skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This design has the really annoying situation that applications closing down can't leave stuff in the clipboard.

Some programs on Windows will present you with this dialog when closing the program:

There is a large amount of information on the Clipboard. Do you want to be able to paste this information into another program later?
Did anyone actually read the article?

TL;DR: GPT-3 wrote this from looking at, I guess, various internet review sites and forums etc.
So it’s a 30% tax on the digital economy? The first iPhone didn’t even have an App Store, it can be a viable business without all this.
Spot on. I'm sure the YC group partners have told them as much:

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/why-does-your-company-deser...

https://blog.ycombinator.com/users-you-dont-want/

Though, I understand the apprehension behind having to pay 1% of the revenue. It is a psychological thing mostly (in a way, the potential costs seem bottomless like with card payments, even though 1% is actually a super-good deal for small tech shops).
or cypess
Apple has become the parent/older brother who makes up entirely arbitrary rules whenever they feel like it (ie is beneficial to them).

They had a long standing exception for ads not requiring in-app purchases (for some weird reason), but now they're drawing a line in the sand randomly.

We've had app stores now, and the world isn't better off. In perfect irony, apps are the new Flash, and as long as there is 0 standardization, openness or even a sliver of interop, we're just treading water. I wish regulators in some significant jurisdiction hit them all with a hammer, setting ground rules for side loading and a meaningful opt out for end users (that didn't simultaneously cripple their devices).
Based on the community out here, you’re not correct.

I’m surrounded by Ex-military, business owners and people in the medical field. Most of whom “prep” to some degree. They’re all very wealthy by most standards (multi-millionaires in wealth). We also have the amish, which do fit your “out of the system” reasoning. But I’d argue they didn’t fail, nor are they classic “preppers”.
> couldn't literally anyone else do this? If we start blurring the definition, why does it conveniently stop there?

Sure.

I don't think anyone is getting dinged or getting special affirmative action consideration for listing themselves as unspecified multi-racial.

If someone checks a box that gets them special affirmative action consideration, and it makes up no part of their application, and it doesn't pass the sniff test at the alumni interview, then a note will probably be made that race, appearances, and application do not appear consistent, and they will proceed from there.

The admissions officers are looking for a compelling narrative to admit the applicant. It's up to the applicant to provide that compelling narrative.

If I were advising someone who is multi-racial with an affirmative action twist while not really looking the part, I would recommend that they make a note of it in their application. Note that being part Black while appearing very White usually has some impact on shaping the person's identity.

For reference, I knew one person at an elite school who would introduce herself in icebreakers as "My name is $NAME, and I am Black"... and her skin was extremely pale white. She had a Black grandfather who had a scandalous affair with a White woman (when and where that was not apparently acceptable) to produce one of her parents. She told us stories about how that impacted her identity. I imagine she may have written a little bit about it in her one or more of her admissions essays.
> By the way there used to be a laptop named “New New XPS 13"

Before version control
If it was a chip transaction, the bank may or may not agree to temporarily reverse the transaction for you depending on the transaction and your history with the bank while they contact the merchant and investigate.

If it was a non chip transaction, and the merchant has a physical presence, then the chargeback is almost always immediately approved due to the merchant not having updated their machines to accept chip transactions.

https://www.merchantmaverick.com/the-emv-liability-shift-now...

If it was an online transaction, it gets murkier depending on how secure it was. I have been asked for SMA 2FA confirming charge and amount when buying from BestBuy.com, which I imagine is harder to chargeback than a hotel reservation made without the hotel even verifying the card name/address or requiring CVC.

But 99% of the time, if a product/service is blatantly not delivered or the charge was fraudulent (stolen, higher than receipt, etc), the bank will almost always immediately reverse it for you. Although, with chip transactions, I am not sure how it works if you wait a week or month to report it stolen. Presumably, the onus is on the cardholder to report it lost/stolen within a certain period of time.

Of course, whether or not a bank reverses a transaction for you, the merchant can always take you to court or collections (not that they would win, but it would be an inconvenience to deal with).
I actually think the government can and should regulate food consumption. We already did it with cigarettes and trans fats. Omega-6 fatty acids should be next. A more fair but less politically viable alternative is to tax the healthcare of people with >%30 body fat. But these should probably have 10 year limits with the ultimate goal of changing people's habits.
Git-for-Data
I would say no, because of the lock-in. Your argument would make more sense if I could go off and browse any one of a hypothetical 20 competing platforms, but that's not the case.
I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with dell.

The last 2 laptops I’ve had. In 2020 work provided a brand new dell XPS 15.

I opened it up. Logged in. The fans sat at 100% while idle in windows desktop. I ended up just giving it back.

