skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s a complex organization.

Personally, Apple hardware (minus the all usb-c MacBooks) and their software interfaces are more useable to me than Android or Linux. If it was easy, Google would have found a better Jony Ive.

There are probably better product designers out there, but to succeed in a big org, it’s also political prowess and story telling ability. Jony Ive is at the top because he’s good at what he does, and that’s not necessarily being a product designer. It’s being Apple’s chief product designer, and that is not the same as being a product designer. His skill is convincing enough decision makers that he is the best chief product designer in the org.

Is material design good? Having worked at Google as an engineer and working extensively with designers, then also attending design school and coming from a family in the creative field, I don’t respect Google design org for their aesthetic sensibility. I have never met a single designer at Google that impressed me with their aesthetic / photographic eye ( arguably a proxy measure for good designers in the same way logical reasoning abilities are for engineers ). The skill set of a Google designer is not that of an artist.

Is creative director Virgil Abloh of Louis Vuitton a good designer? Most people who studied fashion design would say no. But he sells products, and that’s what the Louis Vuitton’s of the world needs. The fashion designers who have the most street cred aren’t the ones leading fashion brands you’ve heard. Michael Kors is a pretty mainstream and commercially successful brand, but he’s a laughing stock among fashion designers. The ones who know how and when to balance commercial and artistic are the ones who rise to the top in our economic system.

Same with mainstream musical artists. It’s not their music abilities, it’s the whole package. Their style, their album art, their public image.

As for whether Apple products are badly designed or not. We don’t know what Apple’s higher level games are. It’s plausible they intentionally alternate back and forth every few years from disappointing to exciting products. Maybe this is the most profit maximizing. A kind of forward looking planned obsolescence or planned disappointed. We wouldn’t be as excited for the latest MacBooks if the prior generation wasn’t a flop. What we know is Apple is a trillion dollar company, and their stock has consistently done well irrespective of bad industrial design.
How do you ride safely on snow and ice, especially around traffic - one skid and the cyclist could be history.
Microsoft Encourages Employees to State Race, Gender During Presentations
It’s a whiptail effect. Shifts in demand and supply cascade and create unpredictable effects.

For example, the rush on toilet paper triggered more production, which reduced pulp supplies, which constrained golf cart supply.

Why? Seats are made from particleboard, made from pulp. Plus, golf courses bought more carts than usual due to lockdown restrictions.
generally i imagine most folks do want to use the gratis/free/included couple channels of memory bandwidth and the 20x channels of pcie.

the x300 said, screw the southbridge expander which i think is legit, a pretension which deserved to be dropped. but yeah i think most will want to just the main memory.

otoh with usb4 and it's mandatory host to host connectivity i am legit hoping we find some kick ass glueless non-coherent connectivity across cores. pcie was very close but the need to have ntb support complicated. my hope is that eith modern usb4 there's no excuse for missing good inter-system connectivity.

but what value that southbridge/chipset provides? very specious.
Also, a lot of suppliers and shipping companies are trying to recoup their covid losses from 2020. They have increased their service costs, which causes the next guy in the chain to increase their costs, etc.
> But I won't be looking for .NET jobs

Have heard this sentiment in more than one comment in places like HN. "The {tech} is great, but the culture was ... so I'm not putting {tech} on my resume". And So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy :). Yet some tech seem immune to this. They don't say "X is great but the culture was crap, so I'm abandoning X", they say "X is great but the culture was crap so I'm changing jobs".

It really drives home that culture is critical, and even the worst tech can be tolerable if it is thought of as cool. Though of course the thought of abandoning ship to learn the latest and greatest solely to avoid legacy C++98/Spring/WebForms/whatever is naturally appealing.
The thing at the bottom is not a York white rose.

The design of the York rose is quite consistent. It isn't merely "a flower with white petals". In particular, these always have five petals; the one at the bottom has six.

Not every white flower is a symbol of York versus Lancaster.
"do not help produce the supply only push up the demand"

Somewhere between 30% and 50% of jobs do not 'produce' anything, they are Starbucks, Macdonalds, etc. They have no bearing on supply of goods and their shortage.

"yet everyone has tons of money furthering pushing up demand"

This was happening at the top of our wconomy for the past 30 years, thata whu the stock market and house valuations have sky rocketed.
Filtering apps like blokada are a start, I would presume
"Business centers" like kinko's, Staples, Office Depot would be my first bet. Also if you have a college near by they probably do that kinda thing all the time. A 511 page pager would probably be incredibly expensive though, yes.

I just chucked it into Fedex's print service and it looks like it's gonna be $250
I do industry R&D. I don’t think I am all that fettered. I do accept that there is a certain “social contract” involved though! I understand my employers business and my work is done with the ambition to advance the companies long term position.

