MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjice | 2025-05-01 14:33:04+00:00
Jack Bogle probably did more for the average American investor than anyone else in history (maybe barring economic policy or something). His book [0] on the history of Vanguard, it's founding, and their growth is just a fantastic read.

They really did feel like this bastion of customer focused passive investing in the brokerage industry for a _long_ time. They eventually helped seriously popularize index funds to the point where every major firm offers a low cost index fund, because they have to to compete. They continued to lower their fees whenever they could to the point where VTSAX is .04% (with their ETFs being even lower).

He even turned down an offer to create the first ETF (I forget the guy that brought the idea to him), but he explained the idea to Bogle and Bogle politely declined because he thought that having the ability for intraday trading went against the Vanguard model of set and forget passive investing. That guy eventually went to the firm that runs SPY, if I recall from the book. They eventually began offering ETFs, obviously, but Bogle was always more of a mutual fund guy from the way that book puts it.

Bogle really seemed to be for the people. The man was wealthy, but not nearly as wealthy as he could be because they continued lowering fees. Their mutualized fund structure is also a massive part of that.

After he left Vanguard, you saw more traditional brokerage offerings - more active funds and more pushes for offer advisors to you over the phone. If I recall, Bogle expressed some displeasure in that.

You can tell I'm a Bogle fanboy, but I'll gladly wear that badge.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42938221-stay-the-course
by hedora | 2025-05-01 14:33:13+00:00
It's been under a month since Apple's lawyer took over the NLRB and immediately made a bunch of lawsuits over union suppression, employee rights and widespread employee harassment go away.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/04/02/trump-admin-poach...

I'm hoping this judge's ruling will actually be enforced by the executive branch, but I'm not holding my breath. I wonder if there are any mechanisms that allow state law enforcement to enforce federal judicial orders.
by ksec | 2025-05-01 14:33:39+00:00
>There actions back then fitted the Don‘t be evil motto.

Disagree with that. All the privacy issues people have problem with now were already a problem in 2007. But being the media darling along with Submarine PR Google didn't get much bad press.

There were lots of other things too, including their site breaking Firefox as well as Chrome, their promise not to make another browser.
by rtkwe | 2025-05-01 14:33:57+00:00
The exact numbers are unknown but there are a known handful in units like the Wafen-SS. A LOT of documents were destroyed in the fall of the regime. The encounter shown in Band of Brothers supposedly did happen where a PI spoke with a German POW who grew up in America there's no documentation of it but that's not terribly surprising.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/german-ame...
by sumtechguy | 2025-05-01 14:34:01+00:00
A bit of bleach once and awhile is ok. There is even a spot for it to be put in on the detergent tray. I do not use it all the time. I stick to the powder and a cup or so of bleach every now and then on a clean cycle (once or twice a year). Pretty sure it is a color safe powder I am using.
by bix6 | 2025-05-01 14:34:23+00:00
Do we think index funds will continue to be this financial savior for regular people in the future?

On the one hand total market index exposure is fantastic.

On the other it’s accumulating more and more with a few firms giving them exceptional power.

Does this unravel at some point? It’s hard to think the index itself could go bad but perhaps everything behind the scenes could fall apart?
by registeredcorn | 2025-05-01 14:34:30+00:00
>they did try to hide some of this stuff, by abusing attorney client privilege

I don't know a thing about the legal system: if someone gets caught doing that sort of thing, does that incur additional punishments?

I mean, if you do something illegal, and when the police arrest you they prove that you were trying to hide it from them, that's another charge. How does that work if the court catches you doing it?
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-01 14:34:51+00:00
My grandparents were children of the Depression and given their experience living through that they always considered the stock market to be gambling and thus never invested in the stock market. My parents absorbed that ethos and also never invested until they had to when they got a 401K (but they were well into their 50s)... then they liquidated their holdings as quickly as they could like they thought stocks were dirty, or something.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-05-01 14:35:10+00:00
I think Apple has needed a change of leadership since day one of the Cook era. He may have been brilliant at logistics and putting products on shelves, but I think Apple innovation has flatlined under Cooke and if anything, the holier than thou arrogance of Apple in general has grown exponentially. Maybe it's time to breakup Apple - separate the computer and phone divisions.
by M95D | 2025-05-01 14:35:10+00:00
Saving to text file is inefficient. I save sqlite databases using VACUUM INTO, like this:

sqlite3 -readonly /path/db.sqlite "VACUUM INTO '/path/backup.sqlite';"

From https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html :

The VACUUM command with an INTO clause is an alternative to the backup API for generating backup copies of a live database. The advantage of using VACUUM INTO is that the resulting backup database is minimal in size and hence the amount of filesystem I/O may be reduced.
by ajross | 2025-05-01 14:35:28+00:00
Again, 100% not going to engage on another senseless ZFS/dtrace/whatever platform flame. But this point is worth responding to:

> Was SunOS 4 as transformative as BSD?

