skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started a product newsletter and I need to know if it sucks or not
This weekend I created a newsletter.

It's about how products go from being “that new technology” to the thing they are today.

I take 1 product (either physical, digital - it can be anything) and write about:

- Why I love it
- How it started
- Lessons it can teach us

I've written 2 so far:

1) Slot Machine
2) Jeans

–––

What do people think?

http://lessonsinproduct.com/

Honest feedback appreciated.

Thanks in advance

– Tom
Most Amiga users - at least the home computing/gaming enthusiasts - never saw a big-box Amiga back in the day. To most users, 'The Amiga' was the A500, which released in '87 and reached peak popularity in the very late 80s/early 90s.

And to most Amiga gamers, Doom was where it became clear the PC had overtaken. Amiga game developers also got obsessed with trying to build a Doom clone for the Amiga, repeatedly showing how futile that effort was* , and much talent was wasted in that pursuit rather than making more good 2D games.

But by the time Doom arrived, the SNES had already been out for a couple of years, too, and despite a weak CPU it absolutely destroyed the Amiga in terms of 2D graphics performance (multi-layer parallax, loads of sprites, loads of colours, and 'Mode 7' effects)

(*ok, maybe not entirely futile if you've seen Dread/Grind which are super-impressive, but it took until the 2020s to pull it off, with an engine that seems about halfway between Wolf3D and Doom in terms of capabilities)
Wow, your tool is amazing. I have been searching for something like this for quite some time and even thought of writing such tool myself.
I've worked on the claims management process flow for payer like Anthem before. It's probably obvious, but this story hints at some serious deficiencies in the backend processes.

One way to look at it is that this Byzantine process helps Anthem by trapping valid claims in a black hole of bureaucracy. That way they don't need to pay, right?

It's not quite that simple. It's true that incentives are not usually aligned, but in reality the payment P&L impact is often far away from the claims processing administrative decisions. At many payers (like Anthem), the ultimate 'payer' for most of the cost may not actually be Anthem. They may be the third-party administrator charging back to an employer, or the Federal government. Even if it is Anthem, the owner of the cost center for this broken administrative process is almost certainly removed from whomever runs the actuarial accounting to decide what kinds of services to cover and how much to charge customers (except, as the author found, once they unite at the level of the CEO).

Ultimately for Anthem, this claim cost them a lot more to handle than if they had just paid out in the first place - even if they were the ultimate payer. Consider how much time the author spent on the phone with customer service representatives. Many of those were almost certainly contracted out and charged to Anthem by the minute. Then consider the claims processing backend, also likely contracted through third-party claims processing and management systems. It would have been simpler to manage the first one straight through.

Usually what it comes down to is that it is hard to estimate the ROI for investing in fixing a problem like this, because the benefits are spread out over many small cases. One way to prove it out is to highlight some of those small cases so that payers feel the pain and recognize the need for change. Thus, I am glad the author published this complete story.
How many plastic coated “reusable” bags that are in everyone’s closet, car, and boat were imported during the same period? These cloth / plastic / bags are full of evil chemical dyes and surfactants from manufacturing in India !
Typical story about some exotic knowledge or practice that is a shortcut westerners could take to solve otherwise complex problem.

Who says anger is always wrong? Or that not exposing children to it is better? Screaming at somebody can be a valid excalation in a conflict, signaling serious aggression and that worse is to come if the offending party does not cease.

Yelling can be stupid and worse than useless. People can lose their temper too often or when they do not have a chence to win an escalated conflict. But an extreme does not justify the other (never doing it).

Also kids are kids. Sometimes they will not accept any calm argumentation no matter what. And shocking them into submission with verbal aggression will. Again, this can be over used by some parents.

There are no shortcuts and no recipes. Never doing something or always doing some other thing does not work.
This is what motivated me to start a company. It is a tech company because that's what I know. But at the end of the day, it's my way of creating what I consider a healthy environment. I was very fortunate to work in an environment like that 6-7 years ago and now I want to re-create it through my company.
This is why I ask for qualifications when someone has an authoritative tone.
I agree. Mine looks much better than I was expecting. I suspect some people don’t like them because they are too realistic.

When I think of people who use Memojis, they rarely choose designs that resemble them. In some cases I think the rejection could be this. People want more control over virtual versions because normally they have it.
but that is 4 years later than the xerox optical mouse tech report, and from a different company which copied their default mouse pointer style from xerox. it doesn't bear on the question of whether xerox was implementing cursors without hotspot coordinates at the time that they adopted the left-leaning shape

(i suspect xerox mouse cursors always had variable hotspot coordinates because it's, what, six microseconds extra in the screen update to subtract them? and i think smalltalk-76 mouse cursors have hotspots. but 01988 or even 01985 is way too late)
The story of the monster is technically the truth. Being near the sea is dangerous and requires respect and understanding.

There will be a transition period between realizing the story is fake, and the real reason why small people need to stay away from the water.

However, this realization will be at a point when the kids are bigger and more co-ordinated to get away from a rogue wave/whatever danger.

