skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general I agree with you that there are some tradeoffs to make. IME it's still worth it. For example, my mental wellness has improved immensely. Also, I tend to use my time in more purposeful ways instead of wasting it doomscrolling.

Regarding life events: I quit all social media about 5 years ago[1]. People I care about know about that, and if they want to tell me about life events they do it with other means. Those who don't, they weren't really friends, just acquaintances. I am OK with that.

[1] with the exception of Linkedin, which I hate and never use, but I have been asked by people in my company to keep a profile for PR-related reasons.
> I know a lot of students hated it

That's a good thing. I don't know whether your assertion about the breakdown between "real nerds" and the other camp is accurate or not, but I think this point stands on its own regardless--learning is hard. It's uncomfortable. It's unpleasant. If it isn't, you're not being pushed hard enough. So what's the point of asking students how they feel about it? Why make strategic decisions based on those data?

I'm genuinely curious, not trolling or anything. It seems completely baffling to me that educators behave this way, and I'd really love to understand why.
How does a generic "best pens" listicle which recommends the company's own pen make it near the top of HN without manipulation ?
In a market with high uncertainty, more companies are likely to abandon it than hope that their actuaries get the numbers exactly right.
The messages about going cold turkey are popular, but you do miss out on a lot. I deleted all my social media in 2015, and didn’t mind too much, but years later when I met my wife (and there was more pressure to be social) I made accounts again so people could message me and I’ve been able to hold back from spending all my time doomscrolling.

I think the social part of social media can be good for us, and we have to figure out a way to avoid the toxicity. I’d like to see more posts about how to bend the algorithm to show you less toxicity- at least on Instagram I’ve managed to use the “not interested/relevant” button enough and turned on content filtering that it mostly shows me wholesome content. I don’t know if everyone realizes that if you hate-watch a video or hate-read a post then the algorithm sees that as engagement and will show you more. You have to nope yourself out of the dark corners as fast as you realize where you are.
It seems like a lot of people spend time outdoors, gardening, hiking, doing outdoor recreation, etc. Is it really true that we're losing something here?
AEM is a little sketchy though, you need to trust a flash drive to hold it, and make sure that drive doesn’t get overridden by a malicious attacker. Your link goes more into depth about the disadvantages
It's how humans lived for all of history before the Internet. Seems healthier to me. If you're not close enough to someone for them to want to share updates with you specifically, or to see them and catch up, why do you need to know every update on their life?

Tbf I'm in a family group WhatsApp chat, which I guess fulfills the "life updates" part for my family. But no public social media, don't see the need
Losing touch with old acquaintances is just part of getting older. fwiw, my experience is that I stayed on social media (although I don't post anything, I just keep the account) and still missed huge life updates. I reckon about 80-90% of my FB friends don't post to FB or Insta anymore. They just don't post anywhere.
Coming from a Python background, working with data heavy analytics in finance, one of my biggest Rust-is-the-one moment has been because of Polars. It lets me do everything I could do with Pandas, but with added speed and safety. Lack of such packages (as far as I'm aware) in Java, C++ and other languages keeps an entire ecosystem of data-heavy workloads in Python. But most Python projects I've found are very hard to scale beyond the prototyping phases.
> Water scooped from reservoirs is less effective than you might think.

I'm guessing that water scooped from reservoirs is probably more effective than no water at all.
While political bias is undisputable, I prefer notes over deleting in general.

I like to read dead/flagged posts sometimes hwre on HN to be able to see what the moderators flag, and generally they are doing amazing job: even if I don't agree with the flagging, I am able to spreak about it with others and I understand the reason.
There are the dongle solutions, each unique and keyed, but has a cost. There are the 'phone home' solutions, but if your product is good and gets share = attracts hackers who figure it out. Game people fight a constant battle = steam servers, essentially a mandated phone home cloud. You can add a few backdoors with a mechanism that scatters them with many entry points that each send a 'canary in a coalmine' alert = you know, but nothing is hacked. Once known, the canary can be used as trigger for unpaid product.
Not sure how legal that is, but there are people who create software security methods dongles, cloud servers, canaries etc - google that and ask and assess the cost/benefit ratio. Some just tolerate the problem and their only solution is an update gatekeeping method. Reasonable price is also a good plan for a large base = $$ in numbers...
It's not limited to deposits. Most money reforms were designed to screw up people keeping their saving at home as well. Also there is inflation, when both deposits and "existing money" get diluted while the printer goes brrr.

