MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rickdeckard | 2025-06-12 12:59:36+00:00
There was a second issue:

The reason why the phones even landed in South America (and Spain) was because Telefonica heavily invested into Firefox-OS and lobbied several HW-vendors to provide devices for it.

The idea for Firefox-OS to carve-out its niche was to go lower in spec than Android could, providing a solid entry-level Smartphone experience at a price an Android device could not match just due to Hardware spec alone.

Google understood the threat, and indeed they couldn't lower the bar that low anymore and have Android provide a decent experience on a device with 1GHz single-core CPU and 512MB RAM.

As a fast measure, Google created "Android Go" as a stripped-down Android variant for lower-spec hardware, exactly to respond to Firefox-OS.

--> The fact that WhatsApp was missing on Firefox-OS was the final deathblow, yes. But even before launch of the device, the wave of "Android Go" devices matching/undercutting Firefox-OS in price was already building up, and carriers not confident in Firefox-OS were starting to order those devices.

Then, at the moment the Firefox-OS device faced its major setback after launch, that wave already came crashing down into the procurement departments of all the carriers, and so the gap to threaten Android was closed.

Just to reiterate the scale: Google made a "Go" variant of Android and ALL it's GMS-applications just to close this gap. After the threat was gone, "Android Go" was discontinued again
by hwillis | 2025-06-12 12:59:57+00:00
> Surely the power electronics or even just the control algorithms in a BESS could be slightly modified to consume power, get warm, and not transfer any current to or from the battery cells, effectively taking advantage of the BESS’s heat sink to sink excess power and sell that service.

Unless you specifically design for it (specifically, with a dummy load), the efficiency of the system is inversely proportional to its ability to do this. You need a secondary system.

The power system can connect the battery terminal to in or to out, so if you switch both on at once you effectively bypass the battery. It's called shoot-through current and is generally considered a destructive process. If you can switch on and off fast enough you could limit it to a non-destructive level, but in practice most systems will not switch fast enough. They are designed to operate with the battery load, which is at minimum ~10x higher resistance than the transistor itself. In practice it is often 100s of times higher.

That's where the efficiency comes into it. If a power system is 98% efficient (pretty normal- this does not include power lost to heat in the battery itself), that means the electronics can only burn 1/50th as much power as normally passes through the system. Worse, when you put the switch into shorted position it will try to pass 50x its rated current. You need to switch much faster -certainly more than 50x faster- and that will probably put it outside its operating region.

It is relatively easy to just have a large resistor, but it is not very well suited to use battery power systems. Batteries are very low impedance, and the power system exists to transform to a lower voltage and higher current. Resistors are cheaper when they are higher voltage, so the power system is a hacky kludge.

The overall solution is just more batteries. Oversupply is a transient problem and always will be.
by danielbln | 2025-06-12 13:00:16+00:00
This sort of asynchronous flow will become more and more mainstream. chatgpt.com/codex, Google's Jules and to a degree Claude Code (even though that's local) are all following that pattern: phrase a goal, send it off to the agent, review the diff and request changes, rinse and repeat until ready for PR review.

For me this only works for fairly tightly scoped tasks that aren't super complex, but it does work. And I think the days of staring down the IDE will be coming to a close for all but the most complex coding tasks in the future.
by dcminter | 2025-06-12 13:00:27+00:00
He could have said that he had omitted some passages for impropriety. If Bowdler could say then then so could he - by the standards of his day or of ours. Saying nothing would have been an option too. His actual statement still seems at worst a lie and at best intentionally obfuscated.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree (although it would be very interesting if there was contemporary evidence of his actual thoughts and motivations).
by mft_ | 2025-06-12 13:00:29+00:00
Thanks :) I'm actually a long-time Mac user, but switched to a Windows laptop a year ago due to availability of certain apps. My Windows installations are usually pain free, with all of the recent crap disabled or removed. The growing hatred comes from everything else: Office, and the poor UX of the online variants, and the awful usability of the modern iteration of Sharepoint (or whatever it's called now), and crappy unreliable authentication flows, and Teams repeatedly changing its UI, and Teams and Outlook pushing new variants on you, and Teams causing problems for someone on a call most of the time.

