MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by egypturnash | 2025-08-02 16:31:53+00:00
It's not going to solve loneliness.

It's just going to provide a weak substitute for actual socialization.

Talking with actual humans but only over the internet is not enough, I have been there and it was a terrible trap, it provided just enough to make it possible for me to avoid physical socialization, while not giving me enough to actually thrive; we need to get out and be in the same place with other people, doing things, making emotional connections, even if we are awkward in person because too much of our socialization has been online and we barely know how to carry on a conversation.

Talking with a fake person over the internet is not going to be any better, especially if this fake person is built with the same meticulous attention to maximizing engagement at the expense of everything else that has thus far characterized all our social media, it doesn't matter if these interactions make you happier or sadder, it doesn't matter if these interactions are good for you or society as a whole, as long as you keep coming back so the company can point at an ever-growing MAU number when they make their next pitch for funding.
by turnsout | 2025-08-02 16:32:20+00:00
I'll give you two completely different and conflicting opinions!

Bear case: No, there's nothing you can do. These are exceptionally rare hires driven by FOMO at the peak of AI froth. If any of these engineers are successful at creating AGI/superintelligence within five years, then the market for human AI engineers will essentially vanish overnight. If they are NOT successful at creating AGI within five years, the ultra high-end market for human AI engineers will also vanish, because companies will no longer trust that talent is the key.

Bull case: Yes, you should go all in and rebrand as a self-proclaimed AI genius. Don't focus on commanding $250M in compensation (although 24, Matt Deitke has been doing AI/ML since high school). Instead, focus on optimizing or changing any random part of the transformer architecture and publishing an absolutely inscrutable paper about the results. Make a glossy startup page that makes some bold claims about how you'll utilize your research to change the game. If you're quick, you can ride the wave of FOMO and start leveling up. Although AGI will never happen, the opportunities will remain as we head into the "plateau of productivity."
by vntok | 2025-08-02 16:33:43+00:00
> You seem to assume that cutting funding by 20% will cut exactly the fraudulent parts.

Not at all. What I'm saying is that, based on (a) the astronomical amounts involved, (b) the absence of previous audits on the spending of said amounts, and (c) the fact that the institution is immediately agreeing to a settlement:

(1) it seems pretty improbable that there's not some sort of misuse of funds

(2) it seems pretty improbable for a cut this size not to touch at least some of the fraudulent parts along the way.

I'm not sure why you'd think otherwise. Is it that you somehow believe in Hardvard's perfect integrity, or in the administration's exclusive targeting of legit programs?

> I'm likely just as stupid as my friends.

That's probably it, but it's not uncommon at all. When choosing their friends, most people optimize for similarity rather than difference. You could also think of it as being likely as intelligent as your friends!
by exe34 | 2025-08-02 16:33:56+00:00
Oh no, I don't expect Trump to leave the White House unless it's in a box. He' s about to splurge $100M of his own money on a ballroom, so clearly he's planning on being king for a while. No, the comfort is that the US won't be bossing the world around for very long. Russia says a lot of things, but the only people they can bully at this point is their next door neighbours. The US can currently glass pretty much anybody anywhere within 2 hours. Trump is just making sure their influence on the rest of the world becomes minimal within a decade or two.
by dtkav | 2025-08-02 16:34:18+00:00
Obsidian distributes their software for free, and makes money on a core plugin called Obsidian Sync (note that it is not open source). Obsidian Sync relies on their cloud to offer e2ee file sync.

Obsidian also has a rich plugin ecosystem with lots of open source plugins that are available and serve the same purpose (and you can use gdrive, dropbox, etc too).

It makes sense to me that they released a proprietary privacy and security focused plugin (that is their core business) and they don't want other plugins to be able to arbitrarily change the server that their plugin is pointed at.

Suppose they have a government customer who is using Obsidian Sync and the sync URL can be changed easily via configuration changes -- now the customer believes they are using Obsidian Sync, but actually their data is going somewhere else.

I don't think you would be surprised to find that e.g. a dropbox daemon has protections to make sure it is pointing at dropbox.com. Why would you expect Obsidian to be different?

(disclaimer: I work on a different plugin that adds file sync and collaboration features to Obsidian)
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-02 16:34:23+00:00
> Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.

That thinking assumes that money and human behaviour is in a one direction. You first have human behaviour and then you have money, so it would stand to reason that one is subject to the other. However, in reality the relationship is of co-dependency. Human behaviour adapts to the availability of money and what it buys. Have you ever seen trying to reintroduce a wild animal after it's being treated for a long time? You can't just throw it in the jungle and expect them to survive.

> needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.

Which I'm reading that is not essential, following the previous paragraph, which I disagree. Take electricity out, most people wouldn't be able to survive too long. We weren't dependent but we've built lifesyles that are and we are trapped in it. Which doesn't mean we need to return to jungle, it's just that we need to treat the relationship between humans and the economy with much more respect than that.

> you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true.

I believe you are thinking about a ostentatious lifestyle. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about lifestyle where we are used to electricity and supermarkets. Where everything is taken care of so that we hyperspecialize our skill sets.
by LargeWu | 2025-08-02 16:34:43+00:00
I don't disagree with that. I think economic power getting concentrated in a relatively small number of hands is unequivocally bad.

That said, the Abundance argument for building more housing is that in many local housing markets, the pendulum has swung too far the other way in ways that are well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive. This very article makes the case that oligopolistic economic power is not the reason for unaffordable housing.
by garciansmith | 2025-08-02 16:34:49+00:00
I miss the ThinkLight (and the dual-light idea he had sounds great). Useful when working in a dark environment to look at papers and whatnot, or just to provide a nice amount of ambient light to smooth out the contrast between the screen itself and your surroundings. Most modern laptops have backlit keys, but those don't help in those cases; they are pretty much only useful for people who can't touch type.
by mullingitover | 2025-08-02 16:35:32+00:00
This seems completely tautological.

Yes, when the policies stupid/bigoted/harmful/cruel, you probably also don't like the jerks who are implementing them.

It would be weird if the reverse were true: "Yes, the policies are pure corruption and bigotry, but honestly the bros who are carrying them out are alright. Stand-up guys all around."
by kubectl_h | 2025-08-02 16:35:42+00:00
Substack had a few things that worked for it

* Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse.

* Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse.

* A rapid adoption of substack by well known online writers with loyal followings. These writers either had their own blogs or were exiting traditional media or getting dumped out by the collapse of online media (gawker network, buzzfeed news, etc). Again, could have been Medium if not for their collapse.

* I suspect Substack spent a lot of that VC money guaranteeing 2 years of X revenue for a non-trivial number of high profile writers so they would onboard.

Reading this story I didn't realize just how much they had taken over the years (I use to operate in this media space, but haven't in a long time). I'm not sure what the headcount is but that amount of money is staggering and I can only imagine it was all used to acquire DAUs and very little novel technology has been created with it.

I think Substacks first 10m/100m (their keep of rev/total rev from subscriptions) was extremely impressive and fast. But also it was a kind of low hanging fruit. There was a market already there for this and Medium/Patreon couldn't capture it. Now if they are really at 45m/450m that is much less impressive. It will be extremely hard to get to 100m/1000m and IMO impossible to get much higher than that with their current approach.
by zhyd1997_ | 2025-08-02 16:35:58+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Shanghai/Singapore/Hongkong

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Included in my side project: GitHub - softmaple/softmaple: A Paper Typesetting Editor

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadong-zhang-48a474154/

Website: https://zhyd1997.dev

Email: zhyd007 [at] gmail com
by dash2 | 2025-08-02 16:35:59+00:00
I feel ambivalent about Substack's Notes (its version of X/Bluesky). On the one hand, the signal/noise ratio is higher than either X or Bluesky. On the other hand, I can see signs of the social media engagement farming nonsense that I've come to dread.

But, I can just click on the "Following" link to avoid it. In fact, I can even set that as my homepage. So, so far, it's not that bad. And I continue to enjoy the diversity of writers; and am much more worried by virtuous scolds than by neonazis.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-02 16:36:01+00:00
It feels weird to read all these responses from people who think the only way to socialize is to pay high prices at bars and coffee shops.

It’s like how someone who avoids socialization imagines what socialization looks like. I hope some people are reading this thread and realizing it’s not as expensive as they assume to go out and do things. There are many people out there making a fraction of what most readers here do who have no problem finding things to do for socialization.
by olddustytrail | 2025-08-02 16:36:07+00:00
This seems like a self correcting problem.

In the past, women who didn't really want children didn't have a great deal of choice, particularly if they wanted to follow any kind of socially acceptable life. It was considered a failure to many if they didn't get a husband and children.

Therefore there was no particular evolutionary pressure to select for women who actually had a strong biological urge to have children.

