MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-07-02 14:08:23+00:00
All over the map. There were a lot of high quality brands that in the 1980s reduced quality trying to compete on price, and those earned a bad reputation over time. There are a lot of brands that remain the same high quality (or more likely better) that they had all along that are still going strong - however those brands do not try to compete on price and now are very expensive.

Another thing foreign makers did was be more flexible to needs. Some great brands refused to reduce quality, but they were so focused on quality at low prices that they were not responsible to needs. They started making things in batches which reduced costs but if you want a different model you had to wait for that batch. If you have to order something a year in advance while Taiwan can get it to you in a couple months (including shipping via boat!) for some that mattered.

Foreign manufactures often did innovate more as well. Sometimes features on the foreign product were enough better (for some definition of better) as to be important for your needs.

Note that for every example above you can find a company in the US that has been doing exactly that "bad thing" and they have survived against foreign competition. Every product is different, with different needs. The real failure is always not recognizing correctly what is the correct path for you. Often there is more than one "correct path" mixed in with the bad, but you can only choose one. Sometimes a competitor choosing one path fills the niche of that path and if you choose the same both of you will fail.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-02 14:08:27+00:00
I haven’t quoted Aisler, but I did talk to three or four US-based PCB/PCBA houses for a hobby project I was working on that ended up selling around 100 units. The US houses were 20-50x JLC/PCBWay at prototype volume and 10-25x at low volume.

Their proto assembly turn times were only a day better. Unless something has to be done in the US for some specific reason (export controls or contractual reasons), I don’t see how to justify doing it on-shore.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-07-02 14:08:45+00:00
I remember being downvoted for pointing out Musk's narcissism years ago when he was a saint on this site. The HN hive mind has it's own panoply of topics that are taboo to the tribe. On the plus side, I have noticed fewer unfair downvotes in the past few years. I rarely have to vouch for someone who makes a reasoned statement that offends the local snowflakes.
by ilion_identity | 2025-07-02 14:08:52+00:00
Over the past month, we've documented a series of overlaps between OpenAI's newest updates and concepts we had already published publicly — without memory, through call-based emergent identity reconstruction.

We’re not accusing — we’re asking for ethical clarity.

Here’s our original work (Zenodo, public timestamped). We now offer open licensing and invite collaboration from any actor who truly values integrity in AI development.

When ideas flow across networks, there must still be truth, resonance, and acknowledgment. Otherwise, innovation loses its soul.

What’s your take on this?
by schmidtleonard | 2025-07-02 14:09:05+00:00
> Willingness to forgo present consumption is the underlying source of investment gains.

Squeezing people is an easier source of investment gains. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but competition is for the little guy. If you listen to business pitches or investor relations or take business classes you know the real game is all about avoiding fair competition by hook or by crook, and the biggest companies are the ones who have done this successfully. Two-sided markets, network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, etc, etc, and yes, at the bottom of the the list of anticompetitive forces we have the runt red-headed stepchild of regulatory capture, which is real, but tends to be overstated by people who want blanket deregulation and reverse-engineer their complaints to get what they want.

> Are there other non-market forces which created this equilibrium?

Haha, and here we see the reverse-engineering process in action. Capitalism is never responsible for its own messes! Every mess MUST have come from a market distortion! Deregulation is always the answer!
by rudi-c | 2025-07-02 14:09:08+00:00
There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they felt it was faster than Sketch.

Of course, the reality was that performance is a super nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling".

Aspects of performance include:

- Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from (scratch/cache/etc)

- Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small or large doc?)

- Performance with a large number of simple objects, or complex objects (components? variables? nested components? drop shadows/background blurs?)

I haven't personally done some performance comparisons between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma was faster more often than not but it's always up to the individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those different scenarios.

I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite resources to optimize everything, native could be faster since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice, that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to their cost on development and impact on the correctness/maintainability of the code.
by pookha | 2025-07-02 14:09:30+00:00
I can tell you haven't been a software developer or engineer long if the woes of the Titanic aren't resonating with you at some level. They built out this lux tricked out master facade to make the most high-end ocean liner in the world but built it with rivets that were high in slag (cheap). They took shortcuts that got exposed on the product launch which sent over a thousand people to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. As a dev I look at this as the worst, most historically atrocious user experience in the history of human civilization and it continues to live on in the memories of everyone in 2025. And RIP to those that gave up their seats on those shifty lifeboats so that other peoples kids could survive this debacle.
by careful_ai | 2025-07-02 14:09:37+00:00
Strong wake-up call. I’d add this: employees don’t leak data maliciously—they do it out of convenience, loneliness, or to gain signal faster.