The other fact is that this legend is passed down from generation to generation, which is a sign that it’s effective.
arguably there is not so much difference between AirPods in transparency mode and a hearing aid these days.

i share your feeling and remove earbuds. but it’s starting to feel like taking your hat off — purely symbolic gesture.
What a sad state of affairs for professionals.
Oh my god why would you override the back button on the "start archiving" page, once you get there you're stuck and the only way to leave is to close the entire tab and open a new one. You can of course press "homepage" which will bring you back to the homepage.....but then pressing back brings you to the login page again. Arghhhh.
I've dealt with this many times as a South Asian person and it is very possible they still do actually want money. Most people will not ask in a straightforward manner for money and when you offer to pay them, they act all offended. This is a stupid game that I have no idea how it started where they will pretend to not want the money but will still very obviously want it. This has stumped me, being mildly autistic, for the decades of my existence and also stumps foreigners a lot. I cannot proffer a solution. Sometimes asking works, most of the time it doesn't and the other party feels unhappy about it and then when you decide enough is enough and want to pay, another guessing game begins where you need to gauge what amount satisfies them. It's incredibly goddamn annoying and I wish they just told you they want a bribe or money instead of engaging with these weird, obtuse, coy behaviours and then I have to obsess over whether I made a faux pas by paying/not paying them
The reality is that if you speak at a conference there's a decent chance there's video of that on YouTube. If you have any sort of public presence as part of your job, your voice and likeness are probably out there whether you put it out yourself or not.

Keeping yourself anonymous isn't compatible with a lot of even moderately senior-level jobs out there.
My only concern is that standard would easily place Oracle as the winner of most corporate care for developers in a terribly expensive and timely investments!!!
Anger is useful in a way, that it gives energy and overcomes paralyzing fear. When you are in a survival fight with no way to escape, anger can make all the difference - otherwise we would not have evolved it. But sure, it is way way better, to not be in a situation where anger is the last resort - and in all normal (social) situations, anger is dangerous. The idea is is to be in control of your body - and not your emotions controlling you.

So I am with the Inuit with this approach:

"When they're little, it doesn't help to raise your voice," she says. "It will just make your own heart rate go up."

When you meet anger with anger, the fire only goes stronger.

Children mainly learn by observing the elders. If they resolve their conflicts with anger - they will mimic it. If they see the elders being calm, that is what they will learn. And if they learn, that they will get what they want, if they throw a tantrum - then this is what they will do more in the future. Consequence is key here.

But I am very sceptical about the bad stories. They don't help I think.

What helps is channeling the anger with martial arts for example. There you can learn to feel the anger raising, after you get a hit - but not become blinded by it. You stay cool. And in control.

edit: what works best when my children have their heads hot - literally cooling them with a bit of water
> For example, what if it shows others that you're staring something straight ahead but when "in fact" you're looking at a giant window playing a movie? Isn't that a bit awkward?

I dunno, sometimes people stare and think about stuff. I try not to reflexively grab a gadget in such times. But it does remind me of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bSsb9B1163k
I actually found more control in writing complex formulas and scientific notation with MD and then using pandoc to convert than with Word directly. Also, it's almost magical how pandoc does the conversion: fast, accurate, and without fuss.
Sounds about right. Unfortunately, once one guy gives away the farm,
everyone else must follow suit to compete. Say what you will about
Microsoft in their 90s heyday. At least they took your money
with your eyes open as opposed to Google's freebie baiting.
I misread the title, and thought the answer would be something like "with our FREE® Anger Management System™ that you can try* TODAY© from the comfort of your home!"
Lol. Have you ever used their “IDE”? My guess is you haven’t based on the tone of your remark. Apple has been developer-hostile for years, and OP was just synthesizing their thoughts around this and TBH I found the conclusion to be fairly nuanced and apropos.
I’m a single issue “voter”. All I care about is racist ideology and Elon has plenty.
> Sorry... This game runs in desktop browser only as computer mouse is required for precise control

Meh. :‘(
I would use a real relay to switch line voltage power, like one of these: https://www.functionaldevices.com/product/ribu1c/

It has a 10-30v (and 120v)control coil so you can use a low voltage circuit to control it.
Previous threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19396563

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23927773
As evidenced by any example I've seen from these "AI logo generators," image-generation models simply cannot do logos well.

They always create insanely detailed illustrations (not logos) that feel like clip art or anime. Is this is a data-set issue (too much art station/deviantart scraping) or just a taste-issue on the part of the creators of these tools (bad prompting)? Or can image-generation models simply not do "simple" well?
What behavior is that? It seems like they are upfront about the cost right on the landing page.
Right click on the back button and you'll get the full navigation history. Or long tap if you're on a touchscreen.
People stopped wearing watches? Then how is industry revenue growing?

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/watch-ma...

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/accessories/watches-jew...

Of course it’s jewelry. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a gazillion different band and finish colors. Apple switches watch bands out seasonally and changes the available metal finishes of the device with every iteration.

