skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This guy says he lives in Montana. That is probably part of the problem.

I live in a major metro area. It seems like for anything I could possibly want, there is a shop that sells it at whatever quality level I desire. And repairs... People are always saying that you can't fix anything. But that's not true. Just last year my oven stopped working; the local repairman sent the circuit board to a place nearby that "rebuilt" it (checked every component, desoldered and replaced anything that wasn't perfect).

Yep, houses are expensive in the big city. Taxes are crazy in the big city. But the economy supports having durable stuff. If your only option is Target and Amazon, I can understand feeling like nothing you buy works.

Oh, and don't get me started about pens. Come on. A Pilot Metropolitan and a bottle of ink that will last 5-10 years will set you back a whole $40. And then you only need to buy more ink.
OpenAI's Napster/Google Moment
All of this rings painfully true for home appliances. Besides a lucky break with an air fryer (knock on wood), all our non-shitty kitchen items are at least 15 years old. My 1-year old HP printer is obtuse and stupid. Even my $1900 work-issued ThinkPad is rife with stupid driver bugs.

My workshop tools, however, don't seem to be affected. My soldering iron? Absolute tank. Milwaukee drill bits? I abuse them, and they don't care. Even the mid-grade Craftsman multimeter is totally competent.
TL;DR v^2 is bad for your health in a car crash

(But probably read it because it's really short)
> Your grains, rice, cereals beans were probably made on a machine from the 1800's. Yep all the big brands.

I don't see how that could work: the population is far larger than it was then, so our consumption of those must be up a lot. How could a stock of machines that was suitable then could be producing even half the volume consumed now?
The biggest difference is that the latter is the only one you'll find in stores, at least in north america.
Sounds like a feature rather than a bug!
the Miele vacuums are incredible.

If you want appliances that last, buy the commercial ones. Hobart makes an under counter dishwasher that you can bet will never wear out and can be repaired.

Shell out for an industrial washing machine like they have at the laundromats. Those things are made to run all day for years. If they break down, they're repairable.
Prob 20-25y ago I read a short “book” online, looked for it multiple times throughout the years but could never find it again.

It was a story of Superman and a villain where the roles were inverted, Superman was the bad guy. It was alternating one chapter with a fiction story and a chapter as technical manual about various hacking topic like basic cryptography, steganography, etc.

The protagonist was using various techniques to escape from Superman and the technical chapters were like tutorials.

I can’t say that it was the beginning of my interest in security, but it was certainly a great inspiration. I also sort of started writing a book around the same idea of alternating fiction and technical chapters, will see if I ever finish it :)
I’ve had to buy a lot of furniture and other things for my new house this year, and one of the things that really sticks out to me is that practically every category of product seems to be split into a bimodal distribution: cheap crap & luxury boutique.

There are practically no entries occupying the middle of the market that are on the basic end regarding features & frills but also high-quality.

It’s incredibly annoying. I can either get an absolute trash sofa for less than $1,000 or I can get a high-end, high-quality one for $5000+. Now there are definitely sofas that occupy the price range between those, but they’re almost all just wildly overpriced garbage that’s no better than the sub-$1000 junk. The same goes for dining tables, cabinetry, window treatments, cooking appliances, etc. I end up just scouring for “vintage” stuff that’s in decent shape whenever possible. It’s like I have this whole other full-time job trying to find quality used goods because the only things I can just get new immediately are garbage.
And I'm afraid I agree with you.

I just hope it doesn't destroy the nice things.

If it does, well, this is why we can't have nice things.
>A refrigerator that can’t last 20 years is terrible for the environment to throw away when it lasts 3-6 like many Samsung and LG fridges do…

Modern fridges are much more energy efficient, which makes this calculus somewhat complicated.
Related:

Humans are not Automatically Strategic (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948600 - July 2015 (11 comments)

Humans are not automatically strategic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1673144 - Sept 2010 (35 comments)
Battery production will increase, yes, but so will electricity demand as transportation, heating, and industrial processes are electrified. Right now electricity use is only 37% of total energy use [1].

> Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh

Again, it's 12 hours for diurnal storage not 8 hours. More than 12 hours during the winter, actually. And diurnal storage isn't the only type of storage that's necessary. Factor in storage to even out seasonal fluctuations and you're looking at days maybe even weeks of energy storage. And again, 500 GW is going to turn into 1,300 GW as the rest of our energy use is electrified.

Batteries don't last 20 years, not even close. Diurnal storage is going to be cycled daily. A typical lithium ion cell lasts 300-500 charge cycles [2]. You can prolong this by limiting depth of discharge but this has the side effect of reducing the usable capacity. Let's be generous and assume 2,000 cycles that's only 5 and a half years.