SunOS was BSD! 3BSD was absolutely transformative. But 4BSD launched after Joy and much of the team were already working at Sun, and almost all future "BSD" innovations of note were actually SunOS features.

Sun took a historically important but otherwise obscure academic platform (total VAX BSD deployments as of 1982 were what, in the dozens?) and turned it into an industry-defining software environment that we still use today (albeit in cloned form).
by platypii | 2025-05-01 14:36:01+00:00
It does support using S3 presigned requests, but it's admittedly a little awkward to ask a server for a presigned request before every fetch. But does still have the benefit that you can have a small and light server just handing out signed requests, and then the user and their browser does the heavy lifting. This can save a lot on scaling out server costs.

That being said, I wish there was a better auth story. Open to suggestions if anyone has ideas!
by hammock | 2025-05-01 14:36:30+00:00
"Fill the gaps with your mind" is very broad, and applies to lighting, pointillism, etc a divers lot of things that are not obvious to a non-painter.

But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
Show HN: I made an anti-distraction tool that uses interactive nudges
by azerksss | 2025-05-01 14:36:54+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Azamat, and I wanted to share ProDUCKtivity, a Chrome Extension I built to address a problem I constantly faced: getting sidetracked by distracting websites while trying to work.

Like many, I found typical hardcore website blockers didn't work for me long-term; I'd eventually disable them or find ways around them when a distraction craving hit hard. This led me to explore a different approach: what if, instead of blocking, an extension used gentle interventions to make me pause and reconsider?

That's the idea behind ProDUCKtivity. Instead of just blocking sites you tend to overuse, it uses customizable reminders:

1) Motivational audio clips of different intensities with a bit of humor. 2) Interactive prompts that require confirmation and solving math challenges before proceeding to the site. 3) A reflection prompt asking, "Why are you visiting this site right now?"

For me, that brief moment of reflection is often enough to break the automatic habit and get back to what I was doing.

This is the first version, and I know there's a lot that can be improved. I built ProDUCKtivity primarily to solve my focus problem, and I'm curious if this 'gentle nudge' approach resonates with others here compared to hard blocking.

What do you think of using interventions like these versus outright blocking? Are there specific features or types of prompts you believe would be more effective for staying focused?

I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback you have!
by dreamcompiler | 2025-05-01 14:37:25+00:00
UVB does work but it takes longer than UVC. So long that if you try to use it to disinfect skin, it's likely to give you sunburn before it kills much of the virus.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/based-on-science/covid-19-...

Contrast Far-UVC (200-235 nm), which kills the virus quickly and yet does not seem to cause skin or corneal damage, despite being more energetic than UVB.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-UVC
by thecapybara | 2025-05-01 14:37:29+00:00
The ESP32 (and other ESP chips) are somewhat common in smart home/IoT gear, particularly for devices that are dependent on a cloud service to function. There's a growing trend in the smart home community of re-flashing cloud-dependent ESP32 based hardware with ESPHome, which makes the device fully local controlled, eliminating the risk of the cloud service being discontinued/enshitified.

It's not a particularly common thing yet, but smart home enthusiasts are becoming increasingly concerned about the expense and effort required to replace cloud-dependent hardware because the manufacturer decided the cloud service isn't worth maintaining anymore.
by jjice | 2025-05-01 14:37:56+00:00
I actually like their revamp a lot (last few years?). They have a million subdomains they send you around which is weird, but I don't mind the current UI. Sometimes they still send you to an old page though, like for scheduled investments (if I recall). What are the parts that irk you, out of curiousity?

I think Fidelity's Net Benefits (which I believe is distinct from the personal site) is pretty bad though.
by Wobbles42 | 2025-05-01 14:38:19+00:00
This tends to be a property of regulations in general. It costs money to comply. At a minimum you often need to hire an expert that actually understands the regulation and can explain how to comply with it.

In general that cost doesn't scale linearly with size, so bigger companies are proportionally less impacted.

Sometimes an attempt is made to compensate for this by exempting organizations under a certain size criteria.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-05-01 14:38:23+00:00
I'm currently trying and failing to find a supplier for this in the UK. Any suggestions?

Counterargument at https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/19czc16/a_genera...