Current job I got a 2022 dell XPS 15. It has an annoying whine when the fans spin up. It gets HOT! And it’s the first time ive experienced audio issues. And I’m not alone on the audio issues. Everyone at work with the same laptop has audio issues which is always resolved by restarting the laptop… for example today I connected my Bluetooth headphones. It connected but didn’t appear as an audio device so I couldn’t hear anything. This also caused the speakers on the laptop to stop working.
> It has happened before and it could happen again.

Sure, I wasn't implying that it couldn't happen here, I'm just clumsy with words. I was trying to say it's hard to imagine it happening at similar scale _right now_, i.e. Danish fishing vessels buying slaves and throwing them overboard when they're too weak to continue working, in 2022.

I'm aware of trafficking, forced prostitution and indentured servitude with work in nail salons etc, but as far as I understand, the scale is (currently) very different, and it's much less extreme (assuming there are no secret mass graves we'll find in the future).
Yes, nobody is dropping test scores because they are irrelevant -- although that overreach does exist in the press. They are dropping them because they add little after GPA is considered and may introduce costs, barriers and biases.

The author identifies the steel man version early on: "standardized test scores are nearly useless (at least after you know GPAs)" but then mostly ignores that parenthetical. This part that addresses it seems deliberately obtuse:

> If you care about the difference in accuracy between GPA and ACT, then you should care even more about the difference between (GPA only) and (GPA plus ACT). It’s incoherent to simultaneously claim that the GPA is better than the ACT and also that the ACT doesn’t add value.

Again, the version of this that reasonable people argue isn't that the ACT doesn't add any kind of value, it's that the amount and kind of value it adds (incrementally more predictive accuracy) aren't worth the costs and biases are introduced. If you myopically value accuracy, it doesn't make folks who want to balance accuracy with other goals incoherent.
That Cardboard Box in Your Home Is Fueling Election Denial
While I sympathize with the OP's complaints, as an employer (small 15 person company) I would defend most of these practices (employment verification, reference checks, university degree verification, etc)

I've (literally) employed people who were working 3 jobs without any of the other employers knowing about one another. We were being scammed. This happened not just once, but with 2 people (1 full stack engineer who is a HN regular, and another was an account manager).

This was at a 15 person company, and 2 out of the 15 were working multiple full-time W-2 jobs all with full time benefits. At the end they were both let go once we discovered the deception (their downfall was neither of them were meeting productivity expectations, not getting their work done)

After this, we heavily beefed up our pre-employment screening, which is all of what this person is complaining about.

Unfortunately there are people in the job market who scam companies. To find and weed these people out before they make it in the door, we need to do things like verify your degree (even if it was 20 years ago) not because we care whether you have a degree, but as a test to see if you were truthful on your resume.

Edit: Also, if anyone requests reference checks from your current employer, you should say no. It's not standard practice to check current employer, only prior employers (at least in the US).
Many chains will price match

https://thepointsguy.com/news/hotel-price-match/
Could you give an example maybe? I really struggle to understand what you mean
Nice try :). Computing built out of cryptographically secure cons cells.

But no, this doesn't solve anything, because the root problem doesn't have anything to do with technology. The root problem is that people need to work together despite having conflicting goals and interests.

Like, e.g., the major issue with trusted computing isn't trusted computing. Everyone would like their devices to be secure against unwanted software doing bad things. The conflict is over who owns the device in the first place. I'd like to own my PC, the very one I'm writing this comment on. So does Intel, Dell, Realtek, Microsoft, my bank, every news site, half a dozen governments, and countless criminals specialized in exploiting digital technology. Whether or not TC is good for me hinges entirely on the answer to the ownership question.

As for complexity - it comes from the industry incrementally evolving technological solutions to what's a philosophical/sociological problem that doesn't have a theoretical solution yet (and might be unsolvable in general).
My Precision Mobile 7750 is a beast. Chucked 128GB RAM into it. Should last me 10 years.
I’m not sure what you’d gain is worth the cost. What’s the cost in dollars and cents of SQLite cves over the past 20 years, and what would the cost be of rewriting that entire codebase?

At some point you have to come to terms with the fact that some bugs shouldn’t be fixed.
And that's what everyone does.
> You’re not going to replace Excel with Notion’s tables or even Google Sheets—they don’t have all of Excel’s features or its 504 functions. But in a way, that’s the point. They’re simpler, rethought, and focused on a specific subset of Excel’s features along with other new things. That’s why they’re winning in their niches, with well over 220 million people using a spreadsheet other than Excel today.
> Dell laptops are horrible for a number of reasons.

I was about to type "Dell is a horrible brand", but GPT-3 was faster.
My experience with Dell with their laptop has been the worst at work.