Practically speaking this means that my work is restricted in that it deliver something resembling a product or service within a couple of years. Even if only the thinnest of MVPs of a concept. String enough of those together and you get pretty close to something resembling “unfettered”.

I suppose my point is that industry R&D is not all that bad right now, you just need to be a reasonably responsible corporate citizen.
I have an old USB laser printer that used to have an rpi print server to make it 'networked'. Then I installed an apple airport extreme next to it, and figured I could use the USB port on the airport to network it instead. Which it does, but this only effectively makes it USB-over-IP, which works fine for Windows machines, but most 'modern' devices (phones, tablets, chromebooks) can't talk to it for lack of driver interface. So now the house main RPi server (in another part of the house) acts as a print server (CUPS, mDNS, etc) and flings those packets up to the airport, which sends them to the printer. But works pretty well, despite the seemingly needless complexity.
So here's a thing. Covid can cause neurological damage to the brain's frontal lobe, beyond that implicated by the loss of taste and smell.

Damage to the frontal lobe causes what Neal Stephenson referred to as "poor impulse control". I think the rise in violent incidents on airplanes is linked to this.

Additionally, poor impulse control leads to impulsive spending and purchasing behavior. Compounded by lockdowns and government checks, the situation is that consumers have upped their consumption way beyond their means; but some of this I suspect is neurological as opposed to psychological.

I think wild consumer demand just happens to be right now the most visible part of an iceberg of long lasting brain damage caused by covid, that our society is about to crash into.
It's hard to say how much they were overpaying. If they "overpayed" by 20% - almost certainly someone else was willing to "overpay" by at least 10% if not 15%.

Unless it's a pretty strong buyers market (spoiler: 2020-now wasn't) - you're gonna have a tough time buying a lot of houses and not "overpaying".
I mean that Oracle is even more fantastically expensive, and the SQL Server team wants the charge a comparable amount. They're slowly but surely working up to that level...
"Modern" anything, when the focus is on "modern" and not on state of the art, will tend to produce somewhat radical things that attempt to do something never done before in the field.

These examples of architecture are certainly new, certainly a spinoff from related past designs but with new materials and angles (I'm talking out of my butt a little).

I wouldn't mind a "recession" back into Beaux Arts for government and public buildings, but that isn't going to win "modern" design prizes.
I definitely see what you're referring to happen a lot. Ironically, one thing I also enjoy about HN is reading a questionable article and seeing the top comment be a well thought out take down from someone who seems like a real expert. But it's true the top comment regularly seems to be a (sometimes egregiously wrong) takedown or downplaying.
I totally agree, and I believe that was also the reason why IRC was so successful in F/OSS communities.

Traditional thread-based forums are great for archival but also seem to encourage a full-sized post, which is a conversational barrier by itself and also limits the potential engagement by reducing the number of people willing to reply. It doesn't seem to me that the discouragement of short posts is inherent to forums though, for example traditional South Korean forums had been traditionally evolved from BBS and had a strong dichitomy between posts and comments, so short comments and quick reactions were norms (longer replies are typically posted separately in a post). GitHub issues seem to be somewhere between those different models.
Running my own development service, I usually manage to find unique names for people all the time. If they really need a specific name, it's not always expensive to buy it from certain (legit only) places...

We don't use AWS for most of our solutions, we still use traditional (fixed price) hosting. AWS changed hosting into a utility-based service that can balloon way too fast, and they make TONS of money off of unsuspecting clients, especially government clients. It's wild to see their bills at times for even simple web sites that don't get tons of traffic. On-Prem services are better sometimes, but no-one wants to hear that.
Vashon mystery: How did the bike become embedded in the tree? (2013)
What everyone is going to have a real hard time wrapping their head around for the next few years:

We built a highly efficient economy for a set of behaviors. A shock happened that caused a lot people to change their behaviors (probably for a long time, since they've had 2 years of 'practice').

Our economy, which was built for those old behaviors (living in cities, riding public transit, eating at restaurants, travelling internationally, etc.) is doing a bad job of adapting to new behaviors (Living decentrally, driving more, ordering out more, travelling locally. etc.) because we used to think 'People don't change very fast, we can build a just-in-time economy.'

But here's the thing about cycles, soon things will adapt to those new baselines.

Companies will carry more inventory. (until a new generation of FP&A underlings forgets what a pandemic is)

Not enough steel to make enough cars? Here's my amazing ' Airbnb for cars' startup (Hey Sand Hill, did you know, dollar for dollar, they are the most underutilized asset in the world?).

Natural gas extremely expensive? Let me introduce you to renewables, which btw are getting better and better every year.

