skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was only when I had kids that I understood what this means.

My children are not "my purpose." I mean, that would be a lovely sentiment, but it's not the actual truth.

But having kids (and being a hopefully-good father), means that no matter what else sucks at work, all the projects that didn't land, my boss's daily kicks to the crotch, and every multi-million job opportunity I stupidly turned down... I did right with those kids. If I had made any different choice in life --no matter how tiny-- those wonderful kids would not exist. And that satisfies my sense of Purpose.
Well, consider what position you are in when someone with absolute power over your life and death grants you a new name as a sign of favor. Do you risk rejecting it and potentially endangering yourself and your entire family?
I’m fascinated that this urban legend persists among tech people because it’s so easy to disprove.

Did you know that you can set up a proxy from your phone and capture all traffic from it? It would be so trivial to find the traffic from your phone. There are ways to MITM and inspect the traffic, too.

There are also many people doing static reverse engineering of phone apps looking for security vulnerabilities. To believe this urban legend, you’d also have to believe that none of them have ever encountered this hidden voice analysis code.

If we ignore that, you know there are OS-level security controls on apps, right? iOS and Android don’t make it easy for apps to use the microphone constantly and run in the background to process it.

Finally, if we ignore all of that, how can anyone believe that these companies are recording conversations but none of their employees have ever chosen to blow the whistle? We’ve seen numerous FAANG “whistleblowers” come through with everything down to trivial or baseless complaints, but nobody has blown the whistle on these supposed widespread spying programs?

The whole urban legend is preposterous to anyone who has any experience with apps or phone security, let alone common traffic analysis or reverse engineering tools. I don’t understand why the myth is so persistent among even some technical people.
> A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog, DNS, mail.

I always felt like you are painting target on your homelab when you allow outside access.
Or they googled fitness or outdoors and live near water

Edit: yep
I don't get how it could cost more to replace the battery than to buy an entirely new car that also has a new battery. I bought my Nissan Leaf for $13.5k after a lease.
> The same class of issue can occur for any other project

This class of issues sounds like the prolific class of

DON'T WRITE TO /tmp

Which is why systemd has a private tmp option

https://salvatoresecurity.com/the-many-perils-of-tmp/

https://systemd.io/TEMPORARY_DIRECTORIES/
I always preferred alacritty which is faster and hopefully safer.

Tha macOS part uses the rust `objc2` crates which I find high quality and the codebase is a joy to read.
> I think most people who work at Big Co's have their share of meetings where half a dozen people attend regularly, but have never said a word and you have no idea what they actually do. Those are the "NPCs" he's referring to.

Have you considered that those “NPCs” have no idea what you do..?
Therapy has been absolutely life changing for me. It has helped me manage my anxiety and build a life I’m happy with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Osmond
I totally concur, Mr President. Now I must steal back my spaceship from the Russian embassy before moon fall tomorrow night or I won't get my deposit back!
I'm certain there is, but I don't have a reference for it yet other than my imaginary HELLO (Highly Efficient Limited Line Output) language.
But if you're listening for 64, or even 1024 wake words, you won't get to the level of granularity people are claiming to observe, like in the other comment here where they tested "pool fencing". If you were putting together a list of 64 words, would you really include "pool fencing"?
There are way more power users of macOS who turn to the Terminal because of the beauty of Brew than there are people who switch from Terminal.app.

Thinking there are more people who switched out of Terminal diminishes how massive computing is.
Buy a boat. Preferably a sailboat. Your money problems and depression will quickly solve themselves. Ask Ishmael[1] about it.

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2...
What do you think of Hardy's book in number theory? I have never done number theory but having to study it a bit while I work on sets of traps that are approximable by algebraic numbers and it is really a nice read.
I love Thinkpads and have a few, but this depends on a model.

Some Thinkpads, more specifically x2xx series (ie x250 - x290) require removing all internals to get to the keyboard to replace it (batteries, storage, wifi, motherboard, speakers, CMOS battery, and a few others). Dell Latitude E5470 on the other hand allows replacing its keyboard by pulling out a small plastic panel and removing one screw.
I haven't run into a problem with spam marketplace listings. I do live in a pretty rural area though, may just not be a problem out here.
> Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere.

I agree that this can be called misleading, or even potentially a scam.

> It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN.

They're well aware of how affiliate links work, so as I said above, even if they only advertised the coupon part and never the cashback part they'd have to have never bothered to visit the Honey homepage or tried it themselves. I'm sure they just determined that they'd make more revenue than the lost affiliate revenue at first and later determined they no longer would.
Also, couldn't a lot of it be done on device? Say, have a set of key phrases to listen for, and if the device hears them, then mark that the user should be targeted by certain kinds of ads.

