MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inetknght | 2025-10-03 02:17:37+00:00
> Messenger was never the primary draw of Facebook.

I didn't say it was. Remember, my statement was: ... that people are in the app because Facebook gave out Facebook Messenger

Indeed, I remember using Facebook just for messages. So when Facebook Messenger came out, I used that exclusively.

Now, I've long since moved off of Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Some of my family still use it though, and I've seen it. It's not what it used to be. So, I then expanded on that to say: Then Facebook changed how Facebook Messenger works

> they’re factually incorrect or illogical

So, where's the factually incorrect or illogical argument?

The final straw for me to move off of Facebook was Cambridge Analytica. Once I realized how terrible not just Facebook was for not only permitting that kind of shit, but practically inviting it as a feature... that was very telling. And I've since stopped using nearly all social media, present website excluded.
by alex43578 | 2025-10-03 02:17:52+00:00
"Lots of users would gladly pay way more than $30/year have an ad-free experience"? Outside of ads embedded in Google Maps, a free and simple install of Ublock Origin essentially eliminates ads in Search, YouTube, etc. I'd expect that just like Facebook, people would be very unwilling to pay for Google to eliminate ads, since right now they aren't even willing to add a browser extension.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-03 02:18:29+00:00
> The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.

Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads. (Some state governments did provide some of the initial capital for the earliest railroads). Most of federal largess to the railroads came in the form of land grants, but even the land grant system for the railroads was remarkably limited in scope. Only about 7-8% of the railroad mileage attracted land grants.
by autumnstwilight | 2025-10-03 02:19:05+00:00
Being interested in something is a skill that can be cultivated in itself. Of course, you probably won't be able to convince yourself that something you find unbearably dull is interesting, but you can deepen a vague interest into curiosity towards and appreciation of the details and nuances.

It's not about joyless grinding or forcing yourself, more like putting yourself in a space where you engage with the thing and deciding to go just one step further than the point where your attention initially starts to drift. Or just putting yourself back in the space of thinking about it when you have a free moment, like waiting in a queue. You can use that time to, for example, make up a few sentences in the language that you're learning (perhaps about how annoying the queue is), or playing music in your head.

It is slightly more difficult in the moment, but in the long term it makes your life experience richer and more fulfilling than if you pulled out your phone and started scrolling (which you can still do afterward). You don't have to be mercilessly beating yourself about productivity, but if you develop these kinds of habits you tend to naturally start doing it more often.
by TheDong | 2025-10-03 02:19:28+00:00
> Every other major messaging app exposes something to developers

Not iMessage, which is the largest messaging app in the US. Uniquely, it doesn't even have an android app, so android users have to pay $800 to buy a single-use device with an effectively worthless OS bundled on it just to be able to join group chats.

iMessage doesn't even have good crypto, the default settings include unencrypted iCloud backups of your iMessage data lol.

I'll take Signal, which works on my desktop linux machine and android phone, over iMessage any day of the week, but the US as a whole seems to have chosen differently
by Neywiny | 2025-10-03 02:19:35+00:00
Not putting words in your mouth but your 10k mark I think coincided with my viewpoint for my own fitness journey. You did it in your living room. The gym is a whole thing. Getting the without gear, the water bottle, the driving, etc etc. Then when you're exhausted and tired you have to drive back or walk back or whatever. Doing push ups in your living room has no barrier to entry or exit. You do them when you want to, you stop when you want to, and you're back on the couch watching tv to recover within seconds. Can do it in hotel rooms, late at night, 5am, whatever. For me, that's the benefit and why such exercises work when gym doesn't. Maybe some of your success is from a similar vein, maybe not
by dkarl | 2025-10-03 02:20:21+00:00
All of these are interesting analogs to each other, in that they involve a critical "thinking about" aspect paired with an intuitive, creative, active mental process.

In the case of catching a fly ball, the "thinking about" approach using trigonometry is completely unhelpful. In the case of music, the "thinking about" approach of theory can be helpful, but many people who learned informally have been brilliant musicians without ever learning a formal approach to theory. In the case of math, the critical "thinking about" aspect is vital. Pretty much everybody needs it, Ramanujan aside.

