skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's definitely broken for one-off reports, but in the last beta period (for iOS/iPadOS 15), they actually made some changes. There are user visible "Resolution" and "Recent similar reports" fields. I actually submitted a few feedbacks and saw them change from "Recent similar reports: none" to "Recent similar reports: more than 10" and then "Resolution" actually did change to "fixed in an upcoming release of iOS". At least two feedbacks I submitted got responses to them, which actually got me an email asking for more information on one.

I don't think the system is perfect by any stretch. But it definitely has improved, and Apple does read them. The catch is that for esoteric issues -- especially ones that say "Recent similar reports: none", publicizing them and asking people to submit feedback if they can reproduce the issue will likely help prioritize it.

Esoteric crashes /are/ harder to diagnose. Minority issues are also lower on the totem pole for any org. I don't want to excuse Apple here -- it does suck, and it does need to keep improving, but last beta round was seriously an improvement over the past.
Because it raises the barrier to entry and probably has a serious impact on the number of issues raised.
Learn to dance.
What do you think the next big thing it? What product segments and companies look really promising?
You know what has the same, and even sometimes better, precision, requires no batteries, lasts a life time, and is usually a lot cheaper? Classic analog vernier slide calipers. You really don't need anything that fancy the get some exceptionally precise measurements.
> BTW I have met Apple engineers who write things. Important things, like the TCP/IP stack for the iPhone.

Doesn't the iPhone, like other Apple products use the FreeBSD networking stack?
Everyone gets upset when Amazon sells imitation products, but then when Instagram tries to do due diligence to make sure its products aren’t fake, they get upset about that too. They just can’t win, can they?
Maybe the best way to do this is to simply befriend an apple engineer? Admittedly this limits the option only to people who work near Apple buildings
Modern HDDs have gotten somewhat better
so what’s on your wishlist right now?
Just got off a plane. My current setup is a 45 liter backpack with adjustable straps so I can compress it when not using the full capacity + a 25 liter NF backpack, which carries my electronics and also serves as a day pack for long hikes or walks through the city.

My 45 liter is max carry on. There's nothing like being able to just exit the plane and not worry about standing by a conveyor belt for 20 minutes waiting for luggage.
> > Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents.

Bad at picking products and life partners.
Even I can solve it at home, I can't do that during interview.
Burglary Statistics
Well...yes. I think we're mostly in agreement that these arguments are meaningless because they can always be created, for every thing.

So the next time you hear an argument that falls into 1 of these 3 buckets, be skeptical both ways (for & against) because the mere presence of criticism can't be evidence of anything.
The flip side of this - is that service techs are by their nature biased to failures. They don't come out to the machines that are working. This is an issue for top-selling items where they may see a lot of service calls but the overall rate is lower than something they see less frequently. In my experience I have known few technicians that have the statistical smarts to account for this.
>Facebook is a net negative for society

Bold claim, Cotton. I personally have a hard time imagining a world where if Facebook didn't exist, something like it wouldn't either. There were plenty of companies vying for the same idea. Or is the suggestion that all usage of the internet to allow people to connect with each other are bad.
> You wouldn’t have an Electron app on iOS anyways.

You're missing the forest for the trees. The issue is not building an app specifically with Electron, but building an app which requires a browser. The browser is expensive in terms of resource usage, which results in less battery life.

Using a browser is OK for an app intended for a light usage session (like booking a flight). But not OK for an app which is intended for heavy usage sessions (like browsing pictures in an infinite timeline).

There's a reason Slack (which already has a reputation of impacting your battery life) decided to create a native app for mobile instead of using an Electron-like framework like Capacitor[1].

[1]: https://capacitorjs.com/
Aka native advertising.
I don't think the problem is intractable, but I also don't think the problem is going to be fixed very soon. It's like google. I doubt any googlers here like it when people use "complain on HN" to fix "my account was locked" stuffups. The bottom line is that with 125,000 employees for 1.5 billion users, they don't have much choice unless people pay. (I paid for google one in part to have at least SOME paid access to helpdesk and so far, they've been very nice)

Apple is very focussed on profit. There often is very little profit in this space and the more time it sucks to decide #WONTFIX the more it cost you. In that model, which is not a good model, but in that model, doing less engagement pays back better if you make really really good product with low overall bug/problems.