Sadly, as this article discussed, Mac OS is not going in a direction that's strongly encouraging. Plus, RE: Microsoft Office, I always believed that it was handicapped on Mac versus Windows. Excel seemed to bog down more quickly when faced with large spreadsheets, and the whole suite seemed sluggish, as if it was running through a not very efficient compatibility layer.
by DanielleMolloy | 2025-06-12 13:00:48+00:00
> Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. > this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.

I can read too. I added a comment with a number. You don't know my intent, this is your interpretation.

Besides, 2018/19 was a steep outlier with the 737 MAX crashes. This is why these got widespread attention and have been discussed down to the last detail for years.
by kosh2 | 2025-06-12 13:01:08+00:00
I have two problems / questions with this:

1. This theory requires a parent universe that can't have been formed inside a black hole. This means there must a be second "universe creation" mechanism that we can / may never know about from our child universe. For me, this doesn't really answer the true question: "How did our universe begin?" Yeah, it may the "unknown field with strange properties" but instead we get an unknown parent universe with strange properties.

2. The black hole in the parent universe must be much much bigger than anything we see in ours since it has to contain all the matter that we see. How is a black hole supposed to form that is 750 billion times bigger than the largest black hole we know about?
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-12 13:01:10+00:00
It's not the skeumorphism but this:

I might have 5 virtual desktops and 3 different web browsers and each of those has 4 windows open and each window has 20 tabs. Never mind the terminal windows which themselves participate.

Conventional thinking is that if you can't find things you need to download and install some new program, maybe one that splits your tabs into "subtabs" or maybe one that organizes your virtual desktops into "virtual superdesktops", etc. Trouble is now you have another thing to find with all your desktops, windows, and tabs! You just can't win that way even though people insist that you can.

Paper, however, is privileged because it lives off the desktop. It doesn't disappear when you switch tabs, it doesn't disappear when you switch windows, it doesn't disappear when you switch virtual desktops. You can tape it here or there and it stays there even through reboots.
by eadmund | 2025-06-12 13:01:38+00:00
> Is there mobile push technology which is actually fundamentally push, all the way down to the transport layer? Like open socket, listening for incoming packets only, no notifications-> no traffic?

That’s the end-to-end principle. Each host on the Internet is fully capable of listening on a socket and doing whatever its owner wants it to do.

The issue is when firewalls prevent incoming traffic, and when NAT prevents a host from even being on the internet. There’s not really a good reason for NAT with IPv6, but there are some good reasons for firewalls. They mostly boil down to human imperfection. The developers of one’s OS and software are imperfect, so the fact that a laptop sitting in Dallas can be probed by other computers in Frankfurt or Maseru thousands of times a second is an issue: a single bug will make one’s computer, and all its data, vulnerable. And users are imperfect, too. One might misconfigure one’s computer, and accidentally expose a service to the world.

There could be some approaches to mitigate these issues, but we’re probably stuck with firewalls forever. Which is really kind of sad.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-06-12 13:01:53+00:00
My first full time job coding, 2012, was creating a Netflix clone Christian entertainment streaming service, i.e. Kirk Cameron movies. I don't know too much about being an evangelical Christian outside of being tricked into a ski weekend in 7th grade and tricked into a few revivals later. I've read the Bible and Commandments like thou shall not steal, thou shall not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, and thou shall not kill are some quality values that I would especially like to see in politicians. Overall, I think Jesus was a very cool dude. I had no moral problem with what I was doing and I needed the job.

