skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I'm in the middle of replacing a one-year-old LG fridge I've been doing a bit of reading. Apparently rotary compressors like this require exceptionally precise tolerances to achieve any manner of reliability.

Thirteen years doesn't strike me as particularly bad. Not great, but not bad. That 80-year-old fridge the repair shop guy is bragging about is almost certainly not an auto defrost unit. So, sure, it's probably close to a modern fridge in power consumption but the tradeoff is you'll have to scrape ice out of it periodically.

https://hbr.org/1989/03/cold-competition-ge-wages-the-refrig...

Edit:

Pretty early on I got a couple wireless temperature probes and used rtl-sdr to pipe the data into a TimescaleDB instance (and slapped Grafana in front of it).

I have no idea what the actual problem was because LG was keen on a refund over a repair. The symptoms were failure to cool and ice buildup on the evaporator getting into the fan and making a racket. The tech diagnosed a bad thermistor which brought the freezer temp during defrost down from 50°F to about 30–40°F. Even though the tech took a steam gun to the evaporator, it took about two weeks before enough ice built up and fell into the fan again. At this point the fridge wasn't getting below 40°F either and my landlord decided to take them up on the refund offer.

Could've been a bad compressor as one of the failure modes is inability to pump refrigerant. The compressor itself sounded like a ringing bell. I stopped caring because nobody at LG cares and they are not positioned to actually service their appliances. It's likely a design flaw they either already know about or don't want to know about. Getting through to a person empowered to do anything is nearly impossible and their techs have a miserable time trying to get parts from their poorly run warehouses. I'm a bit apprehensive that other companies have joined the race to the bottom, but for now LG is solidly in never again territory for me.
> basic software design principles like modularity

A single product can have a modular design, but modularity across unrelated products designed by different designers is a different concept that should have a different name.

In my opinion it’s just not something that really works. This is similar to the “ability” of some software to have multiple pluggable database engines. This always yields a product that can use only the lowest common denominator… badly.

But now imagine having to coordinate the sharing of database engines across multiple relying products! So upgrading Oracle would break A, B and fix C, but switching A and B to MySQL would require and update to MySQL that would break D, E and F.

That kind of thing happens all the time and people run away screaming rather than deal with it.

Shared libraries are the same problem.
Temujin was a nothingburger of a warlord until he was nearly 40.

What did he learn in those 20 years that made him Genghis Khan?
There’s a bunch of anecdotal reports of forced updates being applied when owners have been holding back for a long time:

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-forced-an-upda...

https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1222613978427...

I’d also consider remote feature removal a form of unattended update–the first of which really made the news a pretty long time ago when they disabled autopilot on all Tesla’s in Hong Kong.
This was my experience working with Unreal Engine. Couldn't figure out what to do next until I could get somebody to take a look at my problem and that would take multiple postings on discord to get somebody's attention. Somebody had the galls to get upset by my question because he was in the middle of getting help on his.

This support by discord or community only on discord trend needs to stop. It's just creating toxicity and those with malice/narcissism personality dominates.

Rarely do fast response times create a sane knowledge based community, it only agitates and lots of noise is created as a result.
"Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension[…]
The extension of a technology like the automobile “amputates” the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence.
ways.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Love this quote, and many others by MM.
Utterly blows my mind how we seem to be failing to apply and extend his teachings to help understand this modernity beta test we're participating in.
It's not a "too bad we can't make it more durable because that would increase the parts cost" situation, at least not solely. It's also a "how can we make this product break quickly and make it badly repairable so that you have to buy a new one" situation, aka planned obsolescence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
What if I'm rich and just want reliable appliances? It's a wild goose chase.
So before I worked at the last job, I worked for a camera store back in the last days where those were still generally a thing (2004-2010 - it wasn't too bad of a job for a kid in school). We offered by now, pay later back then, and I don't think we invented it either. Of course it was basically just a credit card application, and there was no requirement to pay it off within a set amount of time, but if you didn't, then they'd hit you with all the interest that had quietly been accruing during their "introductory period" or whatever they called it. Which is to say that it was scummy and deceptive, but not much more so than other American business practices and certainly less than others, and hey they had to make money and eat too.

Perhaps Klarna really is better, but then again maybe that's why they're hemorrhaging money at such an impressive rate.
FWIW I love this Panasonic toaster, which is some substantially different toaster tech: https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-NB-G110P-FlashXpress-Infrar...

No thermostatic control, but the defaults are fine for my uses.