I don't have any evidence either way that that happens, but it seems like a more practical way to accomplish it.
So what’s the case law for violations of the GPL? Did anyone get criminally convicted prosecuted for violating any software license at all, and was anyone convicted? I’m only aware of civil suits in this regard.
KAOS (TV Show) Review: Overwhelmed by the Shear Creativity and Originality
Drastically reduced Xiaomi bootloader unlock policy raises ownership questions
How about experience with bioinformatics and software development but not rust specifically?
I am inclined to say that a low pace of change isn't necessarily a problem for something that at its core emulates 70s hardware.

It can easily become a problem if you don't leave it at that and add everything and the kitchen sink to it. Not having used the feature I have a hard time imagining why a terminal emulator should have SSH integration to begin with.
I think the issue here is that with retirement levels of money existing friendships can become strained.

If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you earn 100 then I mean sure, you have different toys, bigger house, whatever, but you're both existing in the same universe with similar constraints.

If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you suddenly have 60 million like the guy in the post then it's more of a test because your lifestyle can just differ hugely.

Some people can handle it but with others there will be an underlying resentment. There are lots of layers to it. They look for work - you look for suitable employees.

Having said that, in my experience there are only really a few major cut-offs, one between homeless/terminally skint and working, one between working and being able to live off of investment income, _maybe_ one at the sort of bodyguard required super famous level. Inside those it's just sort of like, yeah ok, your car/yacht/jet/whatever is better than mine, cool.
Mostly I want to benchmark code in our production monorepo, so a web tool doesn’t make much sense. We have a bunch of data structure code and standard utility libraries so it’s not feasible to copy everything into a web form.

When doing data structure work I’ve started writing micro benchmark files with mitata (https://github.com/evanwashere/mitata) which does a decent job running GC between runs and outputs some very cute graphs and such. I recently rewrote a core container class we use at Notion and for a 5% speed up on a bunch of our public API routes.

OP, I see you have a mitata-inspired benchmark library “benchmate” (https://github.com/3rd/benchmate/tree/master), I’m curious about difference from mitata, what was missing from it, features added? I looked a bit at the code and it’s certainly easier to read… mitata codebase feels like C written by someone who’s too smart.
I very much agree that it's bad in this regard and potentially even illegal, I just don't think they were ever misleading about the fact that they do this.
It's also just kind of cool and fun to hack together a personal website
This is far from true.

There are many things you cannot do in residential neigborhoods, if nothing else, it's a residential not a commercial property, so a house, not a hotel (or a store, chemical factory etc.)
We bypassed it by switching to starlink. Now my IP address is a too-big-to-fail CGNAT.

The old IP address was a mom-and-pop CGNAT.

Thanks CF, for protecting us from capitalism, I guess?
My caching proxy disagrees with that.
My threat models are bad 4g connections and greedy telcos.
I have vr.dev and want to do something meaningful with it, additive to the community, and not just a trash content blog. any ideas? who’s down?
People always say that just making something open source doesn't entitle other people to something like support, but it seems like the consensus is that this doesn't extend to girlfriends?

Not being married implies the ability of either to leave whenever it suits them without any financial obligations to the other. She had nothing to fear if the startup failed and left him in debt, and conversely, she doesn't necessarily gain anything if the reverse is true.

I dunno, everyone dunking on him for this feels like a kinda shitty thing to do. It seems like he's self aware enough that he already knows this, and he'll undoubtedly find out later he regrets it when it's too late to fix it.
Cloudflare is so embedded into so many important services (like some other companies, including Google), that they need to be thinking of their role as having some government-like responsibilities.

For example, for starters, Cloudflare and Google need to find ways so that individual people who're wrongly being locked out of services by the company, have some way to get that unlocked. Not "sux2bu we dont do support bro".

(Then they can start thinking about the next step, which is due process, and what it means to wrongly lock out someone in the first place.)

That said, as an immediate pragmatic matter, one debugging tip with your Firefox is to go to the `about:profiles` URL, and temporarily create a new profile, and without using any Firefox sync feature, and see if Cloudflare lets you through, and then incrementally add back in your extensions and preference customizations, and see if/when CF stops letting you in. (Not that it will necessarily identify the sole and exact trigger, since they might be using scores of multiple factors, but it will be evidence of one thing that pushes it over the edge. And maybe get you to a compromise setup that lets you do your work for now.) Also helpful is to have alternate browsers installed; personally, I keep Chromium installed, as my "violate me every possible way, if you'll just let me access this one page/site I really need right now".
I think OP's title itself answers the question — they're wealthy, and most if not all things that he could really want in the world is a transaction away. "Constraints" are key to finding purpose and direction. There can be a right/optimal set of constraints, but when there seems to be none, any is better. Constraints forbid us from being able to have something in life (things or experiences) that we also want. When we can satisfy any want, it doesn't feel like the wants matter anymore. The very reason the want existed in the first place was because it was not something that was possible at the time.

