MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dsign | 2025-09-19 11:01:37+00:00
You may be taking things from the wrong end.

Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.

The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.

I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.

There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.
by jongjong | 2025-09-19 11:03:38+00:00
I sometimes get jealous of bad people. Bad people tend to surround themselves with other bad people. So when their 'close ones' die, they probably don't feel much grief... And they probably inherit more money because bad people have more money.

It's like how some criminals describe feeling a sense of relief once they got caught. Some part of them is glad that they get punished.

Being a bad person is a win-win in this world; you win by cheating and then if you get caught, you can at least rejoice in knowing that there is justice in the world.

Being a good person is hard because everyone close to you is also good, so their death is unbearable and unjust.

The only thing which sucks about being a bad person is love... Because if you're good and you fall in love with someone and they don't love you back, it's much easier to fall out of love. "Maybe they're a psychopath" or "They're too superficial" you subconsciously tell yourself...

But if you're a bad person and you fall in love with someone and they don't love you back, you think to yourself "They must be a good person; they can see straight through me into my dark heart" and this sign of virtue makes you even more attracted to them. Hating you is proof that the person is sane, wholesome and perceptive... Which is very attractive to someone who is none of these things!
by fiatjaf | 2025-09-19 11:04:52+00:00
That's a misconception: you don't "use" relays (in the sense that you don't have to have a static list of relays you always use), you write to relays. When reading you connect to the relays of whatever the people you want to read from.

Some apps indeed use this method of selecting a static set of relays, and if that was the protocol you would be correct about centralization or bloat, but this is legacy from a naïve unfinished early implementation, most apps do the correct thing now and the rest is transitioning.
by nunobrito | 2025-09-19 11:05:13+00:00
All of that is correct, albeit not the full picture.

Crypto wasn't created as a "get rich quick". I say this because I was there since the early days and participated quite a bit on the related BBS. Back then you'd already make good money building bots for day trading on stocks, crypto was really about a type of currency that no government could touch.

Nowadays the large majority of users are desperate to make some money through pyramid schemes and pure speculation to "get rich quick" albeit they usually end up losing money. The small minority is doing what they've always done: looking at systems, criticizing systems and building their own solutions to those systems.

There is really good stuff being built. Not many do it, granted.
by callmeal | 2025-09-19 11:05:20+00:00
>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great)

Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut.

But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.
by muskyFelon | 2025-09-19 11:05:44+00:00
I wouldn't say he's one of the best CEOs. He's been "successful" by - selling an unhealthy addictive product - burying research on its mental health impact on children - engaging in anticompetitive behavior

Oh yeah, add stealing the original idea for facebook from the Winklevoss twins. I'll take being a loser if that's what it takes.
by Valk3_ | 2025-09-19 11:07:18+00:00
How do you become good at this? Is it simply practising doing UI/UX interfaces over and over and over and over until you get it? Do you have some specific advice on how to get "there" faster? I recently stumbled across this Refactoring UI book[1], heard it's sort of popular, know if it's any good?

[1] https://www.refactoringui.com/
by bagatelle | 2025-09-19 11:07:30+00:00
I've thought a good bit about the "too large" side (author here under a different name). The magic rule for me has been to consider whether each member actually has a function within the community, in the sense that they contribute something unique to the group which is not contributed by anyone else, and for which the community would be hurt if they aren't there. The idea was originally put into my head by C.S. Lewis, in his work on Membership: "If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables." E.g. if you were to remove a random poster from HN, it wouldn't affect anything much at all, because they end up a number. However, if you were to remove dang, their presence would be missed because they contribute to the uniqueness of HN's community in some way. IMO, if the group doesn't pass this test, you haven't actually found the real community yet.

Of course, all of this is quickly-written thoughts for a HN post. Maybe at some point I'll edit them down and post them properly, but I need to discuss it with more people so I'm sure my thoughts actually strike reality.
by keiferski | 2025-09-19 11:11:05+00:00
Yeah, I mean I am not personally working on a project in this space, nor do I have any super-strong feelings about it.

