MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-06-13 19:02:22+00:00
> they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps.

It’s not enough to be as good as the competition when they already have an established ecosystem of apps and accessories. To be successful you have to leapfrog the competition. You need to offer something so compelling that consumers are willing to put up with the inconvenience of the lack of ecosystem. This is why WebOS and BlackBerry 10 failed. They were as good as iOS and Android but not good enough to overcome that massive downside.

This is also why Apple managed to get a foothold even though established players like Nokia and RIM had the market cornered. Instead of catching up to the competition they leapfrogged them.
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-06-13 19:02:35+00:00
Well, I used to paint houses professionally. I can also tile, frame rooms, and know basics of electrical and plumbing. I can also make pretty good pizza.

But painting can earn a really good amount of money. Once you know what you're doing, you can make $3-5k in ~2-5 days, but it's a hustle, and you may not always have clients.
by oguz-ismail | 2025-06-13 19:03:01+00:00
> your implicit claim of having tried it

I tried printing positional parameters, they looked fine. (And already uninstalled docker. What's the point of containerization if you need superuser privileges to use it?)

> if $user_provided_path is empty, it defaults to browsing the filesystem

That's what

vim -- ""

does.

> But there are a lot of characters there that are specifically there to avoid footguns

What are those characters? --? That's not a lot
by jfengel | 2025-06-13 19:03:34+00:00
Only voters count, and they have a majority of those. There are a great many people who choose not to vote, and as far as I can tell they haven't changed their minds about that.

It's not a large majority; it's a narrow majority with somewhat of a thumb on the scale. But that thumb is substantial, and it's why they've controlled the government for the vast majority of the 21st century.
by wredcoll | 2025-06-13 19:03:51+00:00
Are you technically correct? Yes.

Are the majority of people who make these types of complaints thin-skinned right-wingers? Also yes.

In my experience, people who actually experience intimidation for their views, like you know, the view that being gay is fine actually, don't go around making these types of complaints. They're out protesting and fighting.
by liveoneggs | 2025-06-13 19:04:00+00:00
I owned and loved a few palm pilots (and a handspring visor) but Palm was a nostalgia brand already by 2010.

In the proto-smartphone years they were competing with blackberry and losing in that "business-phone" use case. (Treo phones, etc) Maybe they got burned by the Palm VIIx! :)

DangerOS (sidekick phones) came out and had killer games and even Windows CE had a few devices out there, with Palm integrations iirc.

The year HP bought palm - 2010 - had the Android Nexus One and the venerable iPhone 4! HP never had a chance.

RIM (blackberry) was the only one who ever had a (distant) chance at a 3rd player in the smartphone universe at that time.
by eloisant | 2025-06-13 19:04:40+00:00
To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery life were not great.

That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".

One of the strength of iOS and Android were to create a completely different userspace that what we had in desktop OS, more adapted to mobile. They combined the "just works" aspect of feature phones with the power of smartphones.
by mayoff | 2025-06-13 19:05:52+00:00
When I think about HP as a software & services company, I think about the times I booked Disney vacations in the 2010s. The Disney web site for managing your reservations, looking at park attraction wait times, etc., was usually painfully slow, and the bottom of every page proudly featured the HP logo.

It's probably still slow (I haven't been to Disney in a while) but no longer mentions HP.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-13 19:06:45+00:00
I agree.

OEMs have always been weird because in some sense consumers attribute the computers to them. But they don’t have a core competency in software. And they don’t have a core competency in the hardest parts of hardware—chip design, etc.

Picking the right parts to buy, assembling them, shipping them, that’s all important stuff. They weren’t in a position to win against Apple; they were playing one of the three games Apple plays, almost as well as Apple.
by dartharva | 2025-06-13 19:06:50+00:00
It is amusing how mainstream media's coverage of Apotheker's firing is opposite to what the author says regarding his attitude towards webOS:

> Apotheker stuck to what he knows best and decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. He was particularly bullish on HP's acquisition of Palm, which was made prior to his arrival at the company. He planned to let Palm's webOS software permeate the company's various hardware lines, including PCs, phones and the much-publicized TouchPad tablet.

from https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/ind...
by abalone | 2025-06-13 19:06:58+00:00
That's really cool. I will just add that in my experience, with a bit of conditioning it is possible to get this satisfaction from crossing things off digital lists. The benefits are manifold:

- It saves paper

- It's easier and faster to reprioritize tasks

- It's always with you in your pocket

Personally I use Apple Notes which has checklists, as opposed to a task management system or even Reminders. The flexibility of just writing things into a freeform note and hitting a button to turn them into todos is the right balance of low friction and just enough structure. Hitting that circle to check it off when done is actually quite satisfying.

