skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone can stick a CE sticker onto their products. It's a self certification mark, and I've never heard of a company ever getting in trouble over this stuff. All it says is "I promise to follow the CE rules" but there are no mandatory audits or anything, unless a company gets found out to be violating the spec.

I don't think the CE mark protects consumers the way it could decades ago, with international imports taking a few seconds and free postage to boot.
it’s not q “dumb invention” it’s a cost saving measure at the expense of injuring people.
This seems like an extreme position that at best wastes everybody's time and doesn't improve anything (and is a good example of why being careful with regulation like this is very important).

Consider settings like: how long it takes for the car to shut off the lights automatically after you turn it off and lock it. Or other obscure things. You're not going to have physical buttons for that. You'd have a digital screen with next/previous/ok buttons. That isn't any better than using a touch screen to access those settings. Arguably worse UX.

Another posted suggested allow touch screens but have them not operate while car is in motion, with no override, and I think that's a much more targeted/palatable proposal with (maybe?) less unexpected consequences.
Women more likely to consider ending a relationship due to sexual disagreements
Yes, let's. PISA scores have been dropping here in Finland too, and we don't have close to the magnitude of the problems I personally saw as a US high school student last decade. I'd be willing to bet a lot of countries have seen a decline since 2010 or so.
Ask HN: Is there a social network for some config files?
I typically lose my config files when moving to new OS installation because the config files are almost never documented, I mean what option has been chosen because of doing something really needed and what option has been chosen because of experimenting without even aware of what is it doing. Is it any general community dedicated only to some text configs?

GitHub is too big for this goal and IMO it is actively losing the hacker spirit so I hate every time I need to use its awful UI being too overloaded with pesky features, 2FA theater and actively bothering user's attention with promoting their services related to generative neural networks.
No. I don’t have a lot of money, and am skeptical they or other shiny new tech toys can save the planet via consumerism. I’m pro-Tesla on net. Everyone in the upper middle class were buying Lexus’ and Suburbans before Tesla came along, so I imagine many thousands of tons less pollution than the counter-factual. But probably buying a brand new Tesla isn’t cooling the atmosphere appreciably. In any case, I’m not that counter-factual. To the extent I like cars, and I kind of do, I like those with character and manual gears. I try to limit my driving, but when I have to drive, I enjoy the full experience.
Hah, that is definitely not the short term result.

The yoke is upside down every drive for me. Just getting out of the driveway it's going to be upside down.

The yoke is fine doing extreme turns, my hands find it and I can turn it all ways very quickly multiple turns. I'm not concerned of “extreme situations” or anything like that.

But when I want to "blink right" it's a real fucking problem to figure out where exactly on the yoke I should exert sufficient pressure. Unless the yoke is upright and I'm “holding it right”; as it were :)
Why did schools give up on enforcing cellphone bans?

> what if there's an emergency?!

This excuse didn't fly in the era of flip phones. Classrooms and the front office have phones which can be used in cases of genuine emergencies.
Make Amazon sign up for compulsory customer protection insurance if they want to share the liability with somebody, otherwise it's all theirs.
BMW had this solved in 2003 with their central wheel interface

But they are not a hot California startup speaking at TEDx about how they will change the world so they must be in the wrong.
If the question is truly simple it can probably be answered by the codebase or the internet. Otherwise the flow is ruined anyway when you stop it to ask someone in person. One has to load the context that was subconscious into the foreground for explanation of why they're asking.

Instead you want to interrupt your own flow as well as that of others to get immediate feedback on simple issues?

Your last sentence is incredible. No, I don't want my own flow to be preserved at the expense of others'. That's why I ask async and do something else while I wait for them to be free. But neither should I be a necessary component of someone else's flow at the expense of my own.
I mean, smoking is pretty anti-social adjacent. Smells bad, makes the people that do it smell bad, leads people to argue that their litter is special.
thank you, my friend :)
I think he's pretty well analyzed it. Personally, I've had to drive a car full of toddlers with no heat in winter because my touch screen gave out and it was unsafe both to pull over and to try and troubleshoot while driving. This happened in a 2023 model year high end minivan. My 2009 mazda POS with physical knobs has never had a single problem in over an order of magnitude more time.
While that sounds admittedly ridiculous, there is international data that suggests the problem is widespread and its rise coincides with smartphones.