It's more that I like personal websites, from both an ownership and creative perspective. And so I wish there were more approaches which attempted to incentivize that model without creating a complicated new protocol, platform, etc. That might involve making it easier to create and self-host websites, an opt-in directory of personal sites with chat + forums attached, or something else like that.
by steveBK123 | 2025-09-19 11:12:18+00:00
It's like the Bill Murray quote though - I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it.

The entertainment industry is filled with a lot of more-famous-than-rich people. By these numbers David Lynch (at 78) was probably as wealthy as 1000s of random (and anonymous) successful Mag7 SWEs are at retirement.
by rvz | 2025-09-19 11:14:10+00:00
With any ecosystem that allows lots of customizability means that there are millions of alternatives to choose from.

Web development is exactly like this.

Apple gives you a limited choice of supported languages to build iOS and macOS apps - i.e. Swift (default) or Objective-C which means less focus on seeking alternatives, context switching on the stack and is why you are productive with the technology and know it inside out.
by dchftcs | 2025-09-19 11:14:36+00:00
People should stop using the Photos app. It is an application designed to lock you in first, make your life hard second, and manage your photos a far third. If photos are important to you, you should never ever put the master copies in an opaquely-managed proprietary container. It prevents you from auditing your files easily, it also prevents you from making backups in other media. Photos isn't even useful; leaving the photos as files allows you to pick multiple tools to manage them better.
by sofixa | 2025-09-19 11:14:53+00:00
> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries

Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts.

And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.).

Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind.

But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-19 11:14:57+00:00
No and yes I think a lot of people see the tax cuts as a lump sum transfer of wealth from the American public to private hands. In fact after you made this comment I found that the house.gov website says this explicitly.

The argument that taxes are part of the social contract was made by the same people who invented the concept of the social contract, of which the US constitution is famously an explicit example. So yes in general I think the people who founded the country bought the argument that creating a government required the payment of taxes necessarily as an obligation.

Do you think anyone really buys the idea that it's anything else?
by bandie91 | 2025-09-19 11:15:03+00:00
i practiced this email address scheme for a short period, then switched to ${my_initials}${few_digit_digest($other_party)}@${my_domain} $other party being a webshop, an online service, an institution, or a person.

then to ${my_initials}${random_few_digits}@${my_domain} to be able to hand out pre-generated email addresses of mine even offline, and bookkeep who has got which random number at my side internally.

this raised the least eyebrows so far.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-19 11:15:38+00:00
That's not a language feature as much as it is a culture and standard library feature.

For instance, Java could do the same, but in practice conversion methods throw runtime exceptions that you won't be warned about and your code will randomly crash if conversions fail, except in some cases when it doesn't. For casting between numeric types the language does have some legacy cruft, but for web applications nothing is stopping you from doing this. Java's explicit exception system is great at forcing developers to deal with potential failures, but in practice Java developers chose not to deal with exceptions so often that exceptions now get hidden.

Rust does this stuff in the standard library and that gives you the advantage that you don't need to explain the concept and convince every developer that this is a good idea. The same way Java has optional nullability annotations that are rarely used in practice because not every developer feels like adding them, unlike languages where nullability is part of the type system.

The concept is not exclusive to Rust, but I also haven't found it very popular outside of Rust developer circles.
by jcattle | 2025-09-19 11:15:38+00:00
I mean, to me at least it is also interesting. Like Japanese writing or Arabic. It's interesting because it is different, there's a different predominant convention. You can also think further about how the writing convention might have had an impact on culture and the society itself.

Also thinking of maps and Japan: where I am from (Germany) public overview maps of parks or street maps usually have north as up. In Japan however it is very common for those maps to have up as the cardinal direction you are looking at the map at. So if you are looking at the map in a western direction, the map will have west up. So for walking the map is straight up, backwards down, left left and right right.

Like that it is very easy to know which way to go. Want to go to some place that is on the left on the map? Turn left!
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-19 11:16:26+00:00
> And yet a lot of young people somehow think they were good guys.

