MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitpush | 2025-06-30 20:16:51+00:00
> Buying an iPhone and then demanding that it has to work

Buying something used to mean something. If you're still beholden by company rules of a product you _bought_, you have been leasing/renting it.

If I buy a house from a builder, and it came with a requirement that you can only use Amazon Ring cameras, or builder-approved groceries - you'd be pretty pissed.
by alganet | 2025-06-30 20:17:11+00:00
My original comment included a political example, but I removed it before posting precisely to avoid confusion between what I said and simple polarization schemes.

It's not about backlash. Media has several ways to deliver a different message, to different audiences, using a single piece.

What I mean by "audiences" is much more granular than "against" or "in favor".

The article attempts to do that (there are hints of this granularity of target profiles all over it), but it's not very subtle at doing it.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-30 20:17:34+00:00
> During the ZIRP era there was a financial incentive for everyone to over-engineer things to justify VC funding rounds and appear "cool".

Yep, and what’s worse is that…

> Now ZIRP is over, but the people who started their career back then are still here and a lot of them still didn't get the memo.

…folks let go from BigTech are filtering into smaller orgs, and the copy-pasters and “startup lyfers” are bringing this attitude with them. I guess I got lucky enough to start my interest in tech before the dotcom crash, my career just before the 2008 crash, and finished my BigTech tenure just after COVID (and before the likely AI crash), and thus am always weighing the costs versus the benefits and trying to be objective.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-30 20:17:52+00:00
If it's sunny outdoors, I use an E-ink display. My Macbook Air does a maximum of 500 nits, but I don't think even 1600 nits is enough, which is the maximum a Macbook Pro can do with some hacking.

If you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkEa1ZttTxg

It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).

> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.

Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.

I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.

People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.

Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
by flysand7 | 2025-06-30 20:17:59+00:00
Yeah, this kinda becomes a problem when the library you are using does not distribute its source code, so even if you get the line, this information is practically useless to you.

This has been my biggest problem with exceptions, one, for the reason outlined above, plus it's for how much time you actually end up spending on figuring out what the exception for a certain situation is. "Oh you're making a database insertion, what's the error that's thrown if you get a constraint violation, I might want to handle that". And then it's all an adventure, because there's no way to know in advance. If the docs are good it's in the docs, otherwise "just try it" seems to be the way to do it.
by taeric | 2025-06-30 20:18:00+00:00
I only mentioned tagged template literals, as they were called out by the article as an unsung hero. Presumably, they are an example of what a good template language looks like. If so, they don't give me hope that we know what a good template language looks like.

The idea of the post seems to be encapsulated in the web components issue and discussion. Agreed that it looks largely about data binding to DOM trees. To paraphrase you, "seems like advanced DOM interpolation in JS." Which, I just can't bring myself to agree that this looks good. Happy to be proven wrong in time.
by arp242 | 2025-06-30 20:18:30+00:00
> Like what if a veteran struggling with PTSD has a therapy dog to help keep them emotionally regulated?

Is that actually a real thing? As in: I'm sure some people struggling with PTSD greatly benefit from their pets, but do they really need them at their sides 24/7 for "emotional support" and can't do some shopping without one?
by vkou | 2025-06-30 20:18:35+00:00
The tool is $10, the two minute walkaround of undoing your pressure caps, measuring the pressure, and redoing them, every trip, adds ~1000 minutes/year.

... Or you could just have the manufacturer spend $30 to embed this into the car's dash.

For similar reasons, your car also comes with a fuel gauge, and doesn't require hand-cranking to start.

If you really want car prices to come down, have the manufacturers fire most of their workers and replace them with robots (I'm not sure if the robots will make for a good consumer base, but that's someone else' problem.)

Look at a BYD car factory versus any one ran by the American auto dinosaurs, and that's where you'll find the price delta.
by specialist | 2025-06-30 20:19:15+00:00
With the race towards quantum supremacy, POW-based cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin) will be broken. Facing default, governments will fast track adoption of QuantumCoin as the reserve currency.

What a32z has trademarked as “Web 4.0”.

QuantumCoins (qoins) relies on a novel disproof of error algorithm to establish ownership. Somehow, a single qoin captures a unique position of the qubit matrix's superposition.

tbh, I don't really understand the maths.

