MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-06-24 20:30:52+00:00
>The rise of "basic economy" seems a lot like the general phenomena of "enshitification" and has a similar motive - degrade your product to squeeze the last drop out of the consumer. And it seems logical that charging by the "degree of shit" in a product means every level is going to be shit actually.

How do you draw the line between "cutting frills that nobody really cares about" and "enshitification"? Prior to airline deregulation air travel was luxurious[1]:

>BERAS: But it's not just that the planes were more spacious. Back then, the airlines would go out of their way to compete with each other on amenities.

>MALONE: Right. Like, the plane we're on, it had a lounge in the back. You might get a six-course meal or a fancy cocktail included.

>BERAS: Plus, all kinds of other perks, like custom playing cards delivered in a fancy case, shaving kits delivered in a fancy case, cigarettes delivered in a fancy case.

>MALONE: Yeah. And, you know, as we get into the '70s, the amenities got ridiculous. Airlines even had meat carving stations, so flight attendants would roll the meat right up to you and carve it up right there in front of you at your seat.

>BERAS: But perhaps the pinnacle of all amenities was...

>VAN DER LINDEN: They had a piano bar, an honest-to-God piano.

But air fares dropped after deregulation, after much of these perks were reduced[2]. Of course, people who wanted those amenities would rather than they be bundled, because they'd be paying for it anyways and airlines could benefit from economies of scale for offering those amenities. They might even call it "enshitification", if the word was around back then. But most people would rather that their experience be a little crappier but save a few hundred bucks on airfare instead.

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197960905

[2] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/3rdparty/2013/2...
by michaelt | 2025-06-24 20:31:29+00:00
It's a simple matter of the number of motors you have. [1]

Assume every motor has a 1% failure rate per year.

A boring wheeled roomba has 3 motors. That's a 2.9% failure rate per year, and 8.6% failures over 3 years.

Assume a humanoid robot has 43 motors. That gives you a 35% failure rate per year, and 73% over 3 years. That ain't good.

And not only is the humanoid robot less reliable, it's also 14.3x the price - because it's got 14.3x as many motors in it.

[1] And bearings and encoders and gearboxes and control boards and stuff... but they're largely proportional to the number of motors.
by atmavatar | 2025-06-24 20:31:41+00:00
A small detail you're missing is that in the US, sugar (usually in the form of corn syrup) is added to everything.

Example: I'd bet many people who are at least gen X grew up with PBJs as a staple food. It seems healthy enough: bread, peanut-butter, and a little jelly. However, today there's sugar added to the bread, sugar added to the peanut butter, and most certainly sugar added to the jelly, far beyond what it was when growing up.

If you aren't really careful when at the grocery store or making food from scratch, you can easily end up consuming a lot more sugar than you realize.
by csa | 2025-06-24 20:31:45+00:00
> I guess it's a routine part of China's paranoia. They definitely do do weird things to check if tourists are causing trouble in some way i guess.

I’m guessing you actually did something suspicious or illegal without realizing it.

A common and simple example of this is taking pictures where it’s technically forbidden — airports, military buildings (these aren’t always obvious to visitors), religious sites, etc.

Another example would be interacting with a person of interest. This could be a Chinese person that they are watching, or a foreigner that they are keeping tabs on (e.g., embassy staff that they suspect of being an agent).

As a tourist, you probably wouldn’t notice these things or even be aware that they are a red flag.
by Analemma_ | 2025-06-24 20:32:18+00:00
I don't think there were any specific security issues caused by Easter eggs but the policy was announced as one of the many changes in their "Trustworthy Computing" initiative.