Currently on year 10. The power button got a little finicky so I have to wedge it with a piece of cardboard to make contact, but otherwise as good as the day I bought it.
I used to worry that it was bad, but now I've embraced it. I try to know just enough to synthesize new thoughts but can defer to Google for details.
I don't believe I need to justify my existence. I'm here, I'm living a life that I hope doesn't leave too big a footprint on the planet, and I'm enjoying that life (most of the time, anyway).
This sounds like a worse way of doing a layoff. It specifically worked for you in your situation. I doubt it would work for anyone else.
We have completely remodeled both the exterior and interior of our last 70's home. But we haven't replaced a single appliance. I have made far too much money repairing newer appliances for clients and friends.
HN cannot escape the group dynamics that are universal to all gatherings of human beings, this is likely to have been true throughout the history of this site, even if to different extents.
Google "tofu dreg construction" to see just how bad modern construction can get.
Looks like the website is down. Here.

https://archive.ph/hOrqv

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DpnnLQNgUiQ

Maybe we can switch links? @dang
Ads is what I can’t see on the verge because of adblocker. Promoted content is whole other topic.
Yes exactly, If there is no collective agreement then it’s simpler: the law applies. It’s the law that says you fire the last hire first.

To sidestep it then just requires bargaining with the individual rather than a union.
You are very mistaken if you think Apples recent "privacy" push wasn't about taking over advertising revenue from Facebook, Google, snap and tiktok
Even they are suspect. The quality of the batteries in MacBooks at our office has been terrible. Lots of them swelling up and splitting the case apart.
Congrats. I'm going to wait for the reviews before I order one, though I expect they'll be spectacular.

I feel like with the likes of the Bambu(sp?) X1 and their fancy shmancy lidar sensor, it's only a matter of time before Prusa is going to need to push that into their printers. E.g. the lidar could show width, heighth, and any stringing from the filaments -- ideally making it easier to determine the specs for a new filament.
Apple icon -> System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> checkbox for "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls"

I found this setting while googling last week after getting frustrated that Firefox wasn't letting me tab to links as I expected when it worked just fine in Chrome.
They are designed to die just slightly past the warranty, so they can sell you another. Of course, the statistics means that quite a few units won't even last until then.

Before manufacturing tolerances were as tight, they'd error on the side of caution and overbuild, resulting in a wider MTBF curve. There were both many early failures as well as ones which far exceeded their expected life. Now, the standard deviation is much smaller so the end-of-life has become more well-defined both at the cost of nothing much lasting longer nor shorter than expected.
They do.

There are ads in the play store (labelled), ads in the Google news feed (labelled), ads in Gmail (labelled and similar to the ads in the web version).

But no ads in what I would consider the daily experience (home screen, lock screen, apps menu, settings).
Sorry, really? You can't even tab between controls in dialog boxes by default on a fresh install without turning on "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls", which you ironically can't enable using the keyboard. Seriously, go try it: open System Preferences and try to do _literally anything_ without using the mouse.

Even Finder is wildly unintuitive at times: Enter renames a file, while cmd+O opens it? Or cmd+down, apparently. Press space to show the quick preview of a file, and then cmd+O to open it: the quick preview morphs into the Preview app. But then press cmd+Q, and instead of quitting, it turns back into quick preview.

While I'm a macOS user full time, my experience is completely the opposite of yours. I've constantly had to learn weird nuances of how Apple has managed to make keyboard navigation more complicated than it needs to be.
> You can’t easily prove that your fridge really will last longer, but easy to price the price is low.

I'm not so sure about that. In my experience people tend to be less price sensitive with household appliances (big one time purchases that are supposed to last long) than they are with other more expensive items. Most people I know tend to be lifelong customers if they have good experiences with a specific brand and are very willing to share that brand as a recommendation.

The problem is, those good experiences don't seem to hold true anymore. Price hasn't been a good indicator for product quality and life expectancy for a while. I've seen this first hand with my family. My parents were very willing to spend significant amounts on stuff like dishwashers, fridges, or washing machines. Despite sticking to the brands they had good experiences with, the product lifetime decreased with every new product purchase. It has come to the point that they don't care for the brand they used to trust, they are just buying the stuff thats cheap and checks all the boxes.

These companies seem to have traded high customer loyalty (and possibly a very efficient organic marketing channel) for more frequent sales but higher price competition. I have no insights into those companies, but I'm not sure if that was an intelligent long term play.
probably in reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461690
First, Apple doesn't show ads anywhere in the OS. If you're talking about ads served in web pages, that's another thing.