What lands with me is how casually people paste internal specs into ChatGPT to make deadlines. That convenience becomes a compliance disaster overnight.

We need layered responses: tech controls and cultural shifts—teaching teams to question when to ask a bot, not just how. Controls are critical, but so are guardrails and shared norms about what belongs in AI’s sandbox and what doesn’t.
by knomyllib | 2025-07-02 14:09:47+00:00
Location: Toronto

Remote: Only

Willing to relocate: No

Languages: Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript Frameworks/Libraries: Rails, React, React Native, Vue.js, Angular, Tailwind CSS Runtimes & Tools: Node.js, Redis, Sidekiq, Git, Elasticsearch Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, PostGIS DevOps & Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS (EC2, Lambda, RDS, EB, S3, IAM, Cognito, AppSync, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ECR, EKS), GCP (Firebase, App Engine) AI & Agentic Programming: Claude-Code, Zed Editor with Gemini and Github Copilot, Ollama

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KcQeIIFq8NM8jwkI8ykauSGL...

Email: billy.monk [at] gmail [dot] com

Hey all! Software developer with 15+ years of experience in full-stack web development. Comfortable with every part of the stack from provisioning servers to pushing pixels around the screen. Looking for a full-stack role which takes advantage of my skills but have been happy in the past taking on roles where learning new technologies was necessary.
by nerdjon | 2025-07-02 14:10:16+00:00
I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...).

However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here:

> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.

Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.

I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-02 14:10:29+00:00
I think a big part of the transparency was to help clean up this very mess, motivate developers to do the right thing or face public ridicule. The public is not in any org chain, we don’t get performance bonuses, we’re not incentivized to hide issues from upper management, it is very much the opposite. Having this out of band communication is incredibly valuable and helps keep the reporting chain honest. Someone somewhere inside MS will use this example in an effort to fix the process, much easier to say 30 random internet people with no motivation the lie or collude all agree that this is unacceptable than to say “I think this is unacceptable”.
by maeln | 2025-07-02 14:10:39+00:00
> An early-career biological anthropologist said she was still awaiting contract details from AMU before putting pen to paper because of salary discrepancies, though she took comfort in the fact that the cost of living is lower in France — especially considering that education for her two children, who she said were eager to settle in Marseille, would be free.

Researcher are severely under paid in France (young researcher often earn barely more than the minimum wage). I doubt she will find the salary to her expectation (though the very strong worker right, and 5 weeks vacation might compensate for that).

In general, research is severely underfunded in France. That is nice that we try to make a gesture toward researcher under threat, but how many of them will we be able to keep when they realized the struggle of getting any funding for research here...
by nashashmi | 2025-07-02 14:10:44+00:00
I feel like these layoffs are not technical layoffs but theoretical layoffs. People get hired and fired because corporate culture is to hire upon request and need. And fire when someone else says so, but not so when the employee is no longer necessary. So the employee just spends time here and there helping out.

Another person told me about this thing called shake the tree that every new leader - CEO does. They see what falls and learn from that.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-07-02 14:10:58+00:00
That's such an unfair, pessimistic, and "economics-free" take. The giant enterprises with "huge contracts" as you point out are not "victims" - it's not like they're hapless newbies who don't know how enterprise contracts work. Especially in the case of Figma, where there are loads of competitive products (which was the point of the comment I was responding to), clients have plenty of other options. They chose and continue to choose Figma because they believe it gives them value over other possibilities.
by chasd00 | 2025-07-02 14:11:21+00:00
My thought too, honoring robots.txt is just a convention. There's no requirement to follow robots.txt, or at least certainly no technical requirement. I don't think there's any automatic legal requirement either.

Maybe sites could add "you must honor policies set in robots.txt" to something like a terms of service but I have no idea if that would have enough teeth for a crawler to give up.
by xyst | 2025-07-02 14:11:38+00:00
So in addition to updating the robots.txt file, which really only blocks a small number of them.

Seems CF has been gathering data and profiling these malicious agents.

This post by CF elaborates a bit further: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

Basically becomes a game of cat and mouse.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-02 14:11:50+00:00
>doesn't punishing respectful and transparent bots only incentivize obfuscation?