For the curious, I'm thinking that emacs on this in the garden sun will work well, and there's a vesa mount to strap a mini-pc to.

edit: got a holding message from their Europe store, we're in "the May Day holiday from May 1 to May 5", which presumably means nothing much happens until that ends.
by tanepiper | 2025-05-01 14:38:56+00:00
This is also what I am doing in my day job - our team own a full-stack solution for a Headless CMS and delivery platform - with that we've had to build our bits of the tech stack that over time now allow us to offer it to more team - but with that we've also had to make parts more specific to the domain we work in.

It also starts to look like a framework in parts.
by afavour | 2025-05-01 14:39:11+00:00
I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary.

Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions meant you had no choice but to care. Modern tech has "freed" us from that concern.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-05-01 14:39:51+00:00
Valid concerns about op-sec and personal responsibility aside, I think this is another example of why "security at the expense of usability comes at the expense of security". Official DoD communications equipment sucks, so people use the less secure, more usable encrypted communications platform when they feel they can get away with it.

Maybe the DoD should work on developing some internal Android and Signal forks that focus on adding additional critical security controls without impacting usability. There's an obvious desire path here.
by jim201 | 2025-05-01 14:40:14+00:00
I am concerned that the App Store has become the norm. For many young people, iPhones and iPads have been their only computer. Many have never seen a world where app developers can distribute independently. The NYT had an article out about ruling, and the number of people supporting the App Store was astounding.

I think Apple has done a great job marketing the App Store as the reason for the security/UX of their platform, when in reality, it's the OS. It's the OS that requires apps to get permission before accessing my location, it's the OS that isolates apps from each other, it's the OS that provides an easy way to install/uninstall packages.

The confusion between benefits of the OS/benefits of the App Store combined with many peoples' unfamiliarity with third party distribution has made it more difficult to convince people of the merit of these antitrust suits.
by lelag | 2025-05-01 14:40:45+00:00
Interesting point about PC going digital-only as Nintendo is a fascinating counter-example.

While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it.

Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version requires manufacturing, shipping, retail markup, yet costs significantly less than the digital bits that have near-zero marginal cost.

It strongly suggests Nintendo wants the physical retail channel to thrive, or values the perceived permanence/resale value of cartridges.

This context makes the Switch 2 "gamekey" cartridges (physical auth token, digital download) fit their pattern of valuing a physical artifact and retail presence, even if the data delivery shifts.
by badsectoracula | 2025-05-01 14:41:08+00:00
Yeah, as i wrote "if you're on Debian AFAIK AMD is paying someone to experience the pain in your place" :-).

I used to use Debian at the past but when i was about to install my current OS i already had the openSUSE Tumbleweed installer in a USB so i went with that. Ultimately i just needed "a Linux" and didn't care which. I do end up building more stuff from source than when i used Debian but TBH the only time that annoyed me was with ROCm because it is broken into 2983847283 pieces, many of them have their own flags for the same stuff, some claim they allow to install them anywhere but in practice can only work via the default in "/opt", and a bunch of them have their own special snowflake build process (including one that downloads some random stuff via a script through the build process - IIRC a Gentoo packager made a bug report about it to remove the need to download stuff, but i'm not sure if it has been addressed or not).

If i was doing a fresh OS install i'd probably go with Gentoo - it packages ROCm like Debian, but AFAICT (i haven't tried it) it also provides some tools for you to make bespoke patches to packages you install that survive updates and i'd like to do some customizations on stuff i install.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-01 14:41:33+00:00
It's the IGM and of course it isn't their public position, but it is clear that this is what they think and how they behave. They also are extremely influential in my company, as part of the Betriebsrat, and try to steer it in that direction.

I recently had to deal with them (as part of the Betriebsrat) and, just as human beings, they seemed to be some of the worst people I ever met.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-01 14:41:37+00:00
Yeah. Basically, his horrid, abusive father drove Don’s older brother, Freddie, to alcoholism. I read Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” and it actually made me sympathetic toward Donald. That's not to say I forgive him or that he gets a free pass. But wow, I'm not sure how he could've ended up any different.

The world would be better if Fred Trump Sr were emotionally capable of saying “I love you, son.”
by agarsev | 2025-05-01 14:41:50+00:00
Nintendo at least has a good history with this, at least in my experience. Both 3ds and WiiU e-stores were closed, but I can still play all my digital games on both. I can even make backup copies of the game on external media and everything works as you would expect (save online multiplayer, which is a shame but that's a different story)
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-01 14:41:59+00:00
It does, but Steam outlives console e-shops and hardware which have limited lifecycle by design since they are deliberately generational.

GOG would be another example since you can get a DRM-free binary.

