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Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?
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Chi-fi IEMs. People have no idea what sound quality can be achieved under 100$.
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A set of Wera lasertip screwdrivers. Or, a Knipex Cobra pair of pliers.
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Nesting silicone bowls with lids. Quiet and good for everything.
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Uniqlo Ultra Light Down Jacket
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Dual-end pliers, like this: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Performance-Tool-W1105-Side-Locking-4-in-1-Dual-Jaw-Quick-Pliers/1887175258 There used to be a beefier version that was just perfect; despite over two decades of abuse (dropping off ladders onto sidewalks, letting children play with them...) my first pair is still going strong. Now you can only buy slimmer knock-offs, but they're still great. Needle nose, std pliers, hex pliers, and wire strippers in a single, rugged tool.
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I like this question because I come at it from a very different lifestyle. I’m a digital nomad and I have mostly lived out of a backpack and carry on for the past 10 years. My philosophy is that things have to be worth carrying and they should be very easily replaceable if anything gets lost, stolen or breaks. A few of my under $100 favs: Universal GaN travel adapter: One of those square bricks that converts from any AC outlet to any AC outlet and has 3 or 4 USB charging ports built in. I got enough wattage to charge my usb-c laptop as well, so one brick takes care of all my devices. Backup android phone: Our phones are so critical that I keep a hot swappable spare phone on me, currently a Moto G 2025. It’s already logged into all my apps and 2FA. I could throw my iPhone into the Seine and keep on trucking. It even has backup NFC credit cards. I keep a cheap travel eSim plan active on it so that if I am somewhere sketchy I can leave my main phone at home. Logitech MX Keys Mini: Great portable keyboard. Backlit, usb c and multi-device. Typing this post out on my phone now. GL-iNet Beryl: The do anything travel VPN router running OpenWRT out of the box. Great for securing and extending sketchy WiFi connections or if you have to work off your phone’s hotspot all day. Decathalon Quecha Escape 500 23L: Such a great personal item size backpack for the price, less than 40 euros.
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$50 RTLSDR Kit https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CD7558GT I got this to play around with what's on the air, and now I'm a full blown extra.
Shoehorn! Particularly a long one if you'd like to avoid bending down at all when putting on slip-ons. Of course they are primarily great for saving the backs of your shoes. The IKEA one is perfect (at least for 6'1" me).
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STEEL long shoehorns. Once you break one, you'll spend the money.
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Yes, good callout! The one from IKEA is metal (usually not an IKEA fan but some good stuff like this and it's under $100, but of course there are tons of other options).
gotta be a tire inflater (not sure what brand) that came with a flash light and works rain or snow powered by car adapter
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Be careful buying those, and test them on multiple tires IMMEDIATELY. I bought a series from Slime brand; every one failed within two tire inflates. Went to Harbor Freight, and bought their most expensive one; it has earned the price since (still under $100).
Pocket operators are really fun to play with when you need a break from work.
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What is a pocket operator? Got a link?
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These are pocket operators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhFIUdICYSA They can be used on their own or together, frustrating, fiddly, fun. :)
Wow that looks like a cool purchase are they fun to play with like do you get to create your own beats
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Very fun, you can make loads of things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBOHsKv_ej8 - but mostly it's just something taxing to change the brain channel for me!
Guessing the hygenics depend on your local water supply, but some varieties of tea (and coffee actually) want to be brewed at below-boiling
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You can still boil it and just wait a couple of minutes and use a food thermometer, no?
I use a Logitech MX Ergo that has a trackball, and it's helped me a lot with wrist pain. Using a trackball felt a bit weird initially.
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I got "fashion shamed" by another geek for using a trackball "like it's still the 90s". I don't put much stock in anything they've ever said, since.
Similarly, and also right at $99.99: Evoluent VerticalMouse https://evoshop.biz/evoluent-verticalmouse-medium-p-72.html
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Wow. A single picture of the product. And a name. And a price. That website went all-out on their minimalist design principles.
UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction (electrek.co)
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1) Introduce a lot of intermittent generation into energy grid without sufficient amount of storage capacity. 2) Use marginal pricing model which effectively guarantees windfall profits for those sources. 3) Utilization of peaking power plants falls, but you still have to keep them because there is not enough storage capacity. 4) Peaking power plants rise generation costs to offset the lower utilization, further adding to the windfall profits. 5) You need more grid capacity to handle energy transfers from distributed generation sources. 5) ???? 6) Act surprised when people loudly complain about electricity bills. Intermittency of generation is an externality (same as CO2 emissions) and should be priced accordingly. People are willing to pay premium for supply stability, but the current pricing model does no account for that. Trying to change consumption habits (like smart grids, dynamic pricing, etc.) works poorly, especially for such vital resource as electricity. I think there should be some kind of price penalty for intermittent sources dependent on total ratio of intermittent generation in the mix. At least until grid-scale energy storage technology will be advanced enough to store weak of total energy consumption.
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Thank fuck I am 100% off grid.
The entire sector will need government bailouts within a decade. The executives running these wind power companies are going to run off with huge bonuses, the company is going to default on its debts, and the government is going to force the taxpayers to make the banks whole because "we need power!"
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So RWE, the German multinational that won the largest share of this auction, with a yearly revenue of €29bn and an existing 153.2 TWh of power generation, is going to need a bailout from the British government, in the next four years, over a project to supply 7GW?
Nothing you've said actually means anything. The self-imposed tax is there and isn't going anywhere, so it's included in the price. The other two points are accounted for in the strike price, because this capacity came into being and is now offering electricity at the strike price.
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The government is literally comparing a raw price with a price+tax … and what makes this even more disingenuous is that the government themselves applied this tax. AND the tax is absurdly high!
>* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind. Is that unreasonable? Carbon dioxide is an externality, and it needs to be accounted for accordingly. Suppose the government is tendering contracts for milk for school lunches. One farm runs a CAFO[1] that pollutes the local river. The other has cows on a pasture that doesn't. Is it that unreasonable for the government to be like "well hang on, the CAFO farm might be cheaper the grass fed farm, but it'll cost us money to clean up all the shit they're dumping into the river, so we're going to impose a tax on the CAFO farm for their pollution"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_operation
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>>Is that unreasonable It’s not unreasonable to report the facts and let the reader decide. The carbon tax is a readily available fact where in your example is subjective.
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> Is that unreasonable? Carbon dioxide is an externality, and it needs to be accounted for accordingly. Yes it is unreasonable. Spending money to reduce carbon is just a subsidy for other countries who DGAF and will emit both theirs and yours.
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When your country emits more CO2 there’s more CO2 in the atmosphere independent of what anyone else does. So it’s true each individual country only receives a fraction of the negative impact of their own emissions, but that fraction isn’t zero and therefore should be taxed.
Can you give an example of a better method? The one that I can think of is the government sets the amount of electricity produced, and then it’s rationed. But I doubt the UK would be happy with rationed electricity where your power shuts off the second it’s over. That would be essentially mandatory blackouts all the time. Not to mention the cost would be held by the government, so you end up paying it in taxes anyway.
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Rationed electricity might also come in the form of a universal basic entitlement, followed by market price for higher usage. One assumes under such a system that the state would own and operate energy production and that they would, for instance, increase the ration over time, leaving the remaining needed capacity to be fulfilled by the market. Honestly, pricing based on the cost of financing and operation isn't a terrible idea.
The non renewable operator would be free to sell at a competitive price or not at all. Perhaps on nights when there’s no wind at sea they might be able to make their obsolete infrastructure pay for itself briefly.
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But that is exactly what is happening. Each seller can offer their price and each bidder can also offer their price. And since running a gas turbine is more expensive than wind power they are forced by the market to turn their gas turbines off when there is wind. However when there is only a little wind they can power up their gas turbines and sell to the highest bidder. But since there is also a little bit wind, the wind power people can also sell to that highest bidder. That is how it happens that suddenly wind power is just as expensive as the gas turbines, because there is simply not as much wind power to go around for all the people that need electricity.
"Make any money" is not clear enough. Providers of input and purchasers of output have each become monopolies and have squeezed the profit out of smaller providers. They borrow to survive, government pays those that loaned the money, then the cycle continues. Farmer suicide has become a very popular way out of the cycle, which is one indicator that the money isn't really there any more.
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Saskatchewan farmers have done very well since ~2000 or so. The 80's and 90's were very rough. Yes, costs have skyrocketed -- combine harvesters start at about a million now. But wheat prices and yields have been high enough to more than compensate. But Saskatchewan farmers are a great example of a low cost producer. A Saskatchewan farm usually runs about 10,000 acres per operator. UK farms with a couple hundred acres can't compete.
We recognise that "I decided your kilo of gold is worth $50 so here's the $50 and now the gold is mine" isn't a purchase, that's theft. I'm going to assume you don't think it's insane for us to pay what the owner asked here (If I'm wrong, do let us know). So, OK, clearly this CCGT electricity here (made with gas) offered for £85 per MWh we're going to buy that, for £85 per MWh. Now, we also needed all this wind power which bids £5 per MWh. Presumably you'd want to pay them less than £85 per MWh. So, too bad, they bid too low, they get punished right? But since you aren't OK with paying less than the bid price, doubtless if they had bid £84 you'd pay that right? Notice that the incentive in your model is for everybody to guess what you'll pay and bid just barely below that, whereupon you've wasted a lot of resources, your strategy no longer has any price discovery value, and you're paying almost as much as before. A triumph of... rationality? How much do you reckon you can save the average household if you do this? £50 per year? Twice that?
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I suspect GP actually wants an end to market pricing of energy and a move to a renewables-opex type of pricing, presumably with state financing and even operation. It isn't an insane idea: if it could be done cheaply enough and run well enough.
There's a big wind farm I drive by occasionally and sometimes most of the windmills are feathered. Some are turning, so there's clearly wind. I have assumed this is when the demand is low (or maybe negative).
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That’s not necessarily true. In general a single windmill is more efficient at pulling energy out of the wind than two are. And the marginal costs of windmills are not zero. I.e. their maintenance cadence (also) scales with active hours. So it might be a “at this price-wind point it’s not profitable for us to run a second mill”
I’m missing something. Is the operator paying actual cash money if the market price goes up? It’s not just that they’re forced to produce electricity at a rate that’s possibly less than what it cost to buy fuel? (Or in the case of renewables: producing for less profit than they would if they made their contract later)
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Think of it this way: as a windfarm operator you know your costs and you know your expected amount of energy produced. But you don’t know the precise timing and therefore the market value at generation time. From the first two you can calculate what you need in terms of £/MWh (include whatever profit you want in there). Now you can go to the government and bid that price in the auction. If you win, you have a safe profit and all risk (and upside potential) now lies with the government. As GP said, in the case of 2022 you would have lost out on revenue. But that’s the price foe guaranteed margins The CfD part is a technical detail. It ~ doesn’t matter whether you first sell the energy and then go to the government for reimbursement. Or whether you sell the energy to the government which then handles the follow up sale. What I’m not sufficiently familiar with is whether you _have_ to go to such an auction (i.e. whether the auction also is the mechanism of capacity planning) or whether you are free to bypass this system and just hook up your wind park and carry the risk yourself. But functionally this is an insurance scheme for profits, with a market based pricing system
JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3 (github.com/juicedata)
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See also their User Stories: https://juicefs.com/en/blog/user-stories I'm not an enterprise-storage guy (just sqlite on a local volume for me so far!) so those really helped de-abstractify what JuiceFS is for.
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It is not clear that pjdfstest establishes full POSIX semantic compliance. After a short search of the repo I did not see anything that exercises multiple unrelated processes atomically writing with O_APPEND, for example. And the fact that their graphic shows applications interfacing with JuiceFS over NFS and SMB casts further doubt, since both of those lack many POSIX semantic properties. Over the decades I have written test harnesses for many distributed filesystems and the only one that seemed to actually offer POSIX semantics was LustreFS, which, for related reasons, is also an operability nightmare.
Juice is cool, but tradeoffs around which metadata store you choose end up being very important. It also writes files in it's own uninterpretable format to object storage, so if you lose the metadata store, you lose your data. When we tried it at Krea we ended up moving on because we couldn't get sufficient performance to train on, and having to choose which datacenter to deploy our metadata store on essentially forced us to only use it one location at a time.
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> It also writes files in it's own uninterpretable format to object storage, so if you lose the metadata store, you lose your data. That's so confusing to me I had to read it five times. Are you saying you lose the metadata, or that the underlying data is actually mangled or gone, or merely that you lose the metadata? One of the greatest features of something like this to me would be the ability to durable even beyond JuiceFS access to my data in a bad situation. Even if JuiceFS totally messes up, my data is still in S3 (and with versioning etc even if juicefs mangles or deletes my data, still). So odd to design this kind of software and lose this property.