The only Linux phone I know of that's actually purchasable for humanly reasonable amounts of money is the PinePhone. Everything else I've seen is yet another Android, and Android is tied to Google.
When mongodb (or some similar object-like storage engine) was pretty new I played around with it by writing some HTTP API using PHP. I was frustrated about how I would mostly write code to check if the user was allowed to r/w an object, if the input format was alright and overall do very little productive work on actually doing something with the data. So I implemented a "universal" API that allowed arbitrary access to the database. Permissions, ownerships and permissable data were stored as template or metadata objects. So basic API methods could be easily setup and only more complex actions would need actual coding.

Wasn't finished beyond a basic PoC, and I did it more fun/practicing than for anything of more tangible value. I believe the code has been lost.
apparently according to Google most Mongol leaders died in their 30s, the demographics in the Golden Horde were somewhat different than today. The guy who leads the Taliban in his 20s isn't exactly the Mozart of terrorism, it's just a dangerous job. More importantly comparing world historical figures to your average modern day senior project manager is kind of wild. Everyone in the software industry may think they're Alexander the Great, but they're likely not. Most senior military staff is also old.

What I'm saying is obviously that if you looked at merit, on average, software teams should be older than they are, not that it's physically impossible to have a good leader who is young.
cgi-bin: haven't seen you in a long time.
100%. I worked in the heart of semiconductor manufacturing. Quality primarily a result of systems such as COD (Contain-your-own-defect), SPC (statistical process control), inspection metrology (traceability to NIST, MCA, reproducibility, repeatability, etc.), 5M+E (man, machine, materials, methods, measurement and environment), copy exact, etc.

What OP is talking about is that good tools are the ones with better design. OP mistakes the technical term "quality" with "good design". Quality is producing things as per specifications and allowable tolerances.
That is very very cool. I work at a hospital campus (Melbourne), all hdds require destruction. So I wonder if your customers should be businesses not individuals.
I live in a Southern European country where the standard for office work is 9-18 with a one hour break starting between 12:30 and 13:30. On my last job as employee we were more flexible. I was starting at 10 maybe with even a 90 minutes break but I was usually in office until 19 or 20, which was OK because traffic was insane before then.
There's a small subset that avoid it - but the only one I know of is the Speed Queen machines that are identical to their commercial offerings - and have remained basically the same for decades.

One way to gauge it is see how available repair parts are (all systems eventually wear out) and what the costs look like.
There's also Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" which is a separate thing (that arguably should be enabled by default).
I know that this is a real problem, but I also wonder if this perception is also perpetuated by selection bias.

People with established careers in tech often change job through their established networks, and especially when they are highly sought after.

So it may very well be that the strongest senior candidates’ resumes never reach your inbox, while it’s more likely that strong junior candidates have no other option.
On a related note, playing far cry 2 without using the handheld map and walking everywhere did wonders for my spatial memory. The game is gorgeous and full of tiny details so it isn't as boring as it might sound.

Each mission starts with an npc giving you the location of your target (safehouse 2 miles east of shanty town, outpost south of lumber yard). Sun can be used as a compass (when it's not raining). After a while you start to recognize the landmarks and don't need the map anymore.
Right now nobody has a functioning fusion reactor, so nobody knows how expensive it would be to run one. Hopefully, there would be some way to make it cost reasonable money - since it has many advantages over existing solutions - but I have no idea if it's feasible with current technology.
"Agile" in job reqs usually means "we do Scrum with Jira, you'd better be able to align with the Scrum process".
Mass production is only profitable if its rhythm can be maintained.. that is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity. The result is that while, under the handicraft or small-unit system of production that was typical a century ago, demand created the supply, today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand.

Edward Bernays, 1930

I believe that competition in the future will not be only an advertising competition between individual products or between big associations, but that it will in addition be a competition of propaganda.

Edward Bernays, 1930
I spend a lot of time outdoors / hillwalking / mountain climbing in Scotland and it is quite fustrating and in my opinion quite dangerous how technophobic the standard advice given is.

Almost universally guides and mountain rescue people will advise that people should carry and have knowledge of how to use a map and compass, inform that a phone with GPS is to be used as a backup with no advice given on how to use it.

Navigating with a map and compass is a difficult skill that takes a lot of practise, Scottish munros are very regularly subject to almost zero visibility where even the most advanced navigator would have difficulty. Almost none of the receipients of this advice actually want to navigate, they want to be able to follow a route for duration of their journey. A task that is very simply done with a phone if someone has been given the correct instruction.