And investing/keeping money in assets is not exactly widespread there in general population.
I live in Chicago. I grew up in Southern California (Ventura County). Huge wildfire in fall of '93 started in my neighborhood. Then a few months later in '94, got to "ride" the Northridge earthquake. I would love to move back to CA, but haven't because of natural disaster risk. I still have family that lives there, though, and I enjoy going back when I can. The Great Lakes region theoretically is poised to be a /relatively/ safer place in the future as a "climate refuge", all things considered. And the huge amount of fresh water is nice... except... the more I learn about PFAS in the water, the more I realize... no place is perfect. (And if it truly was perfect, I'd probably not be able to afford to live there.) So... I choose snow, cold, and tornado risk over wildfire and earthquakes. Out of all the risks, wildfire risk seems the scariest (okay, maybe second to flooding). Everyone gets to (and has to) choose which risks they're willing to live with.
Suppose someone was attacking you on some social media site and the site's algorithm was promoting that attack greatly enhancing its damage, and you wanted to try to sue the site. There will almost certainly be something in their terms of service (TOS) that says you have to arbitrate (with an arbiter chosen by the site) instead of sue.

Even if the TOS doesn't require this so you can actually sue they would likely have a choice of venue provision that would make it inconvenient for you and/or a choice of law provision that would be favorable to them.

If you have an account at the site it will likely be very hard to get out from under the arbitration/venue/law provisions of the TOS.

If you no longer have an account you will probably have a better chance of escaping the TOS, especially if whatever you want to sue over took place entirely after you deleted your account.
So you knew your kids had been doing something they shouldn't.
I stopped going on social media apps and felt my mental health improved at least 2x.

You should try it too!
PESOS is pretty good. I was aware of POSSE but not PESOS.
Agreed, LLMs mean that it's MORE useful and important to learn Racket and C, the LLM will help you much more with knowing the specifics of python/js/go/java or whatever human-focused language you end up working with for your job. If you want to be a stellar developer in 2025 you want to learn the things the LLM ISN'T good at, understanding the fundamentals of computer science is way more useful now than it was 5 years ago because the baseline for being good at a language is so much lower with an LLM aiding you.
I did not know that we could post stupid stuff on hacker news.

The truth is that nobody cares if we delete our accounts on social media.
It's odd that you think social media would be viable without it. There's a reason there are teams of Kenyan moderators getting PTSD from the sheer deluge of unimaginable horror which is regularly posted and filtered out.
Obviously, models need the same brain flush brains do when they dream
My favourite is the Pelikan M200, which is not even listed here. Most classical and functional design.
Also be wary of alcohol-containing mouthwashes. They increase your risk of mouth cancer by the same mechanism that drinking alcohol does, and many mouthwashes are 40-proof / 20% alcohol.
What does keeping the account actually do to prevent scamming? They’re going to scam regardless.
> How would suing ExxonMobil lead to an immediate reduction in emissions or preservation of ecosystems?

... Did you read my comment? Did you read the original question? I'm really not sure where you got lost. Yes, if "greedy oil companies" were sued "out of existence" there would be an immediate reduction in emissions.

If you want to start a different question that limits the scenario to ExxonMobil and a realistic judge in the actual system that we have, then go ahead.
ZZ

Or use tmux/zellij.
Aside from Facebook (which I was never on), I'm still on Mastodon, but have let Twitter go fallow due its moribund nature.

I deleted LinkedIn (after the MSFT acquisition) 10 years ago, due to the business model change. Even prior to that, it was getting too spammy anyways.

I keep a token Instagram just for viewing the rare family/friend that insists I see something from a trip, but I never post there.
I fourth-year undergraduate argues against the change like a professor. Honestly, this shows the strength of NEU's current (former) curriculum.

Without knowing the new curriculum, I guarantee you that one of the biggest daily complaints about the old curriculum was the requirements that they write unit tests ("check-expects"). Do you think that's going away? Hahahaha. The laugh will be on students who think they're getting something different because the label on the can changed.
I'm puzzled as to why people rage about Twitter and Facebook going down the drain, and then switch to new services like Bluesky or Threads and try to convince everyone to do the same.

I mean, why on earth would you expect anything different this time from yet another "social" thing made and run by a corporate entity?