As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008.

Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.)

The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
Awesome RAG
Remote Work Hurts Innovation Among Work Teams New Study Finds
But of course it was already dropping quite consistently at that point. Perhaps smartphones made it worse, but clearly, concluding that they caused it seems very far fetched.
It's weird that people point to this recent episode of inflation like it's been relatively severe. Historically speaking, it wasn't very high, and it didn't last very long. It would make more sense to blame COVID or the great recession--both of which were much more disruptive to day-to-day life.

I wonder if it's mainly younger people who believe this inflation is traumatic, because they haven't experienced a real economic crisis.
I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard.

How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway.

The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving.

So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
Ha, will be amazing if it can be used like a pontoon for river crossing. Would be super useful for certain traffic situations.
Not if they have people facing roles. In that case their job IS talking to other people. Sure, they need to prepare, but the higher up they are, the more of that preparation is done by assistants.
All the CE marking indicates is that the product complies with European specifications. As far as I know, there are no EU/EEA specifications regarding the voltage of an USB port.

This may violate the USB spec and burn out phones, but it's not necessarily undeserving of the CE mark.
But this phenomenon is happening across the developed world:

> Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average

Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
I'm old enough to remember the PowerPC to Intel transition at Apple, what a wonderful time that was.

Then you blew it because of arrogance, now you're high on hopium like the kids say.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.
> courteous and long

How about urgent and short?

e.g. One day a kid will charge their toy over night with your 13v usb-c charger and they'll burn their house down.
The second reason. Companies that are worse at getting people to self-exploit tend to do worse financially, and thus tend to disappear. Of course, if too many people quit or burn out, then the company will go bust, too. The optimum will be just one step short of that. And whenever someone starts a new company, they will look at the existing successful companies for how things are done.

There is no evil master plan. The processes that lead to self-exploitation will sound reasonable and well-intended. (If this wasn't the case, people would refuse to adapt it. Most people don't like exploitation when they see it.)

For example, in most of Europe there is a law that requires employees to record their working hours. This law was created to prevent (unpaid) overtime, and it does that. Now company X implements this by making you write down how many hours each day you worked towards which task. Doing this every day makes you think where you put this one-hour chat you had with a co-worker. It was nice, but which task did it contribute to? (It didn't...?) If you bother to ask, everybody will actually encourage you to have those talks, that it is even in the interest of healthy company culture, and remind you that maybe it's part of the paid break (you didn't forget you have that, did you? it was never anyone's intention that you skip your break). Nobody will be responsible for nudging people towards efficiency. It's all the fault of the individual who feels pressured into efficiency. It was never anyone's intention to prevent you from having those occasional nice chats, and nobody will stop you if you keep doing it.

Still, every day you get to think about how long it took and which task it belongs to, and it feels a bit like lying to just add the time to a random task. This kind of habit can shape your thinking.
Sure, let's deflect because our livelihoods are owed to developing software for phones.
Knowledge management reminds me of The Codeless Code on documentation: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/215
Hackers want not just hack for themselves but share the product of their craft with other parties without going through fences.
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended.

Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
Right, but what the GP wrote was not one of those comments. They are correct. Some parts are LGPL and some aren't.
I went to school in South Korea, it's basically illegal to ban smartphones in schools, but even now, top high schools ban smartphones. parents prefer it, and students get good grades. But I'm not sure about the causality
Endlich.

Four years after Mazda. But the video still shows big touchscreens, useless themes and distractions of the driver. Why they mount office monitors on the cockpit instead of building them into the cockpit?

