HN user
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/36/1-op-de-5-mensen-woo...
It's basically this graph. In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people). In 2024 about 3,3 million people live alone. When you look at the infographic, ages 30-60 add up to like 1,2 million people.
https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-...
Here we have an estimation that the country is missing like 400k houses. So if two-thirds of those 1,2 million married each other and started living together, they would nicely plug the housing crisis by freeing 400k houses.
Either way, we have a huge societal change that lots of people live alone, which did not use to be the case.
I've posted it already, but at least in my country (Netherlands) it seems like the problem isn't the lack of housing, but lack of marriages. If people ages 30-60 married each other at the rate they used to in 60's, then there would be no housing crisis.
The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of people per house.
People always want high trust societies.
Disagree. High-trust can only exist in the absence of class disparity. You're not going to steal from your neighbor if your neighbor has exactly the same things as you do. You will if he's substantially richer. At the same time, you want to be as rich yourself as possible. Can't have both though.
Countries like Japan or Singapore aren't high-trust societies, they're high-enforcement societies. That's different. In my eyes, high-trust society is a society where law enforcement isn't needed because people self-police because they value the collective, not because of fear of punishment.
A friend of mine never locks his car because he trusts that nobody will steal it even though he knows that once the car is stolen, the chance of recovery is zero because the police simply ignore such reports. This is high-trust society.
Not exactly. I don't really have much interesting to say. I'm trying to use the internet less in general not because of surveillance, but because of overall enshittification. Reddit has become a normie platform at this point and there's no point using it. 4chan still allows free speech but truth is, I'm not an interesting person and nobody cares about my personal issues. There are quite a few intelligent people on HN but the culture here promotes staying on topic and being civil, which is good for productive debate, but not really fun.
Are there places in EU that are dark and easy to visit?
I specifically remember that my dad brought from work crappy projector and I watched Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix that was RMVB encoded camera rip from cinema. RMVB was all the rage on my 128kbps internet.
It's less about how most of them look like different stages of fisting party, and more about the fact that they have zero distinctive elements. Despite the amount of ads being shoved down my asshole, I still find it difficult to recognize different brands. Meta and Gemini being the worst offenders, if you show me these two logos in a week and ask what they are, I'd have zero clue they're even company logos. This is the level of failure we're talking about.
I think this is peak millennialism because the design is supposed to be as inoffensive as possible and therefore shows absolutely nothing.
1. In some areas AI is extremely proficient, in others it's "two plus two equals three". Your experience with AI will highly vary depending on how knowledgeable it is about the particular problem you're facing. It's also a skill on itself how to talk to AI, just like "googling" used to be.
2. AI allows people to 10x things. If your organization has a healthy engineering culture then I assume people don't send for review shit like "change constant into hardcoded value" and AI-generated PRs are checked to fit the broader design, but if your organization was already full of idiots, then they produce 10x the output. Good luck trying to survive that.
The problem is that more convenient corporate-owned options take over, become the standard, and then the cost of running free software skyrockets. Nobody in my friend group uses Signal. I haven't met a single person IRL who has a smartphone that isn't running on either Android or iOS. The fact that not everyone looks at me like I'm taking crazy pills when I suggest Firefox over Chrome (Firefox having its fair share of drama though) is already a huge win. I'm the only guy actually running Linux as the only PC system.
To be the devil's advocate, engineers themselves can be hilariously incompetent too. Engineers have a tendency of assuming that budget is infinite and target audience is other engineers from same specialization. Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account. At some point my manager, who himself used to be an engineer, told me with straight face to convince the rest of the engineering department to drop everything and join his newest pet project despite zero potential of any business outcomes.
But it's also true that modern world changes much faster than in the antiquity. If you built a church, a market, and a few utility buildings like tavern and blacksmith in 500BC you could rest assured they'd still remain used in 1000 years practically unchanged unless the structure or wider economy collapsed. Meanwhile "office building, shopping mall, nightclub, school" all varied highly in popularity within last 50 years, and it's difficult to convert one type of building to another, not to mention the costs of modernizing an old building.
The problem with torrents is that they naturally die when people lose interest.
I really struggle to find new music. I feel like I've already listened way too many times to everything I have on my SD card, but I really don't know what to look for. When I was a kid I was very much into rock and everything adjacent so I do have albums of most iconic rock bands. Nowadays I'm more into electronic music. I love a good techno track and I have a folder with 2000-2010 greatest pop-techno bangers. God damn Basshunter gave me more happiness than my entire career combined. At home I often listen to more ambient music, mostly from SomaFM. There's an artist/band called Hello Meteor and the worst album is still 9/10. On the opposite side of the spectrum there's this guy Darren Tate - most of his music is literal trash, but there are a few golden nuggets with how he operates with dynamic range. Like, Prayer For God is absolutely amazing, it's so energetic. But it's really difficult for me to find electronic music that doesn't suck, most DJs make one good track by pure luck while mass-producing slop.
1. If multiple companies use given SaaS, then "per company" cost is likely to be lower than in-house solution. Think of tools that have wide range of use cases, like Windows or Photoshop.
2. Even if SaaS has only one customer it might still be cheaper to outsource a project. Big companies tend to have lots of managerial overhead - a meeting where we discuss the prospects of designing a schedule of meetings to manage the plan of meetings. This cost might be higher than profit margin of a company consisting of five dudes and a tank truck of energy drinks.
How is that different from having a banking app installed? Or a government ID app?
only with Android or iOS
99% of people understand this as "you need a smartphone" which is not a problem in 2026, even for the elderly.
Seriously, there is something tremendously wrong with governance when politicians keep changing the whole world around us, without us having any say in it at all.
