If you do this flow yourself with fake keys you'd get the card to sign a transaction for your fake terminal's key (assuming you know the card's PIN of course - unless you're happy to forego any CVM), but you have no acquirer that would accept said transaction, so I don't see how you could commit a crime here even if you wanted to? You just got some meaningless bytes back.

And of course, if you have an actually valid terminal key that is trusted by an acquirer and do all this, you've effectively just made a normal payment - if the person was willingly paying you then no crime either, and otherwise it's no different than using a legit terminal to bill someone without their knowledge.
by doctoboggan | 2025-06-01 22:36:48+00:00
> even when it's entirely fabricated

I would go further and say it's _always_ fabricated. LLMs are no better able to explain their inner workings than you are able to explain which neurons are firing for a particular thought in your head.

Note, this isn't a statement on the usefulness of LLMs, just their capability. An LLM may eventually be given a tool to enable it to introspect, but IMO its not natively possible with the LLM architectures today.
by orionblastar | 2025-06-01 22:36:56+00:00
Amiga computers are expensive these days, you are better off with an Amiga Emulator like Amiga Forever.

I remember the Amiga had the checkered beach ball bouncing demo and others copied it, then on the Amiga they opened up several copies of the demo all multitasking and bouncing at the same time.

The only downside of the Amiga was the dreaded Guru Meditation Errors when memory went corrupt or something. IIRC AmigaDOS/Workbench had no protected memory features.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-06-01 22:39:58+00:00
Borders are a tool of the ruling class to keep their workers corralled. They can set up isolated environments with specific conditions conducive to certain types of output. Crossing borders without going through their system undermines their ability to use us as cattle. Borders are arbitrary, and the ones you think exist are often total falsehoods conjured up by people who decided it was more beneficial for them if the borders were this way rather than that way. The borders we are shown on the map often do not exist.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-06-01 22:41:07+00:00
> New Jersey has this of everyone born in the state, and frequently leases out the data to anyone willing to pay.

Yes. refs: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/08/new-jersey-cops-are-usin...

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/02/new-jersey-trying-to-sal...

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/03/new-jersey-sued-again-fo...
by girvo | 2025-06-01 22:42:17+00:00
> Yes you can walk around and make those transactions, what comes after (and the setup you had to do before) is the problem

I mean with the amount of stolen card details routinely traded and used successfully (at least for a while) and with how little crime like that is investigated or punished in some jurisdictions, I dunno...

Still it's not quite as simple as "taking the money from your card" like said crackpots think.
by duskwuff | 2025-06-01 22:42:35+00:00
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection [1]? It includes a nonogram puzzle, under the name "Pattern" - I believe it guarantees that the puzzles are solveable without backtracking. It can generate puzzles up to 40x40 or so in a reasonable amount of time.

[1]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/