It seems kinda harsh but it's important to remember the context: at the time, the security situation in Windows and Office was dire and it was (probably correctly) perceived as an existential threat to the company. I think "no Easter eggs" was as much for optics as for its actual effect on the codebase, a way to signal "we know about and stand behind every line of code that gets written; nothing is unaccounted for".
by ramshanker | 2025-06-24 20:32:34+00:00
Moreover, I read the wiki ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-57A/B_MOP ) that 60m penetration specification is for ~35MPA concrete. And good basalt rocks easily go 100MPA. So if Iranians choose just good Mountain, and there are plenty of them...... Mother earth is really strong some places.
by hbn | 2025-06-24 20:32:40+00:00
My work gives us Copilot access since We're a Microsoft Shop™

It's too bad Copilot is by far the dumbest competitor in the space

My favorite interaction so far was when I prompted it with:

ffmpeg command to convert movie.mov into a reasonably sized mp4

Sure, it's not the most direction instructions, but I tend to give it just enough to get the job done, assuming the LLM knows what its purpose is as an LLM, and it always works with the other chatbots.

Copilot's response:

I implemented and executed the Python code above to convert movie.mov to a reasonably sized movie.mp4 using ffmpeg. However, the Python code failed since it was not able to find and access movie.mov file. Do you want me to try again or is there anything else that I can help you with?

Note that I didn't cut anything out. It didn't actually provide me any "Python code above"
by sho_hn | 2025-06-24 20:32:50+00:00
> doing the "draw at 2x scale and then scale down" dance that was popularized by OSX and copied by Linux

Linux does not do that.

> It's strange that Wayland didn't do it this way from the start

It did (initially for integer scale factors, later also for fractional ones, though some Wayland-based environments did it earlier downstream).
by spiderfarmer | 2025-06-24 20:33:17+00:00
The biggest problem with Microsoft is their UX. From finding out where to actually use their products, to signing in, wading through modals, popups, terms and agreements, redirects that don’t work and links that point to nowhere. Along the way you’ll run into inconsistent, decades old UI elements and marketing pages that fully misunderstand why you’re there.

It’s a big, unsolvable mess that will forever prevent them from competing with legacy-free, capable startups.

They should delete all their public facing websites and start over.
by aeternum | 2025-06-24 20:34:00+00:00
The rapid rotation and your blink reflex is apparently what makes it class 1 (supposedly). I don't see how a blink occurs if it isn't in visible spectrum. The science around the safety is very shaky, many tests look at only retina and not cornea damage.

https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14040682/safet...

Many of the class 1 lidars do damage camera sensors, is your eye really that much more resilient?
by bigyabai | 2025-06-24 20:34:02+00:00
> And probably they don't have many centrifuges left.

In 2016, under the JCPOA, Iran had over 10,000 IR-1 centrifuges in storage and ~5,000 IR-1 in active use. Considering they make them domestically, I don't really know how smart it is to assume the centrifuges are gone for good.
by int_19h | 2025-06-24 20:34:42+00:00
It does unfortunately mean that sometimes `*` will work (and produce an incorrect result) rather than immediately failing loudly with a clear error message in the context in which it's actually intended to be numerical.

More broadly this is the same argument as whether overloading `+` for strings is a bad idea or not, and the associated points, e.g. the fact that this makes it non-commutative - the same all applies to `*` as well, and to lists as much as strings. At least Python is consistent here.

Although there is one particular aspect that is IMO just bad design: the way `x += y` and `x = y` work. To remind, for lists these are not equivalent to `x = x + y` and `x = x y` - instead of creating a new list, they mutate the existing one in place, so all the references observe the change. This is very surprising and inconsistent with the same operators for numbers, or indeed for strings and tuples.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-06-24 20:34:50+00:00
I'm not a Python master but I've struggled with all the previous package managers, and uv is the first tool that does everything easily (whether it's installing or generating packages or formatting or checking your code).

I don't know why there is such a flurry of posts since it's a tool that is more than a year old, but it's the one and only CLI tool that I recommend when Python is needed for local builds or on a CI.

Hatch was a good contender at the time but they didn't move fast enough, and the uv/ruff team ate everybody's lunch. uv is really good and IMHO it's here to stay.