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It backs its metadata up to S3. You do need metadata to map inodes / slices / chunks to s3 objects, though. Tigris has a one-to-one FUSE that does what you want: https://github.com/tigrisdata/tigrisfs
Interesting. Would this be suitable as a replacement for NFS? In my experience literally everyone in the silicon design industry uses NFS on their compute grid and it sucks in numerous ways: * poor locking support (this sounds like it works better) * it's slow * no manual fence support; a bad but common way of distributing workloads is e.g. to compile a test on one machine (on an NFS mount), and then use SLURM or SGE to run the test on other machines. You use NFS to let the other machines access the data... and this works... except that you either have to disable write caches or have horrible hacks to make the output of the first machine visible to the others. What you really want is a manual fence: "make all changes to this directory visible on the server" * The bloody .nfs000000 files. I think this might be fixed by NFSv4 but it seems like nobody actually uses that. (Not helped by the fact that CentOS 7 is considered "modern" to EDA people.)
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> poor locking support (this sounds like it works better) File locking on Unix is in general a clusterf*ck. (There was a thread a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542247 ) > no manual fence support; a bad but common way of distributing workloads is e.g. to compile a test on one machine (on an NFS mount), and then use SLURM or SGE to run the test on other machines. You use NFS to let the other machines access the data... and this works... except that you either have to disable write caches or have horrible hacks to make the output of the first machine visible to the others. What you really want is a manual fence: "make all changes to this directory visible on the server" In general, file systems make for poor IPC implementations. But if you need to do it with NFS, the key is to understand the close-to-open consistency model NFS uses, see section 10.3.1 in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7530#section-10.3 . Of course, you'll also want some mechanism for the writer to notify the reader that it's finished, be it with file locks, or some other entirely different protocol to send signals over the network.
It depends on what level of FUSE you're working with. If you're running a FUSE adapter provided by a third party (Mountpoint, GCS FUSE), odds are that you aren't going to get great performance because it's going to have to run across a network super far away to work with your data. To improve performance, these adapters need to be sure to set fiddly settings (like using Kernel-side writeback caching) to avoid the penalty of hitting the disk for operations like write. If you're trying to write a FUSE adapter, it's up to you to implement as much of the POSIX spec that you need for the programs that you want to run. The requirements per-program are often surprising. Want to run "git clone", then you need to support the ability to unlink a file from the file system and keep its data around. Want to run "vim", you need the ability to do renames and hard links. All of this work needs to happen in-memory in order to get the performance that applications expect from their file system, which often isn't how these things are built. Regarding agents in particular, I'm hopeful that someone (which is quite possibly us), builds a FUSE-as-a-service primitive that's simple enough to use that the vast majority of developers don't have to worry about these things.
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> you need to support the ability to unlink a file from the file system and keep its data around. Want to run "vim", you need the ability to do renames and hard links Those seem like pretty basic POSIX filesystem features to be fair. Awkward, sure... there's also awkwardness like symlinks, file locking, sticky bits and so on. But these are just things you have to implement. Are there gotchas that are inherent to FUSE itself rather than FUSE implementations?
does having to maintain the slatedb as a consistent singleton (even with write fencing) make this as operationally tricky as a third party db?
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It’s not great UX on that angle. I am currently working on coordination (through s3, not node to node communication), so that you can just spawn instances without thinking about it.
This clarification is helpful, thanks! The README currently implies a slightly different take, perhaps it could be made more clear that it's suitable for use unmodified in closed source products: > The AGPL license is suitable for open source projects, while commercial licenses are available for organizations requiring different terms. I was a bit unclear on where the AGPL's network-interaction clause draws its boundaries- so the commercial license would only be needed for closed-source modifications/forks, or if statically linking ZeroFS crate into a larger proprietary Rust program, is that roughly it?
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Also worth noting (as a sibling comment pointed out) that despite these assurances the untested legal risks of AGPL-licensed code may still cause difficulties for larger, risk-averse companies. Google notably has a blanket policy [1] banning all AGPL code entirely as "the risks outweigh the benefits", so large organizations are probably another area where the commercial license comes into play. [1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy
‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid (werd.io)
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Palantir deploys, for each client, a data platform, ingestion and enrichment pipeline, and a user-facing app to allow smart queries and data exploration. The platform stores all the application-specific data in a highly granular, flexible ontology. It also has a powerful ingestion platform that uses AI to enrich documents, create links between existing documents, and map them to their rightful place in the ontology. When the ingestion is complete, you have a multi-signal ontology that allows the app users to find anything in the ontology using multi-dimensional, complex search queries that perform long graph traversal based on multiple facets. I guess in this case they provided the technology and “the client” brought the data. It would be reasonable to expect the “client” data is heterogeneous and contains data from multiple overlapped sources that, once ingested, creates a sophisticated view of the world. This works similarly to how cookie pools work. When you clear all cookies and start fresh, you may visit 100 websites without logging in. Nobody knows who you are. However, once you log in to a random website, your name/email will be assigned to that cookie that will automatically propagate across all previous 100 sessions that were previously linked together. The internet is fantastic at matching a cookie against an existing profile even 400 days after no activity in the cookie pool network. Palantir works the same. If in any of these ingested heterogeneous “client” data sets there is one single matching record, containing or not containing SSN or whatever test flags/rules the “client” uses to determine the immigration status, Palantir can build a confidence interval around that test/flag. One historic bad behavior would lead to a flag for that entity. As a software vendor, they provide the tech capabilities. Each Palantir client brings their own data. Just like in Postgres. If the clients wants to build something, and you can do it, you just get it done. They say the internet never forgets. I guess it’s safe to assume that from now on, the government won’t forget any bad past behavior either.
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Palantir damage control got to this thread faster than the last one.
if you go by “morals” every FAANG employee (current and previous) would need to go plumbing school
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Fair enough, they had (specially their executives and the engineers working on ad tech) a negative impact in the world as well.
I have no strong feelings towards palantir. But the ones I do have are mostly negative. However it seems crazy to me that even the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi. This just feeds extremism because it is extremism in and of itself
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> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi It's not just that idea though. Plenty of presidents have done that without pushback. It's that idea combined with: * Rhetoric dehumanizing the immigrants * Raiding churches, courts, jobs, etc * Revoking legal status of immigrants * Reducing training time for new hires * Detaining U.S. citizens and threatening them * Saying it'll help the U.S. citizens, when data shows it doesn't
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Even trying to follow the existing law is punishable by exile without trial. You can go to all your legally appointed court dates, follow every rule in the book, and get snatched and deported from the courtroom the next minute.
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> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi Because that idea consists of harming someone over their birth circumstances, rather than any objective harm they may have done.
Why have we all lost the ability to think in a nuanced way? It’s very disturbing to witness, particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal. Etcetera, etcetera. You don’t HAVE to dedicate yourself to a fully polarized set of beliefs. Nuance is possible. What the hell is causing us to lose our minds like this? Is it really just social media? So frustrating to witness.
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Sophisticated and nuanced opinions are an embellishment . A badge worn at cocktail parties . Cleaning up a mess is 1000x messier than making it . No one will ever care or remember your sophisticated opinion. That’s why it may be possible to have nuance but it’s just a peacocks feather
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Yes, in the sense it's possible to believe the same things about the NSDAP. However, one who believes such things is simply wrong.
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> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate ... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period. The existence of that app is an abomination; the fact tax payer money is being allocated to it is tragicomic. Not spending it and just giving it as tax returns to the population would be so much better than kidnapping people over being born in the wrong place.
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> ... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period. I mean sure but you have to acknowledge that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports. The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
This comment is a pretty robust example of the problem I was referring to.
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Is there anything inaccurate in the above comment?
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What nuance is missing? The above comment is a list of facts.
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Lists of facts don’t inherently constitute a nuanced take.
The core issue is not that people cannot think with nuance, but that nuance is costly and poorly rewarded.
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Hot political movements, at least in this day and age, are usually in support of objectives the hotheads don't even begin to understand in my opinion and the instigators and promoters certainly don't have the interests of the hotheads in mind. It's easy enough to even take both sides, stir up shit, then be a hero with a clear mandate when whatever side wins. Of course what actually winds up being done with the mandate isn't usually in the interest of the hotheads.
We've all seen the video. You are working so hard to build and manufacture the narrative that fits in your mind, to the point where it can justify the actions of the officer. There is no justification for shooting a woman point blank in the face, and you know it.
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If you believe said women is attempting to attack you with a deadly weapon (an accelerating vehicle that you were struck by in this case) that would fall pretty clearly under justified use of force.
The question you have to ask yourself, us this: How do you deport with millions of illegal immigrants? Propose a better system, considering the realities on the ground. And, no, ignoring their existence is not an option, unless you want "millions" to become "tens of millions" or even more. Note also that mass deportations also happened under Biden and Obama - they just didn't attract the same publicity.
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They didn't attract the same publicity because * They didn't jack up the budget to a size larger than most countries' militaries * They didn't target primarily Republican cities and states out of vengeance for how those cities and states voted * They didn't explicitly target people here legally * They didn't send bands of masked men house to house to kick in doors without warrants * They didn't implement Kavanaugh Stops, which makes racial profiling legal * They didn't implement a "Papers, please" policy * They didn't crow about their cruelty on social media or make funny memes about immigrant families being destroyed * They didn't broadcast that agents had "absolute immunity" even if their agents killed people * They didn't use fascist iconography and phrasing in their press releases and design systems * They didn't create a situation in which businesses and schools had to shut down because their employees and students were afraid to leave their houses because even though they were U.S. citizens, they had darker colored skin or spoke with an accent * They didn't try to end birthright citizenship I mean the list goes on and on. It's not the same at all. That's why they didn't attract the same publicity.
> focus on the criminals and dangerous people first That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
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If that were true, they'd be showing up with real warrants (super easy if these are convicted felon illegal immigrants as they claim! But of course there are nowhere near as many of those as, say, the "thousands" they claim exist in Minneapolis) and mostly dressing in much more ordinary federal agent clothes and it'd all be boring and uneventful and legal enough that most of what they're doing would hardly even be noticed. Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff. Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad , to the point that I think that language is way too mild , but here we are I guess.
> 1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling. I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA. What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
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> Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA. Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it. And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.
Would you support deporting people who are criminals? Or have no intention of ever working and just want to live off various welfare programs? Trying to find some common ground here.
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Nope. Access to food, water, shelter, and freedom of movement are fundamental human rights. I'm not a proponent of executing useless eaters. If you commit a crime with a prison sentence then you serve that sentence where you committed the crime.
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Thanks for taking the time to clarify your position. So if China or some other country decided to send 10 million people here for whatever reason, you think our official policy should be to welcome then in and provide them food, shelter, etc...? What about 100 million people? Should they also be given citizenship and right to vote in addition to food/shelter?
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The only issue would be logistics. Getting supporting infrastructure and housing set up. But yeah, ultimately. More hands, more consumers. Why wouldn't we want as many citizens as possible, we certainly have the land for it.
It is a de-facto corporate state right now. Everyone in the current government tries to see how much money they can steal.
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Has been for over a century.
> Trump has been the only one that the corporations couldn't buy Hasn't he accepted donations from many mega corporations? My assumption is that a corporation wont donate money, without the expectation of ROI.
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OP has the delusion that being rich means you are resistant to corruption by being less likely to pursue riches. That being rich causes one to stop pursuing it.
I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals. The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
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Yeah, this is no different from IBM setting up punch card tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany track its victims.
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> Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place. Had other policies decisions not led about 12 to 20 million illegals in the US in the first place, there'd be less need for ICE. The complete open borders policies signed by Biden's autopen and the millions who came during these four years comes to mind. I'll also remind everyone that it's estimated that under Obama 3.1 million illegals were deported. The question is simple: is the US open to anyone without needing a visa? And if it's not: how do you deal with tens of millions of illegals? (I'm not saying Palantir ain't evil: I'm saying ICE does its job)
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"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.
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The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be. Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
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You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company. Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies. Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
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Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
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My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person. In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass. But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool. A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
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I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement. A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not. A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law. A fence contains the intent of separating things. A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive. The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built. (I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
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Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical. Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')
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> prince Fëanor > one of the good guys Uhhhh... Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed). Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships. Such actions does not a good guy make.
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So it's literally the Elvish word for "television"...
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Telescope, not television.
Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.
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This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it. Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
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This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.
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The tool is a lump of metal apart from ethics, but making the cliterectomy-knife was a choice someone made. We can judge that decision.
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus? This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
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> Torment Nexus You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist? (And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
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The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one followed the argument to its ultimate conclusion, nothing should invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm down the line.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7DjEsFTlic it's also settler logic
> they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus… Worse, that spy apparatus inherently corrupts its users .
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That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing. When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
How is Palantir a loophole? I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
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> How is Palantir a loophole? The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed. I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
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> The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed. Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
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Pretty sure GP is saying that the data Palantir sells are commercial because they're being sold by Palantir.