200 GWh per year is still a massive amount of batteries. We're talking about over a third of global battery production to provide 8 hours of storage for just one country. And again, in reality we need more than 8 hours of storage and batteries don't last nearly as long as you claim.

There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that compressed air, hydrogen, or something else will account for the majority of storage: batteries aren't available in sufficient quantity, and deploying grid storage at any significant scale will severely reduce availability of batteries for EVs.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States

2. https://au.renogy.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about....
You may find ROHD to be interesting, since it takes a very serious approach to verification and even has a simulator built-in!
https://intel.github.io/rohd-website/
I just recently cancelled Prime based on the news about putting ads on Prime Video; between that and the fact that shopping on Amazon has become a nightmare it's just not worth it.

Netflix is definitely on the chopping block, I don't know if there's anything of value there except for the final season of Stranger Things in, I assume, 2-3 years. They do still surprise me sometimes, though -- Bodies was a fun limited series.

HBO (or "Max" or whatever it's called this week) and Disney+ are hanging on for the moment. Apple Music I can't particularly recommend but it meets my needs. Apple TV+ has delivered a surprising amount of good content for a comparatively low price recently.

I don't actually have the option of cancelling it (it's "free" through my credit card), but DashPass has served me reasonably well. I'd probably be healthier and wealthier without it, though.
Is there a different set of IPs for Warp? That would have to be denied too.
Video games are gonna get more realistic
The comparison I'd make is not to cars from the 20th century, but the early 21st, about the last your grandfather experienced. There's a vast difference in the quality of a car from 2005 or 2010 and the equivalent from 2023, and it's not favorable to the latter.
Guess it’s an improvement over deploying it to sociopathic felons which was their last claim to fame.
Discussed at the time:

Don Bateman’s terrain mapping device - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12261578 - Aug 2016 (27 comments)

Also:

Don Bateman, inventor of the GPWS, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104746 - May 2023 (21 comments)
Totally irrelevant links — the assertion was about hybrid cars, those links speak to cars overall.

The Toyota Prius debuted in the US in 2000. I’d argue 23 years is simply not sufficient to make an argument about long term reliability—particularly given that sales took a while to ramp, and any issues in, say, the first 10 years are likely to be dismissed as teething problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens is the interviewee. He helped create OSI, which pushed Open Source (vs Free Software).
I lived there for ~7 years and would +1 this. Living and working there is very different.
You can buy commercial versions of most machines which will be much better quality and without the stupid touch-screen gimmicks. They might cost 10x as much but that's also how much more domestic ones used to cost back in the day.
RedHat no longer pays the people who worked on the articles at opensource.com, they all got fired in the recent layoffs.
I'm working on licenses that do that; they become null and void if there is any duty.

Of course, an outside agreement can establish such duties.
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.

I purchased a Capresso Infinity Conical Burr Grinder from Amazon.com on Aug 21, 2020 for $157.94 and have used it, at a minimum, once per day every day I have woken up at home for three years (at least 1,000 times) and it shows no signs of slowing down.

If my definition of "a lot" correct and is "greater than three" then the author might want to have his or her wiring checked.

Also, as far as staples go, premium staples that can fasten (practically) paper to sheet metal are $0.20 more per 1,000-count than garbage staples. Buy the premium staples that come in a plastic box with a hinged lid instead of the cardboard bricks of staples and you'll never have a jam again.

> The two or three new pens I use each week that, because no ink comes out of them

Ok this is just ridiculous.

TWO TO THREE. PENS. PER WEEK. This has moved into the realm of satire.

Buy Pilot G2 pens. Problem solved. They'll still write after going through the wash.

Where is this person getting their pens?

What are they doing to their pens?

What is going on?

Am I high?

That being said I have nearly no problems with the quality of any purchases I've made because I pay, at a minimum, the inflation adjusted equivalent of what I would have paid 20 years ago for the same product. I also research everything obsessively. Like, read the manual and watch YouTube teardowns of microwaves before buying a new microwave obsessively. I have many fewer things than most Americans but all of my shit is the nicest it can possibly be within my budget.

The race to the bottom is a race I do not participate in.

The bottom is where the junk is.
think about it the other way: if someone who happens to use random ROM happens to be a target of a state security agency of course it would be trivial to infect and the other 999 users would be collateral damage.
ROHD (https://intel.github.io/rohd-website/) is sort of similar to Chisel on the design side (Dart instead of Scala), plus a big focus on verification. It has explicit clock and reset (though nothing precludes automating connectivity of clocks and reset via your generation software).
> don't really work to eradicate an infestation

I think if people don't see it, then operationally, it doesn't exist.
Your furniture buying experience exactly mirrors mine. There’s some kind of hard cut at around 5000-7000 dollars to goods that exceed ikea quality.
I think op is referring to a similar attack vector used in the recently presented “triangulation exploit” wherein attackers used iOS’ stored data from its own local machine learning engine that classifies photos using object recognition and stores text from images with ocr to prioritise which photos from a victims phone had content of interest for them.