I moved to Mastodon, which at least has the benefit of not being owned by a corporation, which will perhaps save it from the usual paths of ensh*ttification.
Open Longevity Project
One of the main issues with the infamous butterfly keyboard Apple put on MacBooks a few years ago was the near lack of tactile feedback. It had feedback, but not nearly enough for a half-decent typing experience. Zero tactical feedback is probably 100x worse than that.
Can you do like a LAN party thing with two of them and play some classic games in co-op that way? Can you legally get these old games somewhere or is it all abandonware?
Nothing like a random politically biased opinion piece to drum up random political opinions on HN. Pass.
i feel the opposite...just passing a licensing exam does not make an engineer, and if you think their better, why are they taking programming jobs instead of "proper engineering" jobs?
https://github.com/manzt/juv
The University that hosted "The Little Schemer" and all its derivatives. Those books were a delight and taught me to think about programming in a way that other languages had not. (Even if I didn't go to that University).
https://prl.khoury.northeastern.edu/teaching.html

I had been to a Scheme conference in Washington, adjunct to the Clojure Conference one year, and it was attended by many undergraduates from Northeastern, (and the authors of those books that I got a photo with.)

I have to feel sympathy for those undergraduates I spoke to. They gave a strong feeling, even then (8 years ago), that it was time for the University to move on in language choice.

I had a similar experience in the late 90s when the world was picking up Java, and our University insisted on teaching in Eiffel.
Hasn't it already had a name for years? A headless CMS
I totally understand you. What find is that when I need to get into touch with old acquaintances an call or email seems to do just fine. It is a bit more inconvenient.

Another reason to not use big social media is that I would rather not have my network to be exploited by some big corp for who knows what they do with that info.
So you're saying it will reverse the polarity?
I started out with an eBay store, and expanded to Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. I'd say about 50% of my sales are on eBay, 40% on FBM, and the remaining 10% through Craigslist - but it changes a lot based on time of year and what the product is. Windows XP machines almost exclusively sell through eBay; more expensive machines almost always sell through FBM.

Most of my buyers buy one machine and are done, but a substantial subset are return customers. Return business is all about the usual stuff: Reputation, level of service, quality of the product. I have a few "regulars" who have bought 4+ machines from me, usually hobbyists or small business owners with a specific need. Having done this for a couple of years, I also now get return customers semi-frequently who bought something a while ago, like it, remember me, and seek me out again.

I don't offer warranties or guarantees on items, but I'm aggressively inexpensive compared to the competition, and I operate on an informal "if I broke it, I fix it" policy. If I told you something was working and then later it breaks, I either fix it, swap it out, or replace the machine.

I have a five-star reputation on Facebook Marketplace and 99.6% positive feedback on eBay as a result of this policy, so it works decently well.
Good to know. It also looks like you can host TabbyML as an on-premise server with docker and serve requests over a private network. Interesting to think that a self-hosted GPU server might become a thing.
Land in the hills above a major city among trees with a view of the ocean in a place with extremely nice weather year-round will always be valuable.

They will absolutely rebuild. Get in now if you’ve got the cash to buy land there. It might take a decade for the EPA to clean it up like Lahaina, but they will absolutely 100% rebuild there.
I have recently discovered the Kuru Toga pencil and it's rapidly becoming my favorite pencil too! Sometimes the lead is a bit shorter than I'd like -- I may check out the Kuru Toga Dive which allows you to customize the default lead length.
Yea but if the train is coming regardless then there’s no harm in closing your eyes if you like. Makes no difference.
> fossil fuel shipment departures from Russia has steadily declined from 80% in Jan 2022, to less than 20% in December 2024

What does No. 3 mean?
It was such a different world.

I still remember a pithy description of IRC from the early aughts: “Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.”
That doesn't even show ms. Add something like +%s%N (ns) to
the options if you want finer resolution.
I actually think the current approach was a deliberate strategy.

Rather than help Ukraine quickly win the war they prefer to slow bleed Russia to help their aims in Syria, Iran, Taiwan etc.
I agree that community notes works well. But for breaking news, by the time it kicks in the damage is already done. I've seen malicious misinfo about the LA fires get millions of views and 20k retweets before the community note was finally approved.
I get it. You go where the people are. That doesn't really negate anything I said except the rush part. Although being able to afford food is certainly a rush.
Because the reasons to quit social media aren't that it isn't useful and that, absent the market conditions it exists within that denotes it's ability to continue existing, it isn't a good product. People love the stuff, it's why it's been the primary use case of the internet, arguably since it's inception depending on whether you consider early stuff like BBSes and news groups/email newsletters to be social media. We had early prototype social media functionality online before we had commerce.

The problem is that these platforms aren't satisfied merely providing a third place within which we can find and build communities, speak with and learn from others with similar interests, and otherwise, be human. Instead we each become a hamster locked in our own little cage, and the principle reason we're there is to sit on our wheel and run, and while we run we're shown a handful of things from people we actually want to hear from and see, and interspersed with those few things are a ton advertisements for products we don't want and aren't interested in, a few we might be, AI generated nonsense that prompts us to engage with the platform to bump metrics up, the dipshit of the day who's said something infuriating that makes us click into the comments and make sure they're getting dunked on (and possibly join!) appropriately that the social media site dug up from obscurity and is now parading to the entire world, and of course, the same posts again.