Anyway try it for yourself but it's not a high-level tool that is hiding everything, it's fast and powerful and yet you stay in control. It feels like a first-party tool that could be included in the Python installer.
by zkmon | 2025-06-24 20:35:22+00:00
What are we complaining about? Is it about the industrialization, economy and jobs that produced plastics? How far do we want to go back? Industries came out of scientific advances and business, which came from social dynamics and foundational academics such as mathematics and logic, which in turn were a result of leisure time due to civilizations, settlements, more food availability, farming, tools etc. All this was inevitable and incremental. Nothing happened overnight. We didn't cause it. And we won't be doing anything to stop it.

There is a story in Hindu mythology about churning of the milk ocean, by gods and demons in cooperation, using a mountain as the churning rod, with an objective of extracting the nectar of immortality. After a great amount of churning, a great poison comes out which must be consumed, otherwise it ends the universe. Lord Shiva consumes it, but keeps it in his throat, to save himself and the universe. When the Nectar finally comes out, somehow gods trick the demons, to keep the nectar to themselves.

Sometimes it occurs to me that this story foretold the extraction of oil from ocean deeps, giving the luxuries to the developed world and pollution to the third world.
by antarabasu | 2025-06-24 20:36:02+00:00
I wrote this after working on the first product for Defog (YC W23) last year. Now, with the pace at which AI products are evolving—faster models, more autonomy, shifting user expectations—I find myself wondering: do those early design principles still hold up?

This piece is a mix of lessons from the trenches and open questions about what needs to change as we continue designing for systems that behave less like tools and more like collaborators.

Curious to hear how others thinking about AI interfaces are adapting their design instincts—or maybe discarding them.
by QuesnayJr | 2025-06-24 20:36:54+00:00
The solution to the puzzle is that "the bitter lesson" is about AI software systems, not arbitrary software systems. If you're writing a compiler, you're better off worrying about algorithms, etc. AI problems have an inherent vagueness to them that makes it hard to write explicit rules, and any explicit rules you write will end up being obsolete as soon as we have more compute.

This is all explained in the original essay: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
by bitwize | 2025-06-24 20:36:56+00:00
1) High prices for the console and games, which may be partially explained by inflation, but still, shit's steep. We're back to the early 90s days of scouring pawnshops for deals and carefully considering which few games we really want to buy. Plus, $10 for a sales demo (Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour).

2) Console must be registered online before becoming playable in handheld mode.

3) Nintendo recently released a terms of service update in which they reserve the right to disable your console if they catch you violating acceptable use. Switch 2s found using piracy carts have not yet been bricked this way, only locked out of internet play (like original Switches were), but still...

4) Some Switch 2 games will not get a physical release, only a cartridge which provides an "activation key" for a digitally downloaded game. Why even bother with this bullshit, I don't know, because it's all of the downsides of physical media and all of the downsides of digital downloads, with none of the upsides of either. On a console.
by gruez | 2025-06-24 20:37:15+00:00
>If we want to stop fare practices we do not agree with then mandating specific bundling in luggage, legroom, food and credit/rebook is available as a regulation.

Let's take the one of the items as an example: I rarely rebook, so I'm presumably benefiting from this price discrimination. Why should I support that it be forcibly bundled? I might be sympathetic to having some sort of baseline fare for advertising purposes, so it's not a race to the bottom to get the lowest sticker price, but I can't see how it's justified to limit consumer choice by disallowing the sale of restricted fares.
by archagon | 2025-06-24 20:37:32+00:00
Thank you for the interesting info! For NY-style cheesecake, I've been attempting to use a paste made of shortening, oil, and flour to coat the sides of my steel springform pan: supposedly an old baker's trick. However, cheesecake removal is still not completely clean, though perhaps I'm doing it wrong. Beeswax seems like an interesting one to play around with, given that canelés are traditionally baked in molds brushed with beeswax.
by bjackman | 2025-06-24 20:37:34+00:00
For the specific case of solving shell script dependencies, Nix is actually very straightforward. Packaging a script is a writeShellApplication call and calling it is a `nix run`.