I'd advise OP to strategize smartly, given they have enough money to last a simple and full life, save, invest, donate, and keep the transactions small; ie. not investing or donating all or a majority of wealth into one thing, instead of a little bit here and a little bit there, every now and then, gradually and slowly.

Taking it slower itself is a form of constraint. And together with keeping relationships and connections, minimizing the noise in life, and making it simpler towards enjoying the truer pleasures of their life, they can grow richer and live more luxuriously, not just in terms of wealth, but also in a safer, more secure and a cozier human experience.
> I think we're in agreement? I'm saying their measure in this case is no worse than any other, but not that it's a fundamental truth.

Maybe we are? I think I lost the thread a bit here.

> chess, Jeopardy, composing music, painting, maths, languages, passing medical or law degrees

That's interesting, I would have still chalked skill in those areas as a sign of intelligence and didn't realize most people wouldn't once AI (or ML) could do it. To me an AI/LLM/ML being good at those is at least a sign that they have gotten good at mimicking intelligence if nothing else, and a sign that we really are getting out over our skis risking these tools without knowing how they really work.
Capital one shopping (basically the same thing) definitely originates traffic, like it prompts users to go to other websites for a better deal.
https://iterm2.com/documentation-automatic-profile-switching...
Music Publishers Reach Deal with AI Giant Anthropic over Copyrighted Song Lyrics
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575940
This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should:

- put a rack in your home
- buy an IPv4 block
- buy dark fibre
- start your own ISP
- advertise routes over BGP
- host your own email
- found a registrar and transfer your domains over

All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.
This doesn’t seem that hard to test? Put a phone on WiFi, run it through a traffic sniffer, and see if it is constantly sending little audio packets to listener1486.facebook.com or whatever.

Or heck, open up a phone and stick a probe on the mic lead. See when it is getting power or not.
The top comment (currently) is someone talking about their feelings.

It has 100 replies.

Then 3 on topic comments... small miracles, then ~ the trash again.... ~30 of the 200+ comments are not slop

On Topic: I think BYD interesting to look at if you want to talk saturation.

I will say I caught a electric tuk-tuk today they are still cool, like Blade Runner or LARPing as an ironic Tesla owner, I swap between the two.
"Crapper" as slang for a toilet has an attestation from before Thomas Crapper was a plumber, so if that's what you were referring to, then it's also not a case where it was named after the guy.
I'm confused. He discovered robotics is hard/boring/silly/whatever--that makes sense. Now he moved to Hawaii to study physics (over mechanical engineering) so he can build physical things. It seems like he's relearning the robotics mistake.

He also had a moment where he realized how he wanted to look (or be seen) like Elon, and how that's so cringe. Then he goes and works for Elon on the "extremely important" mission of DOGE.

It sounds like what he really wants is a mission where he's learning.
Kamala offered a significantly more honest campaign, and would not have been openly corrupt. It's a giant chasm of difference between her and Trump.

Just because she isn't perfect and wouldn't be all powerful doesn't mean both options were the same.

Owners of platforms can be held accountable, especially if they're turning a blind eye. Disabling message history won't save Google or anyone else.
The start of the post literally begins with him saying he doesn't expect anyone to feel sorry for him, or at least, that it's a really silly problem to have.
it's more about the reasons, not who is initiating it or wants it. in any case, i find more often it's just a generic line that people use when breaking up to spare the other party some grief. otherwise it ends up with the other person thinking about what they could have done differently to "keep" the other person.
Fusion is my daily driver and this is a huge thing for me. Missed it. Thanks.
What’s the big deal? It’s just a content cache. You can get dedicated cache appliances directly from Netflix for free if you have a large enough customer base.
That is shockingly inexpensive
Spot-on - I call it out at the end of the article. Principles are broadly the same.
How do you find what to subscribe to without recommendations? It’s a genuine question, I’m not trying to be difficult.
I wouldn't care if they know what I do, as long as they do something actually productive.

You may disagree, but the "NPC" comment comes from the widespread belief that it's easy for low-performers to stick around at big companies, versus at smaller companies that live and die by their burn rate.
The author has two choices:
1. Learn to enjoy the freedom gained from his wealth and not work another day.
2. Give away ALL of it to charity and start over again so he can prove to himself and the world that it wasn't luck that made him wealthy.

Rest is all noise.
What are you interested in? Go levels deeper. Have you found people in that field and chatted with them?