I do know the quantum supreme race requires ever more qubits. Smart money is already investing in legendary earth minerals, needed for the superconducting cooling vessels.
by eqvinox | 2025-06-30 20:19:22+00:00
Mhm. Putting the dummy member into the embedded node doesn't give a path from the proper object to find the embedded node "mid-struct". run-time checks are the "easy way out". We/I'll stick to macro soup probably, so we have compile-time checks.

btw. For ISO C WG14… has anyone suggested adding _Include to the preprocessor, along the lines of _Pragma? It'd really help with doing this kind of really long macros, hiding the clunky "#define, #define, #define, #include" inside a macro…
by bitpush | 2025-06-30 20:19:31+00:00
From the lawsuit

> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.

> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified

That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.

There's more

> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
by _benton | 2025-06-30 20:19:42+00:00
This is probably a controversial opinion but I actually use my iPhone because it's locked down with a curated app marketplace and secure payment system. I don't want alternative payment methods or app stores. So I find it distasteful that other companies are seeking to control Apple's product design through the legal system. They're essentially trying to make it impossible to purchase a product I want, which is more monopolistic than the current status quo. iPhones do not have any sort of monopoly on phones.

If you want that, you can purchase any number of Android devices.
by hysan | 2025-06-30 20:20:17+00:00
Just enforcing it at all would bring about a huge amount of change. I literally see police chilling in their cars while obnoxiously loud cars & motorcycles drive by and they do nothing even though my city has noise ordinance laws. The biggest problem isn’t the lack of laws but the enforcement of them. I’d wager that many of those people feel like they can get away with it not because the police will arrive too late, but because the police don’t care to enforce what’s right in front of their faces.
by whoisyc | 2025-06-30 20:20:24+00:00
Validating input and physics is easy and is effective against some of the crazy cheats people ran on eg PUBG. But it’s much harder to “limit information”. For example in CS if someone is 95% hiding behind a smoke screen with just one foot sticking out, do you tell other players about this player or not? If you don’t, then you are depriving them of information they should have been able to see, if you do, then it still gives a cheater an edge because even if you do spot the foot you will probably have a hard time actually shooting at the player because his body is still hidden.

And even if you can 100% accurately decide when to hide or show information or if you are outright just streaming the game to the players there are still cheats that you cannot detect this way because they only enhance player capabilities within what is possible for an honest human player. For instance a simple cheat can detect if another player’s head is under your crosshair and fire automatically (with a randomized delay to game anticheat systems.) Realistically cheats these days are more complicated and do way more to emulate human input. It’s not easy to conclusively tell if a player is cheating thus way or not just looking at his inputs in one game. Maybe he is just fast, maybe he has lower latency, maybe he is just pre firing at spots he knows an enemy is likely to come from. You can’t know for sure unless you know what’s actually going on on his PC and his peripherals. And if you start banning people using just statistics you will likely end up with many false positives.

At the end of the day there is no silver bullet to cheating. Even if you fully control a player’s PC there are still ways to cheat in hardware [1]. You need to find the balance between annoying too many players with your anticheat and your game getting overrun by cheaters.

[1] https://www.counter-strike.net/newsentry/6500469346429600836
by KetoManx64 | 2025-06-30 20:20:29+00:00
Bitcoin is the solution to income inequality and taking back national sovereignty from central bankers.

Inflation is also a silent, invisible tax on the poor. It quietly eats away at their savings and buying power and ensures they will always be poor.

Bitcoin is also the solution to perpetual war. The only reason that WW2 was able to go on for so long was due to all the Western countries leaving the gold standard, and it is the reason that we have perpetual wars in the modern world. Governments just issue more bonds and when those don't sell, they just ask the central banks to buy their bonds. Bitcoin forces countries back into sane policies.
by sandspar | 2025-06-30 20:20:34+00:00
Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice, and marketing agencies already consider Gen Alpha to be “voice native.” I once saw a small child help his grandfather with a phone issue. The grandfather fumbled with the GUI, but the child opened Siri and solved it by voice. If Apple drops the ball on voice, it may not hurt them today - but they risk losing the next decade.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-06-30 20:20:35+00:00
I'm aware of this theory and it sounds very logical, but essentially it's hand-waving that is not backed by controlled trials or observational data [1][2] What's described above is not necessarily a "problem", it's normal functioning of human body.