Seems a legitimate concern; unsure why op is receiving negative attention for saying so.
> I want my worst enemies to be able to use my open source code against me and my competitors to be able to re-purpose it to try and drive me out of business.

Even when it's the ten trillion dollar combined market cap of FAANG (or whatever we call them now)?

Because that's not open source. That's free labor suicide.
Do this for cars in parking lots too.
Russia, Iran Officially Ditch U.S. Dollar for Trade
> Compare this to nuclear. Let's increase our production levels 100x.

Nuclear power already produces 10% of the world's electricity [1]. A 100x increase leaves the world with 10 times as much electricity as is needed, all coming from a decarbonized energy source.

Wind and solar are cheap because we don't currently have to even out their intermittency. Take away peaker plants and then intermittent sources become way more challenging. Solar produces energy in a sinusoidal pattern daily, requiring at least 12 hours of storage for truly non-intermittent solar plants. It also fluctuates over the course of the year due to weather and inclination of the Earth [2]. Wind power similarly sees fluctuations over the course of the year [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Methods...

2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-normalized-mon...

3. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/53637.pdf
My advice on electric coffee grinders: just buy a manual one with a hex shaft, and drive it with a brushless drill. I've been making drill coffee for years now.
I _love_ Walter Kirn.

> Weak-link computer chips in items that don’t require them also came in for abuse.

Indeed.

I cannot recommend his podcast with Matt Taibbi [1] or the print-only newspaper he edits-at-large [2] highly enough. The man is an American treasure.

[1] https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week

[2] https://www.countyhighway.com/
I think that liability shouldn't require perfection, just close enough as long as the criteria is objective.

I personally think that any criteria that SQLite and Curl can't pass is too strict.
As someone who is of East Asian descent, and with a mid -8 diopter, I fall into this category. I am extremely grateful that I can still get 20/20 vision with corrective lenses, but I assume that at some point, that will no longer be the case.
Show HN: GenAi Yule Lights
In the spirit of 2023, this 32x32 displays GenAi art.

A festive twist to Christmas tree with randomly generated GenAI images on a 32x32 LED Matrix. This cheerful display is powered by Raspberry Pi 4, Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT, 32x32 LED Matrix and creatively framed with Lego blocks.
“Street fighting mathematics” is a fantastic textbook.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Street_Fighting_Mathema...
Could be. I'm in the same boat (tons of outside time as a kid, very little screen time, significant myopia by age 6-7).

Both my parents are past -8, maybe -9 or -10? I forget, got some realllly thick glasses.
Yeah the problem is legibility. It's easy to see a touchscreen, or to understand a WiFi connection. But it's harder to understand why you should rant an oversized motor that will only be run at half capacity.

Features that increase longevity or repairability are considerably less legible to most consumers and therefore get removed first when trying to cut costs.
Either I'm having insanely good luck or I have extremely low expectations of a toaster, but I genuinely don't understand how a toaster does "bad job".

What were the issues you were having?
Exactly! You can still get kitchen appliances that last, but you need to be prepared to purchase pro catering equipment.

High quality toasters still exist - be they in conveyer belt form, salamander grills, or the old stalwart: the Dualit professional models.

The same applies to microwaves, hobs, ovens, ranges (combined hob/oven), et al.
Show HN: Scalable instant messaging app with Django (source code and tutorial)
Well the Perl people also invented the defined-or operator (//), so there is that.
From The Bitcoin Standard:

"The reduction in the purchasing power of money is similar to a form of taxation... As people start spending more and saving less, they become more present oriented in all their decision making... this helps explain why civilizations prosper under a sound monetary system, but disintegrate when their monetary systems are debased."
It's dramatic, but there are plenty of things in society that are similar to what they were 50 years ago. It's not like people from 50 years ago would be incapable of understanding those changes if you explained them. Which is a bit different than 500 years ago.

At least if we're using the technological singularity was what constitutes fundamental societal change in unpredictable ways. The singularity people think AGI is going to fundamentally change everything, even more than what the past 500 years has done. Certainly many magnitudes of order more than the last 50 years. And they think it will happen much faster.
Truly. I think since Wirecutter recommendations are free (at least for NYT subscribers), they make money with affiliate advertising and make more money by having readers who spend money.

