MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jbreckmckye | 2025-09-09 21:13:10+00:00
At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs.

People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best.

The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared).

I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO... C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate and geographically limiting their talent pool. Whilst making workers more tired and less productive.

I still have no idea where it comes from. My best guess is that nobody at that level wants to break ranks with the "collective wisdom" of "investors", which creates a kind of groupthink.

(An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.)
by kmoser | 2025-09-09 21:13:21+00:00
The appeal of something like PHP these days is not that it has any particularly unique features, but that it is ubiquitous, has withstood the test of time (meaning it's relatively bug-free), is well supported (meaning it won't disappear any time soon), and is relatively easy to find developers for. Those features alone make it a contender for projects that don't need a specialized language.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-09-09 21:13:34+00:00
But it didn’t win by default, it beat out the other alternatives, sublime and a GitHub editor (prior to acquisition).

VS Code (Monaco at the time) was developed by a small team largely in secret to keep it safe from other MS departments so it’s really not like other MS software. It has been safe from meddling for a while there is a chance it’ll be a victim of its own success.
by amluto | 2025-09-09 21:13:55+00:00
I used to use them, and I had two issues:

1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.

2. Their customer support and website are very bad.
by kardianos | 2025-09-09 21:13:59+00:00
> We need some deeper changes in the ecosystem.

I avoid anything to do with NPM, except for the typescript compiler, and I'm looking forward to the rewrite in Go where I can remove even that. For this reason.

As a comparison, in Go, you have minimum version spec, and it takes great pains to never execute anything you download, even during compilation stage.

NPM will often have different source then the github repo source. How does anyone even trust the system?
by pavlov | 2025-09-09 21:14:03+00:00
Ok, you’re saying that a Korean architect working for Hyundai isn’t allowed to visit a Hyundai work site on ESTA or B-1.

What kind of visa do they need to get? Please be very specific.

I’ve had L-1 and O-1 visas to the US in the past. Those were complicated processes that took many months and cost over $10k in legal fees each time. Those visas are explicitly meant for multi-year stays, not just work site visits. But is that the type of visa the architect should get for this business trip? If not, then what?
by tacitusarc | 2025-09-09 21:14:36+00:00
I honestly have no idea where I read pietnas. The comment you identified was the one I was referring to.

I care about consistency, but not foolishly so. I suppose an important question is: under what circumstances is consistency undesirable?

I believe that consistency is not an end goal, but a means to achieve clear communication. When being consistent results in less clarity, it should be abandoned in favor of more effective communication.
by anecdatas | 2025-09-09 21:14:41+00:00
The left was a Cassandra the whole time -- it's been nothing but warnings from the left. The Democrats (note: the Dems are not a left party) refused to listen, assuring everyone it was fine, that we just needed to return to norms and decorum. If we just elected the most proper guy, if we just went a little more rightwards in our policies, all this would be fine.

Meanwhile, the left out there pointing at Obama's extrajudicial killings, Bush's whole post 9/11 fiasco, Clinton's "Superpredators" nonsense, etc. etc. and making tons of noise about how this was all going to end.

Turns out, the left was right, the Dems were wrong. But the Dems are still fighting to try and shut down the left. Look at how hard the Dem establishment hates Mamdani.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-09-09 21:14:54+00:00
I think if you want to tinker with hardware, you shouldn't buy Apple. It's designed for people who use it as a means to an end, and I think that's a good thing for most people (including me). I want to bank on hardware that I can trust to be secure. Nothing wrong with building your own linux box for play time though.
by CPLX | 2025-09-09 21:15:02+00:00
When we give money to private citizens it's not a tax. When we give money to the government, it often is.

So paying a union person isn't a tax, any more than paying anyone else. Everything is government mandated or regulated. Is paying interest to Chase Bank a tax? They're federally chartered, and I can't set up my own bank, I'm forced to use a regulated entity.
by epolanski | 2025-09-09 21:15:18+00:00
+1.

I have recently had to delve in PHP and it was much better and more mature than what people painted it to be 10+ years ago.

A night and day difference.

Jira gave me the same experience. I hated it remembering the 2020 times, yet going back to it now...I actually liked it way more than the alternatives.
by derefr | 2025-09-09 21:15:51+00:00
You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then, as every ML thing has been retroactively rebranded as "AI."

Remember the term "smart" as applied to any device or software mode that made ~any assumptions beyond "stay on while trigger is held"? "AI" is the new "smart." Even expert systems, decision trees, and fulltext search are "AI" now.
by Macha | 2025-09-09 21:15:54+00:00
I'm actually considering buying myself an iPhone for the first time. I have basically two priorities when buying an phone:

1. Freedom. I should be able to build and run apps on it without the platform holder having a barrier on it.

2. Privacy. The phone shouldn't be an object to track me for better ad sales or any other purpose.

Of course, priority 1 has until recently always led to Android while priority 2 has always led to Apple.