It may be a painful few years to navigate that transition, and Bridgewater's (weak) point here is that 'hey, consumers are changing behaviors' and nothing more, which to me is a great reminder why this is happening: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-02/dalio-s-h...
Ironic that everything but Windows works fine with zero setup. iOS is not "UNIX", for example. And because the set-up is onerous but relatively straighforward to someone technical, I'm sure they could easily make it automatic. They just choose not to. God forbid HP makes a few dollars less from their cash cow, or MS engineer gets distracted from rearranging toolbar buttons needlessly for the umpteenth time. Can't have that.
If you want to manage a fleet of these on an Enterprise network/LAN, check out my balenaPrint project: https://www.balena.io/blog/wifi-enable-usb-printers-with-a-r...
Is [this](https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/10/23/experts-say-stat...) the article?
François Viète
Very glad this is mentioned. Form follows function, sure, but it follows capital and construction methods and labor practices. The author would best wonder why this is global, and not look towards solely design trends but construction methods and real estate logics for the answer.
Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness.

I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
...compared to Chief Design Officer at Apple? (2011 $30M salary + $25M stock, not disclosed after that).
Interesting discussion/debate. Broadly speaking, I think a country’s culture/politics shapes attitudes about work, the purpose of a company, etc.

In America at least (no surprise!), branding workplace as family just comes across as disingenuous at worst, and naive at best.

Would love to examples counter examples from America where work-as-family is not complete bullshit.
Obviously it's fine for your business to be a "family" if your business is literally a family. But if I worked for a family-owned business, I would prefer to keep my employment relationship more at arms reach unless I married one of their daughters or something.
So what housing cost metric should be looked at? The cost for a retiree living in their paid off home? The mortgage payment for brand new homeowner with minimal down? The cost to split an apartment for 2 people? What objective measure should be used?
Not necessarily if the money goes to just a few person though.
The man who has lived as a hermit for 40 years
Exactly all the same principles as the real estate market now basically.
That is a really good point.

I also have a pet theory that CPI understates the cost of housing due to people who are pushed out of entering the market altogether (e.g. homelessness rising, people living with parents longer)

Sort of the same way some people say unemployment figures understate the true number by ignoring discouraged workers / people who have stopped looking altogether. I have a hunch there are many discouraged folks who have stopped looking for housing altogether.
Just a warning that this is an article by a hedge fund expressing a view of our current inflationary period that I would argue is heterodox among the economic mainstream. I suggest reading Paul Krugman and Claudia Sahm for dovish views, or Adam Ozimek for a more critical view. In particular, the idea that “inflation expectations” can perpetuate inflation via a self-fulfilling prophecy effect has been called into question lately: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021062pap...
I did this with a Zero W a while ago. It may be a surprise how much slower printing is.
that would be a waste of resources. in my area, it's the cars that need more enforcement. every single day i see multiple cars brazenly running stop signs and sometimes even stop lights. they don't even slow down. that's potentially deadly; not so with bikes.
Fuel would be hard to game. It’s just fuel. Other components are trickier to calculate, like aggregate food prices or things involving hedonic regression. If there is gaming, you’d have to look at the tricky parts.
Also back to the fun colors of the iPod’s later years.

All this brushed silver/gold/black bores me. I am very glad Apple has decided to embrace colors once again.
Why are you immediately assuming racism?
It wasnt that long ago that almost all press coverage of TikTok was negative. As it was pointing to China using it to "hack" our mobile phones and steal our data through the intrusive permissions it supposedly uses.

Given that the press didn't do much to sway people's opinions its now being reported on based on the content it provides rather than the platform itself.
> sluggish performance of a 2015 iMac since practically the day we bought it

I wish I had found this website when my MacBook Pro was still alive, maybe Chrome actually killed it after all. The low performance was so bad I moved to Windows 10 ("the last Windows system" they said), but after it notified my system can be upgraded to 11 I quickly moved to Ubuntu. I'm currently experiencing a few hiccups and reduced them with some memory tweaks, but still the experience is much better than Mac and Windows.
I can't know for sure, but I think person you are replying to meant that in a team lacking diversity (in this particular case, diversity of expertise) all solutions tends to receive same, less than optimal treatment no matter what. If anything, it is insult of managers who create such bubbles, not engineers stuck in these bubbles.
Stone and wood is carved by machines quite easily. Sears used to churn out homes with loads of detail and mail them out wholesale to middle class folks. Those homes are now worth fortunes.

We have terrible architecture for ideological reasons. Flat roofs are not signifincantly cheaper to build than pitched roofs, and far less adept at roofiness, but we got flat roofs from bauhaus philosophy.