I count 9 buttons. No distinct knobs for volume or temperature.
Again One button, one function. Not two functions, no long pressing, half pressing or whatever bad user interface ideas somebody can have. Donald A. Norman explained that well in The design of everyday things. And group that stuff logically.
It's incredible how accurate the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard [0] is at predicting model performance compared to benchmarks (which can and are being gamed, see all the 7B models on HF leaderboard)

[0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboar...
The bogus claim about organized retail theft (2023)
They are being made into consumers, for profit. Big companies don't want you producing mspaint artwork, writing little games yourself. They want you consuming generically bland content that they can place advertising beside to make you go buy stuff. There's a slightly similar story with food and why many kids eat sugar. Oh sure you have a choice but when everone has a phone, everyone has a TV, every store has a chocolate aisle at the counter and you've seen 1000 adverts by age 2. Is it really a choice.
Personally, I am extremely bad at resisting distraction. Remote working is tough for me because if I'm in a meeting with some interesting and some boring parts, the moment a boring part starts I'll just quickly check my e-mails, and then I won't notice when the meeting gets interesting again.

I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account.

I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
Yeah, no, you're just annoyed people aren't texting, it has nothing to do with literacy. Audible user interfaces are great but they don't remove the need for text.
There still isn't even a native way to make text nodes in a custom widget. It's been 14 years.

I tried to write a basic serial console app using QtQuick some years ago but the functionality was just too anaemic. I don't really understand how you can write a serious GUI app with QtQuick/QML. If it's just very basic controls, sure. As soon as you need something slightly complicated it totally falls down in ways that QtWidgets don't.

Also the scoping rules of QML make no sense. Children can refer to parents which totally breaks encapsulation.

I love Qt, but QML is meh at best.
Well yes - there has been some research on the use of touch screens in safety critical systems. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49319450

"We got away from the physical throttles, and that was probably the number one feedback from the fleet - they said, just give us the throttles that we can use," said Rear Adm Galinis.

(EDIT: TFA also talks about buttons, and not being able to find information on screens).

OP article is probably a case of the market working it out if Volkswagen is doing it without regulation. I doubt Tesla-like multi-modal touch screens are going to be default ever. They were never a good idea.

But regulation is essentially the people coming together to say "never again", and that is their right in a democracy. Like it or not as inventors or inventor-adjacent folks we might look more harshly at it. But we also have that power and I don't see a problem per se in using it to direct the market on somewhat trivial things like this.

My wife will finally be able to use my phone chargers b/c of the EU legislation on apple chargers.
> It was reasonable to expect that most of them didn't have the technical capacity to accomplish that in the available timeframe.

So what? Just because the owner can't respond in a given timeframe does not give a you (or anyone) the right to appropriate other people's property. By your argument at the height of the Covid lockdowns I would be justified in taking your car & loaning it out to people because you weren't using it and didn't "have the technical capacity to accomplish it in the available timeframe."

The fact that it was a license that IA was assigning to themselves rather than a physical object makes no difference whatsoever.
> Not having a language standard disqualifies Rust.

Then explain how Ferrous Systems qualified a stock Rust compiler.
That's a pretty bleak and somewhat unrealistic outlook. And just because they are 'another rootkit' or 'discontinued' (which I already mentioned) doesn't mean they aren't existing examples.

As for your statement about being customer-hostile: I disagree. I do not want an Activation Lock that someone else can bypass. Call that what you want, but to me that's a feature, not a bug.

The fact that there was a mistake made doesn't mean the whole system is therefore bad. And it also doesn't mean that suddenly it's open to an evil maid attack either (where the heck did that come from?). It's almost like you are completely unfamiliar with root of trust, public-key cryptography and secure enclaves. While nothing is perfect, having a hardware root-of-trust (like Intel ACM kickstarts everything else, Apple's SEP, AMD's AGESA, or ARMs TrustZone) means you can actually prevent evil maid attacks. So far, out of the ~100 different SEP implementations Apple had, only 2 had enough flaws to be bypassed, and those are decades old by now. That's a pretty good trackrecord.