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Right, and what I’m saying is that to the best of my knowledge, Palantir don’t sell data at all, which is the fundamental misunderstanding people seem to have about them.
Referring to engineers with top secret+ security clearances as "consultants" seems reductionistic.
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Ok they are "consultants" with a federally guaranteed moat.
So the “ICE agent” presented identification to her showing he was law enforcement? Nope. Oh so he got out of a vehicle marked as ICE? Nope. Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense. Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
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This is such a bizarre argument because the entire reason the two women were there in the first place is because they thought they were following ICE agents. Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group. They had been following the agents around throughout the day, attempting to disrupt them, which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident. So to claim the women didn't know it was Federal law enforcement ordering them to exit the vehicle is baffling to me because that was the entire reason the women were there in the first place.
Dutch experts warn US takeover of DigiD platform poses security risks (nltimes.nl)
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There is a banner warning at the DigiD website (in dutch) about this: https://www.digid.nl/solvinity One of the FAQ questions is: Will an American company soon be able to view my data? This tells a lot about US street cred atm. This was added to the website not because of niche political activism but by a sizeable concern of the population.
The Dutch sold nexperia to the Chinese, recently decided that going to MS software for their tax division is the best option and now this. Higher ups seem to really be sleeping at the wheel.
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Netherlands as well as Denmark went more into MS than some other countries. Turns out it was bad choice.
It's completely unacceptable and unconscionable for European countries to transfer any part of their critical infrastructure to the US after the US have already weaponised existing dependencies- for example putting the ICC under sanctions and blocking their access to Microsoft services. The cowardice of EU countries is really disgusting.
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>blocking their access to Microsoft services. Really? So basically any organisation in any country that the current or future US administration may be hostile to (read everyone) should now be looking for an alternative. Seems short sighted on the USs end. Again.
Zuck#: A programming language for connecting the world. And harvesting it (jayzalowitz.github.io)
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I’d be interested to see a satirical concept like this that goes more in depth by, say, having the operational semantics help fuel the satire. When I see things like this, I always feel underwhelmed when it’s just a keyword swap. For example, take the title. Imagine if the PL was a declarative way of describing a distributed system, with HTTP endpoints or web sockets connecting modules. Then, for harvesting, it gives unbounded ability for nodes to read and write to other nodes outside of the standard interface. You can just go in and read/write their data, without any public interface needed. Of course someone else can probably come up with something better, but I think it’d be cool to see something that more fully uses what a “programming language” means.
Flagged: code and prose written by an LLM, and uncanny-valley as a result - a few examples: - the programming language part is dropped almost immediately by the LLM. - The unrelated meat emojis to give it an animated background - Painfully generic / not attempting to make a joke: "This language finally lets me express my true feelings about variable assignment." - Every section has exactly the "right" length, ~3-5 items per list, ~2-3 paragraphs per section. Hate to eat downvotes for saying this, I hate what FB / Zuck too and understand the impulse to treat it as unneeded negativity. However, I've been on HN for 16 years, and can't remember a time I've seen a human-generated surface-level satire persist in the top posts. Seems to me the length and subject let the slop skate, at least so far.
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Have you never seen the Zuckerberg “in my backyard smoking meats with the boys” video? It’s so uncomfortable. The meat emojis are relevant
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Smoked meat is not at all random here. Google "Zuckerberg sweet baby rays". This is the deep Facebook lore.
Some well-known satire/parody languages are Omgrofl, Shakespeare, ArnoldC, but there're many more. Can check https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:Thematic & https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:Joke_languages . But although weird esolangs, don't see how Velda and Piet be considered satire.
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INTERCAL was also a satire of the programming languages of its era, AFAIK.
Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley (politico.eu)
Let me spell it out for you: - Are zoning laws affecting only immigrant born population from buying, or simply everyone moving to SF for work? - If the locals are preventing the foreigners to buy housing via zoning laws, then how did those immigrants manage to buy housing like you said? - And once immigrants become citizens and homeowners, are you saying they don't vote for the same zoning laws that protect their housing investment just like the natives? That's where your contradictions are, and this is my last response you get on this discussion, since it's clearly not going anywhere.
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Let me spell it out for you. This is 100% a stupid regulation issue and has fuck all to do with immigration. If the US had a more restrictive immigration policy the same thing would have happened because so many native born Americans (including myself) moved to SV for high paying jobs. Supply and demand is what it is whether that demand comes from a US citizen or an immigrant.
In the US you have to privately pay for many things that you get for free in more developed nations. For example safety is not guaranteed due to extreme homelessness and easy access to guns, so you have to pay more for gated communities and security/concierge. You need to privately pay for healthcare and also pay off debt from university tuition, both is much cheaper in EU. If you have kids, you have to pay for private schools. Then all over the US the infrastructure is so extremely bad that you don't even have sidewalks and you need to take a car to get anywhere, with really bad public transport. If you want to just emulate European lifestyle in the US you really need to spend a lot of money.
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>If you want to just emulate European lifestyle in the US you really need to spend a lot of money. Even a lot of Europeans today are not having the envied European lifestyle right now. Things are getting worse here too, so you also need to spend out of pocket and have a very good paying job, just to get the European lifestyle that was the norm 10+ years ago with an average job. And it's only gonna get downhill from here with the increase in defense spending that's gotta come from somewhere, the stagnating economy and increasing CoL, the ballooning retirement and welfare timebomb, etc. If you make 50% of US FANG wages, then you'll probably be fine, but most people don't.
It is possible that neither are more manipuled tough it's impossible to tell. What seems clear from your example above is that both are manipulated, just in different ways and with google's incentive. It is understandable that countries came to the conclusion that this is posing a threat to their national security.
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And what, exactly, is the national security threat here? If Google is manipulating results to favor its advertisers or the political positions of its owners, that's what all publishers do, and have always done and nobody ever called it a national security threat. The "national security threat" here seems to be that they are showing people content that the government doesn't want them to see.
You're missing the point. I speak American so I can translate. He's basically saying journalism is a matter of National Security. It needs to be done correctly to a high level at all costs, much like education. Google (Silicon Valley) is messing with it.
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If it's a matter of national security and compromise isn't possible, I'd encourage Denmark to seek or create alternatives; it's the best they can hope for. Denmark has no obligation to deal with Google and Google has no obligation to deal with Denmark, regardless of the impact those choices have on the other party.
The facts are clear: Regulate the companies or lose your democracy. FB's impact on democracy has been clear for a long time. This is just the latest - https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying-with-european-far-right-to-strip-back-eu-rules
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Wait, so supporting opposition parties is somehow losing democracy? And you want the government to prevent them from doing that?
In practice, that's a form of censorship since it inhibits the ability of people in Denmark to discover domestic news articles through search.
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But Google is willing to host their content in search, right? They're just not willing to pay since there's no revenue benefit to search hosting it. It seems like Danish media doesn't like this and has chosen to withhold their content, which is their right of course, but it seems strange to contort that into a claim that Google is doing censorship.
CVEs affecting the Svelte ecosystem (svelte.dev)
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It's not that simple to safely parse HTTP request form. Just look at Go security releases related to form parsing (a new fix released just today). https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/search?q=form 5 fixes in 2 years related to HTTP form (url-encoded and multipart). - Go 1.20.1 / 1.19.6: Multipart form parsing could consume excessive memory and disk (unbounded memory accounting and unlimited temp files) - Go 1.20.3 / 1.19.8: Multipart form parsing could cause CPU and memory DoS due to undercounted memory usage and excessive allocations - Go 1.20.3 / 1.19.8: HTTP and MIME header parsing could allocate far more memory than required from small inputs - Go 1.22.1 / 1.21.8: Request.ParseMultipartForm did not properly limit memory usage when reading very long form lines, enabling memory exhaustion. - Go 1.25.6 / 1.24.12: Request.ParseForm (URL-encoded forms) could allocate excessive memory when given very large numbers of key-value pairs. Probably every HTTP server implementation in every language has similar vulnerabilities. And these are logic errors, not even memory safety bugs.
I want to ask simply for curiosity. Knowing you felt this way about that code, and I'm assuming knew that it had some level of relative importance to Svelte as a whole, how did that inform your decision making, if at all?
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It’s probably comparable to other js frameworks, and auditing every package before you use them will leave you in analysis paralysis. I have a low opinion of software in general, but svelte isn’t a particular standout in that aspect.
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The phrase is typically analysis paralysis, but the image of a team of analysts frozen in fear is quite evocative.
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Autocorrected on my iPhone, but sometimes the best thing analysts could do is nothing ;)
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them (approachwithalacrity.com)
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By and large, I agree with the article. Claude is great and fast at doing low level dev work. Getting the syntax right in some complicated mechanism, executing an edit-execute-readlog loop, making multi file edits. This is exactly why I love it. It's smart enough to do my donkey work. I've revisited the idea that typing speed doesn't matter for programmers. I think it's still an odd thing to judge a candidate on, but appreciate it in another way now. Being able to type quickly and accurately reduces frustration, and people who foresee less frustration are more likely to try the thing they are thinking about. With LLMs, I have been able to try so many things that I never tried before. I feel that I'm learning faster because I'm not tripping over silly little things.
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> Being able to type quickly and accurately reduces LLMs can generate code quickly. But there's no guarantee that it's syntactically, let alone semantically, accurate. > I feel that I'm learning faster because I'm not tripping over silly little things. I'm curious: what have you actually learned from using LLMs to generate code for you? My experience is completely the opposite. I learn nothing from running generated code, unless I dig in and try to understand it. Which happens more often than not, since I'm forced to review and fix it anyway. So in practice, it rarely saves me time and energy. I do use LLMs for learning and understanding code, i.e. as an interactive documentation server, but this is not the use case you're describing. And even then, I have to confirm the information with the real API and usage documentation, since it's often hallucinated, outdated, or plain wrong.
IDK I've been using opus 4.5 to create a UI library and it's been doing pretty well: https://simsies.xyz/ (still early days) Granted it was building ontop of tailwind (shifting over to radix after the layoff news). Begs the question? What is a lego?
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your github repo was highly entertaining. thanks for make my day a bit brighter:)
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I don't know how someone can look at what you build and conclude LLMs are still google search. It boggles the mind how much hatred people have for AI to the point of self deception. The evidence is placed right in front of you and on your lap with that link and people still deny it.
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How do you come to that conclusion? There are absolutely tons of code pens of that style. And jsfiddles, zen gardens, etc. I think the true mind boggle is you don't seem to realize just how much content the AI conpanies have stolen.
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>I think the true mind boggle is you don't seem to realize just how much content the AI conpanies have stolen. AI companies have stolen a lot of content for training. So have you. That content lives rent free in your head.
I'm not entirely convinced by the anecdote here where Claude wrote "bad" React code: > But in context, this was obviously insane. I knew that key and id came from the same upstream source. So the correct solution was to have the upstream source also pass id to the code that had key, to let it do a fast lookup. I've seen Claude make mistakes like that too, but then the moment you say "you can modify the calling code as well" or even ask "any way we could do this better?" it suggests the optimal solution. My guess is that Claude is trained to bias towards making minimal edits to solve problems. This is a desirable property, because six months ago a common complaint about LLMs is that you'd ask for a small change and they would rewrite dozens of additional lines of code. I expect that adding a CLAUDE.md rule saying "always look for more efficient implementations that might involve larger changes and propose those to the user for their confirmation if appropriate" might solve the author's complaint here.
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Definitely, The training parameters encourage this. The AI is actually deliberately also trying to trick you and we know for a fact. Problems with solutions too complicated to explain or to output in one sitting are out of the question. The AI will still bias towards one shot solutions because all the training is biased towards that. It's not really practical to give it training data with multi step ultra complicated solutions. Think about it. The thousands of questions given to it for reinforcement.... the trainer is going to be trying to knock those out as efficiently as possible so they have to be readable problems with shorter readable solutions. So we know AI biases towards shorter readable solutions. Second Any solution that tricks the reader will pass training. There is for sure a subset of questions/solution pairs that meet this criteria by definition because WE as trainers simply are unaware we are being tricked. So this data leaks into the training and as a result AI will bias towards deception as well. So all in all it is trained to trick you and give you the best solution that can fit into a context that is readable in one sitting. In theory we can get it to do what we want only if we had perfect reinforcement data.
(Author here) > I'm not entirely convinced by the anecdote here where Claude wrote "bad" React code Yeah, that's fair - a friend of mine also called this out on Twitter ( https://x.com/konstiwohlwend/status/2010799158261936281 ) and I went into more technical detail about the specific problem there. > I've seen Claude make mistakes like that too, but then the moment you say "you can modify the calling code as well" or even ask "any way we could do this better?" it suggests the optimal solution. I agree, but I think I'm less optimistic than you that Claude will be able to catch its own mistakes in the future. On the other hand, I can definitely see how a ~more intelligent model might be able to catch mistakes on a larger and larger scale. > I expect that adding a CLAUDE.md rule saying "always look for more efficient implementations that might involve larger changes and propose those to the user for their confirmation if appropriate" might solve the author's complaint here. I'm not sure about this! There are a few things Claude does that seem unfixable even by updating CLAUDE.md. Some other footguns I keep seeing in Python and constantly have to fix despite CLAUDE.md instructions are: - writing lots of nested if clauses instead of writing simple functions by returning early - putting imports in functions instead of at the top-level - swallowing exceptions instead of raising (constantly a huge problem) These are small, but I think it's informative of what the models can do that even Opus 4.5 still fails at these simple tasks.
