skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, they do (present tense) last longer in the sense that they’re still around and working, which of course doesn’t mean newer cars are worse. It’s a bit like saying someone who’s 70 lives longer than someone who’s 7.

I think newer cars seem to be more reliable but older cars probably lasted longer than you think, it’s just that your view is skewed due to the market you’re used to (reading your link, while a million miles is a lot, though not unheard of for a taxi, the mention of 17 years as if that’s and old car is something I find surprising.

It’s common where I live to see cars from the 60s or 70s still being driven. And I don’t mean maintained classics (though those exist too), I mean just old rusty cars that still work.

All this to say that while you’re most likely right about newer cars being more reliable (and they’re certainly safer, which is more important), that doesn’t mean older cars stopped working after 20 or 30 years, it just seems your view is skewed because you live in a place where a 17yo car is considered old.
A Man Who Digs for Fish (1979)
Dan's fantastic. Been interviewed by him in the past and was super impressed by his interest in understanding technical nuance and communicating the story accurately to a lay audience. He's definitely not a headline chaser like a lot of folks I've met in tech journalism. Ars is lucky to have him.
I just tried the game. Let me preface this comment by saying that I think any exploration of new game techniques is always worthwhile, and, more broadly, creating anything is always positive. I have no expectation that the author of this game created it to please me.

That being said, I standby my initial comment. After playing the game, I see how hyperbolic geometric affects movement in the world. What still remains unclear, however, is how movement in a hyperbolic world impacts game play in a meaningful way. Games are not complete happenstance; they're a collection of intentional choices to create an experience through purposeful mechanics. While the choice of hyperbolic geometric was intentional, the impact of this decision on the game play feels more or less random. That's not to say hyperbolic geometry couldn't be used to make an interesting game, but one would need to design the game in a way that creates a compelling experience by intentionally exploiting the characteristics of hyperbolic geometry. Taking an existing thing and recreating it with hyperbolic geometry is not cutting it for me, at least not in this specific instance.
Isn't that an instance of the license not working?
Come together as a community and help build the right thing. This isn’t the first implementation and I don’t have a fiduciary duty to create value to investors.
So something I have also noticed, mostly on 3.5-Turbo, is textual responses in json take a quality hit, full stop. This has caused me to use mixed output usually. Thoughts and process in json, then "exit" to text for a conversational response.

It is likely also a behavior in gpt-4, but I haven't studied it as closely.
It's kinda just random luck I'd think. My toaster is about 15 years old now, just a generic Breville one. Still works fine.

I imagine anything that would break in a toaster is absolutely trivial to fix, but you are working with mains electricity so in most places you probably need a license to service it. Which just costs more than a brand new toaster.
> Stevens (APUE and Network Programming) doesn't hold up.

> They weren't all that great even at the time

I can’t say I agree with this. Stevens’ books have always been a go to for me for ever. They don’t have great coverage on more recent topics like Anycast and Multicast, so probably outdated at this point, but I can’t think of a single author who taught me more about network and unix/posix programming. All of the concepts transferred well into Java and Rust after it for me. I’m eternally grateful for Stevens’ work.
Back in the mysts of time, every September there would be an influx of new students who got Internet access, and the next few months would be a rough time as all these new users got used to the social norms online. It was a high trust society.

Then Al Gore pushed through legislation making it possible to commercialize the Internet[0], and everything changed. It now became possible to do business, and to advertise on the Internet. This resulted in the "Eternal September"[1], that we've never recovered from. We became a low trust society.

---

Additionally, there is some friction with posting comments and replies online. Thus it's only when you notice something that is emotionally strong, including obvious errors or mistakes, that gets you over the hump and posting. This creates a strong survivorship bias[2], which can eventually lead to thought bubbles and preference falsification[3].

It's generally small communities with common interests, or users who have met in person, that can resist this trend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
Almost everything I buy works great. But I also do a lot (sometimes months) of research before I buy anything. I like to ask my friends what they have and how long they've had it/how they feel about it. If I can, I borrow things and try using them a bit before buying one for myself. I keep an eye out for clever design and quality materials. I often come across low-quality products and I elect not to buy them. I try not to get myself into situations where I "need a carrot peeler on short notice," but if I do I definitely start by calling around and seeing if any of my friends or neighbors has one I can borrow.

Sometimes I end up paying much more than the cheapest, or even average priced analogues on the market, but probably not as often as you might think.

The market produces to fill demand, so I vote with my wallet for the types of products I want to see in the world.

I drive an old car that pollutes more than a newer car because it already exists and I'll never save enough carbon in emissions to make up the cost of producing a brand new hybrid vehicle. I try to maintain my car so it lasts as long as possible. I also try to drive safely so-as to avoid wrecking it. If I live long enough I may drive a hybrid car sometime in the future (there are still a lot of old cars sitting around, though).