But with the upcoming announced changes where google is going to require registration and signing for even third party sideloaded apps, while at the same time the EU is forcing Apple to open up and allow sideloading, it seems pretty clear that in the near future both Apple and Google's policies regarding point 1 are going to converge. On a position less free than Android has hitherto been, and less free than I would like, but unfortunately they are the two options on the market.

So with priority 1 no longer a differentiating factor, it comes down to priority 2.

I've used both Android and iOS over the years, as while my personal phones have always been Android, my employer provided phones have always been iOS. I think I do prefer the Android user experience and have used enough of both that that's not just a factor of which I'm accustomed to, but it's also not the huge difference it once was for a lot of apps.

Right now I'm using a Pixel 7 Pro and I might weigh sitting it out another year, but my USB-C port is failing and I'm also watching the pixel battery issues creep up the model range to newer and newer models...
by riedel | 2025-09-09 21:15:55+00:00
IMSI catchers have been popular by police all over the world. Here are some other tools [0] [1].

Edit: Interesting also the collection of network security via gsmmap [2]

[0] https://gitweb.stoutner.com/?p=PrivacyCell.git;a=summary

[1] https://github.com/srlabs/snoopsnitch [2] https://gsmmap.org/
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-09 21:16:02+00:00
"Thanks for subscribing to Dropbox Pro ianstormtaylor! Would you like to upgrade to Dropbox for Enterprise?"

"Thanks for sharing a file, ianstormtaylor, Dropbox for Business will do some bullshit"

Dropbox was a great product, but a shit company. They have a software platform and core technology that for B2B would readily displace high dollar stuff like managed file transfer and had a good early API that many apps took advantage of. I had a great experience working with them to capture shadow IT use of the product and get it in a managed environment.

But the relentless nagging, even of paying customers, is unserious and stupid. I wouldn't touch the product with a 10 foot pole.
by rafaelmn | 2025-09-09 21:16:21+00:00
Apple watch is like the definition of dorky looking - so much for that theory.

Also flip phones aren't dorky and have a 2000s vibe - but they don't fit Apple "you can have any color as long as it's black" approach to design.

In some ways I can't even fault them - fragmenting your device shapes/experiences to chase a niche look is not good business. But this is exactly what's pushing me out of Apple ecosystem - it's so locked down that if you don't want to fit into their narrow product lines you have no other options. There are no third party watch makers using apple watch hardware and software. No other phone makers with access to iPhone internals and iOS. Nobody can hack a PC OS onto an iPad or build a 2in1 MacOS device.

I feel like this is the last gen of Apple tech I'm in on - I just find there are so many devices that are compelling to me personally but don't fit into the walled garden. Plus Google seems light-year ahead on delivering a smart assistant.
by ajmurmann | 2025-09-09 21:16:32+00:00
Fabulous book. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It's impossible to unsee the two scaling laws he lays out for cities once you know about them:

Infrastructure scales with 0.85: "It may not come as such a big surprise to learn that larger cities require fewer gas stations per capita than smaller ones, but what is surprising is that this economy of scale is so systematic: it is approximately the same across all of these countries, obeying the same mathematical scaling law with a similar exponent of around 0.85. What is even more surprising is that other infrastructural quantities associated with transport and supply networks, such as the total length of electrical lines, roads, water and gas lines, all scale in much the same way with approximately the same value of the exponent, namely about 0.85." - West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (pp. 272-273).

Social effects scale with 1.15: "However, of even greater significance was the surprising discovery that the data also reveal that socioeconomic quantities with no analog in biology such as average wages, the number of professional people, the number of patents produced, the amount of crime, the number of restaurants, and the gross urban domestic product (GDP) also scale in a surprisingly regular and systematic fashion, as illustrated in Figures 34–38. Also clearly manifested in these graphs is the equally surprising result that all of the slopes of these various quantities have approximately the same value, clustering around 1.15. Thus these metrics not only scale in an extremely simple fashion following classic power law behavior, but they all do it in approximately the same way with a similar exponent of approximately 1.15 regardless of the urban system." - (p. 275).
by mikepurvis | 2025-09-09 21:16:39+00:00
I'm also pretty happy with my iPhone 13 mini and loathing having to upgrade to something much larger.

For reference, the 13 mini has a 5.4" screen, and the new-gen iPhones are 6.3", 6.5", and 6.8". Pixel 10 is 6.3" as well.

iPhone 5 was the most perfect size ever and was about 0.3" shorter than the 13 mini, though it had a much smaller screen due to the bezel: https://www.gsmarena.com/size-compare-3d.php3?idPhone1=5685&...
by goshx | 2025-09-09 21:16:52+00:00
I just made a comment that made me realize that the complaints I heard in the early 2000’s about PHP are mostly the same as I heard today and they are all due to one thing: skill issues.

