MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iamwil | 2025-10-05 06:40:22+00:00
Despite trying to instill a customer-centric culture, as soon as Bezos let his foot off the gas, his company just isn't as customer obsessed. Or, they changed their definition of customer from the buyer to the seller.

I dramatically lowered my buying from Amazon about 8 years ago, when I noticed that listings had reviews on items that were completely different than what was being listed. Apparently, sellers sell a known good product that gets good reviews, and then swap it out for something else, so that the new product can piggy back off of the good karma. Amazon just didn't shut this down for years. Also, when Fulfillment services by Amazon mixed the the official provider's inventory with 3rd party distributors and reseller inventories. Sometimes, people would get knock-offs. I knew then, Amazon would coast for at least a decade before the decline would be apparent.

I thought I'd buy more Shopify stock as a result. Dunno if I ever did.
by axiolite | 2025-10-05 06:40:42+00:00
Brother has clearly denied these claims:

"Brother printers do not intentionally degrade print quality based on whether a Brother Genuine or third-party ink/ toner cartridge is used."

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/06/brother_firmware_upda...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using...
by muhdeeb | 2025-10-05 06:40:52+00:00
Huh. That's an interesting possible metric. How many competing tendencies in a space? It a good question and one that's been asked before.

I wonder how machine learnability compares to other measures of chaotic structure, like multi-fractal approaches etc. I wouldn't be that surprised if it's accidentally the same or quite similar to some of the existing metrics.
by schmorptron | 2025-10-05 06:41:37+00:00
Oh wow, I would not have caught that. I had a look at the first couple of pages, and as not-a-C-expert, it looked pretty solid to me. Readjusting our heuristics to generated slop (or even non-slop?) is gonna take so much more energy than before.

Although I've also been thinking about the overall role of effort in products, art, or any output really. Necessary effort to produce something is / was at least some indicator of quality that means that the author spent a certain amount of time with the material, and probably didn't want to release something bad if it meant they had to put a certain threshold of effort in anyways. With that gone, of course some people are gonna get their productivity enhanced and use this tool to make even better things, more often. But having to expend even more engery as a consumer to find out whether something is worth it is incredibly hard.
by timschmidt | 2025-10-05 06:46:03+00:00
> There's a mechanism Dan can use to push for engineering decisions to be reviewed - he didn't do that.

This is the retort of every bureaucracy which fails to do the right thing, and signals to observers that procedure is being used to overrule engineering best practices. FYI.

I'm thankful for the work djb has put in to these complaints, as well as his attempts to work through process, successful or not, as otherwise I wouldn't be aware of these dangerous developments.

Excuses of any kind ring hollow in the presence of historical context around NSA and encryption standardization, and the engineering realities.
by alexdbird | 2025-10-05 06:46:33+00:00
Indeed they do, as they did 25 years, in OS 9.

And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete - on a full size keyboard. And you can type all those things easily using the meta keys and cursors on the bottom row anyway. And why would screenshot need its own meta key in 2025, with so many ways to screenshot or record. But I digress.
by shakna | 2025-10-05 06:48:45+00:00
I've never heard of the phrase requiring having a near-universal agreement before.

And I wouldn't say that's a widely held definition. For example:

> The red line, or "to cross the red line", is a phrase used worldwide to mean a figurative point of no return or line in the sand, or "the fastest, farthest, or highest point or degree considered safe." [0]

If adopting these practices means they stick around and people will always argue for bringing them back if we stop... We've crossed the point of no return.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_line_(phrase)
by submeta | 2025-10-05 06:49:33+00:00
What bothers me more is Amazon limits the products you can see. When you search for a product type (say a USB Hub), it will show you constantly the same set of products. While you scroll, it repeats the products that are sponsored, sprinkling them here and there, and the mindless customer scrolls search results, seeing only the limited number of products Amazon wants to show you. Finally you‘ll order the one with the highest number of stars.

This is not a neutral listening of all available products. Although Amazon proposes has and knows all sorts of products. It will push the ones right in your face that it wants to promote.

So if you are into a purchase, do your research on other platforms first before you order on Amazon.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-05 06:50:16+00:00
This is an unfortunate reality. C++ has evolved into a language capable of a surprisingly deep compile-time verification but almost no one uses that capability. It reflects somewhat negatively on the C++ developer community that problems easily solved within the language are routinely not solved, though the obsession with backward compatibility with old versions of the language plays a role. If you fully leverage it, I would argue that recent versions of C++ are actually the safest systems language. Nonetheless, almost no one has seen code bases that leverage that verification capability to its maximum. Most people have no clue what it is capable of.

There is the wisdom that it is impossible to deliver C++ without pervasive safety issues, for which there are many examples, and on the other hand there are people delivering C++ in high-assurance environments with extremely low defect rates without heroic efforts. Many stories can be written in that gap. C++ can verify many things that are not verifiable in Rust, even though almost no one does.