For some context there were only two companies sharing the building, this company and Newsmax, while Rush Limbaugh studio was right down the road at the time. There were a few developers before me who failed and some problems with a contractor shipping code that didn't work requiring me to figure out how to create a payment system. Nonetheless, I get it online, it works perfect, and they start to get subscribers. I'm watching some of the on demand and some of the scheduled shows realizing that they are injecting ultra right wing political propaganda and conspiracy theories along with movies about Biblical events.

So I give one month notice but I don't tell them why. They offer me a $25,000 raise. I say no again. They offer $1 for any subscription conversion after the first one week free incentive. That one was tough because it would have net several hundred thousand dollars for that first year. They are willing to pay massive salaries to people who help them push the conspiracy theories.

The owner of the company eventually got caught up in an office sex scandal and sold off the service.

I can understand the temptation Joe Rogan submitted to in order to take the money. I had a friend invite me a while back with a spare ticket to the Comedy Mother Ship in Austin for open mic night. Bill Burr did 15 minutes. However throughout the night one amateur comedian after another were making the most disgusting jokes about harming children. What I don't understand about Joe Rogan is how he invites people like that into his home while he has young daughters.
by haswell | 2025-06-12 13:02:05+00:00
I don’t think the issue is a lack of skeuomorphism. It’s more that the devices we use can’t replicate the feeling of something tangible that exists in the same space we do. And that these devices are bottomless portals to any number of other things unrelated to the task at hand.

Picking up the phone to check my todo list puts me in contact with 100 unrelated things, and at some point becomes counterproductive.

If something like the Apple Vision Pro was more accessible and wearing it was more like wearing eye glasses, I think its ability to render objects in space would make it more likely to be an effective interface for virtual task management. Emphasis on “more like wearing eye glasses” because it needs to be an always-on type of experience to come close to replicating a physical piece of paper.
by melvinmelih | 2025-06-12 13:02:45+00:00
> Modern games provide much stronger feedback. Now, when you hit an enemy, you might see:

> the crosshair briefly changes to confirm the hit, damage numbers pop up above the enemy, sound effects, enemy death animations, a progress bar filling up, a new skill unlocked, random reward and more...

I wonder if we can gamify todo apps in the same way, most are too boring and too corporate. It should implement all gaming bells and whistles for ensuring you complete your tasks.
by graemep | 2025-06-12 13:02:49+00:00
Them by Jon Ronson, a book about conspiracy theorists and the like, has a hilarious story of David Icke being delayed at Canadian immigration until he convinced them that when he really did believe in alien lizards, rather than it being a code word for Jews. They would let a nutcase in, but not a racist.

> The core of ancient alien theory is the belief that non-white races are incapable of complex feats of engineering and civilization

In its origins, but do the current crop of believers think that way? If they do is it an unconscious prejudice or a conscious one? I think there is a spectrum of racism here from complete unawareness of the racist origins, to blatant racism.

There are also some white people's achievements, such as Stonehenge, that they attribute to aliens.

> Dig deep enough under a lot of the folklore, especially where it overlaps with neo-Christian/New World Order stuff and eventually you'll get to the Nazis.

New World Order people do seem to overlap heavily with the "white replacement" crowd, so yes.
by raywatcher | 2025-06-12 13:02:52+00:00
It’s barely been 3 days since the entire panel of vaccine experts has been removed, and considering the vetting process for appointing new members to the panel takes years. It’s not surprising that the new appointees aren’t good, even though RFK has pledged that none of the new ACIP members would be "ideological anti-vaxxers” I doubt that will be true and hold up under scrutiny
by jerf | 2025-06-12 13:03:25+00:00
"Scrum" isn't really "Agile", though. Maybe someone developed it through a truly Agile process, but then they froze it and held it up as an unchanged ideal and started down the oh-so-appealing road of telling anyone that finds it doesn't work for them that it's because they weren't doing it right.

I find myself having to distinguish between what I call "Real Agile" and Scrum quite a bit, because Scrum is exactly the sort of thing that Real Agile was a reaction against.