Reality is really context dependent, and with lots of nuance. Obviously being anti-fascist and helped out taking down the Nazis makes you more of a "good guy" than "bad guy" for that specific moment, but obviously that doesn't mean the USSR or Russia is exclusively the "good guys" always, which goes the same for every country out there.

Where are you finding these young people praising the USSR though? It always seems like a talking point from conservatives on the internet, as I'm never able to find these elusive USSR-praisers in real-life. There is a ton of people ironically saying they love USSR, but surely these are not the people you're talking about?
by jmkd | 2025-09-19 11:16:54+00:00
It does on both equinoxes, which along with the solstices have been universally marked days in every civilization. Consider those days as reliable calibrations for any kind of wayfinding or navigation system in ancient times. Aztecs, Mayans and Incans noted the sunrise position every day of the year in order to plan agricultural (and cultural) activity.
by walkingthisquai | 2025-09-19 11:17:21+00:00
When you go to the Gemini in Chrome section on the same privacy page it states:

'When you use the Gemini in Chrome feature, Gemini collects and processes page content and the URL from the browser tab you’re viewing by default. Some of the page content Gemini uses might not be visible to you."

I think they're being reasonably explicit about what they're doing.

Note: I'm in the EU so not sure if this is what's shown everywhere else.
by strken | 2025-09-19 11:18:14+00:00
Steady on now: there's an interesting psychological effect going on. A well known art exercise is to draw a subject upside down, particularly a person or a scene with a clear usual orientation.

When you take something you're very familiar with and turn it upside down, you see all the details - volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour - with fresh eyes. With art, it becomes easier to draw a human figure because it discourages symbol drawing. With a map, I find it helps me realise how close certain points are to each other, how small politically significant regions are, which lattitude different climate bands sit at, and so on.

A mug is a pretty boring object which we're all used to seeing upside down and which doesn't have many interesting features, so of course turning it upside down will not reveal anything interesting.
by max1990 | 2025-09-19 11:18:28+00:00
What will the cost be? I see it's $6,000 for a 10-person startup, but assuming a startup reaches scale, there's no information about what this will cost. Would be unwise to use this SDK as an integral feature without any kind of clarity on pricing. Some guidance would be helpful without needing to start setting up official calls with salespeople and going through some long discussion. Often, those sales pipelines don't even give pricing because the salesperson decides that the startup is not a good prospect. And thus back to the catch-22: we can't know the pricing until we're big.
by farrelle25 | 2025-09-19 11:19:10+00:00
This mightn't be exactly what you're looking for - but Leatherman seems an example of a class of people called 'Holy Fools'. (maybe because Leatherman carried a little prayer book)

The Holy Fools were semi-religious figures who acted strangely or pretended to be mad to challenge social norms and express spiritual truths.

They were common in Russia at one time and called: "yuródivyy"

In the West, some examples would be Francis of Assisi and Benedict Joseph Labre.

edit: In the USA I'd nearly call Johnny Appleseed one of the 'Holy Fools' and even Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)
by alex_x | 2025-09-19 11:19:19+00:00
> The situation you describe isn't easy to get out of until you address whatever fear is causing you to over-worry about every step.

Thanks for the reply, I think this is exactly what I needed to hear; will try to reflect on this.

From the very top of my head: I know exactly what I need to do but I feel like with every tech choice I need to either learn "how" or refresh my previous knowledge.

Wearing multiple hats in rapidly popping up and fading out tech startups didn't really help to go deep with one thing (as I managed to with objc/ios)
by dmarcotte | 2025-09-19 11:19:21+00:00
Thanks! KSON is very focused on facilitating a better interface for a user managing config data, so one concrete example of the embed block's purpose is to help anywhere folks are directly editing important/complex multi-line strings in their config (think sql in dbt files, or bash snippets in GitHub Actions, etc).

By making the content type of the embed a first-class citizen of the syntax, together with clear boundaries for the embedded content, editors and IDEs can hook in all their great tooling to the embed blocks. So, you nailed it: being great for devex is exactly the idea.
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-19 11:19:32+00:00
Common.