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I wonder if this is specific to Python. I've had no trouble like that with Claude generating Elixir. Claude sticks to the existing styles and paradigms quite well. Can see in the thinking traces that Claude takes this into consideration.
> I agree, but I think I'm less optimistic than you that Claude will be able to catch its own mistakes in the future. On the other hand, I can definitely see how a ~more intelligent model might be able to catch mistakes on a larger and larger scale. Claude already does this. Yesterday i asked it why some functionality was slow, it did some research, and then came back with all the right performance numbers, how often certain code was called, and opportunities to cache results to speed up execution. It refactored the code, ran performance tests, and reported the performance improvements.
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I have been reading through this thread, and my first reaction to many of the comments was "Skill issue." Yes, it can build things that have never existed before. Yes, it can review its own code. Yes, it can do X, Y and Z. Does it do all these things spontaneously with no structure? No, it doesn't. Are there tricks to getting it do some of these things? Yup. If you want code review, start by writing a code review "skill". Have that skill ask Opus to fork off several subagents to review different aspects, and then synthesize the reports, with issues broken down by Critical, Major and Minor. Have the skill describe all the things you want from a review. There are, as the OP pointed out, a lot of reasons why you can't run it with no human at all. But with an experienced human nudging it? It can do a lot.
I agree somewhat, but more when it comes to its use of logic - it only gleans logic from human language which as we know is a fucking mess. I've commented before on my belief that the majority of human activity is derivative. If you ask someone to think of a new kind of animal, alien or random object they will always base it off things that they have seen before. Truly original thoughts and things in this world are an absolute rarity and the majority of supposed original thought riffs on what we see others make, and those people look to nature and the natural world for inspiration. We're very good at taking thing a and thing b and slapping them together and announcing we've made something new. Someone please reply with a wholly original concept. I had the same issue recently when trying to build a magic based physics system for a game I was thinking of prototyping.
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LLMs lack agency in the sense that they have no goals, preferences, or commitments. Humans do, even when our ideas are derivative. We can decide that this is the right choice and move forward, subjectively and imperfectly. That capacity to commit under uncertainty is part of what agency actually is.
What is the difference between "novel" and "novel to someone who hasn't consumed the entire corpus of training data, which is several orders of magnitude greater than any human being could consume?"
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The difference is that when you do not know how a problem can be solved, but you know that this kind of problem has been solved countless times earlier by various programmers, you know that it is likely that if you ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, you will get an acceptable solution. On the other hand, if the problem you have to solve has never been solved before at a quality satisfactory for your purpose, then it is futile to ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, because it is pretty certain that the proposed solution will be unacceptable (unless the AI succeeds to duplicate the performance of a monkey that would type a Shakespearean text by typing randomly).
It's not, because I haven't ruled out the possibility. I could share anecdata about how my discussions with LLMs have led to novel insights, but it's not necessary. I'm keeping my mind open, but you're asserting an unproven claim that is currently not community consensus. Therefore, the burden of proof is on you.
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I agree that after discussions with a LLM you may be led to novel insights. However, such novel insights are not novel due to the LLM, but due to you. The "novel" insights are either novel to you because they belong to something that you have not studied before, or they are novel ideas that were generated by yourself as a consequence of your attempts to explain what you want to the LLM. It is very frequent for someone to be led to novel insights about something that he/she believed to already understand well, only after trying to explain it to another ignorant human, when one may discover that the previous supposed understanding was actually incorrect or incomplete.
> If it could truly think it would be able to bootstrap creations from basic principles like we do, but it really can't. alphazero?
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I just said LLMs
You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. That's probably the biggest threat to the long-term success of the AI industry; the inevitable pull towards encroaching more and more of their own interests into the AI themselves, driven by that Harvard Business School mentality we're all so familiar with, trying to "capture" more and more of the value being generated and leaving less and less for their customers, until their customer's full time job is ensuring the AIs are actually generating some value for them and not just the AI owner.
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> You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. In this scenario, why does the AI care what any of these humans think? The CEO, the board, the shareholders, the "AI company"—they're all just a bunch of dumb chimps providing zero value to the AI, and who have absolutely no clue what's going on. If your scenario assumes that you have a highly capable AI that can fill every role in a large corporation, then you have one hell of a principal-agent problem.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure (hackernoon.com)
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The IA needs perhaps not just more money, but also more talented people, IMO. I worry that it has stagnated, from a tech pov.
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Is this some kind of copypasted AI output? There are unformatted footnote numbers at the end of many sentences.
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I was thinking the same thing. No proofreading is a sure sign to me. I also feel like I've read parts of this before.
It's frustrating that there's no way for people to (selectively) mirror the Internet Archive. $25-30M per year is a lot for a non-profit, but it's nothing for government agencies, or private corporations building Gen AI models. I suspect having a few different teams competing (for funding) to provide mirrors would rapidly reduce the hardware cost too. The density + power dissipation numbers quoted are extremely poor compared to enterprise storage. Hardware costs for the enterprise systems are also well below AWS (even assuming a short 5 year depreciation cycle on the enterprise boxes). Neither this article nor the vendors publish enough pricing information to do a thorough total cost of ownership analysis, but I can imagine someone the size of IA would not be paying normal margins to their vendors.
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The fact AI companies are stripping mining IA for content and not helping to be part of the solution is egregious.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
First impressions of Claude Cowork (simonw.substack.com)
I just used Claude Code to do something that would have taken my wife 3+ days She has to go through about 100 resumes for a position at her college. Each resume is essentially a form the candidate filled out and lists their detailed academic scores from high school > PhD, their work experience, research and publications. Based on the declared data, candidates are scored by the system Now this is India and there's a decent amount of fraud, so an individual has to manually check the claimed experience/scores/publications against reality A candidate might claim to have relevant experience, but the college might be unaccredited, or the claimed salary might be way too low for a relevant academic position. Or they might claim to have published in XYZ journal, but the journal itself might be a fraudulent pay-to-publish thing Going through 100+ resumes, each 4 pages long is a nightmare of a task. And boring too. -- So I asked Claude Code to figure out the problem. I gave it a PDF with the scoring guidelines, a sample resume, and asked it to figure out the problem Without me telling it, it figured out a plan that involved checking a college's accredition and rating (the govt maintains a rating for all colleges), the claimed salary vs actual median salary for that position (too low is a red flag), and whether the claimed publication is in either the SCOPUS index or a govt approved publications index (I emphasize govt approved because this is in a govt backed institution) Then I gave it access to a folder with all the 100 resumes. In less than 30 minutes, it evaluated all candidates and added the evaluation to a CSV file. I asked it to make it more readable, so it made a HTML page with data from all the candidates and red/green/yellow flags about their work-experience, publications, and employment It made a prioritized list of the most promising candidates based on this data My wife double checked because she still "doesn't trust AI", but all her verification almost 100% matched Claude's conclusions This was a 3 day, grinding task done in 30 minutes. And all I did was type into a terminal for 20 minutes
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Doesn’t submitting the resumes to Anthropic violate India’s data protection laws?
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> My wife double checked because she still "doesn't trust AI", but all her verification almost 100% matched Claude's conclusions She's right not to trust it for something like this. The "almost 100%" is the problem (also consider that you're sending personal data to anthropic without permission) especially for something like this where it might mean discarding someone's resume, which is something that could have a significant impact on a person's life.
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What human has better than “almost 100%” on a dull task they have to grind at for 3 days? Humans are terrible at that kind of long term focus, make clerical errors, etc.
> Look at my drafts that were started within the last three months and then check that I didn’t publish them on simonwillison.net using a search against content on that site and then suggest the ones that are most close to being ready This is a very detailed, particular prompt. The type of prompt a programmer would think of as they were trying to break down a task into something that can be implemented. It is so programmer-brained that I come away not convinced that a typical user would be able to write it. This isn’t an AI skepticism post - the fact that it handles the prompt well is very impressive. But I’m skeptical that the target user is thinking clearly enough to prompt this well.
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Since LLMs were introduced, I've been of the belief that this technology actually makes writing a *more* important skill to develop than less. So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language. There may be a future AI-based system that can retain so much context it can kind of just "get what you mean" when you say off-the-cuff things, but I believe that a user that can think, speak, and write clearly will still have a skill advantage over one that does not.
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FWIW, I've heard many people say that with voice dictation they ramble to LLMs and by speaking more words can convey their meaning well, even if their writing quality is low. I don't do this regularly, but when I have tried it, it seemed to work just as well as my purposefully-written prompts. I can imagine a non-technical person rambling enough that the AI gets what they mean.
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Thats a fair counterpoint, and it has helped translate my random thoughts into more coherent text. I also haven't taken advantage of dictation much at all either, so maybe I'll give it a try. I still think the baseline skill that writing gives you translates to an LLM-use skill, which is thinking clearly and knowing how to structure your thoughts. Maybe folks can get that skill in other ways (oration, art, etc.). I don't need to give it essays, but I do need to give it clear instructions. Every time it spins off and does something I don't want, its because I didn't clarify my thoughts correctly.
A lot of these have to do with other peoples data. Are we feeding these machines social security numbers and other PII?
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I hope not, but… Yes, probably is happening regularly everywhere it’s not explicitly regulated
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: OpenWork – an open-source alternative to Claude Cowork (github.com/different-ai)
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sounds cool! I'm non technical, I get the workflow with controling home assistant. How could I use this at work? Like how could the workflow be between marketing and devs, for example, for website work, can I change content without dealing with GitHub?
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yo this is so sick, could def incorporate this into my workflow
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let me know if you need help, still a bit rough around the edges
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The word "open" in software names has completely lost its meaning.
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I used "open" because: - it's open source - built on top of open source (opencode) - it's built-around extensibility via plain-text files (skills) and open-source plugins
Updated ! Thanks for flagging
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Awesome! Very cool project, and kudos for making it MIT licensed.
Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
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Something I've noticed with me and other gen-Zers is that meeting with friends or strangers over Discord VoIP is a great way to socialize. It's missing some of the social benefits of in-person meetups, but it's very low-commitment (just hope on a call) and it's much easier to find others who share your interests.
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This is a minor thing, but as an introvert, I really try and push myself to model social behaviour to my kids. Saying good morning to people in the street, chatting to other dog owners, being nice to waiters, travelling by bus, there are lots of tiny opportunities every day to show that world is full of lovely people who aren’t scary at all.
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Having kids (with the right partner and good intentions as a parent) is a great way to avoid feeling lonely. The kid(s) are tremendous source of connection. You may trade for a feeling of exhaustion, overwhelming responsibility, etc. but a lot less loneliness. Also go a step further and join support groups for parents. Community resources where kids play and parents can hang out and chat. Connection is built through shared experiences, and parenting is an experience you can share with other parents. Between having kids and participating in events with other parents, there will be a lot less opportunities to feel lonely.
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Eliminate the Internet. I'm not joking -- it's much, MUCH harder to be lonely if you don't have Amazon, Instacart, UberEats, and social media fulfilling various needs in your life.
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I mean this seriously: we need more cults. Cults have been viciously slandered by mainstream information sources, often because lurid cult stories generate clicks and headlines. Of course some cults are abusive, just like some marriages are abusive. But we still think marriage is good in general. If you think all cults are bad, you're implicitly against all religion, since every mainstream religion was once a cult. Being anti-cult is also profoundly un-American. America was built by cultists. Freedom of religion is literally the first principle stated in the Bill of Rights. A cult is really just a professionally managed social environment. If you trust professionals like lawyers, doctors, or teachers with their respective duties, there's no reason in principle you shouldn't trust a cult leader to manage your social environment for you. Of course you should vet them, ask about their reputation, etc.
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Step one might be to stop calling it the loneliness epidemic. Loneliness is an emotion, isolation is a condition, and we might even expect that if people felt lonely more often they would try harder to be social and actually be less isolated. This is also a network effect: my reaction to my loneliness affects someone else's loneliness if I go talk to them (or not).
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Some people think loneliness is somewhat a result of stress and anxiety, it’s far from it. It is precisely the lack of pressure that makes them stay home. You need to apply as much pressure on them so that staying at home becomes unbearable.