But there is now, so after a few generations you end up with mostly those women having children, that genetically passed on desire becomes more prominent, and birth rates increase again. Until overpopulation becomes a new version of the problem people thought it would be previously.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-02 16:36:09+00:00
Thank you so much for this comment, because it perfectly highlights the point I was trying to make.

When I was a young person in the mid 90s, I (and most of my friends) made the equivalent or less of what you make now. But we also didn't have discord or Internet multiplayer games, so we were basically forced to go hang out in person and find other cheap stuff to do.
Show HN: I've had success in SaaS and now I'm building tools for indie hackers
by gigamick | 2025-08-02 16:36:45+00:00
This is my first product as part of this project I'm working on. It's a no-frills, but perfectly functional customer support tool for indie hackers, soloprenuers and small teams. would love your feedback and suggestions of how to make more people aware.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-02 16:36:59+00:00
For Windows UIs I've been getting into Win32/GDI/DirectDraw/etc.

Tools like CsWin32 and modern C# (ref returns) make working with these APIs a lot more approachable today. It used to be the case that you had to create a nasty C++ project to do any of this. Now you can just list the methods you need access to in your nativemethods.txt file and the codegen takes care of the rest.

Win32 is a lot lower level than other things you'd typically consider to be a "UI framework", but the important tradeoff is that it is also a lot harder for Microsoft to remove or screw with in any meaningful way. I cannot come up with something that has been more stable than these APIs. The web doesn't even come close if we are looking at the same timescales.
by axoltl | 2025-08-02 16:37:18+00:00
Just from my limited experience:

Barton Springs in Austin is always brimming with people and Shiner Bock makes a frequent appearance.

Dolores Park in SF never has a dull moment and you can buy shrooms or edibles from vendors walking around.

Golden Gate Park in SF is massive and there are tons of clusters of people socializing and drinking throughout the park (especially near the Conservatory of Flowers!)

Central Park in NY in many ways mirrors Golden Gate Park only its way busier. Good luck finding a spot near the south side of the park on a sunny day. You might spot a mimosa or two, three…
by bigyabai | 2025-08-02 16:37:25+00:00
Technology in the 1960s: We did it! We finally manufactured the first oral Polio vaccine, humankind will no longer suffer at the auspices of unjust biology.

Technology in the 2020s: What irks me about the Antichrist is that it's too deeply mired in magical heuristics, not enough Gog and Magog, if you catch my drift. This is why I need you to invest in my killer drone company. Okay?
by cnst | 2025-08-02 16:37:44+00:00
To me, it seems like they're simply a monetised version of Tumblr, without the newfound censorship that all the other social media companies somehow have to have.

I really don't get the whole email thing, though. Newsletters are kinda super annoying to signup for, and then to receive. I've tried the Substack version, and I still don't get it. Even though I do love the mailing lists, but that's not the same as the newsletters.
by LexiMax | 2025-08-02 16:37:55+00:00
Business leaders might have had a distaste for the evangelical wing of the GOP, but they have been, are, and always will be terrified of populist left-wing movements. There was a fair amount of that kind of sentiment floating around in the Obama years with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the popularity of Bernie Sanders, so they decided to hitch their fortunes to the GOP.

And it's easy to understand why they made that choice. I don't think they are dim-witted, ignorant of history, or unaware of how this gamble could turn out badly for them. Instead, it's because for all of the problems that they are having with the current administration, they still have their wealth, they still have some of their influence, and they also have the option to jump ship for greener pastures if worst came to worst.

You'll notice that nowhere in that equation is concern for the average working-class American.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-02 16:38:58+00:00
Have you tried doing anything other than work that isn't consuming something?

I have, from drawing to music, from writing novels to doing programming projects on my free time.

It's not very fun, you aren't good at most of it and it's very frustrating. It's also very rewarding being able to overcome limitations and building up skills. But it's first and foremost very demanding. You can't expect someone that just got retired to suddenly spark in creative energy, even if they intimately wanted to do everything.
by gyulai | 2025-08-02 16:39:30+00:00
> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows?

Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms.

I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe).

But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too.

All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.

The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps.

On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
by lvl155 | 2025-08-02 16:40:02+00:00
Healthcare in the US is broken and they won’t let you fix it because the money is too good. Think about the fact that PBMs, which is there to save and manage on pharma is incentivized to promote drug price inflation. That’s just one “small” piece of this clusterf*k. It’s layers and layers of these convoluted system of incentives.