Sometimes I buy antique juicers and they are usually very robust and durable. Not because they're old, but because they're survivors.

On the very rare occasions that I do find myself in the market for some junk I usually have no problem finding it for free or very low cost on craigslist.
Modern retail toasters, don’t seem to be able to fit a proper standard English sized, slice of bread - the size of which, I’m not convinced has increased over time - but rather, the toasters have been designed primarily with US sized slices (which I’m under the possibly erroneous impression, are smaller?!), as the target market.

Quite annoying…
I’d totally give this a shot if it wasn’t supported only on ipads and M-chip Macs
genAI is still not allowed everywhere. I entered a game contest just a couple of weeks ago that explicitly forbade it.

In general the board game industry leaders (and many consumers) are not very receptive to genAI at this point. Probably still many years before it starts becoming a bit more accepted.
On average they didn't (oh no, that repair costs more than the "car is worth" as if that's a metric that actually means anything) but it was far easier to keep one running indefinitely. You could take an engine to a small machine shop and get the head and block resurfaced, valves reamed and cylinders lapped. Without any electronics to fail it was just a block of metal that was slowly losing material and a quick hit with a file could even out any imperfections leaving it like new, just with very slightly more displacement.

Modern engines are way more reliable because they have coatings and materials that will last nearly indefinitely in most parts of the engine but they're built on proprietary sensors and electronics that need a steady stream of replacements and secret software to debug.

We could make cars last indefinitely from a supply chain perspective, but commoditizing software and electronics would make them very marginally more expensive. We absolutely can't have that because, drum roll for the 1000th time, 99% of the population doesn't give a flying fuck and wants cheap shit at all costs.
Regardless of your opinion on this subject, agrivoltaics projects are being installed today at an increasing rate, and they’re going well, from what I’ve read. It’s not some theoretical proposal, it’s happening now. It’s likely that solar panels will be installed both in parking lots and over farmland.
I want to see my hypotheses tested.
No problem. I submit it every so often because it's one of my favorite stories to read at this time of year. I love sci-fi short stories so much so if anybody has suggestions, I'm all ears!
Ways of Spinning Implementation in Complex Natural Language Sentences [pdf]
I'm aware of regulatory capture, thanks. You have not convinced me that this case applies sufficiently to the nuclear sector (which is after all the topic of conversation), where it has been claimed that unnecessary safety regulations are holding back progress.

As for other industries: sure, some regulations are put in place by the industry itself to preserve the status quo. And other regulations absolutely benefit society, even if they impose a cost to the industry. It's important to separate these two cases. What terrifies me is the lack of nuance in the conservative talking points about "reducing regulation," implying that all regulations are unnecessary obstacles that serve no valid purpose. If you want to reduce regulations, okay: tell me specific regulations that you feel cost more than they are worth to society. Don't just lecture me in general about, "Hey, regulatory capture is a thing." Those blanket arguments are unpersuasive and are often propagated by industry players seeking to free themselves of costly regulations, regardless of their value to society.

If we're talking about the US specifically, I can tell you that business and environmental regulations are vastly lighter than other Western nations. In if we compare the US regulatory framework to non-Western nations, we find that there is a tangible cost to lighter regulatory load, in terms of corruption, fraud, pollution, labor rights abuse.
Plastic gears have lower friction and don't require greasing. They aren't really bad on their own. The problem is you can't find replacement parts when they break.
When you steal a book from a bookstore, that copy of the book disappears. The bookstore no longer has it.

When you download a file from libgen, does libgen no longer have that file? Does the author lose their own copy of their book?

What exactly are you stealing (making you have something and depriving someone else of the thing).
KitchenAid sells 4 or 5 different versions of their stand mixers with retail prices ranging from $350 - $1000+. There is a reason for the price difference.
Me too. One of the few stories I go back to every year.
Hey, I'm the lead for that! I think it addresses a lot of the problems raised in these comments about Chisel and other generator frameworks. Happy to answer questions! https://intel.github.io/rohd-website/
Amazon does this a lot in their “customer obsession” management strategy. In their terms, the mechanism to make this happen is called a “PR/FAQ”[1], and the core idea is that if you can’t express your idea in terms of a customer-focused press release, then it isn’t a good thing to add.

[1]: https://productstrategy.co/working-backwards-the-amazon-prfa...
I think it makes sense. Plagiarism is literally taking someones work/ideas and passing them off as my own. If I were to read 100 NYT articles(one of which is about some event) and then write my own article afterwards that uses similar details of the event or is laid out in similar ways, that's plagiarism.