I guess the issue is just that nobody has documented how to do that one specific thing so you can only learn this technique by trying to learn Nix as a whole.

So perhaps the thing you're envisaging could just be a wrapper for this Nix logic.
by stiray | 2025-06-24 20:37:51+00:00
Good for you, I was also doing it when I was a kid. Actually was even cooking roms and removing everything that I didn't need.

Then I got my first banking app and was decompiling it on each new version, removing checks for root, "compatibility" and security checks, and compiling it back. Then another app came, this time for public transport, and I was reversing two apps, once every 2-3 months. Became quite efficient with it.

Then I deliberately bought pixel for GrapheneOS, installed it and never looked back.

As I have already mentioned: I am not using Android because I like it or I would want it. Sailfish has everything, I will ever need. For myself.

But not for living in this world.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-24 20:37:51+00:00
This 100%. Hell, give me a way to write code to filter notifications and I'll do it myself.

I get so frustrated by apps that I need notifications on for but I don't want marketing BS, unfortunately there is no middle ground.

On top of filtering Apple should force app developers to segment their push notifications and allow users to block different types. This would be completely in line with Apple's _stated_ priorities and a great thing to advertise (I can imagine the commercials for it already).
by gip | 2025-06-24 20:37:57+00:00
The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians. It will take significantly more time to get a clear answer.

That said, it may not matter much. Restarting their nuclear program in secret would likely be far more difficult now and would almost certainly be detected. Ideally, a political agreement will soon render the issue moot.
by theshrike79 | 2025-06-24 20:38:02+00:00
The "slowness" and the utter insanity of trying to make a "works on my computer" Python program work on another computer pushed me to just rewrite all my Python stuff in Go.

About 95% of my Python utilities are now Go binaries cross-compiled to whatever env they're running in. The few remaining ones use (API) libraries that aren't available for Go or aren't mature enough for me to trust them yet.
by teo_zero | 2025-06-24 20:38:24+00:00
In bash, it's enough to remember that $? expands to the exit code of the previous command, and $((x)) evaluate x as an integer expression, including the ternary operator x?y:z.

For example the following prints the exit code in green if zero, in red otherwise:

PS1='\[\e[$(($??31:32))m\]$? \[\e[39m\]'
by glorbx | 2025-06-24 20:38:26+00:00
Glad OP discussed daylight savings nightmare.

But I hate how when I stack my yearly weather charts, every four years either the graph is off by one day so it is 1/366th narrower and the month delimiters don't line up perfectly, or i have to duplicate Feb 28th so there is no discontinuity in the lines. Still not sure how to represent that, but it sure bugs me.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-24 20:39:31+00:00
It's not our fault that you don't pay attention to something called the World Series. It's also not our fault you don't have teams good enough to qualify. It's not the called the American Series where you'd be expected to ignore it. /s

I've always laughed at these types of names. The Miss Universe pageant has always made wonder what Miss Andromeda would be like, and if her answers would also talk about whirled peas too.
by chasd00 | 2025-06-24 20:39:45+00:00
Can’t argue with the math but one thing about a mortgage is it takes no effort. Just pay the bill and time does the rest. With stock investment there’s an emotional attachment to every major swing, should you buy or should you sell is never far from your thoughts. Using a home as an investment may not make the most return but it’s easy as long as you can pay the bill.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-24 20:40:01+00:00
> a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing

The amount of the source material encoded does not, alone, determine if it is infringing, so this noun phrase doesn't actually mean anything. I know there are some popular myths that contradict this (the commonly-believed "30-second rule" for music, for instance), but they are just that, myths.
by jay-barronville | 2025-06-24 20:40:08+00:00
As someone who supported the current administration primarily due to their stated position on protecting free speech and fighting censorship, I find this story disgusting. I consider our First Amendment here in the U.S. to be the best and most unique thing about our country. I hated watching previous administrations step all over it, but in my opinion, the current administration is already proving to be objectively worse for the simple fact that they pretended to actually care about free speech only to pretty quickly start cracking down on speech they don’t like (e.g., see the Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk cases—Öztürk’s case, in particular, is extremely egregious). As frustrating as it was when the Biden regime was cracking down on speech they didn’t like, at least they didn’t pretend to actually care about free speech. Running on a free speech platform and then implementing North Korea-style speech policies is such a massive betrayal.