Who thought it's a good idea to put a Intel power hungry heat generator in a laptop with no airflow or proper cooling for enterprise product ?

I had a coworker that nearly burn his leg when having the laptop on them and coding with Spotify in the background.

The thing would thermal throttle like crazy and turn into an helicopter because it has only one 50mm fan to try to cool down the machine...

We had to buy stands to help with the airflow because if you put it on a desk it would block the intake.

It cost the same price than a MacBook M1 Pro with worse performance, worse thermal and it's so loud.

I'll never want a Dell laptop ever again.

Also don't get me started on their power delivery circuit that overheat when the laptop is used while charging or the proprietary batteries.
Good question. IDK. I think for me it’s a mix of good people and a good cause. What do you think?
On the contrary I've had great experiences with Dell's business line (Latitude, Precision models). Likewise the business warranty is excellent - log into TechDirect and I can submit a ticket for any one of the machines in my fleet. Dell will either send a technician out to service it in the field, or they'll mail me an empty box so I can send the unit in for repair.

Consumer _anything_ is going to be hit or miss. This is known. Buying Dell's consumer line and having a hard time trying to cash in on the consumer warranty doesn't mean Dell is shit, just means their priorities are elsewhere. XPS in particular I see lots of complaints about so I don't know why one would willingly buy what one _knows_ is their lowend (yes, it's lowend crap - we know this because they advertise it as "consumer highend"). It probably still gets the job done for most people who own one.

Buy a recent, used Latitude next time and quit worrying - they are great.
This might be the perfect use-case for a database that I'm looking to build for tracking a personal collection, but it's hard to see the full feature set. I assume that's because it's still rapidly evolving.

Do you support image fields alongside the typical string / int / float / boolean fields? Any additional features here, like limiting image size and scaling images that are too large?

I'm comparing this to MementoDB, which has similar features on image storage.
I think it’s high, but it’s also industry standard.

Steam is pretty beloved in PC gaming, and they take 30%. Microsoft and Sony take an equivalent percent for any game to run on their respective consoles. Google takes 30% from the Play Store for anything over $1M.

There is some nuance and discounts for all these platforms depending on volume but the economics are mostly the same. 30% goes to the platform.

We should all be scratching our heads and wondering how the entire industry seems to have coalesced around 30% or how competition isn’t driving it down at all. Hmmm.
David Nichols was cranking out novel psychedelics at Purdue around that time. There's also a bit of a renaissance going on in the EU with 1P-LSD, 1V-LSD, 1cP-LSD, etc. The chemist responsible was recently interviewed and basically says they have a new substituted analogue ready to hit the market as soon as whatever they're currently selling is banned! German video but interview with the chemist is in English: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=iVNCt2zyIaQ
A platform extracting 50% in "platform fees"[0] complains about a platform extracting 30% in "platform fees".

[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/13/meta-cut-on-purchases-d...
I have an XPS 13 also that I'll probably be replacing in another year or two. What is your new go-to I should look into?
It seems like they only wanted to include a block of informational text but the software only supported fields, so they had to make it a dummy required field. This smells more like terrible tech than malice.
Unless you are actively using all that RAM simultaneously (instead of simply leaving a few applications open and switching between them) modern SSDs and zram significantly reduce the need for loads of main memory imho; it just isn't an issue if the web browser uses xx GB over time or the IDE requires a few gigs or a VM here and there needs a couple gigs because almost all of that is going to get paged out when not used actively, and once you get back to it, no big deal to have it paged in at a few GB/s. Laptops with 16 GB are common, 32 or 64 a lot less so. And laptopts with fixed memory are going to be more power efficient and somewhat higher performance (usually).
> No installation necessary, and (most importantly) no gatekeeping of apps by Apple, Google or Microsoft.

This is kind of misleading, as you need to install a browser for it to work. Granted, most computers already have that, but the browser is acting as a "runtime" in this situation. Contrast with other programming languages such as Go or Rust, that produce a single executable that can be dropped in a folder and ran.
It’s amazing that my ThinkPad x1 extreme with a 7th gen Intel compiles my project faster than my dell XPS 15 with 12th gen cpu. I’m convinced the heat and throttling kills the 12th gen laptops. Apple did the right thing dropping Intel.
Had noticed something similar in a couple of car crashes, time slows to a crawl, I was hyper aware, I could observe things happening, dreading the outcome, but I didn't have control to act quickly enough to avert it.
To paraphrase Chekhov - All large companies are the same. All small companies are different in their own different ways.

IMHO large, corporate-style companies all appear to have read the same manuals on how to organize a company, so, minor variations aside, you know what you're going to get.

Small companies don't hire from the same sources or don't reach critical mass in any departments to start down the track of the larger companies, so your experience there may vary a lot, for good and bad.