It mostly isn’t worth the argument. For me, C++20 reached the threshold where it is practical to design code where large parts can be formally verified in multiple ways. That’s great, this has proven to be robust in practice. At the same time, there is an almost complete absence of such practice in the C++ literature and zeitgeist. These things aren’t that complex, the language users are in some sense failing the language.

The ability to codegen situationally specific numeric types is just scratching the surface. You can verify far weirder situational properties than numeric bounds if you want to. I’m always surprised by how few people do.

I used to be a C++ hater. Modern C++ brought me back almost purely because it allows rich compile-time verification of correctness. C++11 was limited but C++20 is like a different world.
by whateveracct | 2025-10-05 06:50:34+00:00
Maybe it's because I'm in WA, but my average Amazon deliver is <2 days. This "2-day shipping is now 5+ day shipping" is just outright untrue out here. I usually get stuff next day, free. Although I also do Amazon Day for that extra cashback on my card. That card has paid a mortgage payment or two since I got it a couple years ago.

And I still haven't gotten a single fraudulent item despite a steady stream of Amazon boxes to my house (I requested an extra recycle bin I get so many.)
by timschmidt | 2025-10-05 06:50:58+00:00
I agree that the article starts out needlessly inflammatory. There are big egos in Science, as in all other endeavors, and folks can get reactionary and arguments heated. "Science advances one death at a time" after all.

That said, further down the article, there is some legitimate discussion about alternatives and even mention that "Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability."

I can't say whether an impact happened for certain or not. I await further evidence. But I do think that the hypothesis is plausible and it's clear from the Chicxulub impact that meteors can have disastrous impact on global ecology.
by raffraffraff | 2025-10-05 06:52:11+00:00
Indeed. But still, there must be some sort of "credit score" behind these devices. It can't just give money to a vendor. It must be based on some prior amount agreed between Garmin Pay and the bank or card provider.

Take a debit card for example. It's connected to a bank account, and cannot give credit. Garmin must be taking some of the risk on board, since the bank or card provider do not.

There's also the fact that anecdotally people are reporting different spend limits. On a thread I saw one person claim that £30 was their limit and another saying "My largest payment so far on the watch has been £275"
by searine | 2025-10-05 06:53:00+00:00
>Difficulty is not value. Extremely talented people are doing arbitrary waste work.

Grants are hard, not because of admin/paperwork, but because coming up with a novel idea is hard and convincing others to fund it is harder.

The people leading the grants are the ones creating and guiding the ideas. They set the agenda.

A tech CEO doesn't spend their days coding minor bug fixes, in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work. They are leaders, who are occupied getting funding and setting the direction.

>Did you miss the comment we are replying to? The existing oversight is ineffective. It’s just a hoop for the professor to jump through.

It's not ineffective though, and an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.

>Personal communication is not systematic public reporting.

You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.

>There is public info - but it’s a facade. It’s constructed with the goal of appeasing the public requirements.

Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.

>Also professors tend to use a two job approach: stuff they like, and stuff that’s important for their career.

Wrong. Every PI I know does the stuff they like, and they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.

>I actually lived it, so thanks for your understanding and consideration.

You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".

>yes you are buying into (or actively promoting) anti-intellectualism. >Name calling.

Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.
by ggm | 2025-10-05 06:53:34+00:00
I enjoy kindles because i can adjust point size.

I don't miss paper, and I don't worry about the length of the written word.

I do find my concentration has lapsed somewhat, I read in small chunks but I do read to the end. Mostly.

What I want is >600dpi e-ink. We've been stuck in 200dpi for a long time. And I would prefer a form factor closer to classic paperback. Boox may come close. Colour boox is 160dpi so is worse, and I'm told the contrast isn't great. Kindles are crap at illustrations.

For context, I grew up in an academic household in the 60s and 70s with over 10,000 books of all kinds, and I married a bookseller and we had 5,000 or so at home until the last decade when we downsized. We now have a few hundred kept for sentimental reasons, under 1,000. We both almost exclusively read kindles. Old eyes prefer larger font.
by zargon | 2025-10-05 06:54:08+00:00
> Or, they changed their definition of customer from the buyer to the seller.

s/seller/shareholder/

I almost never buy from Amazon any more. For certain things it is difficult because Amazon has destroyed so much logistics and has such a stranglehold that a lot small/medium sized companies only sell through Amazon now. I ordered some kitchen gadget a few months ago from the company's own website, thinking I was avoiding Amazon, and it was delivered by an Amazon driver.
by o11c | 2025-10-05 06:54:38+00:00
If it fails to load the CSS entirely, it's not this, just general network problems.