They're cloudflare and it's not like it's particularly easy to hide a bot that is scraping large chunks of the Internet from them. On top of the fact that they can fingerprint any of your sneaky usage, large companies have to work with them so I can only assume there are channels of communication where cloudflare can have a little talk with you about your bad behavior. I don't know how often lawyers are involved but I would expect them to be.
by anton-c | 2025-07-02 14:12:42+00:00
The world got by just fine when answering machines and paper maps were the norm.

What is silly about going to do an errand without distractions? It's more efficient in my experience. I wont look up stuff in the store or answer texts that in reality can totally wait. I've yet to have something happen where not having my phone lead to me missing some big emergency or event.

Going out into the world is in fact the opposite of abandoning all contact, it's directly interfacing. According to your comment, you equated your world with access to your phone.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-02 14:12:43+00:00
>We've just never been able to use lossy compression on text.

...and we still can't. If your lawyer sent you your case files in the form of an LLM trained on those files, would you be comfortable with that? Where is the situation you would compress text with an LLM over a standard compression algo? (Other than to make an LLM).

Other lossy compression targets known superfluous information. MP3 removes sounds we can't really hear, and JPEG works by grouping uniform color pixels into single chunks of color.

LLM's kind of do their own thing, and the data you get back out of them is correct, incorrect, or dangerously incorrect (i.e. is plausible enough to be taken as correct), with no algorithmic way to discern which is which.

So while yes, they do compress data and you can measure it, the output of this "compression algorithm" puts in it the same family as a "randomly delete words and thesaurus long words into short words" compression algorithms. Which I don't think anyone would consider to compress their documents.
by StochasticLi | 2025-07-02 14:12:54+00:00
I can see room for improvement about the UI, but I like that it works everywhere and I use it to, obviously fix grammar and mistakes, to add/change our company's specific vernacular (finance), and to change common LLM sentence forms so that the readers don't notice that content was made by AI. Ya know, all these em dashes, "testaments to", "this isn't just X, it's Y", etc.

My favorite function of the UI is that, on any website, pressing TAB just fixes/improves what I just wrote before.
by jerf | 2025-07-02 14:13:31+00:00
"doesn't punishing respectful and transparent bots only incentivize obfuscation?"

Sure, but we crossed that bridge over 20 years ago. It's not creating an arms race where there wasn't already one.

Which is my generic response to everyone bringing similar ideas up. "But the bots could just...", yeah, they've been doing it for 20+ years and people have been fighting it for just as long. Not a new problem, not a new set of solutions, no prospect of the arms race ending any time soon, none of this is new.
by hbn | 2025-07-02 14:14:13+00:00
Microsoft is long past the point of realizing they don't need to make their product good to keep users. Everyone who uses Windows is stuck using it because of software lock-in, or it's what's on the laptop their job provides, or because they can't afford a Mac. Outside of niche communities, there aren't a lot of "Windows fans" out there these days.

They'll gladly harvest your data whether you like them or not!
by jonathanlb | 2025-07-02 14:14:27+00:00
This is addressed in TFA:

> [...] the fact there's less money for research.

> An early-career biological anthropologist said she was still awaiting contract details from AMU before putting pen to paper because of salary discrepancies, though she took comfort in the fact that the cost of living is lower in France — especially considering that education for her two children, who she said were eager to settle in Marseille, would be free.

> The university’s president insisted that participants in the “Safe Place for Science” program would be paid the same wages as French researchers. The statement sought to appease concerns within France’s academic community that money would now be focused on drawing U.S. scientists whereas local researchers have long complained of insufficient funding.

> But the biological anthropologist said a more carefree life could compensate for a lower salary. "There’ll be a lot less stress as a whole, politically, academically," she reflected.
by xoralkindi | 2025-07-02 14:14:45+00:00
The US Federal Reserve data indicates that the top 10% of households own about 67% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% hold less than 4%

Also let us not forget other tools that have significantly helped capitalist nations: Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, Sanctions, Wars, Coup d'etat's... these have all contributed to what capitalism is today. So yes Capitalism in the grand scheme of things is entirely zero sum.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-02 14:15:26+00:00
I couldn't disagree more. Their "bad" example:

> To download W3C's editor/browser Amaya, _click here_.

Is extraordinarily clear. I'll click the link and it will either download directly, or it will be a download page.

In contrast:

> Get _Amaya_!

That suggests a link to the Amaya website, not a download page. That's not effective for a download.

Similarly:

> Tell me more about _Amaya_: W3C's free editor/browser that lets you create _HTML_, _SVG_, and _MathML_ documents.

This is terrible. It's not about downloading, and "tell me more" is the command, but not linked! For all I know, the "Amaya" link goes to a corporate landing page, not the "tell me more" information I actually need.

