skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if that's a fair assessment, really. While it's not economically viable to pay American wages to put drills together, we do make things like jet engines and CNC machines here. The complexity has to be high enough to justify the high cost of labor. If you can build something from raw materials in your garage over the weekend, then it's probably not worth paying someone's mortgage, health insurance, and 401(k) to get it done.
For hand tools, the highest rated brands tend to be German or Japanese, with US made tools coming in second or third. Just my observation, anyway.
I bought a refurbished Blendtec blender a while back. The jar failed after a year and a half; some plastic involved in the blade shaft bearing melted from the blender's own rotation. It's not designed to be replaceable and so I consider it a design flaw. It turns out someone already created a better jar with a significantly more robust, replaceable bearing assembly. It's called the Alterna-jar or something.

In total I'm in for about $450 and have a powerful blender that should last for at least the next decade.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656224

https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
I think you have to be a union member to be able to work. Without a SAG card you are SOL, even if you are Tom Cruise
> Why does the CEO get paid 10-100x more than the lowest paid worker despite working the same number of hours a day?

Honestly I wouldn’t want to work at a company (of any size) where the CEO was only worth 10x what the lowest paid janitor makes.
I hadn't heard about this, thanks for the link. I did a little digging and it doesn't appear be quite as clean cut as that article says. For instance, check out https://www.theautochannel.com/news/press/date/19970422/pres... (a CR press release), where they mention internal Suzuki documents acknowledging the rollover issue.
It's not actually too hard to walk into a big box store like home depot or lowes and find US made hand tools. They tend to be higher priced but quality is pretty variable.

Almost all the power tools are made in china, though.
AvE does this on his YT channel, though only for hand tools and adjacent stuff (he did a Juicero once and it was utterly hilarious).
I know PayPal "Buy-in-4" has no interest or late fees in its terms. So in that regard, it really is a 0-interest loan, paid in 4 installments. I haven't looked into Klarna, but there's an NPR Planet Money podcast about these types of schemes. The profits are made up by the fact that demand increases compared to credit cards (many are ineligible for credit cards, or don't use them for whichever reason), and that the merchant is charged a higher rate by the BNPL company.
I coded this strategy as a roulette simulator (to learn me some Rust). You are guaranteed to win a few but as you keep playing, your loss goes to negative infinity.

https://github.com/flipbit03/roulette_simulation
Why bother? One practical reason is that I can make spatial decisions about my plans that my wife, a GPS adherent, cannot. Frequently I'll suggest going somewhere because it is close to where we are or suggest we delay a trip because we plan to go out that way next week anyway.
That benefit isn't large enough to justify the cost. If you're just talking about subsidizing the education of the most promising 5 percent of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, then sure. Otherwise, no.
Blendtec, KitchenAid
Good point, our fridge came with an ice maker which we don't use and when something related to it started making a horrible whine I just unplugged the connector, problem solved.
> Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?

They aren't, that's the point. Countries like China, Japan and South Korea are very good at pulling everyone in the same direction by following rules, having hierarchies, exchanging favors, working long hours, handing out punishments and whatnot. Far better than any western country could because we aren't at that point in time (and maybe Japan isn't now either). What they end up lacking is things like creativity. The problem is that western countries are also increasingly lacking opportunities to exercise creativity. There is few ways these days to in good faith drop out of school and crash on someones couch to do something else you rather want. Which has to some extent been the foundation of new industries.
problem is in theory it's "the same quality" but with the amount of shitty chinesium i seen i'm not convinced they're capable of producing anything more than a disposable.
If you want to see the true cost of quality items look into commercial versions built for high uptime. They are often 5x the price or more of consumer versions. For some things this is worth it.
I'm pretty experienced and if you lose track of where you are it can be very difficult to find yourself with a map and compass, often requiring significant moving around. This is particularly true in poor visibility or when everything is covered in snow. If you keep your bearings and know where you are (which you really need to when relying on a map and compass) then I agree its not terrible to navigate.
Few options? Tech companies have incredible lobbying power. They could simply lobby for privacy restrictions, but we're not really seeing that. Instead, feigned helplessness is telegraphed in pieces like this.
> They can arguably do more effective research if some of the researchers are from a low-income rural background.

Surely by now such an argument can be made with data rather than rhetoric? “There can be real benefits to having researchers come from a variety of economic upbringings” is a testable hypothesis. It would be unscientific to advance a funding regime geared towards this absent data.
Oh that hurts to watch, brutal. The "Pwn" button helps keep it light, and I'm definitely stealing that, but ouch.

Can someone who knows mac OS development educate me about why it would be broken/expensive/inadequate to just page the application's mapped pages to disk? I gather at least on the lower memory Apple Silicon devices that swap is pretty aggressive even for running applications?
Sure. But I never questioned whether they had to cross a watershed divide. Of course they had to, because Lake Michigan doesn't drain into New York Harbor.