What unites all of these cases, however, is that the formal "thinking about" aspect is useless on its own. Without the productive, creative aspect, it doesn't have anything to critique and make better.
by jonhohle | 2025-10-03 02:20:33+00:00
I’ve been a Mac user for >20 years, Linux before that, and lots of FreeBSD on the side. The rewrite from System Preferences to System Settings was one of the worst changes I’ve seen.

Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.

Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.

I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.
by sleepyguy | 2025-10-03 02:20:37+00:00
Touch screens can be difficult for seniors to use due to the reduced moisture in their fingertips, which often leads to multiple attempts for the device to register a touch. I'm not yet a senior, and I'm already experiencing this issue myself.

This is why I believe the future lies in touchless technology, like META Glasses. We should be able to control devices using voice commands or simple hand gestures. The need to touch icons or swipe feels outdated.
by handsclean | 2025-10-03 02:21:01+00:00
It’s happened many times before, and people heard about it and aren’t that stupid or forgetful. They just want to believe something incompatible, so they permit themselves a little internal dishonesty: maybe it’s a separate issue that somebody else will surely figure out, or there’s a better solution (that we won’t pursue), or everybody always exaggerates (but we won’t verify that), or they find a way to hate and dismiss everybody who talks about it. Declaring your own shamelessness is more of the same: you’re reframing the problem from the consequences of your actions to your feelings about those consequences, then addressing only your feelings. It’s the same sort of behavior as heroin addicts, who find a route to happiness that doesn’t push them through the good things that the pursuit of happiness was meant to.
by godelski | 2025-10-03 02:21:50+00:00
> Impersonation

Yes, but with a canary. Would you rather not have a canary? The other person also receives a warning that the verification number has changed. It's not like the existence of a phone number is what creates the ability to hijack an account. And again, you can do registration locking so that solves that problem.

You can also do verification of your contacts. Best done in person where you can check the keys.

> MITM attack

I don't think that means what you think it means. Who is in the middle? This is E2EE
by duttish | 2025-10-03 02:21:55+00:00
I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. I bought a mac and iphone a few months back because I wanted to look into iphone development and there was a lot of cursing involved.

First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.

On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.

I'm never buying a mac again if I can avoid it.
by rajaman0 | 2025-10-03 02:22:55+00:00
Consumer brand quality is so massively underrated by tech people.

ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.

I think your points on Google being well positioned are apt for capitalization reasons, but only one company has consumer mindshare on "AI" and its the one with "ai" in its name.
by bashmelek | 2025-10-03 02:23:02+00:00
For me, my real day starts after work is over. That is when the meaningful part happens. And if I am going to accomplish much that night, I need to arrive home knowing exactly what I need to start with, and do it. This is similar to Paul Graham’s saying that the people who get things done wake up knowing the one thing they need to do. Trouble with my evenings, though, is that my commute home and usage of the restroom have a way of draining all of my motivation and energy.
by voidmain | 2025-10-03 02:23:32+00:00
The key thing that memory safety provides is local reasoning. You can look at some important piece of code and conclude that it does the right thing, even if there are a million other lines of code somewhere else. UB makes this impossible; no matter how carefully you review dont_launch_missiles() it might launch the missiles due to an integer overflow in totally unrelated code in the same process.
by Telaneo | 2025-10-03 02:23:44+00:00
I've been really disappointed in iOS 26 for this reason. I thought it was going in the completely wrong direction, but maybe that was just me being grumpy. Then I noticed that the less computer savvy were having an absolutely abysmal time with it. We're back to computers being really hard for the normies, with apparently no mainstream option that's simple and easy for Grandma.

Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.

I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-03 02:23:49+00:00
Science progresses because it makes a disciplined study of the world with numerical predictions that are checked for accuracy.

Politics is treated by most people as essentially a religion. And religion does not progress with death. It just cycles through periods of greater fundamentalism and less fundamentalism.