For more normal people making normal things, its suicidally bad. Ignore your customers at your peril.
I didn’t see any mention of an important one for me. Size. Many of the higher quality webcams are massive. I actually had to buy a shitty webcam to find one that was a size I was happy with. I take my desk aesthetic really serious to me so that was a big reason I returned all my webcams.
This is why I hate Audible and have never been tempted by their many attempts at entangling me in with their endless 'trials'. By comparison, Downpour.com had an easy on/off function for the monthly fees and the credits remain active for up to a year, with a prior warning, for one to use even after canceling the monthly subscription. Edit: also like the fact that the audio books are drm-free/downloadable and I am not beholden to their app to listen to them.
I would love to look at Mullvad. Every time I try to connect to their website using Firefox 101 it fails with Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG. Is anyone else experiencing this?
> I often wonder how Apple can keep posting these quarterly results of a gazillion dollars and still not reply to my Feedbacks for months or years - of things that are very clearly broken!

I mean, you said it yourself:

> I‘m paying them ca 2k per year in hardware costs.

Despite the fact Apple hasn't responded in years, you still pay them 2k a year. Companies exist to make a profit, and Apple has seemingly correctly identified that they can skimp on this area and people will still send them money.
I understand the point. The point doesn't matter.

Air purifiers operate on a fraction of available air. That air supply is continually being cycled, refreshed and mixed. Particulate matter within that air is not evenly dispersed.

That, for a single minute, as a percentage of total air, a 99.5% and a 99.95% purifier produce a minor difference in total air quality is deeply irrelevant to the overall performance of the purifier over any length of time. The 10x difference, however, will matter over time.

This is why the tests, which the author dismissed without any reasoning beyond "looks wrong!", in the original WireCutter article showed such stark differences between the performance of the Förnuftig and the Levoit Core 300, over a 30 minute span.

If you were correct, over those 30 minutes, the amount of particulate in the test room would have been roughly equal for both purifiers. It wasn't. The Förnuftig removed only 64.5% of the particulate while the Levoit removed 97.4%.

Can you point to a test which shows dramatically different results than the ones the WireCutter reported?
> Yes but that requires a majority to want to abolish said LVT, whereas the majority would stand to benefit from an LVT as close to 100% (of economic rent) as possible.

I mean as close to 100% is probably like maybe 4-5% at most, if the LVT on the land and the property tax on the structure were added up to that going by this Strongtown article someone linked me somewhere in this comment chain about how some PA towns have done it.

I think you’re reading me and getting the wrong idea about what it is I’m arguing against. LVT’s as a tax are okay in lieu of other taxes, provided they’re in lieu of other taxes and also the rate is not set arbitrarily high to accomplish nebulous other social goals. That last part is requirement for every sort of tax, and excessive government revenue should dollar for dollar be returned to the people it was levied from.
Forcing multiple-unit pricing likely increases sales. You probably came to the purchase page just needing one. But you’re probably 𝖽̶𝖾̶𝗌̶𝗉̶𝖾̶𝗋̶𝖺̶𝗍̶𝖾̶ motivated enough to pay extra for a bundle of two if you have to! You’ll justify it by telling yourself “I might need the second one later”, but I’ll bet a lot of them end up going unused.

Raising the entry price slightly perhaps also makes people think a little harder about whether they really need to use a TSI or whether other support channels (Stack Overflow? Reddit?) might be more appropriate.
I too snickered at that reply. Then I scrolled, and found his answer adequate.

This doesn't mean that exploitation of women as unpaid labor is fake, it's _extremely_ rare. But, on the other hand, it's not inconsistent for someone suggesting _relying on your community_ to, you know, _accept help from said community_.

The issue with the unpaid labor of women isn't that we're helping our families, or even that we're not receiving monetary remuneration - it's that it's frequently non-consensual (in the sense that there's no safe possibility to refuse) and without any respect for women's agency.

And, you know - thinking about that this way - it's not like I never proofread a friend's manuscript. It's an interesting, and on many levels enjoyable activity. It's also a quite personal, even intimate, way of helping a friend.
Why? It seems fine to me. I don't even know how a design for a card could be good or bad. It's just a print.
Watch and discover the world with hundreds of different webcams. Beautiful places, the most famous cities and areas with current informations about temperature, wind and humidity.
If you are using someone else’s work for free, then what’s there to complain?
>>I'm sure it's a long-observed correlation, but corporate anti-union sentiment could easily explain much if not all of that effect.

I recommend you look at the literature. There's been a lot of good studies on this and it shows that there is a causative link as far as one can be uncovered in any social science.