When you program a machine to do the same thing but 1000x more efficient, it's still plagiarism.
Mobs are only optimistic when they’re going to war.
The concept of a regular “tune-up” has likewise fallen out. Older cars needed carbs adjusted seasonally, spark plugs replaced, caps and rotors, timing, etc. tires are genuinely incredible. A car over 100k miles used to be at the end of its life, now cheap cars routinely go double that.

Those are all things that are still in cars (or have been replaced with digital equivalents) but have become so reliable that we need to be reminded to check them. It’s not unreasonable to expect spark plugs to last 100k miles.
A 100x increase would get us back to what we were building half a century ago. Current nuclear production has been nonexistent, which is why this one reactor is such big news.
> I believe you know this already ("my proposal isn't perfect") so don't take this as an argument...

Yes, I do, and I agree. This could go horribly wrong.
No, this is just a stay of the ban so that no parties suffer undue harm whilst the Court completes a review
The criticism still stands. It should not take 47 years from recognition that a road is needed to actually building it.
The article was about consumer goods in general, so data about cars overall is more relevant than a single brand. Nonetheless, the Toyota Prius is, by reputation, a very reliable car. Here a used car website used it's data to estimate car model's lifespan, finding that a Toyota Prius has a potential lifespan of 250000 miles, much greater than anything from the 1980s.

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cars-that-will-la...
If you can complete a PhD do you really need meds?
More useful links than Google Books for it:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-098-street-fighting-mathemati... - MIT Open Courseware version of the course (some links don't work)

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262514293/ - MIT Press link for the book, includes Open Access link (working, unlike one of the OCW links)

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5339/Street-Fighti... - Open Access link from MIT Press
Seconded, though I'd add that with the current concerns about climate change and resource utilization, we need to think a bit more about product lifecycle and this is a reasonable way of illustrating that.

If the embodied environmental impact of a product increases 10% to make it last 100% longer then we need to think about making that change rather than producing twice as many to replace the broken ones.
I’ve had the same experience, with paper shredders - particularly the Fellowes brand, in the UK - which all have a nylon (possibly some other plastic) cog, somewhere to overheat, then break.
Perhaps it's possible to create open source implementation of the server side? I remember someone did something similar with Obsidian Sync
To make such bold claims about all the toasters being produced today you must be quite the toaster enthusiast.

Although I admit to some scepticism. Seems likely that some toasters will turn out to be of high quality.
> but a significant number of his projects were abandoned or are still "work in progress".

That sounds like Rust is at worst the same as any other language people program in.
Happy New Year: Celebrating 21 Years of Innovation with Ejabberd
I think Dualit still make pretty straightforward mechanical ones. Or if not, you can buy an old one that's already been someone else's toaster for life and can now be yours.
> pens - same as staples.

I focused in on pens as I was reading the piece because I'm something of a pen snob, something I realized when I was at a job fair one day in college and I had a brief feeling of aversion when a recruiter offered me a shitty free pen.

It's not hard to get good pens, and they're not particularly expensive. $1-2/pen will get you very solid ball-point pens that write smoothly and reliably. Some of them can be refilled to save more money and reduce waste. There are wide varieties of styles, color, and point fineness to choose from.

If you usually buy shitty pens for $0.10 each or whatever that may seem like a lot, but unless you go through multiple pens a day or something it's really not. The $10/year or so I spend on slightly nicer pens is well worth it to me.

I suspect there are probably also similar quality options available for things like staples and matches, but I'm not familiar with those.
I recently made a blog post / rant about this exact thing https://willbush.dev/blog/complex-appliances/. I only shared it https://slrpnk.net/c/buyitforlife. Someone mentioned a warranty law in the EU that affects quality https://slrpnk.net/comment/4749319. I didn't look too far into it. Anyone know anything about that?
You can also get the same information from here, which has an extensive reference section at the bottom. Disclosure: I wrote it.

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Heat, Bedbugs die at 119-125 degrees fahrenheit after a few hours.

I put 6 propane gas blowers in an apartment, the kind that is used at construction sites. Let that run with thermostats and cameras for a few hours. Bedbug free. Have since done it at 2 other apartments after months of infestations, immediately fixed.

Source: personal experience, after trying lots of other methods.

https://www.orkin.com/pests/bed-bugs/does-heating-or-freezin...
> The likely reason Masimo made the strategic choice to sue for for unjust enrichment instead of damages is that damages are limited to the license fees Apple would have paid in the alternative world where they sought a license.