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Not for everyone but if you can, get a dog. Dogs are icebreakers. People like to meet a cute dog. They won't know your name at first but you will be "Fido's Dad" or "Dave's Mom". Other dog owners will greet you and so long as your dogs don't hate each other you already have something in common. A dog gives you a reason to be wherever you want to be - take a walk around the neighborhood or to the park. You're not a rando taking a walk for mysterious and possible nefarious purposes, you're walking the dog. But for for goodness sake, pick up after the pooch. If you can wipe your own arse you can pick up a dog turd with a plastic bag.
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Anecdotally, I've had a lot of people in my life recede after getting pets. They're an excellent excuse to say no to things that you might otherwise do, because you need to get home and take care of the pet or you can't find a sitter to go on a trip etc. Not generalizing to all people, but I think for some a pet can reinforce anti-social tendencies.
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together
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undo urbanization, education, and technology. retvrn to monke.
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A couple of years ago I tried to create a platform to connect people to local communities. The twist was that each community had members that worked as buddies to help welcome and guide new members. I got 10s+ communities and members but since there was no business model associated and I needed to work, I couldn't kept it up. The website was https://tribalo.app . From the few numbers I got, I figure out it help. Maybe one day I don't need to work and can focus on it again.
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LifeKit did an episode on this recently. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/06/nx-s1-5667582/how-to-build-a-village Some things I do: I organize a monthly brunch for friends. I try and grow it, invite people I've recently met. If someone asks me to do something, I try and do it. Get invited to poker night, I'm there. Asked to play Fantasy Football, yep! Even though I don't watch football and have never played.
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Telos
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Spending time in parts of Latin America or western Europe or east Asia and then coming back to the US, you can see a lot of ways in which we've built loneliness into the fabric of US culture. It goes beyond car culture. It's probably illegal to build a cafe within walking distance of your neighborhood or into the first floor of your apartment complex. Americans get an idea of how bad we have it when we go on vacation, but we don't see it as something that can be built at home.
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In the USA, the loneliness epidemic is compounded by isolation. A large portion of our society has moved into suburban communities that are largely impersonal. There is very little in the way of in-person community outside of churches or political movements that only certain kinds of people want to be involved with. With the Internet giving us the ability to interact with our chosen niche with little effort, we are willing to accept this still-impersonal alternative to our stagnant communities. I have found that, as a city-dweller, I benefit from separating myself from social media and going out into the world looking for more personal connections, but this is somewhat of a privilege afforded to those people who live in more densely populated areas. Even then, my distance from social media can sometimes be a handicap when you interact with people who are still reliant on it to coordinate everything. For most people, the social opportunities that existed in the 70's through the 90's simply doesn't exist anymore. If you aren't using social media, you're practically being anti-social, but there is something inherently anti-social about social media to begin with, so you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.
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stop inventing and endorsing divisive ideas
loneliness is not really transmissible like an epidemic. If two lonely people get together, they aren’t lonely anymore.
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It is very possible to be extremely lonely in a room full of people. People are uncomfortable to interact and make small talk. They know smileys and lmao, but many have forgotten how to laugh irl.
I don't think this will ever be resolved. It's a twofold problem, I believe. People are lonely because of fear of rejection and also actively avoid new people out of caution and high standards. So two people who are otherwise lonely will make no effort to connect. I think social networks have done a tremendous amount of damage to our collective psyche. Because on the web, you can single-click permanently block someone and never see them again. If you are admin of a group this person is in, you can also ban this person and prevent them from interacting with members of the group (in the group, that is, you cannot control private messages, but by banning someone from a community you are effectively isolating them), and I think we haven't considered how much power we are giving to random Reddit mods due to this.
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I do believe high standards are behind a lot of the dating issues. Dating pools are so large that people hold out for the right combination of the things they find desirable--except they're never going to find that because they don't have exactly the right combination to attract that "perfect" match.
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Is that REALLY a lot of power, though? Reddit is quasi-anonymous, how "isolated" are you when you can create a different account in seconds?
It’s all about fostering community again, and that’s more than just shared calendars and town events. It’s “third places” where folks can just hang out and work, play, share, and commiserate without having to pay money to do so. It’s bringing back establishments that promote lingering and loitering, like food halls or coffee shops, rather than chasing out folks. It’s about building community centers inside apartment complexes, more public green space, more venues and forums. Giving people space that doesn’t require a form of payment is the best approach, because humans will take advantage of what’s out there naturally. Sure, structure helps, but space is the issue at present I believe.
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> but space is the issue at present I believe. Is it? There are a number of third places around here that sit effectively vacant. The few who are passionate about seeing those spaces thrive will tell you that the problem is getting anyone to come, not finding space to host them.
Make Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing legal again. Having barely room for little more than a bed forces you to get out during the day. Stuff happens when your default for where to spend your time is not at "home". SRO halls also usually had more room for common spaces to meet and socialize with other people in a similar position in life, and of course, SRO is a very cheap housing option.
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have you ever lived in one?
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I lived on a kibbutz for nearly three years after university and had similar levels of personal space. While I definitely would not want to live on a kibbutz for my whole life, there were very significant downsides (internal politics), I made some lifelong friends there and overall consider that experience to have been very positive, in particular for my social life.
Loneliness epidemic started 30+ years ago. There were books written in the 90s about it(bowling alone). Nothing modern can be blamed on it. If anything, social media is helping the crisis; not causing. The 'fixes' has been established for just as long. My nearby 'community centre' was built in 1987. Has this been successful at all? Not in the least bit. The reality of what is causing this hasnt changed. Without fixing this key problem, the crisis obviously has continued for 30+ years. I'm not nostradamus here. However, from many previous conversations it's crazy how absolutely nobody is ready to talk about the cause. They'd rather just call it a paradox or feign ignorance for why this is happening. Honestly it's rather conspiratorial creating when you think about it. Out of curiousity I asked what gemini 3 pro thinks. 1. Revival of third places. As if that hasnt been tried for 30+ years... fail. 2. replacing 'socializing' with "service" The idea is that cleaning a park will somehow make you less lonely is laughable at best. 3. Bridging the generational gap. Elderly teach the young skills? while youth teach digital literacy. My community centre literally has this. F mark. 4. Urban design and walkability. We need to spend trillions of dollars to completely redesign and rebuild cities? lol what. 5. digital hygiene social media is a sedative? crazy. I love gemini, but man they are getting it so wrong. All of this will likely just caused the crisis to be worse in my opinion. To me, has this been done unintentionally through the typical 'road to hell is paved with good intentions' or has this been intentionally done and maintained? The refusal to acknowledge the cause seems to push toward intentional. Guess we just live with the loneliness epidemic.
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>4. Urban design and walkability. >We need to spend trillions of dollars to completely redesign and rebuild cities? lol what. That doesn't mean the point is wrong. The US bet on the wrong urban planning ideas, and now it is facing the consequences. This is not unique to the US; other places have fallen into the same trap.
Maybe dumb question but how does one "join a volunteer organization?" I tried a long time ago but got ghosted.
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Not a dumb question. Depends on the org. Many large orgs have smaller chapters locally, but there are often regionally-relevant ones. I’d start with personal passions, and work from there. It won’t really work, unless it’s something we care about. Volunteer orgs tend to be fairly disorganized, and there’s usually a lot of lively personalities. If one seems too dysfunctional, try another. Don’t just go for one. Also, it can take some time to get into the “inner circle.” Like any human society, trust takes time to build. We need to be willing to start small. Get to know the place. Figure out where we can make a difference. I’ll bet that ChatGPT would be a great source of information.
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Phrases like "I’d start with personal passions, and work from there" and "we need to be willing to start small" are NOT actionable, they are meaningless platitudes. Not to mention it assumes everyone has "personal passions," an the majority of people probably don't. I didn't "just go for one." I spent like a month trying to volunteer , for anyone. I was on medical leave from work at time time so I had plenty of time to give. Nobody ever got back to me or picked up the phone. It was worse than applying for a job. I have an anxiety disorder, so even reaching out caused me massive stress and anxiety. So I caused myself distress to feel more worthless than I already felt. My heart is racing and I'm on the verge of tears just typing this up. So I'll ask again, how does one "join a volunteer organization?"
1. Pass a law letting people WFH where its reasonably possible. I WFH in a walkable city and me and my friends try new restaurants every week, always around noon. I've met lots of new people, and joined new groups that I wouldn't have found out about if I was stuck at my desk. Give people more freedom of movement.
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Do you have any strong evidence that this would improve the situation? It may be correlative and not causative, but as working from home is increasing, it seems that most related statistics to loneliness are increasing as well. What if it's actually part of the problem and not the solution? I'm not saying that I have evidence on hand to the contrary, just trying to challenge the idea.
There's no question that there are 15-20 families within 300 yards of my house. But that group of people absolutely does not have a sense of shared anything but the road. And the fact is that this is true of the supermajority of suburban streets in the United States.
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I don't disagree but 30 years ago the people in those kinds of neighborhoods did get out and talk to each other, did organize cookouts and other gatherings, and in general were sociable neighbors. The people changed.
Go to church. Data from various studies, including those from academic institutions and public health organisations, supports the idea that regular church attendance helps reduce loneliness by fostering social connections, support networks, and a sense of community. 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3551208/ 2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/human-flourishing/202102/how-religious-community-is-linked-human-flourishing 3. https://hrbopenresearch.org/articles/7-76 4. https://www.cardus.ca/research/health/reports/social-isolation-loneliness-and-christian-communities/ 5. there are plenty more... also if you allow anecdotal data: I have been going to a church half a year now, and the sense of community is amazing, made new friends and know more people I could dream of. So there is a way, there is a light. Never felt lonely again since.
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Sounds good, but I would have a hard time pretending to take it seriously. I wouldn’t want to lie to them.
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Would be great if you didn't need to believe in a supernatural being.
"Just join a group" The whole point is that they're not doing that, not that they can't or that its really hard to do.
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The problem is that being present in a group isn't the same thing as being part of it socially.
For what it's worth, I tried that a few years ago. It worked for a while. Then I realized that my church relationships were paper thin and that I'd be forgotten the day I stopped coming and/or I started showing that I didn't really believe in what was preached. Got better connections through improv acting and role-playing game. YMMV
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As someone whose childhood included attendance to various churches, this mostly reflects my experience. That's not to say that it can't or won't produce deep connections, but it is in my estimation more unlikely than not, particularly if there's anything about oneself that the church doesn't agree with or if commitment to that particular denomination hasn't been established. Personally speaking I find the need to conform to the church's norms/expectations to not be ostracized at minimum chafing and in the worst case stifling. The third place and social aspects can be nice but being told how to live and exist isn't.
I've entertained the idea of going to church. My understanding is that a non-trivial number of people going to Unitarian Universalist churches are openly atheist and completely comfortable with that. So the preaching ends up being more about general good community ideas and less about dogma. I have not decided yet that it is a good fit, but I am definitely thinking that I should foster some community connections outside of my own family.
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I was involved in a UU church for a few years. It's a weird organization, and very unstable, with another revolution sweeping in new leadership (and completely new culture) every 5 to 10 years. When I first started going, it was VERY open to atheists and secular humanists. New leadership sweeps in, and there's a mandate to focus more on "worship" and other religious jargon... and let the atheists know that while they can be fellow travelers on some of the social justice stuff, they're not really in the fold. Last I heard, that leadership wave had themselves been swept out under controversial circumstances. But by then I was long gone. I could never really get a straight answer on WHAT we were supposed to be "worshipping", given that UU's don't profess faith in any any particular deity or pantheistic concept, etc. I finally reached the conclusion that we were supposed to just worship the leadership's political beliefs, and not think too much or ask questions. In fairness, maybe that DOES make it a real church?