Bonus: I added a keyboard shortcut for strikethru which adds some extra satisfaction of crossing off the task (or portions of a task that i've written out).
by SoftTalker | 2025-06-13 19:07:13+00:00
Ha you sound like me in terms of your other skills. Throw "decent shade-tree mechanic" in there for me. If it can be done with wrenches and other basic tools, I can probably do it.

One of my kids painted for a while. He made good money but business tended to come in waves (mostly during the summer when apartements and houses changed over) and not much in winter (worked well with his being a student at the time).

But reaching over your head with a brush or roller for 8-12 hours a day will eventually cause RSI.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-13 19:07:21+00:00
One could make the case that nobody needs tablet apps because web apps work well on tablets -- without annoying notifications or annoying popups to access privacy violating features [1], without adding clutter to an already too cluttered "desktop" of icons that all look the same, etc.

[1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I guess somebody with dementia might...
by klank | 2025-06-13 19:07:22+00:00
Fair, thanks for pointing that out.

If you allow me to view the weights of a model as the axioms in an axiomatic system, my (admittedly limited) understanding of modern "AI" inference is that it adds no net new information/knowledge, just more specific expressions of the underlying structure (as defined by the model weights).

So while that does undercut my original flippancy of it being "nothing but gradient descent" I don't think it runs counter to my original point that nothing particularly "uncanny" is happening here, no?
by bluGill | 2025-06-13 19:07:49+00:00
He wasn't acting alone. HP bought this whole company not long before this (HP bought Palm in April 2010, the 49 days seems to start around July 2011). Most of the blame for shipping 270,000 units that didn't sell has to go to Palm. Even if he correctly predicted that Palm wasn't going to sell that many (I'm not sure if that is possible), he wouldn't have been in power long enough to change things. Predicting the size of the market probably wasn't even his job.

I wouldn't even call this rushed to market, though expectations were likely too high for reality. Still it takes years of investment to build a platform like this.
by onli | 2025-06-13 19:07:50+00:00
The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of giving it another go. The right decision would have been to price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got stuck for a long page download) and meanwhile work on the next generation, which then would have more apps and less early issues to have a better chance at the market.

But that is only obvious if you were there back then. If you saw how bad Android devices were in comparison, how big the lead of webOS was.
by ilamont | 2025-06-13 19:07:53+00:00
"I don't see anything about AI that will reduce the need for copyeditors and proofreaders."

Former copyeditor here. That ship has already sailed. The suits realized the copy desk was a cost center that they could live without.

For the most part they were right. The burden of copyediting and proofing fell to writers and editors. Print publications were closed down, and everything shifted to digital, meaning errors could be corrected after the fact (often after readers caught the mistakes). Technology also helped catch errors before publication (spelling and grammar checks, software like grammarly, etc.)

All the people with that title I used to work with were laid off years ago and are in different careers now (mostly in marketing, but one person is an emergency services trainer).

I think where the real skills gap exists in the AI world is fact checking and getting the "voice" right. I don't think the hallucinations problem will be solved, and AI generated and copyedited text is so milquetoast.
by rurban | 2025-06-13 19:08:08+00:00
So he is a follower of the self-imploding theory, also in film history with the death of United Artist with Cimino's Heaven's Gate debacle.

Whilst e.g. Quentin Tarrantino outlined the opposing theory of the witch hunt in the Manson murder trial and its death of the hippy culture.

But I fail to see the connection to now. Social awareness killed by the Nazis again? Or did they overdo it by cancel culture?
by lithocarpus | 2025-06-13 19:09:04+00:00
"why would you want to avoid it?"

Here's an example. Company A invents compound B and pays company C to do safety studies that monitor the subjects for a few weeks or months. The study shows no significant danger. They start selling compound B in food or as medicine. Then 10 years later after millions of people have ingested varying amounts of compound B, it's found to cause some harm that wasn't found in the initial study. Company A pays a fine of less than the profit they made selling compound B, and compound B is pulled from the market.

There are many stories like that. Should I have avoided compound B on the precautionary principle? Or, because the only science done so far in those first 10 years showed it was safe, should I have considered it safe?

In the case of food additives it's even worse. Company A makes compound B, it's in food, no studies are done, millions of people eat it, are harmed, and no one knows for years or decades.