And if there is such strong anti-union sentiment among corporations that means unions are not good for shareholders and that means that unionization is going to reduce shareholder profits which is invariably going to have the effect of reducing investment.
What a terrible analogy. You are saying it’s as easy to move to the US from other countries as changing your phone?
I was looking at a home with property on the central coast, inland a bit. The gentleman had spent the last 20 years building his own little subdivision. He had 10 or so homesites of 1 acre with modular homes on poured foundations. He told me that he would never do it over again. He told me a story about how he was required by law to build an affordable unit for every however many traditional units, so he had to build one. The problem was that the county also said that the maximum acreage for an affordable unit was .5 acres, but the minimum acreage for a septic system was 1 acre. There is no overlap in that venn diagram. So he was stuck there for a while, then the local government organized a meet and greet where he could meet the folks in local government in that county and tell them his troubles with getting his subdivision built. The guy in charge of the affordable housing laws was on one side of him at the table, the septic guy on the other. In that moment each of those men discovered that the venn diagrams did not overlap. Those two functions of government had never talked, and didn't even known that their regulations were mutually exclusive.

He said it was a lot of that kind of stuff.

What I learned from that whole interaction- don't develop property in California.
This is a false dichotomy.

Working in a private room in a coworking space with random strangers is not the same as working in an office where everyone is working for the same company.

You may believe that there is absolutely no benefit to being physically collocated with your colleagues, and you may even be right, it’s quite obviously a very different option from the only 2 you’ve presented (work at home/work in a coworking space with random people).
Dan, I don't see the GP flaming anyone. Compare that to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820486 where the commenter impugns the motives of those who disagree, which is clearly against site guidelines. Is the GP comment dead because of a breach of the rules, or because it expresses a position that is not allowed to be held?

If there are opinions or positions that are not permitted on HN, it would be helpful to know what they are.
They could permanently lose every customer who has ever sent them a Feedback and the CFO wouldn’t even notice
Impressively small and trade-offs seem pretty reasonable. (namely lack of runtime parser, minimal built-ins).

Initially thought the lack of built-ins would be annoying but it looks very easy to simply "re-implement" them given how easy the C-interop is to use.

JS isn't my favourite but with such a small VM implementing what is a fundamentally a very modern scripting language I would be tempted to use it on my next embedded project.

The other seemly killer feature from my perspective is ability to snapshot the VM state to stable storage and resume on reboot rather than start from new execution context.
Odd story about MapBox, we used to be a customer, and their product was very solid so we were happy but we were using it in a 3d engine which was causing loads of map requests driving up the costs. We only had a couple users and the bills were already in the hundreds per month. So I contacted them to see if we could come to some sort of agreement. The person who replied had a familiar name, I didn't remember where I'd heard that name before so I googled it, and it turned out he was one of the 3 kids that sexually assaulted a drunk girl during a spring break. Even though their abhorrent behavior was caught on video and presented as evidence they got away with less than a slap on the wrist, and the girl suffered emotional trauma and dropped out of university.

Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.
> there's an explicit description of how one state transitions to the next. That's part of the definition of the Turing machine!

A Turing machine does indeed describe which states the machine transitions between (by its definition). So, it might say that if it reads a "1" and is in state "A", transition to state "B".

However, crucially, a Turing machine does not specify the physical mechanism by which this state transition occurs. You just have to enumerate the rules for state transitions. The definition of a Turing machine says nothing about whether or not these states are voltages, the locations of rocks, or the magnetic moments of iron atoms. Nor does it say whether the transition is being implemented by a CPU or a human being manipulating rocks.

So the only rigorous way you can make a connection to a physical computer is to just identify a mapping from physical states to Turing machine states, and observe whether or not it performs all the state transitions correctly. If it reads a "1" and is in state "A", did it go to state "B"? If it did, it is behaving as a Turing machine. If it did not, it is not behaving as a Turing machine.

> At that point you could certainly argue that the computation is really happening in the mapping itself.

The mapping is fixed, so I don't see how it can do any computation. Others have objected to the fact that the mapping in the iron bar is obviously extremely complicated, but this strikes me as ultimately being an objection that this doesn't "feel" like computing.

But as a counterexample, you can do computations under homomorphic encryption. Suppose you have encrypted a computer program that sorts a list using homomorphic encryption. You hand it to me to run on my CPU. When I observe the voltages of the CPU, they will appear completely random to me. Only if I have the key can I provide the correct (complicated) mapping from physical states to Turing machine states and interpret what is going on on the CPU. But if we reject "complicated" mappings as not being "real" computations, then you're forced to say that computation under homomorphic encryption isn't "really" computation --- even though you've handed me a program to sort a list, it ran on my machine, and it handed you back a sorted list.
> these must be aligned between the client and server

looooool

(Seriously, though, could someone tell me why this was supposed to make sense?)
>The main problem is that the attending doesn't have a good way to filtering the noise from the signal.