On a separate note, border agents being able to force you (anyone, including U.S. citizens) to give them access to your devices has been a problem for a long time and certainly should be illegal. When traveling internationally, you should either (1) leave your personal devices behind or (2) back up your personal devices to an encrypted drive (a tiny SD Card is ideal) and factory reset them. I know the EFF has been fighting that issue for a while and I’m hoping that at some point in the near future, border agents will be prohibited from forcing folks to give access to their devices.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-24 20:40:15+00:00
This always happens when growth of a good or service slows but the provider is still expected to keep delivering growth.

Historically it has led to finding efficiencies - but that takes R&D, not just financial engineering.

In the near future humanity will to do a mix of three things: a) accept that growth is over (it’s not, this is temporary until the next thing is invented), b) find a way to return to the frenzy of innovation that pushed us to expect growth (likely by leaning back in to R&D), and c) legislate the types of squeezing we’ll tolerate (as the EU is doing)

Companies that invest in R&D need to start winning to kickstart growth again. Big companies can do it - eg. Google Gemini is topping leaderboards.

While you wait for a return to R&D, contemplate the miracle of the complex economy that led us to the point where lower middle income people can have a Basic Economy seat on a tin can in the sky.
by martin-t | 2025-06-24 20:40:16+00:00
> Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.

Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not.

The issue with LLMs is that they allow doing things at a massive scale which would previously be prohibitively time consuming. (You could argue but them how much electricity is worth one human life?)

If I "write" a book by taking another and replacing every word with a synonym, that's obviously plagiarism and obviously copyright infringement. How about also changing the word order? How about rewording individual paragraphs while keeping the general structure? It's all still derivative work but as you make it less detectable, the time and effort required is growing to become uneconomical. An LLM can do it cheaply. It can mix and match parts of many works but it's all still a derivative of those works combined. After all, if it wasn't, it would produce equally good output with a tiny fraction of the training data.

The outcome is that a small group of people (those making LLMs and selling access to their output) get to make huge amounts of money off of the work of a group that is several orders of magnitude larger (essentially everyone who has written something on the internet) without compensating the larger group.

That is fundamentally exploitative, whether the current laws accounted for that situation or not.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-06-24 20:40:23+00:00
I think it is less common now, but ISP routers on average used to be trash with issues — bufferbloat, memory leaks, crashes — so a number of people bought a higher end router to replace the ISP provided one. Mostly tech savvy people who were not necessarily in IT.

Nowadays my ISP just uses dhcp to assign the router an address so you can plug any box into it which talks ethernet and respects dhcp leases to be a router which is nice, albiet 99.9% of people probably leave the router alone.
by toast0 | 2025-06-24 20:40:28+00:00
I've got at 1650 Super; it's not bus-powered either. I think it's got a 6-pin, but often you can plug a 6-pin into an 8-pin board and it'll just run a lower current limit (this might not be accurate --- a lot of internet comments say 8 pin boards will detect a 6-pin connector and refuse to work). A whole lot of modern computing gets ~ 90% of the performance with 50% of the power; so if using a 6-pin lead drops power to 50%, you would still get most of it.

I've got a ~ 2006 380W power supply hanging out near my desk and it's got a 6-pin pci-e cable; I really don't think people won't have at least that, certainly not 95% of systems with a pci-e x16 slot.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-06-24 20:40:52+00:00
What you're talking about is called constructive dismissal, which is when rather than firing you an employer changes the nature of your job to make it impossible or intolerable to fulfill, waits for you to either quit or fail to meet the new conditions and get fired for cause, then can avoid paying unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal#United_...