Genuinely, the way people talk about going back in time to kill baby Hitler, if I had a time machine, I would spend the rest of my days sabotaging whatever countless number of people invented or would invent the Curated Fucking Timeline, on however many platforms it was invented, by however many data scientists. I would argue it is the single most destructive thing Silicon Valley has ever turned out.
Because you don’t need virtualenvs or ruby_modules. You can have however many versions of the same gem installed it’s simply referenced by a gemfile, so for Ruby version X you are guaranteed one copy of gem version Y and no duplicates.

This whole installing the same dependencies a million times across different projects in Python and Node land is completely insane to me. Ruby has had the only sane package manager for years. Cargo too, but only because they copied Ruby.

Node has littered my computer with useless files. Python’s venv eat up a lot of space unnecessarily too.
> Programmers seem to hate rigorous namespace systems though

Pretty much a nothing burger in Rust, so I disagree that items necessarily hate the concept. Maybe others haven’t done a good job with the UX?
People drift apart over time sometimes. I’m on Facebook still (TBH it is hard to see much by my friends, between all the algorithmic stuff). Despite being on there, there are some folks I’ve just kind of… lost contact with.

Maybe have a text chain for your friends or something? The folks I really expect to know things about… they’d tell me while we were interacting.
The magical thinking in the case of the airstrip is the lack of a causative connection: you need to clear the airstrip for the plane to land, but clearing an airstrip does not make a plane land.

Or in other words, magical thinking doesn't imply the lack of a conceptual connection: airstrips and planes landing are definitely conceptually connected. Magical thinking is the drawing of illogical causative connections from conceptual ones.

(I don't run into "cargo cult" that often. But I think TFA is a great writeup of why it's not the best term; as engineers, I think we should aspire to use the best terms available to us.)
Interesting.

We didn't ask for anyone to call the ambulance, although personally I am happy that it was called and she was checked out.
In companies that aren't completely pathological, HR complaints often will eventually oust a toxic manager. But sadly the key word is 'eventually'. It will usually take sacrificing multiple employees and/or the leaving feedback of many others to build enough of a track record or evidence for them to finally take action.

Complaining to HR probably won't help you, but it could be part of what eventually helps someone. Often not worth it compared to finding another job though.
I mean, stays out of the way for simple uses.

When I first learned Python, typing python and seeing >>> and having it evaluate what I typed as if it appeared in a file was a good experience.

Now that I use python a lot, ipython is more out of the way to me than the built-in python repl is, because it lets me focus on what I'm working on, than limitations of a tool.
Yes, I think this is perpendicular to my comment. I stopped arguing about language superiority a long time ago, my comments were intended to reflect my own journey only.
I’m actually shocked you got it to play games like that. I have several nvidia laptops that I use ranging from a 750M, to gtx 1650, to a rtx 4050. Every couple of months I’ll switch back to the dedicated GPU to run a sanity check for features, and do a 180 in an hour. I understand making compromises on shadowplay, GeForce streaming, the control centre, and the nvidia app as a whole. But I always notice microstuttering that shouldn’t be there and draw the line at having to manually set up VDPAU/VAAPI and keeping up with the trends of what this year’s optimal way to install games is (which DE on which back end, playonlinux vs lutris vs winetricks vs proton, etc).

I’m glad you got your 3050 to do basic things and hope you get more use out of it as software improves.

NB: IMO the best Linux nvidia laptops are the Lenovo legions. They have a bios switch to force the use of the nvidia chip and mask the iGPU. Half the issues are gone then.
I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it :) So strange that there were people who actually knew what they were doing and studied problems with rigour and care! Rather than some SV techdude's idea of what is cool
It’s odd how so many people have developed the attitude of “censorship bad” without thinking about the consequences of removing it or whether “censorship” on private, profit-driven, opaque-algorithm-powered social media should even be considered bad.
Zuch was granted his wish and was turned into a real boy. And now he knows he can do a lot better.
Mostly from local recyclers; also sometimes from folks on Craigslist who are looking to sell instead of recycle. Prices range dramatically based on the machine but $10 or less for a Windows XP machine is normal, $15-20 for a 4th-6th gen i3/i5, and it goes up from there.

I have relationships with a few recyclers and also volunteer my time with a nonprofit that also offers refurbishing; I frequently buy the machines they don't have time to deal with for low prices.

Recyclers have a huge advantage in getting their machines for free; I am too small-time to do that effectively. However, I take on the repair jobs they're not willing to do, so I get a pretty good deal on the inventory they have.