I've raided Scrum for ideas in my agile processes, but I would never rigidly do exactly it.
by adrienfallou | 2025-06-12 13:03:44+00:00
Fun comments on this page; a lot along the lines of "enterprise sales strategy is dead on arrival because I can't try it".

The thing is, every random person being able to use an LLM or related app for free (or even a fixed, amount like a $20/month subscription) is basically the company behind it saying "please spend our money". That might work if you raised tons and tons of cash, but if I recall Mistral has raised ~$1B compared to OpenAI's $60B. That gives them good incentive to prioritize making money over being the hype tool that you can easily try. User-led adoption isn't the only strategy out there.

As for it being a fork of Continue, they acknowledge that very much in their blog post that announced this. Sure, it probably means you could set up an equivalent yourself with Continue pointing to the right model; but that adds a lots of friction – and might not be allowed in an entreprise setting.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-12 13:05:30+00:00
>How would you even know? Does breaking your thoughts and experiences into discrete signals help you, as an author, understand your own biases and why they are valid or not?

Here's the absolute beauty of this. Lets generate an example.

I go on r/python and ask, "How do I access json data from requests library?" then give an example. Perhaps the greynoise community api? simple data = json.loads(response.text) sort of situation. You're going to get 2 comments. 1 comment calling you an idiot, and the other trying to help you deal with json as a dict.

Flipside, you go on r/python and say, "python cant handle json data, loading up as dict is inefficient" You're going to have 200 comments from experts trying to prove you wrong. You will have many elegant and efficient answers that you can choose from. About 150 of them will be people calling you an idiot.

>I suppose a tangential question then is, why publish? Is there value in putting ideas into the world beyond entertaining/entraining an audience or having your ego stroked?

Very frequently you dont publish. Being wrong on the internet is fantastic. Do not expect an audience or to have your ego stroked. Expect flamethrowers aimed at you.

>perhaps you will tell me (the author) what I'm not seeing?

He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not ask is a fool for life.
by detaro | 2025-06-12 13:05:54+00:00
Most airplanes can dump fuel, but it's not an immediate thing, so not really applicable here (and obviously doing it over a city is to be avoided as well).

It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-12 13:06:29+00:00
> Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate when writing an email?

OK I got a bit triggered by this sentence. Not at TFA, but sharing my own experience: Games are fun. And I don't mean Type 1 vs Type 2 fun and the email is somehow type 2 fun. I mean that the stimulation / "hit" from a game is just higher than 90-99%% of work tasks (writing a new CLI or optimizer excluded!!). We pile on much stimulation to the work to get it to hit harder: Working by others (social/peer), snacks (biological rewards), free caffeine, money (sometimes lots), etc. And physical trinkets.

We have studied this to death in other parts of our own biology, like food. Unhealthy food/drink is fun. It's a pleasurable reward sometimes, but if it forms the basis for your diet you are going to have a lot of trouble enjoying healthy stuff. You can't outrun a bad diet. You can't add a kale salad after a bowl of ice cream and expect your insulin levels to go down. You have to treat the underlying problem: A hugely stimulating / rewarding thing is displacing the healthy stuff. Almost every piece of sane health advice after 1900 has focused on removing unhealthy factors first.

Work/hobby is no different. When I'm obsessed with factorio (it happened a lot once or twice), I find it harder to focus on work. When I "fast" from those "treats", work takes on new enjoy-ability. Dopamine diet is probably the wrong technical term, but it nails the practical effects well.

I'm sure phones are just as stimulating for some. We all have our vices.
by 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV | 2025-06-12 13:06:40+00:00
This seems blown out of proportion. Anyone who knows how streaming in React works knows, that you can't stream your HTML line by line. And there was the need to not block first paint (HTML, not JS) just because of metadata. It's reasonable to have a list of user agents that are exempt from that behavior since those are also not the bulk of your traffic where you want to show something as fast as possible.