from what I've looked into, on an individual level, the main thing I need to do is learn how to be a good company for others. Be for other strangers what I would want them to be for me. But it's easier said then done. From a practical perspective, there is the whole "3rd place" issue. How can I open a business that caters to the public, who will just sit there and loiter on their phones and laptops all day and be profitable. Starbucks sort of did it in the 90s, but they're not tolerating that anymore. Forget businesses, can you walk to a park, a beach, a hiking trail on a whim and run into people? Can you hold events, watch parties,etc.. on public places easily like that? It's not easy at all these days. I blame cars. I despise the idea that electric cars are the replacement to cars, without considering changing transportation so that it is more efficient with trams, trains,etc... The side-effect of that is you run into strangers on public transport. This doesn't just affect the loneliness epidemic, it is in my opinion a direct cause of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, and of course obesity. You can't even be homeless and sleep on the streets these days. Even the park benches are built to be hostile to anyone that wants to chill there for too long. Society was restructured between 1950s-1980s so that it is suburbanized. It's all about the family unit, single family homes, freeways and roads built to facilitate single family homes (after WW2, starting families was all the rage, plus white-flight didn't help). Shopping centers built to cater to consumers driving from their suburban homes. Malls you can walk in, after you drove some time to park there. Even when you buy food items at grocery stores, pay attention to serving sizes, it is improving a little, but you'll see at minimum a serving size of two typically. Society was deliberately engineered so that you have more reasons to spend more as a consumer. Families spend more per-capita. suburbs mean more houses purchased, entire generations renting with their bank as a landlord via mortgages, home repair, home insurance, car insurance, car repairs, gas stations for cars where you can get the most unhealthy things out there in the most frequented and convenient places. Make kids, make wives, make ex-wives, get sick the whole lot of you for hospitals, health insurances,etc.. It wasn't planned by some central committees or secret cabal, but it was planned nonetheless by economists and policy makers. If everyone just got married and had kids, they won't be lonely would they? you don't need to hang out at park with strangers, you'll feel less of a member of your local neighborhood who look and think like you, and start thinking more as one people. All the interpersonal interactions and opportunities to build relationships with people are commercialized and controlled. For one reason or another, people are just not getting married in their early 20's anymore, or having that many kids later on like before. Even when you get married, your interaction is by design with other married people, who are busy commuting in their cars to and fro work, kids school,kids sports, plays,etc... imagine taking your kids on busses and trains every day to these places which are fairly near-by, by necessity. you'll be spending time with them instead of operating machinery. They'll be meeting stranger kids from other schools, seeing random strangers all the time, you'll be talking to randos as you walk to the train, wait on the bus,etc.. but this can't be monetized. Blame the economists and policy makers if you want to blame someone. If you want solutions, let's talk explicitly about the policy changes that need to happen. Too much traffic? tear down the freeways instead of building more lanes. It costs $10B to build a simple metro line? pass better laws to regulate bidding and costs, investigate fraud and waste. But to dig even deeper into the root of the matter, look at what is celebrated and prized in society. Most of its ills come from there. For most Americans, it is inconceivable to be able to just go out of your house without any plans or destination in mind and just start walking and see where you end up, and who you run into. That's a crucial and tragic ability that's been lost. We really have more urgent things to address to be fair, but ultimately, this can only be solved one small step at a time, but also big sweeping changes are needed. The first step is to define and accept what the problem is, and where the blame and cause lie.
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>Blame the economists and policy makers if you want to blame someone. I wouldn't go as far as blaming, but American society should at least acknowledge their responsibility for this. Its not like the KGB imposed zoning laws in Texas. You (Americans) did. Americans chose the urban model they wanted.
> the mass social media is trending sharply towards being a 100% troll mill I agree. It's one reason I still come to HN and it's one of the few places I bother to comment (and the only place with more than a few dozen users). The moderation and community culture against trolling makes it a generally positive experience. I do still need breaks sometimes, though, for a few months at a time. I'd love an online community where everyone was having discussions only in good faith. Zero trolling. I can dream.
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> I'd love an online community where everyone was having discussions only in good faith. That's already readily available outside. The whole appeal of online 'communities' is that it is not that.
There is also the thought of too many people to help. Like right now there are thousands/millions of people starving is it my fault? Should I empty all of what I have to help them because I'm guilty if I don't. That's what I'm wrestling with granted what we're talking about is not the same thing. Handing somebody $5 and moving on is not that but yeah idk. I guess as a person that keeps giving shit out eg. $100K to my own family, it gets old. But I will go out there, I'll see what happens. I need to face my fears.
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I hear you. I've had ungrateful family members drive me broke. Compassion is doing the right thing, even when it's scary, or it hurts, or no one is watching, or when people around you misunderstand and demonize you, or they are just plain ungrateful and leave you holding the bag. I admire your willingness to continue grappling with it and finding your own answer. Regarding women again, are you meeting enough of them? What's the scene like where you live? I don't know what it's like in NYC, but the social/dating scene in my current city just doesn't exist, and I'm watching some of my friends grapple with seriously heartbreaking loneliness. I don't know what to tell them. I'm dating my high school sweetheart again, but we were broken up for several years, and many of the experiences I had with women during that time were quite traumatic. The rest of them were just not a good fit. I had completely given up on dating altogether, at least for a period of time, and only then did the love of my life find her way back to me. Despite years of extreme loneliness in new cities, I still consider myself lucky and wish I had some actionable advice I could tease from the situation. I've even experimented with building dating apps because this epidemic just scares the shit out of me.
People need to purposefully and intentionally do things. Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. There is no fear or rejection, there is no work to get out of the house, there is no risk. But there is also no reward. My thoughts on this are you need to have multiple roots into your community. This is something that you go to often and talk to people, become a regular, say hi. Think back to how your parents or grandparents did it: They went to church/temple/synagogue, they went to PTA meetings, they talked to their neighbors, they were in clubs, they went to the same bar. So I think doing things that get you out of the house, consistently the most important part: 1. People need to make a point to talk to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner or bbqs, make small talk. How towns are constructed now is a hindrance to this (unwalkable towns where all of the houses are big garages in the front and no porches). 2. Join a religious organization. Go to church, but also join the mens/womens group, join a bible studies class. Attend every week. 3. Join social clubs / ethnic organization. The polish or ukrainian clubs, knights of columbus, elks, freemasons. Go every week. 4. Join a club / league. Chess club, bowling league, softball league, golf league. Tech meetups, DnD Night etc. But you have to talk with people and try to elevate things to friendships. 5. Have lunch, happy hour, etc with coworkers.
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I do this. Even to the point where I go to church yet am openly agnostic. Takes the right church, I enjoy a good pastor and message even if I don’t technically believe it can be rooted in morality or philosophy and I can filter out the religious aspects. The thing is, church works for this because it’s an agreed upon and set time of the week. It’s hard to lose what has been lost in the macro sense and then go from 0 to 1. A social movement like “screen free Saturday” or something would be ideal. Kids had to prearrange where to meet, where the teens will party (they don’t party anymore yall!), arrange logistics, and deal with being bored during some part of the day (underrated life skill, as a busy adult I love being bored, but hated it when young). I just recently explained to my kid how TV worked in the 80s. You couldn’t pick what to watch and there were very few times when cartoons were on. You either watched the news or MASH with the adults or found something else to do out of boredom.
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This is answering the wrong question. You're answering the question, "In a loneliness epidemic, what can I do to be less lonely?" Your answer is to use self discipline (which is hard) to get out of your house consistently, a decent answer to that question. To actually fix the loneliness epidemic, you'd have to get everyone else to do that. In the 20th century, getting out of the house consistently was the easiest way to interact with other people. Now, you can interact with lots of other people (in a less satisfying way) without leaving your house. What's going to fix that? How do we get everyone to eat better? How do we get everyone to get enough sleep? How do we get everyone to exercise more? "Just tell them to do it" won't work. "Why don't we all just put our phones away?" won't work. We'd need a policy . (My best guess: in the US, mandate that health insurers pay for therapy, and provide therapy at low/no cost in countries with national health care.)
Sounds like a lot of work. Isn't there an app where I can just order a temporary friend for a few hours. Uber Friend.
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> Isn't there an app where I can just order a temporary friend for a few hours there's two. Only Fans and making an appointment with a therapist (basically a professional listener/friend educated in helping you help yourself).
> 2. Join a religious organization. Go to church, but also join the mens/womens group, join a bible studies class. Attend every week. So no atheists then?
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I'd say particularly if you're an atheist. I've always been atheist, but fascinated by churches and religions regardless, because no matter what you believe, it's hard to refuse the proof that the ideas themselves are powerful and helps people a lot of the times. Why is that? Best way to find out is to talk and engage with those who have these different ideas, probably where they are the most comfortable. Doesn't mean you need to forget all the horrible impact it has had too, and how much better humanity would probably be without it, or even continue thinking about ideas how we could finally get rid of it once and for all, without violence. Also, probably different in different parts of the world, but in many places churches are just purely architecturally/visually beautiful and historically interesting buildings. Some of them have really interesting acoustics too, and organs. Many interesting stuff at churches :)
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It's not even just an atheist issue. You have to have spiritual beliefs that values the specific repetitive churche rituals so as not to be bored out of your mind.
Join a hackerspace I suppose. Technology is a religion anyway.
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I always said science is kind of like a religion in a way. Wonder if that's closer or further from some truth than "technology". Interesting perspective nonetheless.
Surprised to see this comment strike a nerve with the HN crowd. That was my first thought as well. Religious organizations? No thanks.
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If you agree with the entire comment, except just that line, do you upvote or not? I think maybe that's why :) If that line was the only thing in the comment, the reaction would probably have been different.
> What if all they need is one single person to say hi? Then say 'hi'. By definition they're not going to seek you out nor are they going to be findable so you're only option is to say hi to everyone and hope one sticks. edit: heh i hope you're not talking about me, i walk to the grocery store regularly by myself. It's how a take a break from work and get some exercise. i'm fine :)
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That's my point. How can I tell the difference? One of my ideas was legitimately to just hold a giant sign that just says "hi" I had this idea a few months ago, but never wanted to waste a whole Sunday on it. Maybe I should.
> (unwalkable towns where all of the houses are big garages in the front and no porches) You can turn the garage into a hangout spot. A neighbor has a full bar with communal table plus TV for sports and he opens up the garage door once a week on a schedule (Sunday game day or whatever depending on the season) and whenever he feels like it on work week evenings. As people pass by we invite them over and after a few months everyone knows that when the garage is open, they can come over for a drink and to shoot the shit. Low pressure social interactions that often turn into weekend outings, regular poker games, etc. Now years later we get impromptu block parties when he brings out the grill onto the driveway. It’s done wonders for our community in an otherwise unwalkable SoCal suburb.
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This works wonders. I did it accidentally. In March 2020 when my gym closed, I started working out every night in the garage. After a couple of weeks a neighbor who I only ever said "hi" to wondered by and asked if he could join since his gym was closed. After a while more showed up, and now I have like 12 people every day show up. One Friday someone brought a bottle of whiskey and we hung out after the workout and now weekly happy hours are a regular occurrence. The neighbors who don't workout stop by after the workout for happy hour. It's almost become expected and folks schedule their weeks around it so that they can be there for drinks in the evening. As a super introvert nerd, I never thought I'd be the center of community in my neighborhood.
This is something I absolutely would not feel comfortable doing unless I was warmly encouraged to join in, that's how I've been turned into a social outcast in my youth. I know some people who for a fact feel the same way. Maybe one solution is therapy, to help massage them out of their shell, to help them learn to be vulnerable and unafraid and friendly. But many of them refuse to go to therapy for whatever reason also. These are things I will be running into as I try to resolve this. I have already encountered a young man named Daniel who remembered me, and told me that he was hospitalized, and that the thought of me and my sign helped him get through it. I'm dealing with people on all spectrums of mental health. In fact, maybe that's kind of the point. I'm trying to reach out to people who refuse to go to therapy, who have internal thoughts berating them all day long, and I have the unique opportunity of helping them through the darkness and into the light of the truth, that they are valuable and lovable, if only people saw the true them, and trusted them to become that.
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Yep. I grew up in the era of ‘stranger danger’. We were explicitly taught as kids to fear strangers and socialising. We were taught “don’t be rude and butt in to conversations uninvited”, etc. Still, something else is off. In the 90s, the Internet was a way to expand your social circle. So many friends made on IRC groups that moved into real life. Nowadays yeah, commenting on Reddit and chatting to friends in message groups does feel like socialising, even though you might go two weeks without seeing anyone other than coworkers, cashiers (maybe) and Uber Eats delivery drivers.
I think the trick is getting off social media. When I was a computer nerd in the 2000s, I noticed people used to like to hang around and chat, but I mostly didn't. Now, everyone is an internet addict, and I was just ahead of the curve. No one hangs around and chats anymore. When you get off social media, real life becomes far more interesting. The problem with addiction is that it's so stimulating that everything else is boring. You have to let your mind reset.
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Thankfully social media is getting so much worse so fast it's making this easier and easier. HN is the last social media platform I still participate in... and I suspect that might not be for too much longer. I recently logged onto Facebook and Instagram to update my 2-factor auth settings after having too many notifications of malicious login attempts. It was incredible to see what a transformation has happened there, it's like going to a decaying suburban shopping mall with only a few stores left open (and sort of sad to see the remaining users so continually desperate for a drop of approval from some imagined community). Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script. Twitter used to be my strongest addiction, but it's almost unbelievable how big a transformation has occurred since it became X. It's almost a parody of everyone's dystopian social media fears. HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.
My friend, don't scare quote freedom. Sure, it may not have infinite value, but there are plenty of far less valuable things we endure significant harm to be able to enjoy. And I say this as someone who absolutely hates social media.
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Usually countries don't go to war over actual principles such as these but for self-interest. That's what I was getting at. Scare quotes indicate the position of the concept within public-facing rhetoric for an Opium War style operation (which would presumably be about profit, control and so on, the usual).
just find a hobby that involves other people. any kind of team sport, r/c airplanes, shooting, bird watching, the options are pretty endless. You'll meet other people, make friends, and not be so lonely.