They need a language or IDE that can hold their hands. They need a code base that doesn’t require much thinking. This is all for good and for the better, BUT, they are all due to skill issues.

You hate PHP because you are not good enough to tame it.
by the_gastropod | 2025-09-09 21:17:05+00:00
You've got other good answers. But basically: there's no reason to not go with an MVNO. It's literally the same service for a fraction of the price. Pick one with whatever main carrier has the best coverage in your area.

Wikipedia has a solid table of U.S. MVNO's, for a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
by ctippett | 2025-09-09 21:18:37+00:00
Apple's text replacement feature is perfect for this. I have a bunch of ascii emojis that auto-complete for me when I type a matching string (I've based mine on the old BB Code emoticon syntax[1]), e.g. :shrug: → ¯\\(ツ)/¯ (as it happens I also have a text replacement that converts -> into an arrow).

[1] https://tl.net/forum/smilies.php
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-09-09 21:18:42+00:00
> learning it in school

In all seriousness everybody still probably needs to learn it in school, because the scientific literature is entirely in metric. Even papers authored by Americans and published by, e.g., the American Chemical Society, all use µg/mg/g/kg and µm/mm/cm/m for their measurements. If you don't have an intuitive understanding of those measurements, you can run into visualization problems.
by Insanity | 2025-09-09 21:18:57+00:00
That seems extraordinarily poor battery performance. FWIW, I often go on hikes that take a similar 4-6h time. Granted, I get to charge it on the drive over so I usually start the hike with 100%.

We'll use my phone to take photos and videos on the hike. Never ran into battery issues. And it's Canada, so hikes are in cold-ish temperatures.
by russellbeattie | 2025-09-09 21:19:01+00:00
If Apple had an insanely great AI feature that truly differentiated itself from their competition, we all know they'd take a lot of time focusing on how their hardware enabled or enhanced that functionality.

The expectation is that Apple will eventually launch a revolutionary new product, service or feature based around AI. This is the company that envisioned the Knowledge Navigator in the 80s after all. The story is simply that it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't make it a non-story, simply an obvious one.
by CPLX | 2025-09-09 21:19:55+00:00
A Korean architect might well be allowed to come for meetings or to supervise on a B-1. They might not, depending on what they actually do.

The laws are written out and there's lots of precedent. The point I'm making is if there's 300 people with hard hats and hi-vis vests that say "mechanic" on them (to name one example I saw in a video of the raid) there's a pretty reasonable chance they're very clearly on the wrong side of visa law.
by vel0city | 2025-09-09 21:20:08+00:00
I use Mint which was an MVNO for T-Mobile. They've since been acquired by T-Mobile, but I haven't really experienced any difference in service. I also haven't used Visible, so I can't directly speak to that but Visible is owned by Verizon FWIW.

I probably experience times with deprioritization. 5G service can go from getting several hundred megabits with pretty low latencies to only getting a few megabits with potentially up to 100ms or so latency, depending on crowds. I don't recall any times where I had good signal but couldn't get any data, but definitely been in places where it'll struggle to do video chats or something at a big live event that doesn't have the extra 5G infra deployed. For example, an extra large crowd at the park for some event will probably give poor network experience but I'll otherwise get good connectivity in a modern sports arena.

In the end it's just a value proposition. Is having really fast network everywhere, all the time really that worth it to you? For many the answer is yes. But for me, on my personal device, if I'm getting poor data rates that's probably a clue I should really be putting my phone down and get back into whatever is happening in the park so I don't mind and the savings are quite nice.
by anecdatas | 2025-09-09 21:20:09+00:00
> No, Immigration isn't going to be sent door to door to do something bad to citizens.

You've got a whole lot of history to read. Because this is exactly what has happened in the past. You don't think this has happened to the Romans? The Russians? The Italians? The Germans? The Spanish?

This is a classic maneuver of a state sliding into autocracy -- if you cannot find enemies outside the state, you find them within the state. Go read Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism then come back.
by bombcar | 2025-09-09 21:21:13+00:00
I remember the discussion pointed out that as long as they had "assumed due diligence" because they were randomly selecting properties in tests, they did fine.

But once word got out "sell your shithole to Zillow, they don't even check" of course EVERY shithole went to them.

Tragedy of the Venture Capitalists or something.
by hn92726819 | 2025-09-09 21:21:13+00:00
Be warned: each layer of eink reduces contrast. With 4 layers, the contrast of the color boox tablet is terrible. Also, if you buy from boox, you have to pay about $50 to return it. Not worth it at all in my experience, unless you will always be in direct sunlight.

I went through that and then bought a Carta 1200 display BOOX 13.9 and it's amazing. Black and white only, but the contrast makes the device usable.