Do you have active hobbies and things your interested in that are not computer related?

Sometimes energy comes from recharging outside work with hobbies and passion projects, experiences with family and friends.
The parts of Norway where most of the populations lives have warmer winters than most of the northern US states except the ones near the Pacific ocean.
Exactly. Anyone complaining should donate time or money.
That is crazy and awesome that the virtual POST card (brandnewsentence) modeled the real environment so closely. Feels obvious that it would line up - once proven, haha.

I would have been yelling at an Arduino (and possibly a shift register) wired to the 7-segment LEDs... (I don't do hardware :D but I would've been convinced it was necessary)
> The OS is still managing and abstracting hardware in the same way that it always was.

Not at all. The OS is not "managing" anything. It has no direct access to the real hardware. Only the firmware does. The OS is just talking to the API the firmware presents.

They're not our devices anymore. They're intel's, nvidia's. They dictate how we use them. The hardware's just sitting there, waiting for the right electrical signals to come in. But the OS is not the one sending those signals. Their firmware's in charge of that. It's the middle man between the OS and the device we paid money for. If the firmware doesn't like the tune we're singing, it shuts us down.

There are completely separate computers inside these things. They don't run our code, they only run signed code. Whoever has the keys to the machine's code owns the machine itself. And it sure as hell ain't us.
I’m replying to the parent commenter and giving him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he’s talking only about social security payments which are beyond the essential, and which could “safely” be cut back. I recommend to you to also interpret comments generously before replying.
You don't even need attention - it could be a public blog where you share about the things you learn. You never know who it's going to help. That's primarily my motivation with the blog.
https://landchad.net/
It's not too late. We've overcome the rich before and can again.
A reasonable tradeoff to explore is that software ought to work like a halfway-point between copyright and patents: in exchange for an exclusive right to distribute your binaries for 10-15 years, you provide your documentation for how it works (including source code) so others can build on your work after the exclusivity period ends. The exclusive right does not cover the basic idea/independent implementations of the same functionality.

Potentially utilitarian software and creative software could be treated differently, e.g. have an escrow for games (for which user customizations are less important).

Obviously DRM to restrict user modifications is unethical and harmful toward functioning markets and should be illegal.
My approach to Big Tech interviews
How do you find these places if you're not an American?
Totally. If I would tell 10-year-old me that I have my own website on my own domain, it would be seen as a shocking development. I find it really cool to be able to have a corner of the internet that is just mine.
So I put this into my (WIP) AI writing app, and these were its thoughts on seeing the first paragraph:

{
"reflections": [
{
"text_snippet": "Life has been a haze this last year. After selling my company...",
"response": "This reminds me of Joseph Campbell's concept of 'hitting the wasteland' - that disorienting period after achieving what society told you was the ultimate goal. Campbell wrote about this in 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces,' describing how many mythological heroes face their greatest crisis not in battle, but in the emptiness that follows victory. There's a beautiful quote from his lectures: 'If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take.'"
},
{
"text_snippet": "Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way",
"response": "This evokes Viktor Frankl's concept of the 'existential vacuum' - the state of emptiness that comes when our primary drive is satisfied but we haven't yet found what he calls our 'will to meaning.' You might find resonance in his lesser-known work 'The Unheard Cry for Meaning' where he writes: 'What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.'"
},
{
"text_snippet": "I have infinite freedom, yet I don't know what to do with it",
"response": "This reminds me of Kierkegaard's meditation on anxiety and freedom. He saw anxiety not as fear of external threats, but as the dizzying awareness of infinite possibility. In 'The Concept of Anxiety,' he describes it as 'the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility.'"
}
],
"questions": [
{
"personal": "What did you imagine freedom would feel like before you achieved this level of it?",
"philosophical": "When you say things feel like 'side quests,' I'm curious - what would a 'main quest' feel like to you now?"
}
],
"closing_thought": "Your situation reminds me of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha after he became a wealthy merchant. He had everything, yet felt a profound emptiness that eventually led him to his true path. Sometimes the void itself becomes the doorway to something deeper."
}

---

Really cool to read the comments in this thread & see the real-life advice of people who have been in these situations too!
Well yeah, if you’re a legitimate user, CF will block you.

It’s only easy to bypass if you’re scraping or doing nefarious stuff.
Very cool story. Not what I expected to find on HN but glad it was linked! I was born and raised in Massachusetts and know the Zildjian brand, but had absolutely no idea they were based there.
If you want to see how shallow and utterly stupid anyone in tech is that has money, read this post. It is golden. I was doubled over laughing at the DOGE part. What a chud. And they say the rich know how to use capital. No, they don’t. They’re just like you and me and it’s mostly just to get their rocks off. Typical HN trash.