Truncation "shouldn't" be common, because chunking is very common for mainstream web servers (and clients of course). And TLS is supposed to explicit protect against this regardless of HTTP.

OTOH, especially behind proxies there are a lot of very minimal HTTP implementations. And, for one reason or another, it is fairly common to visibly see truncation for images and occasionally for HTML too.
by wtallis | 2025-10-05 06:55:02+00:00
I've learned to be wary, too. Most desktop motherboard these days have several fan headers just above the memory slots. They also frequently use DIMM slots that only have one latching lever, usually at the top of the slot near the fan headers. So when you're trying to remove a memory module, if you use slightly too much force and your finger keeps moving after the latch opens up all the way, you get a deep puncture wound.

The headers on the keyboard look like they'd be easier to hit accidentally, but probably not with enough force to cause a serious injury. I'd still prefer having some covers over them.
Show HN: OpenAI plans global data center expansion
by techyquantum | 2025-10-05 06:55:26+00:00
I wrote a detailed analysis of how OpenAI is expanding its infrastructure globally, securing funding, and forging partnerships with chipmakers in Asia & the Middle East. https://techyquantum.com/openai-infrastructure-expansion-glo... Would love feedback on the technical & strategic aspects.
by alexdbird | 2025-10-05 06:56:20+00:00
> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa.

Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to the beginning/end of the current line, whereas Ctrl-a/e follow wrapped text.
by quantummagic | 2025-10-05 06:57:52+00:00
It may be that it's area, or customer specific, but Amazon is still great here. I'm ordering a computer overnight, so I hope I don't eat my praise on this one, lol. As a household we spend several thousand a month on average, so maybe we get put in the "keep-em-happy" file? One thing is, we only order if it ships from Amazon; never with someone who handles their own shipping.
by octo888 | 2025-10-05 06:59:08+00:00
> Aren't the English already forced to give cops their phone passwords and face jail time if they refuse to?

Similar to France too right?:

> The French Court of Cassation has ruled that people who are suspected or accused of a crime are obliged to reveal the passcode of their mobile phone to the investigative authorities. The Court found that a mobile phone passcode can be considered a “secret decryption agreement of a means of cryptology” (convention de déchiffrement d’un moyen de cryptologie). Refusing to hand over the passcode of a mobile phone is punishable by a fine of up to 270,000 EUR or three years’ imprisonment

https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/news/french-court-rules-...
by ggm | 2025-10-05 06:59:32+00:00
"Daedalus"- who did the back pages of New Scientist, is said to have got the UK patent office to issue a patent for an entirely passive metro system based on this theory.

I believe it was a protest against beaurocracy, and to prove a point about it being illegal to patent perpetual motion machines. It wasn't (a perpetual motion machine) but it was based off "free energy" -it comes to a halt eventually.
by isodev | 2025-10-05 07:00:57+00:00
It’s amazing how today we have social networks bending backwards to be able to call themselves “open” and “decentralised” when we already have all the tools we need to be truly independent.

I think when we’re building something with “good UX” the major point of “does this remove agency from users” is somehow missing from the picture. When everything runs on some kind of system, it’s not extraordinary to expect people to know how it works and maybe be able to do it themselves.

Otherwise, fast forward a decade of simplifications, and we can’t even install an app without someone on the other side of the world approving the “transaction”.
by mjg59 | 2025-10-05 07:01:45+00:00
Hey, look, you're free to read the mailing list archives and observe that every issue Dan raised was discussed at the time, he just disagreed with the conclusions reached. He made a complaint to the ADs, who observed that he was using an email address with an autoresponder that asserted people may have to pay him $250 for him to read their email, and they (entirely justifiably) decided not to do that. Dan raised the issue to the next level up, who concluded that the ADs had behaved entirely reasonably in this respect and didn't comment on the engineering issues because it's not their job to in this context.

It's not a board's job to handle every engineering complaint themselves, simply because they are rarely the best suited people to handle engineering complaints. When something is raised to them it's a matter of determining whether the people whose job it is to make those decisions did so appropriately, and to facilitate review if necessary. In this case the entire procedural issue is clear - Dan didn't raise a complaint in the appropriate manner, there's still time for him to do so, there's no problem, and all the other complaints he made about the behaviour of the ADs were invalid.
by lkey | 2025-10-05 07:02:31+00:00
No, there's no conspiracy here. Ezra's probably a true believer, which I think is sadder honestly.

There is no coordination besides shared interest in protecting capital, same as it ever was. Shared 'class interest' and 'class solidarity' if you like. Though some of these folks are probably in weird passive aggressive and catty group chats these days, like Andresson and Thiel.

It is not a conspiracy to look at the super-pacs funding candidates with weird positions either. The transfers of cash are pretty open in our second gilded age.