Personally I think introducing novel compounds to the body is just a bad idea period and I avoid them as much as is practicable. Too many have been found to be dangerous only decades later, and we have a population with rapidly rising rates of chronic disease and cancer etc that could be related to toxic stuff. Why risk it. And especially why trust science that is paid for by the companies that will profit if the science shows their thing to be safe?!

---

There _could_ be ways to show safety of something to a point, like do a 20 (or 50) year study with large cohorts where one population uses compound B and the other doesn't and monitor overall outcomes. But that's far too expensive and time consuming and not required so basically no one does it. Companies want to profit from their novel compounds fast.
by wredcoll | 2025-06-13 19:09:24+00:00
Sure, just as soon as you show me the proof of existence of "thoughts" and that you exist as something other than an illusion in my mind.

How about the existence of numbers? The proof of 1+1=2? We humans have words for lots of things that only exist as abstract concepts without a physical embodiment.

Identity is one more of those and it's trivial to understand its application to real people.
by refulgentis | 2025-06-13 19:09:28+00:00
Agreed - I'm not surprised, hell, at this point...it is time for me to announce that I have adopted the position that I'm surprised and saddened if you don't use an LLM, at all, when putting something out into the world.

When I, and others, perform a similar action as a producer, I want to avoid the experience I had as a consumer.
by krick | 2025-06-13 19:09:36+00:00
Somehow the existing answers don't satisfy me, so here's my attempt. The essence of it is really simple.

The axiom is an obviously true statement: if you have a bag of beans, you can somehow take one bean out of it, without specifying, how do you choose the exact bean. Obvious, right? And that's really it, informally this is the axiom of choice: we are stating that we can somehow always do that, even if there are infinitely many beans and infinitely many bags, and the result of your work may be a collection of infinitely many beans.

Now, what's the "problem"? If you look closer, what I've just said is equivalent to saying we can well-order[0] any set of elements, which must make you uncomfortable: you may be ok with the idea that in principle you can order infinitely many particles of sand (after all, there are just ℕ of them), but how the fuck do you order water (assuming it's like ℝ — there are no molecules and you can divide every drop infinitely many times)?

This is both why we have it — ℝ seems like a useful concept so far; and the source of all notorious "paradoxes" related to it — if you can somehow order water, you may as well be able to reorder details of a sphere in a way to construct 2 spheres of the same size.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-ordering_theorem
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-13 19:10:14+00:00
I'm slowly building a business which produces and sells plant tissue cultures. I have many years to go before I can do it full time, but that's the goal in around 5 years. One of the big challenges is scaling up. This work is fairly labour intensive once you've got several batches on the go, and different species and protocols lead to different timelines and so on. There's always something to do. At some point, assuming things pick up, I'll have to go all in on the business. That'll be scary. There'll be an extremely busy liminal zone in which I have a full time job and thousands of cultures to manage. The margins aren't incredible, so it'll be a slog with fairly limited rewards. However, once I get past that zone and can leverage economies of scale and more safely invest more in the business, it should get quite a bit easier. Here's hoping. The risk and sweat equity factor is truly not appreciated if you haven't done it before.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-06-13 19:10:16+00:00
I wouldn’t trust AI with my therapy. I’ve done “sessions” with it before to just see how good it would be, it’s about as good as Eliza. My wife ripped them apart.

It gets concepts wrong, and can’t resolve interweaving narratives which a human can follow without issue. The advice it gives is generic and impersonal, and if you’ve ever had real therapy, you immediately sense of it’s short comings.

I’m sure a lot of that gets less noticeable as training and models get better, but it seems like we’re plateauing in the returns we get from more training.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-13 19:10:32+00:00
+1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but personally I don't get it.

Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly.

The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop".

And it's still not a fully solved problem - there continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or at least give the appearance of concurrency)
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-13 19:11:09+00:00
I don't totally disagree, though I dislike most web apps because, well, they require an internet connection too often (if not always). And I don't trust their creators to be any better at not violating privacy (my data is typically stored on their servers, after all).

With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in my comment.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-13 19:11:11+00:00
What kind of "automated contingency process" is going to drive down a rural road in a blizzard with a chainsaw to get a tree of the power line?

Even the best organizations have emergencies, that's just life. A business which has everything perfectly automated and organized to handle anything that happens is also a business that has no employees, because they won't need anybody working for them.
by OutOfHere | 2025-06-13 19:11:14+00:00
Stock daytrading, but expect to lose for several years before you begin to win. It is skilled work, so don't get advice about it from those who believe it's not possible. It even is true that it's not possible for most people.