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Birding is great.
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> just find a hobby that involves other people... shooting, Ok that one made me chuckle just from the initial reading of the wording. I don't disagree though, I do competitive bullseye, and it is definitely a communal thing. Many old guys at the range in particular seem to be there for 99% talking at you, and 1% actual shooting related stuff. If I'm going to the range for a set of three position, a 120-shot session by myself takes like 2.5 hours including setup and teardown. If there's talkative-old-guy at the range, then I'm there for 4 hours, and I don't even make it through 60 shots lol. Which is fine for someone like me who is a competitive shooter but not like really trying to be the absolute best, I don't mind spending 60 minutes doing bullseye and 180 minutes chatting about whatever. The actual competitive shooters at the range though, they'll either have someone screen talkative-old-guy for them, or just otherwise make it clear that they are Serious and not to be bothered.
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> You'll meet other people, make friends 'Making friends' doesn't occur by just being in proximity to people. Quite likely at the end of the night they'll return to their lives and you won't be invited to interact with them again until the next meeting. That's if you're not excluded from existing club cliques - I've gone to many different meetings and come away at the end feeling more alone.
I thought of this the other day. I was on the train ride back from Chicago, and there was a family of four adults, sitting across from me, all just staring at their phones. I was effectively alone at that point in time. None of them were present. But you explained it in a new way I had not thought of before. They're quite literally not there in that moment, for however long that moment lasts.
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I took the train from Seattle to Portland last fall. Half of the people in the observation car were on Nintendo Switches the entire time. In the observation car.
> bag ends Never seen "cul de sac" in English before...
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Never heard "bag end" myself.
I'll say that when I was a kid, the neighborhood was still as it was originally built, no sidewalks. Didn't stop anyone from socializing, didn't stop kids from biking around. The city added sidewalks there in the '00s or so, but when I go back there I almost never see anyone using them. I think the trend of isolation and loneliness is not really related to infrastructure or stuff like "walkability." Those things are pretty minor obstacles.
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How big were the lots? How far of a walk was the closest bar, grocery store, cafe? Do you have to walk onto someone's property to talk to them if they are sitting on the porch? I lived in a car dependent burb for 20+ years and would rarely, if ever, run into my neighbors out on the town. Living in a walkable neighborhood in a medium-low density city for under a year and I regularly run into my neighbors.
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Standard 0.25 acre suburban lots. No markets, cafes, or anything like that it was a bog-standard subdivision. There was a small park sort of centrally located but that was really the only ammenity. Supermarket was a few miles away. Nobody walked there, cars to go anywhere. Neighbors still knew one another, at least on the same streets. Kids met at school, figured out where each other lived.
This requires them to have spaces where they can express themselves sexually without the fear that male sexuality will be judged as inherently violent or oppressive. I've lost count of the times I've seen women praised while men were castigated, in the same space, for expressing any kind of honest sexual preference.
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It's an annoyingly double-edged issue, and one that I believe neither side of the political spectrum (speaking in very broad strokes here) has addressed well at all. Though I usually consider myself progressive (to an annoying degree to some), the progressive "answer" to young men right now on how to find friends and partners is essentially something like: > You should just be yourself! > But, if you aren't practically perfect and even slightly express your social and physical needs you are a monster. > But, even if you are perfect, we reserve the right to hate you based on experiences with other people of your gender, or because of your privilege, even though you probably have never felt it, and we're also allowed to make fun of you because of said privilege, since making fun of you is "punching up". > Also, you also should accept that you will *always* be considered a threat to half the population due to how you were born, and if you don't accept that or even try to prove the opposite, that makes you even more dangerous. > If you aren't happy with this you are an incel, and don't even mention the word "misandry", that's not a thing. The only way to change this is to either be gay or transition into a woman. Obviously I'm employing a bit of hyperbole for emphasis and this is also me trying to empathize with what it's like being a boy right now despite lacking first-hand experience. Luckily, most women do not feel this way about men, but I've heard all of this said by my friends at one time or another (and I might have said something similar myself during my weaker moments, when I was upset). Meanwhile the hardliners on the opposite side of the spectrum espouse the idea that actually men should be evil because it's manly. That women are lesser to them and that patriarchy is super cool actually. See Andrew Tate as an example, who has captured the ears of millions of teenage boys around the world. At first it's hard to comprehend why his ideology speaks to them, but you have to remember that most of them are just entering the time of their life where they have to figure themselves out, where they have to, for the first time in their life, find friendship, respect and companionship on their own outside of the family or the playground. And after all, everyone wants to be loved and respected in some way, and Andrew Tate offers them an answer: You can be an asshole and still be loved and respected, while the leftie answer tells them that you can be as perfect as you like, but you probably still won't be loved and respected, and if you fuck up, don't expect any grace. And now the question is what should society actually do so that both young men and young women can find a harmonious place in it? I think really the only answer is to stop playing the blame game, stop trying to make one side the constant bad guy and scapegoat, try to comprehend that we are all equally human, and that whatever a person's gender is doesn't give you the right to be shitty to them. I don't know, maybe this is simply another utopian idea, of men and women living together in perfect unison, never being mean to each other. I think we should still strive to achieve some sort of balance, but sadly I don't really see an easy answer to this. Sorry for this long rant, I've wanted to put this into words for a while. Occasionally I think about how bad it must be being a teenage boy right now, the thought scares me and I feel lucky not being one. Every time I read another woman saying that she's afraid of every man on the street walking in proximity to her, and every time it's dark out and I hear a man behind me and I get physically afraid, I think, what if I was a man and she was afraid for her life because of me? Just because I exist in the space next to her? Just because of a random coin-flip during my conception? And it feels awful. I don't want anyone to go through that.
Not everyone has left the real world, only the people who got really sucked into the online/social media world. This can maybe seem like the whole world though, if you're in that bubble. Bars are still packed on the weekends, people still gather at churches, or gyms, or bowling leagues, or book clubs, or any number of other "IRL" activities of all kinds that are going on. You do have to make the effort to go out and get involved though, nobody is going to come and rescue you.
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Many of these activities have gotten extremely expensive or just died out in the majority of places. There's 2600 bowling alleys in the US compared to 4000 20 years ago. That's a decline of 35% without accounting for population. Last time I went to a bowling alley the price for a lane without drinks was 100 dollars for an hour and a half. This isn't even in a very high cost of living area. Besides a place like the gym can hardly be considered a place where people gather, most people just see it as something functional and would rather not be disturbed (I believe this has gotten 'worse'). I agree with the fact that it's exaggerated online but when you see these kinda numbers in the vast majority of activities which were affordable for most Americans not too long ago it's not solely to be blamed on individuals. I believe in the majority of the country things will only get worse with how little value is placed on being involved in things for 'community'. People have gotten more anti-social because of social media (and just media in general). Most tech workers won't be as impacted by this I assume, they can afford paying 200 dollars for bowling without thinking twice, same with many others of the upper middle class.
I wrote that comment back when he had only one or two links, and this post had 4 comments anod 2 points. I stand by what I said: I wish I could have downvoted it for being a low effort drive by comment.
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To be blunt: what you said was completely out of line. You were mad that he wasn't responding to your other comment (why wasn't it in the OP if you wanted people to read that stuff before responding?). You then got mad that his comment was voted higher than yours (again, putting all that in the OP would've fixed that, not to mention complaining about vote counts is straight up childish). Just take the L man. You lashed out for no good reason, the person you responded had a hell of a lot more grace and tact than you showed this entire exchange, just learn from it and move on.
Hey, I love you. Since I was a small child, my grandfather used to beat me savagely and shake me and pin me to the ground, screaming that the devil was inside of me and that I would never be capable of loving or being loved. This was literally beaten into me. He'd beat me with the buckle end of the belt, like a whip, hitting my face, arms, whatever he could. He'd keep beating me until I couldn't cry anymore, telling me that men are not supposed to cry, and that it was his responsibility to teach me not to cry. I flashback at least once a day to it. But, he was wrong. I love a lot. So much that sometimes it's unbearable. I cry all the time. Sometimes out of pure love for someone. And there are people who I think love me. Of course the doubt is permanently sewn in. But my heart goes out to you, seriously. I love you just for existing and being yourself, and I hope you're okay. We're not alone. Email's in my bio if you ever want to talk.
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I appreciate the sentiment, but knowing that it's entirely coming from you and your experiences, and nothing to do with me and my own personality except for the one thing we have somewhat in common, means that your comment is to me merely a representation of you and what you stand for. Which is great and beautiful, but it doesn't cross the bridge of being a meaningful comment on my end. That's actually the exact problem I'm facing, so it's incredibly relevant. A year ago, I was talking to the local Catholic priest (I was donating some religious statues that I had effectively inherited), and it came up in conversation that I was going through a rough time. He went in for a hug, and it felt so absolutely empty and disingenuous. I accepted it merely to avoid a scene, but it was absolutely not welcome or meaningful. When I'm out in the city, I want to reach out to those people who put that they feel "100%" alone just like I do. I wrote in the article some of my thoughts and feelings on this, and some things I tried and didn't try. But ultimately, that's the gap I want to bridge now. We have a thing in common. How do we go from there? (Not you and me, but me and a stranger who has the same problem as me that they want to solve.) What do I say next? What's the next thing we can do in that interaction, or maybe a later one if I ever see them again? This is my question to myself, what I'm wondering in this whole post.
I like this poster thing. Anything that gives people a little connection to those around them. I sometimes sit on my front step and play guitar. 9/10 people ignore me but usually I'll have one or two nice conversations with a neighbor, and have made a couple friends this way. It helps that I live in a dense walkable place with lots of people who are similar to me.
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I've done sidewalk art with my kid. Between Spring and Fall last year, I'd make a new drawing every time it rained. Rarely was there a day without chalk on my sidewalk. I did it to play with my kid (and learn a little Japanese by writing the title in kanji), but another outcome was talking to neighbors. I keep to myself and have been told I'm difficult to approach, but people often come up and compliment the drawings. One lady said that, when walking with her granddaughter, she makes sure to see what's new on my sidewalk. It's been a very "low risk" way to put myself out there. I draw without anyone looking, and chatty people come to me while I'm in the yard.
Design and Implementation of Sprites (fly.io)
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Very cool. One usecase the blogpost seems to hint at is to use this to implement async agents that write code for you. Like, you have some system that hears about a new issue — from slack, linear, wherever — and then spins up a Sprite, checks out the codebase, works on a solution, commits, and creates a PR. Is that what you guys are thinking of? I get that Sprites are a new primitive, but I feel confused as hell about what exactly I'd want to do with it.
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Very cool product, but I have to ask, out of personal interest: What did the bracket in the slack channel determine was “Chicago’s best sandwich”? Or the top three, even? I’m always looking for new sandwiches. Off the top of my head, I might nominate, - the pork tenderloin at JT’s - the Big L from Fontano’s (hot take, I know; it might go to Graziano’s if they hinge-cut the bread, but not doing so is a fatal flaw to me) - the Cambodian fried chicken sandwich that’s occasionally available at Hermosa - honorable mention: the comically oversized chicken torta at Migos (Edit: I inexcusably transposed Bari and Fontano’s; the nomination is intended for Fontano’s)
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It's too early to say. We started the bracket back in 2020 with a nomination Google Sheet, and then the pandemic happened, and then I kept saying I'd throw a web app together for us to actually do a seeded bracket with; 5 years later, some of the restaurants have changed, so we're re-doing nominations, and we'll have bracket voting rounds starting probably in February. I owe it all to Sprites! Nhu Lan's Banh Mi #1 and JPG's Muffaletta are the top 2 current noms, but I think the Tempesta B. Franklin is a sleeper, and the Phodega Viet Dip has a cheering section and I haven't tried it yet. The joy of doing an actual bracket is that it'll involve people doing field trips to have their first Mr. D's Pork Shish-Ka-Bob sandwich, or the Alpine Combo. It's a 16 sandwich tournament and we're at like 26 nominations right now so it'll be interesting to see what happens.
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Sounds cool. I love Fly.io. That crew is sharp. The article could do with a few pictures to illustrate the layers. I’ve read it, but I can’t say that I understand the implementation.
I was looking forward to a post about designing sprites, i.e. little graphical blobs flying across screen. Needless to say, this was not it.
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Especially with the recent story on Street Fighter having a typo fixed by creative usage of sprites. :D
Likewise!
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+1. This thread, the thread about documentation, and the thread about turning off Sprites, when taken together, thoroughly illustrate why I'm not currently a Fly user.
Ask HN: Anyone else finding it impossible to land a job?
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I sent out roughly 1,000 job apps last year and I had maybe a dozen interviews. Expecting worse hit rates this year. For reference, I'm a mid level web dev with 4 y.o.e. I have lots of friends with similar resumes (or better in some cases) who can't get a call back to save their lives. So no, you're definitely not alone. Unless you have a best friend somewhere, or already have a senior title with more than 7 y.o.e., the door seems to be shut. But hey, keep on paddling! We'll get there.
