This is a shill piece from the CEO of DuckDuckGo.
I think you want a different word than "shill", since obviously he's not being deceptive about his association.
Maybe you meant to type "fluff piece"? That could be a matter of opinion.
Readit Newsneilv commented on Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo gabrielweinberg.com/p/som... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
neilv commented on Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns algodrill.io... · Posted by u/henwfan
Or it's just big corpo policy that everyone except HR hates and is just hard to change.
I like your optimistic theory.
I'm the type to talk with HR about when the company could do something better, and some of them appreciate it.
(Most recent was when a company was starting each Monday morning with a miserable cross-hemisphere all-hands meeting videoconf... that sucked the life out of the recharged energy people came back from the weekend with, for the potentially rewarding work we were doing. The company improved.)
neilv commented on What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you? louplummer.lol/nice-stran... · Posted by u/speckx
I could write all day about the times people helped me that I know about, and there's others I suspect, and surely others I never suspected.
One that comes to mind was when I was on my own as a teen, and fortunately had a community college co-op student internship. My coworkers looked out for me in various ways, both professionally and personally, as if it was just ordinary for them.
I also found some similar above-and-beyond goodness by people at Brown University.
So that's what I knew in adulthood, until later disillusionment.
I still try to promote the way that I know exists, and I recognize a lot of other people who live that, or are ready to switch to it.
neilv commented on What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you? louplummer.lol/nice-stran... · Posted by u/speckx
I like this. I hope this thread fills with many more comments.
I think it's important to remember especially in traffic and such that cars aren't cars, they are people. I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people. It's easy to think everyone else is an idiot and become aggressive, but remember it's a small percentage who actually agitate you.
Now to answer the question. I guess it's when I was a kid, I'd completely torn my ACL but they wouldn't operate until I was done growing. I don't know how old, 12 maybe? I was in Washington DC running across a busy street when my knee slid out of place and I fell in the road. A Mercedes stopped, purposely blocking both lanes of traffic, and a husky middle aged black lady in scrubs got out and dragged me out of the road onto the sidewalk. She asked if I was ok, and I was as it happened here and there, and off she went. It was such a kind gesture in a city that seemed so cold and always on the go.
> I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people.
Lately, this is my experience in general, not only cars. Though I want to say both that 20% and 60% are genuinely good, and that first 20% are readily above-and-beyond.
In the big-name college town where I live, which still pretends to be warm-fuzzy (the remaining hippies are silver-haired), eventually you pick up on a pervasive undercurrent of selfishness.
A lot of people only get into the prestigious places because they look out for their own interests, and being here is only temporary and transactional.
And a lot of people are strained by the high cost of living for lousy conditions, and are just trying to get by.
Still, I've seen, for example, delirious (opioids?) street people slump off a bench on the gritty main drag, and quickly be surrounded concerned and helpful passersby who looked like yuppies. (And the only phones out were multiple people calling 911, no social media content creation, just genuinely helping and then disappearing.)
neilv commented on What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you? louplummer.lol/nice-stran... · Posted by u/speckx
he was definitely alive
Was he a soulful bearded guy?
neilv commented on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/fleahunter
As a Plex user I'd recommend a used last-gen game console as a TV source. In my AV room upstairs I've had an XBOX ONE S for a long time and more recently I got a PS4 Pro for the spare room downstairs -- both at Gamestop. I have some games for both of them but I am more likely to game on Steam, Steam Deck or mobile.
Every Android-based media player I've had tried just plain sucks, the NVIDIA Shield wasn't too bad but at some point the controller quit charging. You can still get a game console with a built-in Blu-Ray player too and it's nice to have one box that does that as well as being an overpowered for streaming.
I have a HDHomeRun hooked up to a small antenna pointed at Syracuse which does pretty well except for ABC, sometimes I think about going up on the roof and pointing the small one at Binghamton and pointing a large one at Syracuse but I am not watching as much OTA as I used to. It's nice though being able to watch OTA TV on either TV, any computer, tablets, phones, as well as the Plex Pass paying for the metadata for a really good DVR side-by-side with all my other media.
As for TVs I go to the local reuse center and get what catches my eye, my "monitor" I am using right now is a curved Samsung 55 inch, I just brought home a plasma that was $45 because I always wanted a plasma. I went through a long phase where people just kept dropping off cheap TVs at my home, some of which I really appreciated (a Vizio that was beautifully value engineered) and some of which sucked. [1]
[1] ... like back in the 1980s everybody was afraid someone would break into your home and take your TV but for me it is the other way around
Seconded. I've been doing a game console with monitor or dumb-TV for ages (PS2 Slim, PS3 Slim, PS4 Slim, PS4 Pro, PS5 Slim).
I also use this for occasional gaming, or I would've stuck with the PS3 Slim or PS4 Slim. Both of which would mount pretty nicely, with a VESA bracket, to the back of a pre-smart formerly top-of-the-line 1080p Sony Bravia TV (like I use currently with the PS5 Slim).
Were I not in minimalism culling mode of personal belongings right now (in case the current job search moves me cross-country), I'd be stockpiling a backup or two of this workhorse dumb-TV.
neilv commented on Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud 0l.de/blog/2025/11/xiaomi... · Posted by u/stv0g
On a tangent note: don’t use ultrasonic humidifiers. Unless distilled water is used, they create a shit-ton of pm2.5 particles.
Use evaporative humidifiers (just disks with myriads of small notches for water to cling on and a fan): https://us.smartmiglobal.com/pages/smartmi-evaporative-humid...
That Smartmi model seems to have toxic IoT in it.
I'm currently using the Vornado EV100 non-IoT evaporative humidifier, and my only complaints are relatively minor, as humidifiers go (consumable wick, fan noise, insanely bright blue LEDs). https://www.vornado.com/shop/humidifiers/evaporative/ev100-e...
neilv commented on The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme pcgamer.com/software/wind... · Posted by u/naves
A non-obvious reason that I think the yellow background would've looked especially bad to people at the time, is that most people doing non-gaming on PCs at the time were using MS-DOS programs in text mode, with 4&3-bit color, where it was very unusual for the background color to be bright.
(It was technically possible to get a bright background color on PCs in text mode, but very few programs did that.)
Most people have to be a bit selfish, to acquire greater money/power/status than others. You usually don't come in first in the race, by pausing to help another runner who fell.
A lot of the people just trying to get by, on the other hand, have it harder because of the externalities of someone else's selfishness and sometimes cheating.
But, people just barely getting by can go one of two ways: they may or may not decide to help another person who falls.
Some just getting by will think we're all in this together, and we help each other, no matter what the jerks do. I think this is actually pretty popular philosophy, and is my own thinking.
But other just getting by might think they can't afford to help others, or that it's every person for themself. That philosophy happens, too, and is unfortunate, and it can be contagious. But much of the helping-others group is resilient.
Since you mentioned NYC: A very minor anecdote, but once, when I day-tripped to NYC for a startup interview, I just missed the last train home to Boston. I went to the booth where I saw an employee, and asked them what do I do. Her initial reaction was gruff indifferent dismissal, like is a stereotype of people in NYC. (A stereotype being something like, you can't care, because there is so much misery and crazy around you, and other people's problems are just too much to deal with besides your own.) But I think she picked up on my implicit Pollyanna belief that she would help me, because, an instant later, her whole tone changed, and she projected warmth and caring, and told me how to get home on a bus. (The startup was offering me the position, but I declined, because I decided NYC was too rough for me at the time, the nice lady in the train station notwithstanding.)