If you know you won't return the device, get it on their website because they'll give you extra pen tips and a case. I got mine on Amazon, so I missed out on the extra stuff because of my return experience.
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by cassepipe | 2025-09-09 21:21:18+00:00
> Arm published the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) specification in 2019 as a tool for hardware to help find memory corruption bugs. MTE is, at its core, a memory tagging and tag-checking system, where every memory allocation is tagged with a secret; the hardware guarantees that later requests to access memory are granted only if the request contains the correct secret. If the secrets don’t match, the app crashes, and the event is logged. This allows developers to identify memory corruption bugs immediately as they occur.
by mort96 | 2025-09-09 21:21:35+00:00
> You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then

Not really, I'm taking the hint. If they call a feature "AI", there's a 99% chance it's empty hype. If they call a feature "machine learning", there may be something useful in there.

Notice how Apple, in this event even, uses the term "machine learning" for some features (like some of their image processing stuff) and "AI" for other features. Their usage of the terms more or less matches my line of features I want and features I don't want.
by andrewstuart | 2025-09-09 21:22:06+00:00
If you've read the Steve Jibs biography, you’d know his obsession with creating the future products.

I feel like he’d be obsessively working to combine AI, robotics and battery technology into the classic sci fi android.

Instead, modern Apple seems to be innovating essentially nothing unless you count the VR thing and the rumors of an Apple car, which sounds to me much like the Apple Newton.
by bluGill | 2025-09-09 21:22:25+00:00
> There is EVERY reason to think that they would do this, besides the data showing that they are. The MO is to find an area, buy up all the local tiny contractors, and set prices higher and higher until those contractors finally fail, then sell off any and all assets for a profit.

That is a goal that makes sense. However that goal has been around for a long time and nobody has been successful, and it is unlikely this current round will be. They can't buy up enough small players to make it work.

Anybody can write a book that sounds good. I've read enough to not trust them. I need more authority than just someone wrote a book that ignores any factor that isn't convenient to their opinion. Note that I have not read that book, and yet I'm 100% confident that they did that - it is a pattern repeated far too often.
by Nition | 2025-09-09 21:22:37+00:00
I remember a coworker getting a Dell Streak Android phone in 2010 and it was enormous. Definitely felt more like a small tablet.

The GSM Arena review is mostly about the confusion of whether it should still be considered a phone at this size. Ultimately they decide it's just too damn big for a phone.[1].

It had a 5" screen.

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/dell_streak-review-531.php
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-09 21:22:43+00:00
The whole family is on iPhone, we use Mac now the way everything integrates together I just dont see myself going back. I spent way more on Android and Windows than I have on Apple products. My Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro chip costs half of what my Surface Book 2 laptop costs, and I can do more on it especially with AI locally.

Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
by Theodores | 2025-09-09 21:22:45+00:00
You have hit the nail on the head.

HN is mostly male. We need the opinion of the women that put a lot of effort into their appearance. Not wishing to over-generalise, but they need a thin phone that takes awesome selfies and shows that they are higher status than those with old fashioned bulky phones. Apple have ticked the boxes and they have probably booked out all the prime advertising spots to reach this demographic.
by musictubes | 2025-09-09 21:22:50+00:00
Steel is too heavy. As they pointed out aluminum is much better at dissipating heat than titanium. Shooting video has always heated phones up. A lot of the video features were aimed directly at actual professional video work so I’m not surprised if preventing throttling was a key goal. Game performance will come along for the ride as well.

They also said that this was the first unibody iPhone. Can titanium be made the same way? The unibody MacBooks are really nice though I’m not sure if the same rigidity issues are at play in such small devices.
by petertodd | 2025-09-09 21:22:59+00:00
> What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils?

Frontline trench warfare, including getting wounded.

A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2. What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history, especially the US. People are more resilient than you'd think, especially when society as a whole has your back.

This isn't Vietnam or Afghanistan. The mission is crystal clear and vital. Every day at 9am all of Ukraine stops to remember the dead. I've seen this first hand. Cars stop, people get out and stand, and they honor what soldiers are doing for them. It makes a big difference.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2025-09-09 21:23:22+00:00
> If you put every email client or every web browser on a single page you’d get a crazy mix too -

And yet how many web browsers are actually well known and used by the average web user?

Safari, chrome and Firefox (if you're lucky).

My point is that if there are too many choices for users then the network effect is lost.
by ghaff | 2025-09-09 21:23:49+00:00
From my experience, even with fairly reasonable commuter rail--if not exactly high-speed--about 10 minutes from my house to the rail station or a fairly long drive into an outlying subway station. Plus some walking. You were close to 2 hours each way with a 6am start at the latest.

Latterly if I went into another company's Boston office it was about the same.