The New York Central Railroad followed (more or less) the path of the Erie Canal. They advertised themselves as "The Water Level Route", because they didn't have a major mountain crossing between New York and Chicago (unlike, say, the Pennsylvania Railroad).
In some sense, the longer the brand has been around, the less likely they are to pull an exit scam.
A theory I've been developing explains this.

When there wasn't enough to go around, capitalism was amazing. It created tremendous wealth, such that for the first time in history, in large parts of the world, there's enough for everyone.

My theory is: Back then, the market for most goods was under-served, so the way the rich got richer was by creating more goods, since you could sell everything you could make (almost always at a profit).

However, in a saturated market, the incentives change; because you can produce far more than you can sell, the rich almost exclusively get richer by taking market share from other players. Making something last 50 years instead of 10 at a 1% cost premium becomes a bad idea, because people care about the headline figure.
That's a a valid option, but my response was to GP's phrase that "Government subsidy here would be little more than subsidizing hobbies and other activity that do not provide economic returns," which effectively supports the removal of government funding to humanities programs.

Partial or full funding covers my view that at least some government support should exist for humanities programs. The UK, Canada, and many US state universities effectively already do this, where domestic students pay a relatively affordable sum each year (roughly $10,000 USD annually) with merit and need-based scholarships available.
> Okay, but even in your example of insulating a house, there are areas that can't be insulated. For instance, it'll be insanely expensive to insulate the studs themselves, because they're load-bearing

ignoring for a second that modern insulation is just blown onto whatever surface you want, and obviously doesn't affect load bearing properties,

the analogy is about doing 90% of your job and acting like you did 100% of it

even if you personally think that extra 10% is hard

even if you personally think that extra 10% shouldn't be your responsibility

you still have to do it for it to not be fraudulent
Very interesting. I learned something today.
Health, education.
Fair trading labor is also a terrible idea for our middle class. Not everyone is a technical wizard.
Not being able to trust brand reputation is the same problem, not a different problem.
> How do Coca-Cola get around having to list all ingredients when they sell a bottled product?

Lobbying, I guess? Regulatory capture?
Have you ever counted how many hub caps Steve McQueen’s mustang lost in the famous Bullitt chase scene?
Probably true, but it's also almost entirely impossible to know for sure whether a product has longevity. Yes, this is why branding is important (see Tumi or Briggs & Riley for examples), but it's very difficult to actually know whether the product will last outside of a contractual guarantee.
What kind of battery goes into the Honeywell thermostat you are talking about? Is it one you have to buy from Honeywell, or an off-the-shelf part?

If the latter, how does it help Honeywell that you have to replace it?
> A super-slim docker for statically linked apps that combines the ease of deployment with a much smaller footprint?

I feel like this could be a simple shell script, at least for 99% of real-world use cases.
Unfortunately a lot of people don't have that luxury (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory).

Of course manufacturers often trade quality in favor of margins, but I wonder how much the decline in consumer products has to do with the proportion of people on the 'poor' end of "Boots Theory" for goods like refrigerators, blenders, dishwashers, etc.

With income in the US practically stagnant for going on half a century and the sheer number of categories of "required" goods going up (e.g. phones, computers, TVs), everyone has a whole lot less to spend on a fridge and making a quality unit most people can't afford isn't a way to do business.
Fuchsia does a pure capability model, and resources, even as basic as the file system are provided through handles - and your file system handle is a handle to what would be a directory elsewhere, but that is the entire file system so it’s not a matter of finding a traversal exploit.

In principle you could do something similar with the Mac/iOS sandbox by starting a process with a compute only sandbox, and then provide it with specific sandbox entitlements (from the parent) which includes specific file systems, however they still in principle can see a full version of the fs.

And yeah, any OS that isn’t completely new is burdened with support for old apps, but then iOS which used its newness to have a stronger base security model is constantly beaten up for that model.
I throw ~ $10 a fortnight at the State Lottery with zero expectation of winning (ie. lower than the formal E() chance of winning)

> We're extremely fortunate in Western Australia to have the only lottery in the nation, and one of the few in the world, where all profits are returned back to the community.

In the past year they've taken in a #billion and put out some $323 million in community grants and the rest in prize money.

To be honest, it's a tax I can get behind and it's win-win as it enhances the community I live in of some 2+ million people with the provision of flying doctor services, housing near hospitals for parents with sick kids, annual festival grants, etc.

I even applied for a received a $5,000 grant as a student back in the early 1980s.