As to OP, the simplest solution is to move out of the US early enough or become “poor” enough and be in a wealthy blue state by the time you get to this predicament.
by acedTrex | 2025-08-02 16:40:49+00:00
I try to use claude code a lot, I keep getting very frustrated with how slow it is and how it always does things wrong. It does not feel like its saving my any mental energy on most tasks. I do gravitate towards it for some things. But then I am sometimes burned on doing that and its not pleasent.

For example, last week i decided to play with nushell, i have a somewhat simple .zshrc so i just gave it to claude and asked it to convert it to nushell. The nu it generated for the most part was not even valid, i spent 30 mins with it, it never worked. took me about 10 minutes in the docs to convert it.

So it's miserable experiences like that that make me want to never touch it, because I might get burned again. There are certainly things that I have found value in, but its so hit or miss that i just find my self not wanting to bother.
by MrZander | 2025-08-02 16:41:28+00:00
Very true. We just developed a brand new LOB desktop app and settled on sticking with WPF. WinUI has been dead for years imo.

On a side note, I still love WPF after working in it for 10 years. Maybe it's just familiarity, and it's a little verbose at times, but man it's a great framework when you know that you're doing.
by turnsout | 2025-08-02 16:41:33+00:00
This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world.

He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AGI/super-intelligence. He needs to beat Sam Altman.

The sad thing is, even if he does beat Sam to AGI, Sam will still probably get the credit as the visionary.
by nabla9 | 2025-08-02 16:41:36+00:00
>But Reuters interviews with two Indian officials and three of their Pakistani counterparts found that the performance of the Rafale wasn't the key problem: Central to its downing was an Indian intelligence failure concerning the range of the China-made PL-15 missile fired by the J-10 fighter.

> The faulty intelligence gave the Rafale pilots a false sense of confidence they were out of Pakistani firing distance, which they believed was only around 150 km, the Indian officials said, referring to the widely cited range of PL-15's export variant.

>The PL-15 that hit the Rafale was fired from around 200km (124.27 mi) away, according to Pakistani officials, and even farther according to Indian officials. That would make it among the longest-range air-to-air strikes recorded.
by mroche | 2025-08-02 16:42:02+00:00
> Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.

I wish they didn't. Outlook on macOS is abysmal nowadays and I still find myself resorting to the legacy view just to change some settings that both iterations can read but only one exposes.

I significantly prefer using Thunderbird or the web views for Gmail and Zoho Mail over any version of Outlook. Is the integration across O365 apps nice? Sure, but the platforms themselves are miserable to use.

In a similar vein, I was cautiously optimistic about Teams V2 for unifying the client. But then they completely dropped the Linux client for their PWA which does not have feature parity with the "native" platforms and has a significantly worse UX.
by xoa | 2025-08-02 16:42:23+00:00
>The government not funding something isn't persecution

So you're not just getting down votes, worth noting that you are incorrect to state this as an absolute, as a matter of both law and common sense. It is very well established (and again, makes sense) that there are many many areas of life where it's utterly uncontroversial that the government is in no way required to offer people services. However, IF the government chooses to offer people services, then it must do so in a fair way. For example, a local government need not offer any of its building space for public use. But if it lets one group make use of it, it can't then disallow other groups from doing so based on disliking their race/speech/etc. Any restrictions must be content-neutral (this has been litigated).

Or for a broader theoretical example, there's nothing in the US Constitution that requires government to fund any sort of medical care. While it might be political suicide, Congress could choose to just sweep away Medicaid and Medicare completely whenever it wished, and that wouldn't be unconstitutional. Now instead imagine that the government said "to save money we're going to deny Medicaid or Medicare to filthy negroes or dirty jews going forward!" I would hope that you'd recognize that the government "not funding something" there would absolutely be a form of persecution. Conditioning funding on something the government would not be able to make a direct law about is not a universal Get Out Of The Bill Of Rights Free card.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-02 16:42:31+00:00
This is completely the wrong approach. You can't dedicate your entire life to one specific task and expect when you retire to suddenly be able to "improve the lives of the people around (you) without staying in the consumption treadmill" because all you know is the consumption treadmill. Thinking otherwise is just wishful thinking.

If you see yourself improving the lives of people around you later in life, which is commendable and the right thing to do, you have to start now, while you are still in your prime years. If you leave it when you are older chances are you'll be just another John waiting in line for the next Black Friday.