There aren't enough people studying political science and studying it rigorously enough for the Planck observation to apply.
by cvoss | 2025-10-03 02:23:57+00:00
Well, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)
by riku_iki | 2025-10-03 02:23:58+00:00
> Why is it okay to just accept that the hyperscalers are 100% closed, but the minute a smaller player tries to play "open-ish" with "fair source" we crucify them?

besides morale, from pure business point of view, hyperscalers will likely last, so that's Ok to rely on them, small OSS projects can be supported/modified by community or business itself, but when some small closed source service is gone, it is compete shutdown, you need to migrate to something else in a very big hurry.
by cmurf | 2025-10-03 02:24:46+00:00
As far as I'm aware 14 CFR 107 lacks anything like what applies to aircraft in case of power plant failure.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-91#p-91.119(a)

The catch all under both regulations is anything that's "careless and wreckless"

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.23

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/section-91.13

Was this particular operation careless and wreckless? Could be.

Someone else in the thread said the weather conditions included mist. I'm skeptical misty conditions also permits a minimum 3 miles of visibility, but what do I know I'm just a pilot.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.51(c)

But also, it's possible the waiver I assume Amazon is operating under could include visibility. I assume this because Part 107 requires visual line of sight operation, but Amazon's operation sounds like beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). I don't know anything about that. I'd like to think the waiver and the operating requirements are public information, but I don't know that either.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/section-107.31

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-107#p-107.205(c)
by jmyeet | 2025-10-03 02:24:53+00:00
"Ch" is a strange hill to die on. "Ch" has a mostly consistent pronunciation (eg chair, touch, chain, choke, recharge, etc) that no other letter combination does.

Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word.

There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school).

"Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that.

But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair".

"Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.
by snickerbockers | 2025-10-03 02:26:18+00:00
>that talk about sending troops to republican majority cities

not that specifically but he did actually threaten to use nuclear weapons against american citizens. although FWIW it looks to me more like a manifestation of his advanced-stage alzheimer's than an intentional threat.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SHLHkmWoYDU

>He holds a lighthouse.

FDR is the one who illegally imprisoned 120k ethnically-japanese people (including at least 80k US citizens) in concentration camps solely on the basis of a hypothesized loyalty to the country their ancestors came from.
by neilv | 2025-10-03 02:26:24+00:00
> Writing down the next steps helps to clear your mind after a workday. You write and forget about your work until the next morning.

Another reason, which may be obvious, is that the notes help ramp you back up that next day.

> take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task.

I suppose it varies by individual. Jot down helpful notes (maybe in the issue-tracking comments for the task) that are already easily in mind, but maybe don't think through the step-by-step so much that you get your brain further into that space. If your goal is indeed to have your evening free without being a zombie with your head still stuck in your work.
by jason_oster | 2025-10-03 02:26:24+00:00
> You just cobble something together to sell. It need not be any good. As long as you can fool people into buying it, you can always try to make better versions later.

> So then you get these version numbers, even with decimals: version 2.6 or 2.7. That nonsense. While version 1 should have been the finished product.

E.W. Dijkstra

Translated from the original Dutch [1] [2].

Dijkstra was convinced that programming was a formal application of mathematics. If the program has a bug, the math is wrong. If the program is missing a feature, the math is incomplete.

Personally, I feel that building software like a bridge is the better path. You don't want the bridge patched with new supports and "stability improvements" every time another fatal design flaw is discovered any more than you want to update your OS and system libraries every time a new CVE is announced. These scenarios are both disruptive and costly. But somehow, we have been collectively tricked into accepting it as an unchangeable fact of software.

The advantage of software is that I can "replace the whole bridge" with a completely different design if I wish. Not merely patching an existing bridge in place, with whatever poor aesthetics and integrity problems that leaves behind.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/video-audio/NoorderlichtVideo...

[2] https://youtu.be/-Uae9_pgZzE?si=twwh7k7cPKRB2gvJ&t=50
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-10-03 02:26:34+00:00
Don’t be discouraged, the concept of a “correct push-up” is made up by humans. There’s nothing that makes that definition the truth, except that we’ve agreed upon it. To be fair, it probably works out your muscles more effectively, or in a balanced way or something. But even your “incorrect” push-ups are correct for _some appropriately defined cost function_. I promise, what you are doing is optimal. I just don’t know what for.

And doing 0 pushups is 100% worse than doing 50 of your personally-defined push-ups
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 02:27:51+00:00
> A country loses its right to "re-establish deterrence" when the population it's "deterring" is born inside its own de-facto borders, and when the only reason it needs to deter so many of them is that they would (rightly) like one of a) sovereignty or b) voting rights inside the federal system that controls their borders and can kick down the doors of the houses they were born in.