How can you figure out what that license fee would have been? Couldn't Masimo argue they only would have ever licensed the technology for some huge sum of money?
What is the lcoe?
I'm looking at a legal agreement on my desk to lease 120 acres of productive eastern Nebraska farmland to build a commercial scale solar project. The land would be taken out of production ("sacrificed") for the 50 year lease, with payments about twice what the land leases for for agriculture (soybeans).
awesome resource, mahalo nui loa
My mom has a Kitchen Aid kettle. That shitty thing breaks all the time forcing my dad to replace some parts of the circuit. (And it's not the users' fault, it's a damn kettle, there's not much you can do wrong except maybe starting it empty which they don't do)
That is exactly their plan. Swift could always link into C applications, and they have recently come out with C++ interoperability [1] so things like WebKit etc. can start having parts re-written or new parts written from the start in Swift so they can gradually replace C and C++ codebases instead of trying to rewrite everything (which sucks because even for things much, much less complex than WebKit, you can have a team working for three years working on a replacement and it’ll have less features than the original had when you started).

They’re even working on an embedded subset for embedded devices so things like microcontrollers like battery management, the Secure Enclave etc. can run it.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw
Where does the article say this? Looks like you misread it.
One issue here is that there are well built quality products on the market; the problem is distinguishing them from the crap.

Also, they cost more. Total cost of ownership is typically a lot lower, though.

Want a mechanical pencil that will last you through grad school and at least a decade of your career? Buy a RotRing. It’ll be $30, and worth every penny. Tools? Snap-On or Wright. Shoes? Goodyear welt top-grain leather, such as Grant Stone or top end Allen Edmonds. Luggage? Travelpro or Tom Bihn or Goruck.

All of those items will be 3 or 4x what a Target ratchet or bag or pair of dress shoes will cost, but they’ll last at least 10x longer and in the Snap-On example possibly 100x longer.

Electronics are a somewhat different issue, of course, but even there, my iPhone XR is still going strong, 85% battery health and receiving OS updates.
You haven't provided any evidence of groups specifically deciding to adopt domination strategies. I think you're just projecting your own narrative onto a period from which we have only tiny bits of archaeological evidence which can be interpreted in many different ways.
Do they still have any documentation (service manuals, schematics, etc)? Might they be willing to donate any of them to Bitsavers for scanning?
I recently got this excellent 1964 film showing the NS Savannah digitized from 16mm film in the National Archives vault. Very glorious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8W2Xpz2hA
Dualit is a quality hand built toaster made in the UK since the 1950s.
Ah, no lol. Thank you for the catch.
This is a fairly incredible attack, and agree with your analysis. The hidden Safari tab portion where they “re-hack” the device could be bad organizational siloing as you mentioned or indicative of a “build your virus” approach that script kiddies used in the 90s. Could be a modular design for rapid adaptation, ie. perhaps less targeted.
Information is a loaded word. Sure, you can say that based on our physical theories, you can think of the world that way, but information is what's meaningful to us amongst all the noise of the world. Meaningful for goals like survival and reproduction from our ancestors. Nervous systems evolved to help animals decide what's important to focus on. It's not a premade data set, the brain makes it meaningful in context of it's environment.
My experience has been that it’s extremely difficult to get to great docs even when you do want to invest in them. I really value excellent documentation. I would absolutely kill for a quality overhaul of our various products’ documentation (see: docs.auxon.io).

We only sell to large enterprises & very technical orgs, so to get around middling or confusing documentation what we end up doing is a lot of quickly curated videos that directly address the customer’s specific need, but it absolutely doesn’t scale well, and I am certain that a variety of tutorials, cookbooks, and reference docs would be extremely useful.
> sites implementing 2fa don't make it easy to share the keys

Sites that offer TOTP as a second factor normally either have the seed printed out next to the QR code, or have a button (or link) to show it.

It's a major hassle to scan a QR code from the laptop screen without leaving the laptop, whereas copy-pasting the seed into the password manager is easy. Pasting it somewhere you can share with other people is just as easy since the seed is just a string of characters.

There's also the fact that TOTP is an open standard, so one could very easily implement a bit of software that translated the QR code into the seed, so there's really no point at all for websites to try to protect the seed from the user. The user owns the seed and the code.
There is a middle ground. List your broken stuff for free on facebook marketplace or wherever. There are people who have learned all the common problems with a particular appliance and will go around collecting broken ones to either fix, or use for parts.

That way there is no waste. The appliance will get fixed and resold. It also allows people to specialize their skills to repair things more optimally.
More Than 2000 E-Books Are Free Today for 'Stuff Your Kindle Day'
If you don't like the OSI, then look at the FSF instead. Don't they have the same views on those kind of licenses?
I think v1.9 is where most of the magic happened there — packages gained the ability to list out their precompilation work during installation, which reduced compilation (and associated invalidations) at runtime.
Thank you for informing me. I feel dumb for having chuckled.