These 'third way' institutes and movements pop up every decade or so if you are paying attention. The literal 'Third Way' and 'Tea Party' movements were funded directly by some of these 'abundance' groups. But there's no 'shadowy cabal' or secret. They are open about their desires, and rely on marketing to paper over the obvious.

Manufacturing consent for union breaking in Cali (Ezra didn't outright say it, but Josh Barro did) is clearly in their interest. It's also clear from many of them comments here like: 'I don't care who profits as long as there are suddenly houses' that show the 'abundance' gambit is succeeding.

And to be clear, I'm not against the message 'build more housing', but these are not people you should trust. They need to prove they are serious. Their track record tells me they will bait, switch, and act as spoilers.

Don't take just my word for it though! When they don't accomplish or even push for what they originally claimed their core goals are, remember this conversation.
by yread | 2025-10-05 07:02:52+00:00
I think that DATAS also has more knobs to tune it than the old GC. I plan to set the Throughput Cost Percentage (TCP) via System.GC.DTargetTCP to some low value so that is has little impact on latency.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/runtime-config...
by lurk2 | 2025-10-05 07:03:43+00:00
Why do you believe the alt-right was Canadian in origin? I was under the impression that it originated in the US.

Tangentially, none of them call themselves “alt-right” anymore; this label was imposed upon three disparate movements (techno-commercialists, ethno-nationalists, and theonomists), rather than one that emerged organically. It was never a particularly popular label on /pol/ or Frog Twitter, for example.
by dwedge | 2025-10-05 07:03:54+00:00
I bought a $120 book from Amazon a couple of months ago, internationally, and they sent the wrong book.

I told them, and they said they'd refund it, don't need to send it back, and they'd even add $15 credit.

The refund never arrived so a few weeks later I got in touch again and they said I need to send it back if I want a refund. They told me the previous CSR had lied to improve ratings. I asked who I can complain to and they said nobody and closed the chat. I reopened it, restarted the refund, it was accepted and then 2 hours later I got an email saying that unless I sent them ID my refund would be rejected and that I can "no longer contact them" about this refund. I ignored that email, sent the book back and got the refund.

Another time I bought a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon and they said they'll refund it under warranty. I sent it back and got a warning that if I return anything else in "non original condition" I'd be banned. Even though it was a warranty return.

That level of service would have been totally unheard of for Amazon 5 years ago.
by nosianu | 2025-10-05 07:05:06+00:00
Yes, they chose their genes and the structure of their brain after all, how irresponsible of them! /s

In general, something that happens at scale and consistently is not an individual problem.

You have whole armies of very well funded designers of things like processed food, or games, working to deliberate find the faults in human brains, and to make politicians make the laws that lets them do it legally, and you say it's the fault of the individual that falls for it?
by wtallis | 2025-10-05 07:05:10+00:00
With regards to latency: reaction time is the wrong thing to compare against, since input latency can be noticeable even when it is much smaller than a human's reaction time. And wanting to have your keyboard latency be no worse than 1ms can make sense given that it's only one of many components of the total input latency of a computer. Reducing mouse or keyboard latency from 8ms (125Hz) to 1ms (1000Hz) is pretty much the low-hanging fruit; it's not as cheap or easy to squeeze 7ms out of the other parts of the chain.
by monkeyelite | 2025-10-05 07:05:14+00:00
> convincing others to fund it is harder.

Yes, we are in agreement. That's why promoters are so valuable.

> in the same way a PI doesn't spend their days doing lab work.

This large workforce of Phd's protecting the time of the PI also represents a massive allocation of young intelligent talent, and that's part of my concern.

> an excess of PhDs is not a collapse, it is a boon.

It's difficult to talk about demand for required credentials. A large percentage is foreigners securing visas to work in the US.

> You have absolutely no clue how much public reporting is involved in grants. Just a complete ignorant comment right here.

> Conspiracy bullshit. Take your meds.

I think researchers put a great deal of care into public reporting. And I think they use their intellect to construct a story conducive to their careers. Who doesn't?

I am aware of researchers who use a technique where they get funding for a project that is basically finished, and use the funds for more speculative research. TTheir sources of funding expect more predictability than they can realistically provide. Wouldn't you say that represents a gap in the public's visibility?

> Every PI I know does the stuff they like

I don't doubt they are passionate and driven. I'm saying something different. When you are in the thick of establishing yourself you have to care more about what system cares about (this is maybe your situation?), and modern competition makes this all encompassing. But the book they write in sabbatical tends to look different than their official title.

> they get it well funded, because they are the best in the world at what they do.

How would we falsify this statement?

> You post about tech and programming and call yourself a "software engineer".

PhD to software engineer is a common career path.

> Good. You should feel ashamed for the way you are acting.

Name calling doesn't sound intellectual to me. I choose not to reciprocate.

EDIT: to focus on my personal beliefs and not yours.