So, their interest in getting me to spend more money is at odds with my interest in buying a quality product (or skipping it if they all suck!). At least Consumer Reports is a paid product who only gets paid by me.
They are probably all made with the same guts from one or two manufacturers. Same with microwaves, nearly every model from $100 to $5000 is made by Midea. (Source: Wirecutter)
We need to move away from coal as soon as we can. Coal is worst CO2 pollutant and not that energy dense.

Move to a mixture of wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear - whatever makes sense.

When the last coal powered plant is shut off in US, we should celebrate that as a day off for everyone.
Hardware generator frameworks allow you to use a full-powered modern software language to control generation of hardware. Think about why it may be easier to implement something in Python than C. Adding capabilities to VHDL/SystemVerilog is very difficult since many vendors and tools have to implement it, and if any of them don't support it the whole feature can't be used.
So theoretically - and I tried this a couple of years ago - I could still download the “last compatible version” of an app if it’s available on the store for my old 2010 iPad 1st generation running iOS 5.

This device had 256Mb RAM and 400Mhz 32 bit processor. Should Apple still support this with security updates?
I spent a few nights in capsule hotels, I was surprised at how not claustrophobic it was.

What most people don't realize is everything there is around the capsules. Usually, when you enter the hotel, you start by going to the locker room. There you put in all the stuff you won't need for the night, that is, essentially everything. You may even get a yukata robe, a towel and some toiletries, so it can be literally everything, including your clothes.

Then you can take advantage of the amities and relax. You may find showers, hot baths, massage chairs, etc... Only when it is time to sleep you go to your capsule, which is essentially like a bunk bed with privacy, maybe with a bit of equipment like a TV, alarm clock, charging plug...

Now, I probably wouldn't stay in a capsule hotel for 3 weeks, but I could definitely spend 3 weeks backpacking, stopping in capsule hotels for the night. It is not really designed as a place to stay, more like a place to spend the night with no preparation. Also, while it is cheaper than regular hotels, it is not that cheap, and if you really want cheap, there are other options.
The MCU is the problem. They toast by time. This just can't work well. My parents' Sunbeam had a temperature sensor.
>I don't know how many times this needs to be said

Zero. Few people are unaware that the sun doesnt shine at night. It never needed repeating.

What theyre less educated about is that pumped storage, hydrogen, batteries, solar/wind anticorrelation and demand shaping are, together, more than capable of accomodating renewable intermittency.

What's most ridiculous is that even the most expensive form of viable power storage (hydrogen) is still cheaper when paired with solar or wind than nuclear power is alone. This isnt to say that we should go all in on hydrogen/solar, just that nuclear power's cost is unconscionably high.

Indeed, if it werent for the nuclear military's reliance on civilian supply chains and skills it would never get built and the 'environmentalist nuclear' PR offensive of the last ~8 years that resonated with so many people wouldnt have happened.
As with anything, professional licensure can make things better or worse.

What tends to happen with professional licensing is that barriers to entry are erected, reducing the supply of labour and artificially increasing the price of labour for existing software engineers.

See cosmetology licenses for example: it is ludicrous that it is illegal to shampoo someone's hair in New York without completing a 1,000 hour course of study or having 5 years (!!!) of experience [1]. Yeah, sure, you shouldn't be spreading diseases or anything, but this is far, far beyond that.

A less ridiculous example: doctors. In the US, there is a hilariously restrictive number of residency places available, and this number is set by the government and backed by the American Medical Association. This inflates doctors' wages and makes it much harder to become a doctor than is necessary. There's a strong case for licensing doctors, but the particular way it's done in the US is obviously suboptimal.

My point is that yes, politicians writing regulations wrong will hurt the industry, but strangling the industry by limiting the number of software engineers can also cause harm.

I believe you know this already ("my proposal isn't perfect") so don't take this as an argument, I'm just making the possible downsides explicit and adding some detail.

[1]: https://dos.ny.gov/cosmetology
50GW, 88GW, it's all small potatoes compared to the hundreds of GW of annual additions for other technologies.

If nuclear could compete, China would be building the hell out of it, and selling it internationally. Getting other countries to use your nuclear supply chain for their electrical infrastructure is such a huge geopolitical win that if it were possible, it would be one of the key political and economic strategies of China.

If China, one of the few countries with a mastery of large construction projects, can't make nuclear cheap, what hope do more advanced economies have with their higher labor costs?
Somehow it works fine literally anywhere else in the world. My parents, who were both engineers, had me when they were living in a 500sqft flat shared with my grandma. Then they moved out to a 700sqft flat and had my sister :)

Of course, people in their 30ies could easily afford a house pretty recently, too - before post-covid-printing spike (when the fertility was already low), price-to-income ratio was only slightly higher than it had been historically; before even accounting for increased sqft of the new houses.