Your statement about no other vendors having pre-installed 'rootkits' (they are not rootkits, they are not hidden from any kernel), is wrong again. The products and vendors I described two comments ago have this. You can buy this right now. And with your mentality, you'd call Windows Autopilot a rootkit as well. All of this together leads me to believe you're just angry at something and not really living in the same world as the rest of us.
That may be true but consider that AWS was “just” a reseller of Intel servers a decade and a half ago (remember people saying S3 was too expensive and hard to use with tons of competition, too?). Integration matters and if they do a good job of making it easy to build into applications I’d easily believe that the path for a lot of businesses will involve a partner they already have extensive relationships and experience with.
When working with QML I created this simple debug console, maybe it is useful to someone.

https://github.com/siecje/qml-explorer
Some people in America are just culture-war Don Quixotes; tilting at windmills 24x7. For every person that's rolling their eyes at a pointed "Merry Christmas" in response to their "Happy Holidays", there's someone feeling they scored a point for the authentic American way of life.

You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
They seem to have kids track this year, never seen that before.
Unpacking my quotes, I mean it like this: most people don't choose to use iMessage because of its features, and to look after their groups. They mainly use Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat or Signal for that purpose. You _can't_ use iMessage outside of niche groups because of the roughly 50/50 split in iOS/Android ownership [0].

People do use iMessage, because it's the SMS app on their phone.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262179/market-share-held...
Um, most phones will do speech-to-text...

So I think there's something more going on. I think maybe it's that text was the "default" communication medium, and speech is becoming the default.
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. Everyone wants a scapegoat for this problem, whether it be funding, teachers, or administration, but unfortunately the problem is societal.

Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
I’ve had this experience probably 20+ times over the last few years with Amazon. Stars on Amazon cannot be trusted. Even products on Amazon from verified sellers can’t be trusted to not be fake. My general policy is don’t buy anything from Amazon for which I have any quality expectations.
Make sure you have good insurance and multiple loud smoke detectors...
My ideal is somewhere in the middle. I don't necessarily need a private office, but a shared space with a small team. This way, I'm privy to all conversations relevant to me. Knowing what's going on often trumps the productivity gains of a quiet work environment.

The issue is large open offices where I'm also privy to all the other distractions from other teams that aren't relevant to me.
I am not big about writing blog posts.

But now that I think about it, I could write a small library to automate most of it while delegating some tasks to the application (providing functionality to be tested, parameters and possible ranges to be searched, a way to save/restore parameters to/from the database, provide fitness function, etc.) It is essentially a small benchmarking framework with some added functionality. I think it could be quite useful to some people.
> Yes, properly implemented USB type C ports can negotiate all sorts of voltages, but this is not one of them.

Not just USB-C... even early generation QuickCharge could (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Charge).
I think it's a reference to something Elon Musk recently said about the 48 volt system in the Cybertruck. Apparently switching to 48v allows them to use ethernet in the car and save 77% on wiring.

I'm not sure why 48V specifically makes this feasible, though it definitely makes it more efficient (and lighter). I watched a video on it a couple weeks ago and it made sense to me then, now I'm not sure why you couldn't make a 12V network. Maybe it's just more expensive.

Apparently the Cybertruck is the only or one of the very few cars that have done this.
Sure, but the defaults make that hard and confusing.
So you're an active participant to the company's office politics instead of economic output.

At least you openly admit it.
I dread to think what the insides of that adapter look like.
I've been through lots of languages at this point over 20+ years, everything from C/C++ and (early) Java onwards. Ruby was one of the first languages that felt like it was designed to try and make life enjoyable for a programmer, at the time, circa 2007, that was in short supply.

I've moved on to other languages now, but I treasure the time I spent doing Ruby, and I've carried many valuable things onwards with me.

Things might change for you too, over time, but that won't lessen the positive impact that Ruby has had being so close to the way you naturally think about programming.
> Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you.

This is untrue for even small teams in my experience.

> For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine.

Also not my experience.
The CCPs push to ban iOS to strengthen their digital totalitarian control needs a better UX to gain adoption by the population.

Of course, once everyone is locked in place, the UX could be hilariously bad and it would be dangerous to criticize.
> Since working on my own stuff, I’ve had to drastically reduce the scale of my work, and practice self-discipline that, I suspect, many folks here would consider extreme.

As a person with never-ending, over-ambitious side projects, I'd be interested in hearing more about this!
Perfectly illustrating the problem! Now try to imagine finding that if you are unfamiliar with Ruby routing.