[1] https://www.lotterywest.wa.gov.au/grants/our-role-in-the-com...
This sums up the arrogance of the youth. I wonder how he views his own comments now.
In this context, I think one can assume some high level of commonality between the implementation of the security of the different John Deere products. So, phrasing it as a group makes some sense.
Milwaukee is the respected name in professional power tools. It's great to see them opening a plant in the USA.
You don't claim the warranty. You buy the new one, put the old broken one in the new one's box, and return that.
The stuff that the market doesn't value (e.g sociology)
is already free in online lecture series. So, no it would not be great for the taxpayer to pay for the credential/status/signalling/social aspect when the actual value (learning and knowledge) is free already.
Agreed. I think we are already in the rebellion / response stage. It takes time to build compelling alternatives, though--especially those that care primarily about human needs and not about ROI. I wrote about our search for happiness online (in the context of real relationships and meeting our psychological needs) a couple of days ago, perhaps it will interest you: https://blog.relm.us/finding-happiness-online/
> You’re OK with public school being paid for by tax

I’m not. Show me a child at a public school who wouldn’t be better educated by a private school for the same price.
Thankfully in Europe it is minimum 24 months by law.

This I assume is also why amazon.de won't let you access invoices a while after purchase without talking to a CSR.
> since the fridge compressors from the 1940's and 1950's era were very efficient

Is this only true for fridges? Because this video on a 1984 washing machine versus one from today[0, timestamp relevant] shows a big difference in efficiency from then to now.

0: https://youtu.be/NHrPcx0xkGU?t=776
> So we can't trust what consumers say they want, but we can trust what you say they wan't?

I’m not saying they want anything. I’m saying that what they want is revealed by their choices and not how they might answer any particular question when prompted. In economics this is called a revealed preference.
Complexity and creativity are important aspects of copyright. An obvious and simple piece of code likely won’t qualify for copyright protection either.

function add (int x, int y) { return x+y; }

is probably ineligible
Some background reading about copyright and recipes.

=-=-=-=-

Based on this reasoning, the United States Copyright Office Compendium, the Office’s manual for examiners, states that a mere listing of ingredients or contents is not copyrightable, as lists are not protected by copyright law (chapter 314.4(F)). The Office has also stated that a “simple set of directions” is uncopyrightable.

In addition, courts have found that recipes are wholly factual and functional, and therefore uncopyrightable. As the Sixth Circuit described in Tomaydo-Tomahdo, LLC v. Vozary, “the list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed, facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, a recipe’s instructions, as functional directions, are statutorily excluded from copyright protection.”

https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...
Your brother should write a book.
Something one would not glean from this (fascinating) technical paper: it is absolutely delicious.
I was going to say the same thing. And it always seems to be some little thing for which having made it in metal would've had a negligible impact on price.

I had it with a car door opening mechanism - something you interact with countless times during a day. Less than an inch long. Surprised it lasted as long as it did.

There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts.
That’s nice I suppose, however I have never seen VantageScore considered during literally any lending consideration.
It is very frightening... and you would read how it is in good hands of the banks and whatnot. Meanwhile, last week news was the leak a whole 1.2GB CSv file with account info including phone, address , balance act number from a large Mexican bank. And another one of bbva ... banks dont ha6any control.
Counting blackjack at casinos actually has asymmetric upside as OP words it. Most of the time, you're placing minimum bets slowly losing at -0.5% EV a hand, gaining information on the count. But when the count is high, you're making 8-10x bets at 1 - 2.5% EV and raking in so much, on average, that you come out ahead at like EV 1%.
The problem with many energy efficiency ratings, including Energy Star and that controversial California "ban gaming PCs" one, are that they are designed around "power consumed for a particular use case", where use case is defined as "watch TV for the household average number of hours per day", not normalized for whether the picture quality was great or poor. In the gaming PC case, there was a bureaucratic formula based on how many ports the computer had, and having lots of ports allowed you to use more energy because it was considered a "high expandability" computer, regardless of whether it was reasonable for the computer with empty extra ports and no different parts to use more power. And it focused almost exclusively on "turned off or standby" power, not power in use.

In the case of TVs, manufacturers game the numbers by rating efficiency "as shipped to the consumer at factory default settings." The manufacturer just sets the brightness to 20%, and throws a warning on the screen if the customer tries to change it, saying "the TV may use more energy". Of course, in the store, the TV is set to Store Mode, which means the brightness is often even higher than 100%, and the TV has a sticker about how efficient it is. Nobody would buy a TV that was dimmed permanently to the Eco Mode, but technically, you can "watch the very dim TV", so it counts.

This means that the composite "energy efficiency score" is not calculated with "output" or "work done" or "function realized" held constant. The text of the standards often does not define exactly the outcomes to be achieved.