Even if you could filter the noise; there's still a non-zero chance it won't get prioritized. I imagine in Apple's case you could have very real bug reports that only affect 500,000 people and they can't allocate time to fix this. I think there's a tendency to anthropomorphize companies (and OSS projects) as an all knowing person who can fix every problem and has infinite time. In reality there might be 10 people (or in OSS, just 1 person) in the company uniquely capable of triaging your issue in under an hour. The rest would be just as lost as you would be in a new code base and they have to weigh fixing your bug report vs the other opportunities they have (and I'm sure at Apple, closing Radar tickets wont get you promoted).

At least in OSS you can dive in yourself.
Careful! I used BTC and the processing time was absurdly long.
Many people don't realize how broad a category 'traumatic brain injury' is. When many people hear the phrase, they imagine that it basically just includes physical injuries resulting from bike accidents or car crashes. But in addition to these types of accidents, TBI also includes strokes, which make up almost half of all TBIs. [1] Since most people understand that strokes are fairly common, realizing that strokes are a subset of TBIs allows them to better understand how common TBIs are.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm
XKCD was ahead of you by a decade: https://xkcd.com/806/
ProseMirror has some of the worst developer experience possible. I wasted so much time figuring out it’s convoluted API and abandoned it soon after.

It does apparently have the best live editing / collaboration features of all text editors out there.
From my perspective as what you might call a super-senior, I find this process itself a giant red flag. It is aimed towards recruiting juniors.

I have done enough contracting that before you have finished the sentence, I have already worked out in my head the opportunity cost of 4 non-billable hours. And in return I get.... nothing. Now while it is true that 4 hours of on-site talking to people is still 4 hours out of my life, but at least then I get to meet the people I would be working with and have an opportunity to ask about the company. And you are showing respect for my time by spending your time getting to know me.

And what do you learn from a 4 hour homework assignment that any undergrad should be able to complete, when you can see from my resume multiple L5/L6 positions at different companies? Nothing at all about what you want a senior to actually do. The senior you need is the person who can mentor the juniors through a 4-month long (not 4 hour long) project. Review their architecture, guide it in wise directions. Review their code. Raise the bar on unit testing. Teach the entire organization about better validation methodologies. Create realistic schedules and rational work-streams. Evaluate new technologies.

As a candidate, my interpretation of your process is that I would be working for management that can't think about problems from first principals. You can't hire a senior because you aren't looking for a senior because, as evidenced by your process, you don't know what a senior does.

The first thing you need to do is articulate to yourself what you want a senior to bring to your organization. Structure your interview process to try to uncover those skills and behaviors in a candidate.
> People like you are just pushing back so vehemently because it's popular to hate on crypto and NFTs right now.

And people like you hop into threads pushing your ideas forwards _so vehemently_ without disclosing your financial interest and involvement.
If you're not able to see Google's potential as a threat to the internet I don't think I'll be able to help you see that. I'll say Google owns way more data on us than Apple does and invests heavily into learning from this data for confidential reasons. It's bigger than data leaking. What if Google wanted to pull psychological targeting similar to Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal? Apple isn't in a position that would allow them to do that.

Its above my paygrade to be proposing how our data should be regulated. It's not going to be enough, whatever it is. Currently, it seems like what is happening is regulatory capture to weaken Apple so Google, Meta, etc can harvest more data from iphones while staying untouched.

I noticed you were comparing Googles advertising income to the revenue of the App store which aren't equatable factors but I didn't bring it up but I'm not trying to argue that Apple's tax is just or anything like that.
Actually I've never been heavily involved in hiring a junior. Even at my own level (>26 years prof. experience) I'd happily do a test before a formal interview (though I'd likely want a brief chat with someone from the company to get a feel for what sort of shop they run first). And I would be judging the employer on the quality of their test.
I recently purchased a couple of old PowerBook G4's (the last models from 2005, so 17 years old) There is a community still making new software for these old PPC Macs, and a custom version of MacOS with modern updates including security patches was just released.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sorbet-leopard-your-pow...

They have USB 2.0, so transferring files is no issue. They have Dual-Layer DVD drives, not floppies. I brought the PowerBook with me to a hotel and was able to connect to their still active 802.11g Wifi. It browses sites like hacker news almost as well as a modern laptop. Although, Javascript brings it to a crawl. It can still edit video in Final Cut, make music in Logic 9, and play games like Halo 1.

Honestly any highly specced laptop made with a Core 2 Duo and up (so ~15 years old or newer) is still usable today.
Who is hiring? (June 2022)
Dunno, but I notice if you pronounce it "grifto", people know exactly what you mean without explanation.
> The proper question is what does cryptocurrency do better than alternatives?

Bitcoin, as one example, does a better job limiting supply and preventing inflation than its fiat alternatives.

Of course, this doesn't make the article any less of a strawman.