How would you instead solve this, with the requirement that some users have metadata that takes a while to load?
by npteljes | 2025-06-12 13:07:26+00:00
I am of the same mind. In simpler cases, it would make sense to "resist", like buying a smart TV for its screen, and just never connecting it to the internet, because the software is shit. But in a case of an auto updating operating system? Forget the idea of controlling it. It will be whatever the vendor wants. Or rather, it's either drastic measures, like installing it from a local source and keeping it offline, or whatever the vendor wants. We can have achievements like blocking the IP for the news and weather, and then those widgets won't load, great. But we gained nothing.

I arrived on the same conclusion as you, that you cannot really selectively accept a service provider. Because of the nature of the ongoing relationship, posture evaluation would need to happen on every interaction, which is improbable. I don't think we can evaluate every update. So really, it's either trust, or no trust. No sense to lull ourselves into anything else.

I personally solve this for myself with compartmentalization. For example, I loathe Windows, but I use an LTSC edition of it for gaming, and only gaming. I don't trust them with my "life", so it doesn't get access to my data, just games.
by adamsilkey | 2025-06-12 13:07:44+00:00
I loved your article! Thank you so much for sharing. Fellow procrastinator struggler here.

What's been working for me lately is carrying a Field Notes notebook everywhere with me combined with some of the ideas you talk about here (breaking down tasks into smaller and smaller pieces). It's the perfect size for me to carry around every day.

It's also been helpful as I've been defaulting to opening up my notebook as my basic distraction device as opposed to opening up my phone.
by mihaaly | 2025-06-12 13:08:27+00:00
> if you have spent 20 years or more using Microsoft Office, it will feel quite foreign

I am using MS Office for 30 years, and the current MS Office products feel offensively alien. Slown down in workflow.

Meanwhile, in the past 20 years or so, I was affiliated with organizations (plural) having mixed composition of Win/Mac/Linux support throughout.
by lipowitz | 2025-06-12 13:09:08+00:00
It takes a lot of work for them to push google apps into its own permissions system etc, but its not like you feel that as a user..

Its similar to what the Linux distributions that try to turn on a SeLinux like profile by default would feel like if they really put in the work. That's nothing like switching (from a Linux) to a BSD.

(I would love to just run my desktop Linux with a half baked touch UI and rely on browser versions of almost everything, but that would feel like a real switch between OSes instead of just seeing the same OS with a corrected security profile as the user. I also don't see why you compare it to an Abrams, I doubt an Abrams has a security model intentionally compromised by an ad company, GrapheneOS just makes it possible to catch the dumbest or laziest attacks on a system no one should run ever.)
by CapricornNoble | 2025-06-12 13:09:12+00:00
No, I've watched enough narcosicario execution videos to know that there are objectively evil people in the world. These two guys in particular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Trevi%C3%B1o_Morales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heriberto_Lazcano_Lazcano
by defrost | 2025-06-12 13:09:30+00:00
Pilots, aircraft engineers, and safety regulators also sit in aircraft.

The phrase "line kilometres" might indicate a smidgeon of aviation industry adjacency to some.

EDIT: Above and below comments appear to be low grade random sniping in bad faith.

There's a failure to address content and specifics and a straw assertion about "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators", a claim that was never made.

At best I have the same insights as anyone that worked with 20 airframes for a few decades and staged them about the globe in that time.

EDIT2: Symbiote has deleted their problematic reply below that the first edit was made in response to. The michaelt reply came after the reply by Symbiote and is moot, all my statements are here, undeleted and unredacted.
by HelloNurse | 2025-06-12 13:09:41+00:00
> The rule is simple: the more you procrastinate on a task, the more you should break it down into micro-tasks, even ones that take just 2 to 5 minutes in extreme cases.

This breakup alone could allow someone who can procrastinate on something big but doesn't like to be burdened by many tasks the shortcut, without further gamification, of performing some micro-tasks either to reduce the queue or to "procrastinate" on the rest.