Thus, it is entirely possible for a manufacturer to produce products with a degraded functionality in exchange for "better energy efficiency", regardless of whether worse functionality may cause the consumer to use the item for twice as long. (i.e. some government restricting the wattage of vacuum cleaners, which may cause vacuum cleaners to become less effective instead of more efficient, causing increased run time)

In the case of fridges, you might imagine how a manufacturer might skimp on "lasts long", "how much space the fridge takes compared to how much space is inside", and other things like this.
I wonder what he thinks of that claim now that he's pushing 40.
How many Saabs have you owned?
You can retain significant self navigation skills by keeping your gps maps oriented north.
Have you already paid? Ask for a "pay for delete agreement" if you haven't
I love my 3d printer. Last Christmas opened up a brand new hot wheels track and told the kids not to touch it so we didn’t lose any parts. They waited patiently as I built it. Get toward the end and realize a clip for the tracks was missing no fault of the kids. Damn. Quick search and find a 3d file for new clip. Printed within 30 minutes and kids had their track. So much easier then calling the company and dealing with waiting for a part and not having the receipt anymore. Was really nice
This is why wearable computers were invented . . .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
It is. I have their battery-powered framing nailer, and the same battery drives the new angle grinder I bought. Both a great tools. You don't really need to buy on sale, because they will last a long time.
Yes. While this service is cheaper than the upgrade, it is in a narrow space if they are competing on price. And with the files unattached you now have a convenience issue.
I'm getting at the fact that Wikileaks can't have private GitHub repos that are actually private.
Ah yes good point. I didn't take into account the rotation of a star in my answer around its axis. But yes you're right. And that's why the earth is also kind of a spheroid (squished sphere).

Einstein you crazy bastard, you were so ahead of your time. I wish we could have met. I think you're quite a Feynman, if you catch my meaning.
If the climate has changed, I assume the ability to predict future events, using past ones, isn’t so great anymore?
It.wouldn't be hard. A dozen different body types, and skin color. You quickly recognize body C, darkness 5, remove background, snap a line for the neck. Send is of course automated. I think after some practice you could do several per minute, and with potential payouts of $100 each that is pretty good.
Learning programming.
Or we could just ban importing of foreign tools. Maybe a tariff that ratchets up over time to give industry time and incentive to transition.
There are some things that you don't want to last more than about 10 years. Big CRT TVs and laptop computers come to mind. My elderly parents have a bunch of things that still work, but once they pass the kids are taking them straight to the landfill.
You know that foreign countries don't have to take the loans you offer at the interest rates you offer?

In principle especially a wanna-be socialist country like the Soviet Union wouldn't need to participate in capitalist rituals like this.
The education hurdle and objective goals of nasa also changed a lot
First and most are two different things, and on-star was guilty of far less actual abuse.

On-star was more wrong in principle that in actuality.

The worst thing about on-star was simply that even if you didn't pay for the service, it was still there and could both track and to a very limited extent control the vehicle under someone else's control. But in fact they never did anything much with it, and now it's not even a thing anymore, and if you wanted as an owner you could hack it out without disabling the car. on-star is on the same spectrum with tesla, at opposite ends.

But if you know enough to even mention the name on-star in this context, then you know enough to know it doesn't actually compare at all, which exposes something unflattering about your argument.

Tesla absolutely deserves no breaks or excuses on this or a few other topics.
Last year, I was looking to upgrade my desktop. Found a review that was bemoaning a motherboard because it only had two M.2 slots. How many consumers use two, let alone would benefit from a third?
I knew a fella who systematically bought call options. He would lose most of the time. However, once he bought AAPL calls (many years ago) and rolled over the winnings to buy more. Turned 10k to several million.

He structured his investments to be able to do this, with a portion of it generating "play money" for these wild bets.

He'd accept that his investments would thus generate lower returns due to his betting, but he needed the thrill of it.

I see lottery as the same way. If you have a lot of passive investments and don't need the money, $40-50 a week on lottery is a rationale choice as the outcome can indeed change one's life. And to a level one could not reasonably achieve with hard work alone.
That'd require the likes of China to also want to do that. And there's no hope of that.
The 'Reopen windows' feature is a complete crapshoot on what the app actually does when it comes back up, so I never use it. It has always been half baked on OSX, and seems to also add weird complexity.

Honestly what is the benefit? A computer is off, on, or sleeping. All of that worked fine for years. I don't get it.
I knew planned obsolescence was a thing, but this is just insane to me! At best, it's really disingenuous (which is bad enough). No wonder we have so many conspiracy theorists. They've somehow socially engineered this situation to be acceptable (and relatively unknown).
> without load balancing

HN itself runs on one average sized server. This looks like a blog serving static content which should never go down if you put something like CF in front of it.