When people have an appropriate route downloaded on their phone to work offline ensuring they have enough charge and suitable backup devices alongside told someone their route and expected time of return they have covered most of the situations that get people in trouble in terms of navigation.

Instead they are routinely told to bring a map and compass by people who generally seem to be enthusiastic volunteers who have a deep interest specifically around navigation.
Interestingly, the Bosch food processor we have has a plastic coupling between the motor and the meat grinder attachment on purpose, so if anything gets stuck, it's a 5 € plastic part that's broken, instead of a more expensive and less accessible one. So a plastic coupling alone doesn't sound that alarming in general.
Well, you have to prep. And, to be honest, if you're by yourself you're probably going to be balancing a map on your lap someplace if it's not straightforward.

There's also the old movie/TV trope where, typically, the guy refuses to stop at a gas station to ask for directions if they're lost. Which has now (mostly) joined the trope of not being able to reach someone just because they're not in the physical location you expect them to be.
It is a client-side app that runs inside the browser. Or do you mean something else?
I work at Microsoft, and the majority of people I know use Windows for development. Macs are around, but they seem to be more popular with the managers than with the devs.

(It can be different in some teams - e.g. lots of Macs in VSCode - but company-wide that's an exception rather than a rule.)
Humans have been on the earth for 300 millennia.

If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past 40 for the last 2,000 years.

So for 99.33% of human history the ONLY leaders we had were under 30.
The guy agreed to be returned as he didn't realize he had a broken leg at the time.
> No one argues that Windows is king in software development world in general, but for web development

But given that the majority of developers are web developers[1], how can that be the case?

[1] including, unsurprisingly, the respondents to that survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-roles-dev-ty...
What you're attributing to "evil corporations" is really just mimetic theory playing out. Most people want (in general, but specifically here, those working in corporations) to play it safe and in turn, end up copying "the other guy" in the form of product focus, strategy, and culture.

The sad truth is most people in most companies are just lemmings which creates the illusion of collusion, when really, it's just a whole lot of unoriginality.
I'm not sure I understand.... if 90%+ of your contacts are on iOS, why are you using SMS instead of iMessage?

I wonder if that's a US based thing (I'm in NZ)?
Hasn't collapsed, you just need to access it through HTTP instead of HTTPS.
What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on?

For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
https://www.hisense-usa.com/home-appliance/explore-home-appl...
It feels like a big stretch to consider an algorithm to be 'inspired'.
Where are the bits that correspond to 'inspiration'? Seems like that would answer a lot of big questions in philosophy.
Being a "tech lead" at Google is nothing like commanding a spaceship. It's more like being partially responsible for a team of 3-5 mid-20s engineers building the dashboard and reporting for space shuttle wind tunnel test results (or whatever they do with space shuttles).

Personally, I was a tech lead at Google pretty consistently from the ages of 26-35. I got better at it, and responsible for more, over time. It was a good learning experience for me and even when I was inexperienced at it, I was saving someone else some time.
I suspect it's going to be the FFI integration.

On my machine (M1 pro), Bun calling into a C library and running a no-op is 15x faster than Python calling a no-op function. V8 has never had stable bindings but Bun is changing the game with a TinyCC JIT-compiled FFI that yields a simple API.

$ bun bench.js
3.5331715910204884 nanoseconds per iteration

$ python3 -m timeit -s 'def f(): pass' 'f()'
5000000 loops, best of 5: 53.8 nsec per loop
For newer appliances, I've weirdly found that spending less money is key to achieving longevity.

Smaller, fewer features, less moving parts. Avoid gimmicky features that your grandparents never needed.

I'm a real cheapskate when it comes to appliances and have yet to have one crap out on me.
You cannot have arbitrary small precision past a certain point no matter how much memory you allocate.

You will run into this limit and it's a physical hard limit. Lookup why it's called quantum (mechanics, physics, field theory, etc).

Before you simulate an entire universe try accurately simulating one atom. Let me know how it goes (spoiler alert: the computing power needed to do this is beyond the computing power we have today)
I use both free and non-free software all the time. I have a gaming PC with Windows and a laptop with Trisquel on it for my daily driver. Call me a hypocrite if you must but you can get the best of both worlds if you allow for that and aren’t so zealous for ‘the one true way’.
I'd happily pay 5x the price of the cheapest product available, if I knew I was getting a higher quality product with a longer lifetime.

However, I can never tell if this 5x premium actually gets me a better core product, or just gets me better branding, advertising, aesthetics, and/or superfluous features.

So I usually just buy the cheapest and hope for the best.