A plus is that this gives enough free time and energy during the late afternoon and evening hours to do interesting tech work.
by bsenftner | 2025-06-13 19:11:35+00:00
There is a multi-level dynamic at play, that I suspect has at it's roots the widespread lack of understanding of effective communications.

We are all alone, if not for communications.

It is bias in communications, knowledge of the various forms of bias, their methods, and countermeasures that enable individuals and groups to move past argument and towards shared understandings. With shared understanding naturally causes shared compromise and solutions. Without shared understanding, situations degenerate to stalemate, war, welfare states, and economic slave states.

Individual self conversation, recognition of it, it's biases and countermeasures lay a foundation for a rational individual. The lack of formal and public recognition of self conversation itself is hurdle one. Once that is recognized, a foundation for a rational public can be considered.

Then communicating with others inter-personally, with peers, spouses, coworkers, managers, authorities and strangers. Pairs, small groups, larger groups, and audience dynamics: these all have biases, which are often magnifications of the same bias at a self conversation level. New bias forms are here too, and they must also be recognized, understood, and countermeasures established. This is all nothing but communicating, but doing so effectively, causing understanding in others, and gaining understanding from those less communication-ally skilled.

Now let's take these biases and add in mass media, social media, and all the network effects they bring to the communication situation. Strangely enough, yet again the countermeasures that operate at lower levels continue to function here - except now we're dealing with the public. countermeasures now require public education.

I think by spreading knowledge of interpersonal and self conversation biases, their countermeasures immediate and positive effect lay the foundation for widespread respect of effective communications. After all, the lack of it often only needs to be pointed out for people to consider the ease of adopting knowledge about and the countermeasures that enable more success communicating, which directly correlates to actual success. And that is with everything a person does, because this perspective begins with one's self conversation, reducing the bias there, first. That generates a more rational person, more aware, more active. Push this to network effects, and now we're talking societal change. It's a plan to impress secondary considerations on the general public, because that's the primary countermeasure in communication issues: consider further.
by wredcoll | 2025-06-13 19:11:42+00:00
You'll noticed I already addressed that. There are a number of virtuous actions you can perform. One of those is "emitting the right tokens" in the right context. Can we argue that other things are more virtuous? Easily. Does the existence of more virtuous actions make these actions nonvirtuous? Of course not.

Saying the right thing is a good start.
by nextos | 2025-06-13 19:11:47+00:00
> That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".

The N9, N900's successor, shipped with MeeGo 1.2 "Harmattan" and had the most simple and elegant UI I've ever seen on a mobile. The phone-UI combination was a masterpiece. But it was still Linux, with all power-user features under the hood.
by ang_cire | 2025-06-13 19:11:56+00:00
Sure, I don't mean to imply that there aren't additional skills required to manage something, but you still have to fundamentally understand the thing that you are managing.

The idea that management can be subordinate/project/industry-agnostic is the mistake.

You can't (based purely on work experience, not talking about individual abilities) go from managing a coffee shop to running IBM... OR VICE VERSA

If this assertion is rankling anyone, I invite them to look up how many private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground, by trying to make them operate like SaaS companies.
by Rexxar | 2025-06-13 19:12:27+00:00
Something like that could probably be implemented by storing multiple hash of some automatically modified version of the password. For example, if your password is "PassWorD" they can additionally store the hash of the lowercase version of the password. So if you change it from "PassWorD" to "paSswOrd", they will see it has the same lowercase hash than the previous one without knowing it.
by DannyB2 | 2025-06-13 19:12:41+00:00
Assume use of 8 bit characters. Declare a constant 256 entry array pre-filled with all False except for the five (or six) vowel characters. This is baked into the code and not initialized at runtime.

Now for each character c in the input string, simply do an array index and see if it is true (a vowel) or not. This avoids either five conditionals, or a loop over the string 'aeiou'. The vowel test is constant time regardless of the character value.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-06-13 19:13:22+00:00
"Growing consensus" is not the same thing as consensus. If currently 20% of the top physicists think spacetime is not a primitive notion and this number has monotonically increased by 1% every year for the past decade, that would be an example of "growing consensus".

Besides, Vlatko Vedral is a top theorist in the area, who talks other top theorists at conferences and workshops. He wouldn't say this if he didn't think other top theorists didn't agree with him.
by Dig1t | 2025-06-13 19:13:36+00:00
Where I am, the ag exemption barely blunts the taxes. You can claim the exemption on the land on which your house does not sit, but the house itself and the 1 acre around it is not exempt. Anywhere near a major population center, a house + 1 acre can be thousands, if not tens of thousands, per year in property taxes.