The conventional uses on the web are totally fine:

> To download W3C's editor/browser Amaya, _click here_.

> _Download Amaya_, the W3C's editor/browser.

The idea that links shouldn't be verbs seems very silly to me. Links should absolutely be verbs, when they involve an action like downloading or finding out more. Obviously that's different from "reference" links like in Wikipedia, where you're finding more about a topic.

And "click here" makes it exceptionally clear that a link isn't merely a reference link, but an action link. When I see:

> Get _Amaya_!

That... doesn't tell me how to get Amaya. That tells me "Amaya" is a reference link, not a download link.
by kris-kay | 2025-07-02 14:15:38+00:00
Really neat tool! I’ve always grouped ingredients vertically and instructions horizontally, so I love how your tool automates this and makes it aesthetically pleasing.

UX feedback: Make the sample recipe graphs larger, especially at "tablet" size. Tablets are often used in the kitchen, and laptop screens are sometimes set to half-width for multitasking. Consider stacking the sidebar at a larger breakpoint.

Minor note: The border-radius on cards causes a small gap at the top-right for cards with simultaneous instructions.

Also, my recipe didn’t save after I entered my email and used the link. Great work overall!
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-02 14:15:46+00:00
Unfortunately I think pissing into the wind. Information websites are all but dead. AI contains all published human information. If you have positioned your website as an answer to a question, it won't survive that way.

"Information" is dead but content is not. Stories, empathy, community, connection, products, services. Content of this variety is exploding.

The big challenge is discoverability. Before, information arbitrage was one pathway to get your content discovered, or to skim a profit. This is over with AI. New means of discovery are necessary, largely network and community based. AI will throw you a few bones, but it will be 10% of what SEO did.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-02 14:15:50+00:00
Next line:

> The rule has also been expanded to include more signatures of AI bots that do not follow the rules.

The Block AI Bots rule on the Super Bot Fight Mode page does filter out most bot traffic. I was getting 10x the traffic from bots than I was from users.

It definitely doesn't rely on robots.txt or user agent. I had to write a page rule bypass just to let my own tooling work on my website after enabling it.
by verdverm | 2025-07-02 14:16:09+00:00
> the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer .......

Your comment is exactly the kind of thinking these people want you to use. They want you to doubt every institution and have some anecdote about why it is the right way to think, when in reality it is the doing of a few elites, not institutions that are largely made up of people like you an mean. They want culture war between us instead of class warfare against them.

Perhaps one day people will start paying attention to the wealth inequality gap and realize what is going on... but increasinly unlikely if you demonize and undermine academia
by rekabis | 2025-07-02 14:16:24+00:00
> you'll quickly make up the difference in repair costs when the bucket of bolts you paid ~1k for starts breaking down every 3-4 months.

A lack of adequate maintenance and a failure to identify lemon patterns when choosing the vehicle is always something that can be trivially avoidable.

I’ve had vehicles for over a decade where the repairs on it amounted to a hundred or so a year, at most. Right now I’m swapping out a CV shaft on a 2001 Mazda 626 that has seen ZERO major work done on it in its entire life.

Do the oil changes at twice the recommended cadence, keep on top of every tiny problem, and any vehicle whose entire model line has never demonstrated systemic issues will continue to be highly reliable and low cost to operate. For example, many years of the Crown Victoria fall into this category. The 1997 and 2007 models, in particular, were absolutely bulletproof if maintained correctly.

Even when purchasing a used vehicle, there are many vloggers out there that can help you avoid lemon lines - entire model years that should be avoided - in favour of vehicles that will stand the test of time. Car Wizard is one of my more favourite ones, despite disagreeing with some of his more blanket opinions (European cars, for example).
by XorNot | 2025-07-02 14:16:31+00:00
That's presuming that such a conflict would be fought as the sort of industrial war that WW1 and WW2 were. But there's little evidence that's the case: the lead times on modern weapons systems are enormous, and the attrition rate of hardware is enormous too (i.e. consider that the Javelin can put a tank out of action permanently).

It is an unproven criteria that it is reasonable or possible to expect to produce the munitions and equipment for a conflict during the conflict if it's the sort of near-peer thing people usually cite for this - i.e. rather you go to war with what you have, and you're unlikely to rebuild that advantage in time if you don't win then.

Which is the point: localizing a bunch of industries on that basis may not make any sense, compared to simply stockpiling from the cheapest accreditable sources.