As with most modern art, architecture has a fundamentially adversarial relationship with the vast majority of people.
Microsoft was involved with satellite imagery back in the 90’s, so I don’t see how they could have been copying Google.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Maps
Apple’s first computer, a collector’s dream, could fetch $500k at auction
I don't think children, or anybody without a drivers license should be allowed to ride on the road at all.
ePub are packaged HTML/CSS/SVG, and entirely dependent on their changing specs. That's no good for many of PDF's uses. Printers these days can print PDF directly. With ePub they'll eventually need to include an auto-updated version of Chrome? If we want to replace PDF entirely, we need a stable print-oriented format.
Softstop Barrier System – Tunnel Warning System
i think what's missing a functionality that would bring up previous conversations around the same topic. I.e. on stackoverflow you have strict no duplicate policy which forces people to add and update already existing topic. For that to happen user need to know question they have already exists, or a discussion. And then they can catch up, add scenarios and contribute to it. not sure how this could be added to slack tho.
I remember printing it at school on the single dot matrix printer in the computer lab, which took a couple weeks during lunch breaks and after school IIRC. A lot of students were initially upset that I was always in there taking up printer time... until they saw what I was printing, then suddenly everyone wanted me to print them a copy. I also got some extra credit doing a presentation about it in chemistry class. I'm pretty sure our teacher even took one of the less destructive recipes and made something go boom behind protective glass while everyone cheered. The 90s truly were a different era...
Ublue – Fedora Silverblue for Ubuntu Users
Bridgewater would love to show you their content without the modal.

The only problem is, the lawyers who interpret things the US government says, are requiring them to show it.

Unfortunately, the government has decided you're too stupid to critically read words written by an investment firm. Your elected representatives believe you need to be reminded that investment firms might be writing bullshit to try and take your money.

The only problem is, if you're too stupid to use critical thinking when reading words on the internet, you're also not likely to be the type of person who would read a terms & conditions.

Welcome to exciting world of well intentioned but poorly thought-out legislation with hilariously irrational unintended consequences.
I'm old enough to remember people telling me that flash was the future and anyone using HTLM for websites was a loser.
What i learned from this: if you piss off the USA, you can't travel freely and brave your invulnerability. You should be sitting quiet in Russia, which won't extradite you, and not flash your stolen money. Because if you do, your local bandits will find you, and if you don't, the USA will find you.
A stack overflow style seems better than either a forum or a discord

Support requests are usually questions, and QnA based solutions handle questions well, including search based on prior questions
Legacy Train Control System Stabilisation (2012) [pdf]
Outside NYC and Washington, DC, I'd argue that the rot has hit major cities, unless you can name a good US large-city daily outside the NYT, WaPo, and possibly WSJ.

LA Times might possibly qualify. Other than that, I'm stumped.

Any city of < 1m population ... yeah, it's dead.
Ask HN: Why do businesses need to find contractors/ freelancers?
What are the reasons for businesses to find contractors/ freelancers?
I scrolled down looking for someone mentioning Ctrl-R. I rarely write down shell command lines, even very complex ones, since I usually can quickly (very quickly) access them from my shell history with just a few keystrokes after Ctrl-R. It is the single most useful and important tool in my shell toolbox.

It also obviates the need for many scripts and aliases I would otherwise write: Command lines can be (practically) arbitrarily long, and zsh at least has good multiline edit functionality (including just spawning an editor if you really need to). So there's a lot of "impromptu scripts", sometimes with different variations, in my shell's history.

Some other features I would not want to miss (one from zsh, the other also available in bash, I think), albeit less critical:

1. Alt-. (Alt dot) immediately recalls the last argument passed to the last command line. I use this very very often. "mkdir long_name" followed by "cd long_name" is just one example.

2. Alt-q makes the currently typed command line disappear. But the next time you press enter to get a new prompt, even if you have entered a different command line, it will reappear. Super useful if you remember that you want to do something else before completing your command, without opening another terminal (some things like changing the current directory or env variables can't even be done in another terminal). This can even be done multiple times, it's a stack.

Both need Alt behaving as "Meta" (a checkbox in macOS's Terminal.app for example), otherwise you can still type "ESC" followed by "." or "q", but that's two separate keystrokes.
I can live with many things, but no generics in 2021? Over my dead body!
What's the point of encrypting SSN's? There's only a billion naive permutations..much less if you eliminate "impossible" ones like the SSN prefixes reserved for children of railroad workers. Even if you add a unique salt for each account, brute forcing the hashes wouldn't take very long, assuming the salt was leaked (and most of the time the salt for each account would be in these dumps).

Brute forcing this order of difficulty was considered "done" around 2014 for SHA-1. I suppose you could add enormous number of recursive hashes or an immensely expensive parameter selection for bcrypt. But I feel most realworld implementations of hashed SSN would be only little better than plaintext.
Am I seeing this right, that the contacts underneath the plastic housing for the chip are patterned like the Raspberry Pi logo?