If there are issues in the "Western world" I would look elsewhere. The theory about "nutrient-poor environments" doesn't really fit the case of France which is consuming 3x more bread per capita than US while having 4x less obese people.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34352885/

[2] https://jn.nutrition.org/article/S0022-3166(22)01097-5/fullt...
by jasperry | 2025-06-30 20:20:36+00:00
Update after youtube: It was already known that a time-t function can be computed in sqrt(t) space on a single-tape Turing machine. It's exactly like @cma said: a Turing machine wastes a lot of time moving the head back and forth. Williams' result shows sqrt(t) space for multi-tape Turing machines. Those are much more time-efficient in regard to head movement, so until Williams' proof it was not believed to be possible to to make any algorithm use only sqrt(t) space.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-30 20:20:47+00:00
Then how does Siri deliver on that philosophy? The UX of Siri is that it probably won't understand your request but it might, and only through trial and error do you realize the specific commands it might know. And even then, your queries can fail for unknown reasons.

So I don't think this a likely explanation. Maybe they just wanted to have an in-house solution but realized they have no chance at delivering that value on their own. But it can't be about UX predictability because Siri has none unless you're setting a timer.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-30 20:21:53+00:00
On some level I don't see them as obsolete.

But actually, I spent a few months in a room with a stray cat and all of my DVD and Blu Ray disks and didn't watch a single one. Instead I watched stuff off Tubi, Apple TV, Peacock and my media server. When it was time to clear that room out so tenants could come in I gave most of my discs to the reuse center (sure was agonizing to decide which version of Superman II I wanted to keep!)

Lately it seems like the market for used Blu-Ray players has been flooded with awful Sony units which take more than 30 seconds to boot even if all you want to do is eject a disk. I donated one of those and my NVIDIA Shield and got a used PS4 because even if the boot time is way out of the "consumer electronics" range at least it is a freakin' game console and unlike the Shield I can leave the controller plugged in and expect it to be charged when I want to use it... And the Plex client is great.
by buran77 | 2025-06-30 20:21:59+00:00
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage

Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.

What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
by piperswe | 2025-06-30 20:22:19+00:00
How would they re-allocate ISM space? 6GHz Wi-Fi is widely deployed enough that it would be just about impossible to force an update to every single device to stop using part of the band.

EDIT: looks like it's not ISM, maybe they'd continue allowing Very Low Power devices on 6GHz while auctioning out higher power licenses?
by whstl | 2025-06-30 20:22:23+00:00
> There is no requirement to build an app for iOS devices

By this logic, there is also no requirement for one to eat and breathe, anyone can simply stop. The problem is the consequences.

Building an iOS app is requirement if you want to provide lots of services and compete on lots of market. The mobile phone OS landscape has become a duopoly, and society is free to impose certain obligations on those companies.
by asnyder | 2025-06-30 20:22:39+00:00
There's also https://openobserve.ai, while not as stable as Grafana/Prometheus/Clickhouse, feels a bit easier to setup and manage. Though has a bit of ways to go, does the basics and more without issue.

Crazy crazy they spent so much on observability. Even with DataDog they could've optimized that spend. DataDog does lots of bad things with billing where by default, especially with on-demand instances you get charged significantly more than you should as they have (had?) pretty deficient counting towards instance hours and instances.

For example, rather than run the agent (which counts as an instance regardless of if it's on for a minute), you can send the logs, metrics, etc. directly to their ingestion endpoints and not have those instances counted towards their usage other than log and metric usage.

Maybe at that level they don't even get into actual by usage anymore, and they just negotiate arbitrary amounts for some absurd quota of use.
by const_cast | 2025-06-30 20:22:43+00:00
Yes, and elephant in the room - we already have very good measurements for diabetes risk that doctor's look at, A1C. It doesn't matter much how your glucose happens to be at a point in time because diabetes is a chronic condition that takes a very long time to develop, which is why doctor's aren't going to be looking at your glucose anyway.