A trillion years ago when I was at Travelocity and layoffs came down senior leadership wanted to be fair. Critical positions to the business were safe. For everyone else a quota system was used to normalize headcount reduction by team. Level of leadership and performance were secondary to the quota.

I had a nearly career ending shitty annual review just before the economy tanked. My job was super safe. I was a front end developer for a major web business before jQuery became popular. They could not find competent front end developers. It’s like they didn’t exist anywhere. For the most part this remains true today but everyone pretends otherwise after hiding behind these colossal frameworks and tons of abstraction layers. Now there is no reason to really know how to do that work because imposter syndrome is baked into the baseline.
by zachrip | 2025-09-19 11:19:58+00:00
When I found out I am going blind, I traveled around Europe solo for a summer and I found myself at La Sagrada Familia...once inside I almost cried because the light was so beautiful. And finding a special spot to just sit and enjoy an espresso on a sunny day with it in the background is blissful. I'm not religious at all, but many of the nicest buildings throughout my travels were places of worship.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-19 11:20:35+00:00
You need to add a lot of text, but the text contains about the same semantic meaning. It's a lot of typing but that's a matter of density rather than ease of use.

At least in modern c++. Then again, modern C++ seems to play the same role as modern Java, in that some places use it but most of them are stuck at the version they picked when they started developing on a piece of software decades ago.
by danparsonson | 2025-09-19 11:20:51+00:00
OK, it's just an analogy, to make a broad point about the approach to design and construction. But you absolutely can design software in that way - I do it, and it works very well. It's not easy, but as I said in another comment, it delivers robust solutions that are nonetheless adaptable to change and easy to maintain. By contrast the 'agile' projects I've worked on were either a tangled mess, or else failed spectacularly.

> This isn't how writing code works

Maybe that's not how you write code, but there are many different ways to paint that particular fence, no? I've been coding for a long time and for me, this is the approach that I've landed on that's the best I've found so far. To me, the idea of feature-led development is, to put it mildly, nonsensical.
by jlpcsl | 2025-09-19 11:21:27+00:00
Same here for the last couple of years. KDE Plasma is by far the best computer desktop environment and getting even better fast. Complete opposite to closed corporate desktops on Windows and macOS which are quite bad these days and getting even worse. Corporate desktop ensittification is in full swing for years now. I am so glad for the wonderful KDE Plasma desktop (and GNU/Linux oprating system in general), which still respects my basic human rights like freedom, privacy and does not try to push that Annoying Idiocy down my throat. Thanks a bunch to all free software developers for making all this possible.
by bradfa | 2025-09-19 11:21:48+00:00
Plaid and Finicity do this in the USA for some linking of banking to other financial products. Feels SO insecure. Connecting my credit union checking account through Plaid even ironically brought me to a login page which explicitly states I should never give my banking password to any other entity.

If I need to link my accounts and these services are the only choice then I change my banking passwords immediately after.
by _heimdall | 2025-09-19 11:22:01+00:00
The challenge for the second approach is that budgets are going to be spent once they have been allocated. If you improve efficiency and reduce costs that savings will just get spent somewhere else or on some new initiative.

Government work and corporate work are very much the same in that way, budgets are use it or lose it and everyone will use it this year so their budget isn't reduces next year.
by sho_hn | 2025-09-19 11:22:09+00:00
I know we are not supposed to talk about karma (and therefore a downvote ironically may be appropriate on this comment), but I agree vote behaviour on HN lately shows a still-small but growing tendency toward suppressive downvoting.

This seems to happen generally for two reasons: Even a neutral comment is evaluated for what stance it most closely aligns with, and then downvoted to suppress the opposing view just in case. Or alternatively, a comment that appears low-key combative (but really isn't directly so) gets downvoted in an attempt to ensure harmony.

Both moves to me have "culture war vibes", and come from either adopting those habits or feeling very tired from strife.

I think it's increasingly easy to fall into either bracket, but let's not do that on HN! If a comment is generally polite enough, the only bar to meet is adding new information or new thought into a conversation. None of us come here to be pandered to, and getting challenged by viewpoints that force you to consider the corner cases of your own views is half the fun.