That's where you're wrong. Most people actually do agree with age verification. Just because a decision is stupid it doesn't mean it's undemocratic. Trump was elected democratically, twice. Brexit passed through a referendum.
Never underestimate the poverty of India. India is huge and while in some places there are bubbles of wealth, it's still a third-world country.
It's incredible that a fucking TV is also a scam. I have an LG TV that only works as a dumb screen and it's really beautiful but now when I look at it, I don't see the technical marvel, I think "is someone at LG reading screencaps of my conversations and 4chan threads" because recently I got aware that this could be a very real possibility. And it's not about the TV itself, it's about having to be on 24/7 in order to avoid scams. You cannot just exchange one unit of money for one unit of product or service that gives you one unit of happiness, you have to first get PhD in avoiding scams. And often you watch yourself fall for the scam even though you're aware of it because realistically, you have no other options. Sometimes I need to buy something in a supermarket nearby and then it's "do you sir have our cattle-tracking ad-infested resource-draining attention-grabbing fucking-annoying useless dehumanizing app?" and if you don't you pay €5 extra because fuck you that's why, there's no winning move here. I sometimes go to a shop 30 minutes further down just to avoid the humiliation ritual.
I honestly believe that certain cultures are measurably worse than others, and skin colour is unfortunately a great proxy for that. I am strongly against celebrating cultures that provably have more negative influence on wider society than others - and I don't see a problem with cultural erasure if it eventually leads to better life standards for everyone. Racial profiling by the police is unfair, but it's necessary.
My views have changed 180° once I moved into a ghetto. Within two years I witnessed three shootings, and had my belongings stolen twice. There's trash everywhere, and kids are revving engines at 2AM and nobody cares. I don't buy the excuse "the problem is poverty and lack of chances" because it just doesn't hold up when you compare people across countries. You cannot tell me that a Moroccan kid growing up in Paris somehow has fewer chances in life than a white kid growing up in Rădoiești-Deal. Besides, I don't understand how poverty explains the inability to bring your trash to the trash can.
Being gay is literally illegal in almost all Muslim countries, many of them have death punishment for being gay. I don't see a reason why I'd be morally obliged to respect that as a valid way to construct a society. If they want me dead, I want them dead too, tit for tat.
I see countries like Japan or Korea heavily opposing immigration despite demographic crisis. I don't think they're making the wrong decision.
Some time ago I made an abstraction "hey, most people in our company who use CloudFront don't care about all the implementation details, they just want some paths to be somewhat cached". I explained this idea to a coworker. It took a while, but he understood it. Two months later someone merged a PR that replaced my interface "I want this and this path cached" with a simple passthrough that exposes raw AWS interface. Same thing happened to S3 buckets where I noticed that most people just want "auto-delete files after X days either on or off".
I spent entire year trying to explain to my manager "most devs who create services want a simple deploy button". Instead, we tried to teach devs how our "infrastructure as a code" works so that they'd contribute. The effect was that only one guy engaged with us this way, and he always sent us AI-generated PRs, and every time he saw an error, he just copy-pasted it to ChatGPT without reading and then the answer back to me.
The project eventually shifted towards my original idea, but in an extremely painful way without any design at all. It's just a toolbox of completely random features glued together because one day manager says "no we don't need to support X" and two months later a Jira ticket "add support of X".
1. When you're browsing your phone but you're not having fun, stop. Try to distinguish "I am genuinely interested in that thing on the screen" vs "I'm just doomscrollig".
2. Try to replace parts of your smartphone with other things. Buying a clock helped me fix the habit of "I just opened my eyes, time for phone". I found my old PSP and I'm planning to run some emulator on that instead of phone to play some minigames.
3. I have my phone always completely silent. There's literally no notification that cannot wait until I decide to check the phone.
4. I sometimes turn off the data transfer in my phone. First, I get less notifications. Second, it's yet another barrier and it gives me a second to ask myself "do I really want to play with my phone now".
I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons
It was more of design decision than practical one. My phone has a taller screen than 16:9 so when I watch videos there are black bars on the sides anyway - although my previous phone had aspect ratio perfectly matching the cinema one, making movies truly full-screen (minus rounded corners and the front camera). When I'm doing literally anything else, the buttons are displayed on the bottom of the screen. Some of my friends use gestures and actually that does give them extra screen space, but IMO gestures are less convenient and totally not worth it.
But when you show this on a demo it does look neat, especially with a game.
Give me back physical buttons please.
Microsoft is continuing the tradition of very confusing names
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
I have always felt that the heavy cannabis smokers had something to compensate
I am lonely. Weed makes me to fucked to care.
I live next to a road and combustion-engine mopeds vary from "holy fuck this is loud" to "I can't wait to move out". I used to live close to an airport and that was much better. The specific noise that mopeds make drills into your head. Funnily, I'm never bothered by nails on chalkboard or cutlery on plate, but mopeds, holy fuck, if hell exists, it's full of mopeds.
Seriously though, I'm gay so if I want I can literally go to a sex club and have sex, but scrolling is 100 times better than sex with a random person.
IMO the problem isn't that we choose scrolling over sex, but that having a smartphone makes independence easier, which removes opportunities and motivation to meet people. People talk to each other mainly when they need to solve practical problems. Remove practical problems and you remove social interaction.
I remember clearly that when my ex fixed my bike I had a strong impulse of being attracted to him. But realistically, when my bike is broken, I'd rather take it to a bike shop than ask someone for help and then do favors in exchange.
It's kinda funny that we all agree that code review is important but we cannot agree why exactly it is important. Imagine a bunch of ancient shamans arguing why exactly local volcano needs to be fed one virgin a year but all being in agreement that it does.