I've spent approx. 12 years at large multinational engineering companies and 8 at small/medium size companies. I am now at a good, medium-size one (~150 employees, all told), and unless things change dramatically, this is where I'll have to clean out my office when I retire.

Edit: To elaborate a little, I think the sweet spot where you are quite likely to find a decent experience is in a company which employs at least several tens of people, but no more than a couple hundred.

Why? Because by the time it has reached that size, you will have dedicated people (that is, people allowed to spend time to become good at their niche, rather than being generalists) for most functions.

Still, the company is small enough that most people in the organization at least are familiar to each other, making most interaction more flexible (IMHO) than if you're at a huge corporation where anybody is viewed as an easily replaceable resource.
Dell XPS are great especially for Linux.
I keep hearing that Microsoft is making things "harder", but I've yet to see any evidence that this is true.

All I can see is that Microsoft mandate that laptop hardware sold with Windows installed have secure boot capability and that the MS-signing keys are shipped in the TPM. This has been true for, what, over 10 years?

How are they making things harder?
I'm trying to give myself an undergraduate education in math and/or physics this way. When I study a subject, here's what I'd ideally need:

1. Explanation of the subject. Could be videos or textbook.

2. Problems to work on. Much like learning guitar, you have to learn math and physics by doing.

3. Feedback on my solutions. Did I solve it right, or did I have some fundamental misunderstanding? Also, when I'm stuck, it can be useful for someone to look at it and say "here's where you went wrong."

4. Community and deadlines. It's easy to put off the next lesson/chapter without those. We talk about students with "sufficient motivation," but motivation isn't a fixed thing, and having a community and deadlines can really push up motivation.

A web page or video can explain a subject. A textbook will have problems to work on. But feedback, community and deadlines are something you get from a University class or a MOOC. And there are precious few MOOCs for even 3rd or 4th year undergraduate topics.
> "They reported that just as they were ‘about to’ push the button, but before they had actually decided to do so"

It seems to me it's just a matter of definition. Clearly it was a conscious decision, since they are able to talk about it. They even say they were "just about to push the button". The only confusion is that they also claim they hadn't "decided" to do so. So clearly there is no issue with the "conscious" part, but perhaps some confusion about what constitutes a "decision"?

I mean, what does it mean to be "about to push", if not that they had in fact decided to?
1) in many cases investment options are limited to certain packages. These often suck major ass

2) in many cases there is a 1% + fee which absolutely obliterates your returns over the long run

3) your entire principal + capital gains are taxed as income when you take distributions whereas for an investment outside of 401k your principal gets taxed when you pay income taxes and then capital gains are taxed at a long term rate if you hold long enough, which is way lower than income rate. E.g. you actually kinda get fleeced on taxes too

4) your money is held hostage under threat of 10% penalty for a withdrawal and you have to practically beg for it it is so obnoxious to withdraw.

My 401k did like 4 % at a time when the s&p 500 did like 30. That's a straight up scam
Build quality on Dell XPS has slipped dramatically. I had one whose case would flex when you would touch it (let alone pick it up or use it in a laptop). This caused all kinds of issues, from the touchpad to being unusable to the entire system freezing.

Pretty paperweight after nine months of torture.
My monthly energy needs is probably around 750kwh. Effectively you're giving me my monthly energy needs every hour.

So you have to think big.

My obvious go-to. Giant robot. 20-50 metres tall. Tremendously powerful. I suspect we aren't going to be fighting any kaiju. Instead it's going to be able to travel the country side able to move large rocks for farmers. Cut down forests trivially. Be available to help in whatever way.
If something has no legal uses to speak of, but has illegal ones - especially, profitable illegal ones - then that's good enough reason to ban it as I see it.

And that's definitively where novel analogs of pharmaceuticals, ordered in bulk from dodgy Chinese suppliers, fall.
Why is Windows so vulnerable to things like this? It's a design problem?
I suspect it is a property of subexponential growth. If every team gets new HC then the entire company grows at ridiculous pace. But it does feel disempowering to see the company grow like mad while we are told "not you."
Stop static typing; Use Predicates (in Clojure)
There's a lot of one-off nonsense in here, but then there is also:

> Another example is using a 4k screen ona a 13” laptop. Much better in terms of battery life and price to use a 2.5k screen. Humans can’t tell the difference. Why did they use a 4k?

What? Citation for sure needed. That's ~330 ppi, which is about where Apple's "retina" marketing ends up, so even with that optimistic view on things, it's still "just enough".

Regardless: humans can definitely tell the difference, because pixel density depends on how close your eye is to the display.
You should ask Reddit. They really really want you to use their app instead of your browser, so there’s obviously something (like tracking).