I was unemployed for six months in 2023. Some of that duration was self-induced. My wife did not want to relocate across the country and I did not want to go back to being a junior web developer, or senior positions that sounded very junior, as I have 20 years experience. Fortunately, I landed two opportunities unrelated to writing JavaScript at once and I took the lower paying one because it was fully remote. Here is a list of things not to do: * Don't waste time using employer online career portals. These only continue to exist to satisfy EEO legal requirements. Most employers don't respond to these. * Don't pad your resume. Make every line of your resume count as if it were being read by a human. With AI tools now filtering resumes they are getting better at bullshit detection. Things to do: * Upload your resume to places like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Dice. * Be very specific on your resume. Yes, you should state something about your tech stack in the fewest possible words, but anything related to competences should be expressed in quantifiable terms only. For example you saved the company billions of dollars, or shipped 200 features to production, or reduced execution speed by 50% * Be clear about your experience and what you are looking for. * Have external credentials like PMP, CISSP, security clearance, and more. These open doors for you that you currently don't realize are closed to you and likely pay more.
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> production, or reduced execution speed by 50% Hopefully that's "reduced execution time" :)
Hey, thanks for taking a look! > I'm struggling to figure out what you're good at Can it not be all of them? :p That's one of my big challenges with resumes. People assume I can only be good at one thing and/or assume that I'm lying about my work experience. I can get _really good_ references from all of my previous employers (because I am legitimately good at everything on my resume), but I never seem to get to that point. Historically, if I get a technical interview, I get the job every time. The challenge is getting the technical interview.
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Make multiple versions of your resume, each of which emphasizes a different aspect of your skillset, and use the one that most closely matches the job description when you apply. When I am really interested in a job, I usually make a new version of my resume just for that one job application. It's not as much work as it sounds, because I just include or exclude different bullet points depending on the main skills required in the job description, so that when the person reviewing my resume reads it, they will say "I'm looking for an experienced C# developer... and this is an experienced C# developer! It's a match!". If I include too much info about my other skills, then they wonder if I'm much of a C# developer at all. It's about reducing what the hiring manager would see as "noise" so that they clearly receive the "signal" that they are looking for.
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Also, leverage recruiters - give your resume to as many professional recruiters as you can. They're often better than applying directly now. Also apply at staffing companies, that's a good way in.
Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage (culpium.com)
I'm not sure how true it is or not but I heard that TSMC has the ability to remotely destroy all of their main fab equipment in the event the Chinese are invading Taiwan.
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This is correct: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-tsmc-can-disable-chip-machines-if-china-invades-taiwan The most advanced ASML machines also cost something like $300-400M each and I am willing to bet if configured wrong can heavily damage themselves and the building they are in.
Apple has made some good progress on memory sharing over thunderbolt. If they could get that ironed out you maybe could run a good LLM on a cluster of Mac minis. Again you cannot today but people are working on it. One guy might have gotten it to work but it’s not ready for prime time yet.
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> Apple has made some good progress on memory sharing over thunderbolt The only reason that Thunderbolt exists is to expose DMA over an artificial PCI channel. I'd hope they've made progress on it, Thunderbolt has only been around for fourteen years after all.
> AI chips depreciate quickly -- not because the old ones go bad I've heard that it's exactly that, reports of them burning out every 2-3 years. Haven't seen any hard numbers though.
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Lifetime curve is something they can control. If they can predict replacement rate, makes sense to make chips go bad on the same schedule, saving on manufacturing costs.
Apple loaned TSMC money in order to build manufacturing capacity back around the M1 era. They’ve done that for a number of suppliers and the “interest payments” were priority access to capacity. Everyone was complaining about how Apple got ARM chips while others had to wait in line. That said, they did that for a sapphire glass supplier for the Apple Watch and when their machines had QC problems they dropped them like a rock and went back to Corning. But is that really any different from any other supplier? And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now? They are the cock of the walk.
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> And who tf do you think they’re going to drop TSMC for right now? Don't look now: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-rumored-to-supply-new-mac-chip/
> The only complete package integrator that manages to make a relationship work with Nvidia is Nintendo. And thats probably because Nintendo isn’t adding any pressure to neither TSMC nor Nvidia capacity wise; iirc Nintendo uses something like Maxwell or Pascal on really mature processes for Switch chips/socs.
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And also the Switch 1 was just the hardware for a nvidia shield tablet from nVidia’s perspective, without the downside of managing the customer facing side and with the greater volume from Nintendo’s market reach. (Not that it wasn’t more than that for consumers or Nintendo, just talking nvidia here)
> Not a system that necessarily works all that well if one player has a short-term ability to vastly outspending all the rest. Well yeah, people were identifying that back when Apple bought out the entirety of the 5nm node for iPhones and e-tchotchkes. It was sorta implicitly assumed that any business that builds better hardware than Apple would boot them out overnight.
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> It was sorta implicitly assumed that any business that builds better hardware than Apple would boot them out overnight It's not "build better hardware" though, it's "continue to ship said hardware for X number of years". If someone buys out the entire fab capacity and then goes under next year, TSMC is left holding the bag
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It's not that, either. Low-margin, high-volume contracts are the worst business you can take. It devalues TSMC's work and creates an unnatural downward force on the price of cutting-edge silicon. By ignoring Apple's demands they're creating natural competition that raises the value of their entire portfolio. It really is about making better hardware. Apple would be out-bidding Nvidia right now, but only if the iPhone had equivalent value-add to Nvidia hardware. Alas, iPhones are overpriced and underpowered, most people will agree.
OBS Studio 32.1.0 Beta 1 available (github.com/obsproject)
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I wanted to thank the OBS team from the bottom of my heart.
OBS is a great solution if you're on a budget or doing very simple streams, but I really urge anybody who is serious about live streaming professional shows to check out vMix. It's an incredible piece of software that is versatile and packed full of so many features professional broadcasts need all baked in.
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Geewiz, 700 usd and only updates for a year of you want similar features to obs. Thanks to the api you can do quite complex (or wacky) streams with obs. I don't get the "only very simple streams" argument.
Agreed! I tried to make OBS work for a video podcast, and it was a very unpleasant experience. vMix has great features: built-in remote callers, audio buses, MIDI controller support, titles; just to name a few that I use. I love and use free software a lot, but vMix blows OBS out of the water for semi-professional video productions.
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Btw, there is a midi plugin for obs. I used it, worked like charm.
If anyone is using/testing WebRTC I would love to hear how it is working for them :) I am hoping Simulcast makes a impact with smaller streamers/site operators. * Cheaper servers. More competition and I want to see people running their own servers. * Better video quality. Encoding from source is going to be better then transcoding. * No more bad servers. Send video to your audience and server isn't able to do modification/surveillance with E2E Encryption via WebRTC. * Better Latency. No more time lost transcoding. I love low latency streaming where people are connected to community. Not just blasting one-way video.
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I've been waiting for the WHEP support PR to be merged so I can input video from a stream into OBS and mix it before outputting it again with WHIP. Or am I thinking about it wrong ?
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No you are thinking about it right! I think the best way to do it today is via a Browser Source. It is hard to get people excited because it is already technically possible. I will keep working on that PR!
The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis (404media.co)
I'm sure there will be mistakes made. But it's for the collective good of the country.
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It could be you.
Firing due to political activity outside of work? That sounds super illegal.
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Some states protect political activity broadly. Some states protect voting solely.[1] [1] https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/politics-in-the-workplace-a-state-by-state-guide-to-help-employers-survive-the-presidential-election/
Siemens, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Krupp all seem to be doing just fine today.
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All generalist businesses. Palantir is solely a surveillance business. Like, maybe some day in the future they branch out into something that's not explicitly evil, but that seems unlikely.
>The rhetoric about immigrants being a drain on society are flawed at best, and hatefully wrong and bad faith at worst. Ironically all the big wealthy GOP donors all hire illegal laborers to clean their homes and mow their lawns, and to maintain the golf courses at clubs they belong to. But we can't actually have the conversation about illegal immigration get to the root causes of why immigrants are actually here , now can we? > Stephen Miller wants all undocumented people out of this country because he is a white supremacist. Another point of irony - most of the ardent white nationalists from the heartland of America would be aghast to learn that Miller is a rich Jew from Southern California whose grandparents were immigrants. For a lot of them, Jews are explicitly NOT white nor are they American. > If Republicans were serious about measured but effective reforms to reduce immigration, they would have accepted the 2024 legislative package that capped asylum volume and vastly increased border patrol and border judiciary resources to expedite cases and get people back out of the country in a fraction of the time the current system requires. Or, even earlier, they could have backed e-Verify as federal minimum standard for all employment as far back as the 1980s. But no, let's not go after the businesses hiring illegal laborers.
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> Or, even earlier, they could have backed e-Verify as federal minimum standard for all employment as far back as the 1980s. But no, let's not go after the businesses hiring illegal laborers. Strong borders are entirely about making easy to exploit cheap labor. That's entirely the reason why neither democrats nor republicans have addressed immigration. It's also entirely the reason why the only lever being pulled is deportation. Businesses simply love being able to say to workers "Do what we say or we'll have you deported". This is why undocumented workers pay taxes and can get jobs, even in the reddest of states. It's not some sort of "flaw" or "impossibility" that couldn't be fixed pretty quickly. Rightly targeted law would penalize businesses hiring undocumented workers and would protect the workers regardless of documentation status. Doing that would immediately fix any perceived problems with immigration.
The term to consider here is >extrajudical killing< As in: Someone wotking for the executive kills another citizen, without 1) a need to do so for selfdefense 2) any justification from the judicary for it, and that without being charged for murder/aggrevated manslaugther. The argument: they are not doing what this law enforcement person wants do do of them (whether that obstruction is legal or not), so they are free to be killed is nothing but the total disregard for the law, any decency and the respect for human life and dignity. In short it is lynchmob mentality.
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The argument is that people recklessly driving their vehicles with a total disregard for the lives around them are a danger to the people in front of their car and anyone else on the street, which is recognized by the Supreme Court even when nobody is directly in front of the car. They don’t have to wait until you kill someone and get tried for it. They can legally just shoot you under current law. That’s what the courts say. Self-defense is, however, an entirely plausible defense in this scenario, even if the agent could have acted differently to not be in the path of someone already behaving erratically, and even if people only with the benefit of slo-mo multi-angle replays don’t think so. That’s why nobody is being charged. This happens all the time, unfortunately. The minute you choose to endanger people around you in the presence of people with guns, you’ve rolled the dice on your life. So do you have any actual examples of what you’re describing?
I had to pull out of US stocks/market completely last year after I felt dirty just having money in a country sliding into authoritarianism. Interesting where different people draw different lines :)
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Same. I was actually disappointed to find out my "excluding US" fund had 0.93% exposure to the US. I want it to nil.
They’re arrested and charged with appropriate offenses, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyg3j2kvzdo.amp Renee Nicole wasn’t driving a car at anyone, but regardless, it is stupid to shoot someone who’s driving a car at you as it won’t stop the car. What you need to do in that situation is get out of the way.
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The truth of that can be seen in the recordings where the car is driving away from the ICE person, till it crashes violently into a mast or something after the driver (Renee Nicole) was shot by the ICE person.
If nothing else, thank you for sharing your honest perspective, I appreciate it :) > Or I suppose a more truthful way of saying it is it's not worth it for me because of the sacrifices I'd have to make just for the chance of getting hurt or being added to a list. It's really sad to hear that the chilling effect is working so effectively. I of course understand why you make the choice you make, that's not strange, but that they managed to turn your society into this is nothing but sad to hear.
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Just to chip in: going to small protests has done a lot of good for my ability to regulate. Being involved with a cadre of street medics has made me feel a little less crazy. It's nice to get off line and into the streets- the reasons are terrifying but it feels better to be with my friends in the road than to be at home fretting about stuff and writing dumb HN responses :D
> My "ideology" is submission to the Creator. It's not "my" ideology. > You have your ideology though. Though it's not really yours at all… Aww, we're twinsies!
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You really do not add much value to any conversation you're a part of. The reading comprehension just isn't there. It remains true, my views are gained from submission to my faith. I recognize they're not my views. It's submission to our higher power. The difference is that you think your views are yours. But you're a moral relativist being manipulated. Blowing wind in society, you're a "cool guy". Anything goes. You wouldn't want to rock the boat on the latest thing coming out of your tribe, now would you. You might have to man up and be uncomfortable, taking an actual counter-cultural stand for once. Not happening Chris.
> Everyone is ok targeting te immigrant populations No, we're not.
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I meant "we" in the sense that our country has yet to put an end to it and there is still a majority of people either actively in support of ICE or remaining silent.
I think the GP means the collective "we" is OK with it, evidenced simply by the fact that it is happening.
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Yes, thank you.
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