You can obsess over your glucose all you want, but if you aren't lowering your A1C then you aren't lowering your risk.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-06-30 20:22:46+00:00
Structured concurrency [1] solves the issue of task (and exception) ownership. In languages / libraries that support it, when spawning a task you must specify some enclosing block that owns it. That block, called a nursery or task group, can be a long way outside the point where the task is spawned because the nursery is an object in its own right, so it can be passed into a function which can then call its start() method. All errors are handled at the nursery level.

They were introduced in the Trio library [2] for Python, but they're now also supported by Python's built in asyncio module [3]. I believe the idea has spread to other languages too.

[1] https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

[2] https://trio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[3] https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#task-gro...
by m463 | 2025-06-30 20:23:08+00:00
Actually, iMessage happily harms apple customers all the time.

I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.

I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.

Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
by energywut | 2025-06-30 20:23:12+00:00
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage

I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.

And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.

Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.

You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
by 999900000999 | 2025-06-30 20:23:32+00:00
Ok.

The alternative is corporations just trash the entire laptop. With the rise of soldered ssds( Apple for one) this is possible.

Maybe argue for better recycling ?

It only takes one half awake IT guy to forget to wipe a few drives to spook companies.

In my world if MegaCorp offloads used laptops to a non profit, and the non profit just has to throw in a cheap SSD, that's a win.
Show HN: On-chain Fund Administration Protocol
by fume_protocol | 2025-06-30 20:23:45+00:00
Hey guys,

I built a protocol (EVM-based) to automate the administration of investment funds. Basically, using smart contracts and the programmability of stablecoins, it tokenizes fund units, strikes instant NAV calculations, extracts fees, and handles distributions in a single click.

Any asset managers loving their admin? :) Tell me what you think!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-30 20:23:54+00:00
> problem with Apple is that their corporate culture doesn't vibe well with a lot of new tech

Apple has never been the company that does it first. They're the company that does it right. Arguably, their fuckup with LLMs was rushing a garbage product to market instead of waiting and watching and perfecting in the background.

> Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology

Strongly disagree. OpenAI and Anthropic are blowing billions on speculative attempts at advancing the frontier. They're advancing, but at great cost and uncertainty in respect of future returns.

The smart move would be to recapitulate the deal with Google, possibly being paid by these cash-burning companies for the default AI slot on the iPhone, all the while watching what Apple's users do. Then, when the technology stabilises and the best models are known, Sherlocking the whole thing.
by ljm | 2025-06-30 20:24:31+00:00
I wonder how much that no-expense-spared, money-is-no-object attitude to buying SaaS impacts an engineers ability to make sensible decisions around infra and architecture. Coinbase might have been fine blowing 65 mil but take that approach to a new startup and you could trivially eat up a significant amount of runway with it.

I won’t single out Datadog on this because the exact same thing happens with cloud spend, and it’s very literally burning money.
by monday_ | 2025-06-30 20:24:45+00:00
I have been thinking about adding conductive traces a-la PCB to 3D prints in a DIY setting for a while. Obviously, conductive filaments exist - but they are not remotely in the same category as copper.

My initial hope was that doping PLA, PETG or some other material with a conductor and then applying strong variable magnetic field near the print head to force creation of conductive domains while the filament is amorphous and hot. This turned out to be not feasible, as O3 explained to me repeatedly, over hours of chats.

A simpler and surprisingly workable solution appears to be adding a second printing head loaded with tin. Tin is not as good as copper - but it's still leagues ahead of conductive filaments. To offset the poor conductivity you can use thin, but very broad traces.

A speculative approach would work like this:

1. Print PETG layers using a regular filament, but leave "baths" for tin traces. A bath should be an opening at least 2-3 millimeters tall, to account for the surface tension.

2. After N layers, fill the baths from the tin head. Tin melting point is near PETG, but it would cool rapidly and, hopefully, weld to the plastic.

This way you could probably integrate a pcb into a print. I haven't tried that, but i recall people actually trying to print with tin - so that part is at least not a complete fantasy.
by energywut | 2025-06-30 20:24:56+00:00
> That's pretty evil & predatory to me.

That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done.

Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.