It's not just Palestinians they needed to deter, by the way most Israelis were also born within the borders as well. Israel has in the past made efforts to give more sovereignty to Palestinians but those efforts have largely backfired. I think initial efforts really need to focus on de-radicalization of Palestinians first before there's any reasonable chance another attempt at giving them more sovereignty will be more successful.

> If Israel would like to give Gaza full sovereignty, or Palestinians born inside the occupied territories the right to vote in the federal systems that determine their law enforcement environment, we can talk about deterrence and law enforcement respectively.

They already tried that[0], it didn't work out and arguably made the situation worse as they voted for Hamas[1] which quite openly advocates for the destruction of Israel.

> Israel has unilateral control of who it recognizes as its citizens, and what sovereign states it recognizes. No complaint about current or past bad behavior by the Palestinians excuses its failure to grant sovereignty or voting rights to people under its territorial control.

Are you seriously suggesting Israel can just give citizenship/voting rights to all Palestinians and make a group that largely wants their destruction a voting majority? There's a reason this will basically never happen, and that reason is that it would effectively be suicidal for Israelis. This sort of one-state solution is completely unrealistic. Some variation of a two-state solution is probably the most realistic, but I think we're a long way off from that being viable due to a lack of Palestinian desire for peaceful coexistence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_the...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...
by wlesieutre | 2025-10-03 02:27:54+00:00
Try Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri -> Talk and Type to Siri

You can individually turn off 1) voice activation phrases, 2) press and hold side button, and 3) double tap bottom edge to type

For the flashlight, I assume you're talking about on the lock screen. You can customize the lock screen and remove that button entirely. If he has a newer iPhone, flashlight is probably a good use for the "Action Button" on the left, if he doesn't want to use that for toggling ringer/vibrate.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-03 02:28:20+00:00
If it’s about wanting to understand your end to end workflow and you don’t mind it being “except for babel” then you could run emacs as a headless daemon and pass through to babel with emacsclient.

It’s a bit inelegant, and lacks the complete purity of “just 2,000 lines of code”. But the sentiment is already drawing lines based on arbitrary gradations in levels of abstraction. So if it improves your workflow to switch away from the rest of emacs’ baroque cathedral of unused functionality, and you want the simplicity of your bespoke engine, just make a handful of those 2,000 lines a wrapper around some i/o through to babel.

After all, it’s turtles all the way down on this sort of thing, at least until you’re staring at circuit diagrams of thinking, “huh, wonder if I can build it all with multi-, no, half adders..”. Further than that and you’ll probably need to learn some advanced metallurgy.
by alex43578 | 2025-10-03 02:28:24+00:00
What really has been added in terms of endless menus? Control Center was like 2013, Widgets were like 2014. Today, 90% of things are still controlled via the settings app, except for a few app-specific settings that are controlled via the specific app. The latest iOS has some rougher edges, but I can't see how it's confusing.
by bapak | 2025-10-03 02:29:08+00:00
My mother's brain immediately blanks out the moment I tap something on screen. I can see it. If it's 3 taps she says "oh it can do so much, I'll never remember it"

And that's it. Complete refusal to learn. She uses her phone daily but struggles "to go back," pressing every x and back button until there's nothing, then finally swipe up to reach the iPad/iPhone's Home Screen. She's not that old.
by credit_guy | 2025-10-03 02:31:31+00:00
> the dead-ended LLM tech that they can't seem to radically improve upon

You are saying this just 2 days after OpenAI released Sora 2. I personally consider that a truly radical improvement. Sure, it's not AGI, but it is something that will have a huge demand. If ChatGPT costs $10 per million tokens, you can only imagine how much you get charged for 10 minutes of high quality, high resolution, videos. It can be in the thousands of dollars, and lots of companies will be more than happy to fork that money. And by the way, this will require a lot of compute, and that's where those tens of gigawatts worth of datacenters will come in handy. That is a type of moat that very few will be able to overcome.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-10-03 02:31:35+00:00
Took 3 tech savvy family members to figure out why mom couldn’t sign back into an app she was paying for: every time she “signed in with Apple” she also hit “hide my email” (first option) and so registered with a new random email address every time she signed in

It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.