On the other hand, does it really matter that much? Probably not. It feels good from a hoarding stance to have a bunch of games I'll probably never play but I got for a "good deal", heh.

A counter-point to my comment is that the real goal should be to buy the game on the medium you want to play it on only if you're going to play it, finish as much as you want to, and not care if it goes away because it's all ephemeral in the end.

I barely play games anymore yet I still would get sucked into looking for deals on Switch e-shop and Steam, and that feeling of sheepishness is what I had in mind when I commented.
by danaris | 2025-05-01 14:42:10+00:00
It's also worth noting that the meeting in question was in 2104. That's over a decade ago now.

It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).
by jerf | 2025-05-01 14:42:30+00:00
You don't need a global infrastructure fund. We already know that projects can be run where people and groups come alongside each other in the context of an open source license and work together. Some people will create "releases" of this project, and some of them will become more and less popular over time, but we don't have to have any one global entity blessing any particular team or aspect of development.

Look to how the Linux kernel is developed, and look to its full history, including forks large and small, alternate releases for alternate reasons, alternate releases by different people and teams, and so on. It's not a hypothetical, it's the organization of one of the largest software projects in the world.

And it's a good thing we don't need a global fund, because trying to start at such a high level is basically asking for this to take the next 15 years to even get started. By contrast, anyone can start a new fork of Chromium or Firefox today... which, again, is not just me theorizing, but is a thing that has happened, several times over. Making it so "getting started" is something that can happen in a distributed fashion without having to get some "global" organization to sign off or be created is superior, which is sort of softballing it a bit because it's honestly the difference between possible and impossible.

If someday that develops into a "global organization" or some set of such, hey, that's fine. But trying to get "someone else" to start it at that level... and it has to be "someone else" since none of us could even hardly start doing that ourselves... is impractical to the level of impossible.
by andrewclunn | 2025-05-01 14:42:40+00:00
The worst comments are the flagged ones. The most untrue are the dead ones. Trust the establishment to not falsely characterize their critics. Why woudl anyone call something that opens with, "With the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brain worms have gotten a bad rap..." a hit piece?

Oh baby, give me that big pharma K street revolving door propaganda! Empiricism is dead, credentialism gutted it to make a skin suit that academia now wears, so it's the science now! Preventative care is only legitimate if you pay the health industry for it! I look forward to the day when we can just label anyone who doesn't trust "the science" as insane so we can lock them up. Maybe if I'm a good boy they'll give me a weekly vaccine to protect me from misinformation. I wouldn't want to risk me having unapproved positions if I'm accidentally exposed.
by jmull | 2025-05-01 14:42:45+00:00
You're demanding a standard of radical transparency for government officials that isn't supported by the law and has never been applied before or since.

It seems to be based on a presumption of guilt, which is a pretty severe departure from common principles of law and justice.

If you're sincere, I suppose you've been demanding that current members of the executive in leadership positions make all their personal communications public too?

The laws around this all generally exempt personal communications. You're Presuming people guilty is also not grounded in law.
by taylodl | 2025-05-01 14:42:56+00:00
Even if all this were true, the problem isn't renewables per se, but rather poor grid management. I'm flabbergasted to learn their grid management is so poor. As I said, here in the States, variable power sources must be backed by confirmed power sources that are ready to ramp-up. Here in North America, we use Automated Generation Control (AGC) to control the unit to maintain the phase angle at zero. If the solar output dropped, then the confirmed units would have automatically ramped-up and maintained the proper phase angle.

After minimal research, I found that Spain, and most of Europe, also uses AGC. The system should have "just worked" and prevented this sort of problem. It may be several days before they identify a root cause.
by MostlyBad | 2025-05-01 14:43:09+00:00
Having lived in Japan for 2 year and working in what one would hope being a very educated environment (Todai and Rikadai PhD candidates), I can personally account that the number of Japanese who actually know about that bit of their history is few. Culturally, they don't speak about this topic - and there if something is not spoken about then it does not exist. I would not be surprised if some teachers could simply not cover that bit of the programme without any consequences; Japan is specifically good at not following its own laws, when such laws have been written mostly to appease international observers - same with women equality and discrimination of minorities laws.
by hedora | 2025-05-01 14:43:21+00:00
You need two sides for a negotiation.

Based on the tariff carve-outs and the political appointments Trump's made, Apple leadership is definitely inside Trump's inner circle.

They've been smart enough not to parade Tim Cook around in a MAGA hat, but just barely:

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/apple-ceo-tim-...

I expect there to be some performative lawyering by the Trump administration until the case blows over.
by stevage | 2025-05-01 14:43:22+00:00
> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.

And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.