It might not be jewelry you like, but it’s jewelry.
Here is a CBC article [1] with an embedded 17min Quirks and Quarks radio segment on the finding. You can watch how the tool works in the video embedded near the end of the article. The original .mp4 is available as a zipped attachment on the Science paper. Very cool :-)

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/homo-sapiens-braved-cold-mad...
It is not a good thing because it is interest free and inflation exists. If you would have had that money earlier you could have put it in high yield saving account or payed down debt.
When Commodore died, Motorola's 680x0 series of CPUs were still competitive with Intel's x86, but Commodore would use the previous generation (or two) model to keep the price low. If you wanted the latest, fastest CPU, you had to buy an accelerator (eg. GVP). They should have had the top of the line processors available for those who needed or wanted them and could afford them.

A few years later, Motorola was failing to keep up, which is why Apple switched the Mac to PowerPC.
The people that enjoy a tax refund would not really even notice the small amount they "could have had all along" by adjusting their withholding amounts.
Pricing doesn't look right, particularly the monthly subscription model.

What is the target market? Is there a hidden market where people need to create logos often enough to justify the subscription?
Rolling Airframe Missile
Humans are living longer than ever no matter where they come from
As you said ten years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841

The scary part is that you will likely be saying it again in another ten years and again and then you’ll die as “that weird cursor offset obsessed fanatic”.
I could see this working as a community project potentially. Instead of a physical maker space, it would be cool idea to have collectives built around shared digital storage/compute resources.
You'd need optical transceivers and at that point the added complexity and similar board space required might negate any weight savings (and drive up the price further).
Easiest Way to Leverage Vector Search: Free, One-Click
This is Jevons Paradox, and it's not limited to Bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Oh gosh. I wish we applied the same level of investigation to our political appointees. You telling me Bill Clinton never smoked a joint with his attorney general?
I think you’re exactly right, except I can’t see Apple moving backwards to the eye-exam blinders that everyone else uses. They need to maintain that impression that Vision is less alien than the rest. (“They’re like ski goggles!”) I think the effect gets a little better, until they’re ready to go transparent with AR.
What's a good alternative for generating a logo with similar tools to this?
Well you should. It costs almost nothing and it can have very high positive impact.
That looks like great illustrations, but bad logos.
You can file a W-4 with exemptions and avoid overwithholding! This is a fixable problem.
I love that book, one of my favorite reads of last year.

(Read it before the controversy.)
It doesn't really matter if they work when they're ballot box poison for anyone who implements them. In western Canada there are large groups of people who are absolutely wildly outraged about plastic bag and cutlery bans. They're a constant refrain in the right wing rage farming ecosphere here, because you're exposed to the (very, very mild) negative effects of the ban almost daily, but never to the positive outcome. It's a very easy lever to pull if your goal is to paint any environmental or climate change action as pointless posturing, and it's being used as such.
FWIW I’m happy to try it anyways even if it doesn’t work on mobile. The popup is the only reason I currently have no clue what the game might be like.
Dark UX patterns.
Interestingly (and somewhat surprisingly) you can do this on an Apple Watch.

However, you cannot do this on an iPhone (what?!).
Where are the data centers located?
It checks out with all the usual precedence rules. USD/TB/month is the same as USD/(TB * month). Really pedantic physicists would probably write something like USD.TB⁻¹.month⁻¹ which is, again, the same thing. Unless it is TiB and not TB, that would make the plan about 9% cheaper ;)
The IRS already thought of this - they charge you interest on the money you owed them (with some exceptions, like waiving it the first year it happens, only charging you if you withheld less than last year, etc).
Because it's the new cool tech.
Still seems like a shift from single-use (well, often double-use) plastic bags to multiple-reuse bags is a net win. I know I use my reusable grocery bags for all sorts of activities.
Hire a designer.
People like getting the big lump sum and some don't even realize it was their money all along that they just overpaid throughout the year. It's not a good thing for individuals to overpay.
> Were the first mouse pointers graphical?

Yes. Set aside a few hours to watch ‘The Mother of all Demos’.
compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175022
But to clone the Speccy they first had to obtain one (or a few) :)
It's funny how much of this stuff comes down to just "because that's how someone did it first". I see this mirrored in my own work, where so many arbitrary decisions are maintained for no reason other than that they were chosen at the outset. Nice to see that applies to basically everything.
It is not interest free. E.g., I was paid $480 in interest on overpayments last year.
Potential Perturbation of the Ionosphere by Megaconstellations
Back in the day I remember reading patio11 posts on navigating the Japanese bureaucracy and he described this as "doing SQL JOINs" across different departments by filling out forms and visiting each one.
You forgot "behave like a teenager in puberty and then suffer from the own actions".
It's so that people can stay with the goggles on longer. The only way to normalize people wearing this in public, or to be able to see themselves able to do things with them on is to make them think they aren't blocking someone's face.
Many cars have both daytime running lights and fog lights in the same enclosure. And depending on settings (auto vs manual, etc), the DRLs might stay on at night. And cars vary a lot in configuration. It would take a lot for the police to accurately recognize and ticket people with fog lights on when there's no fog.
Cool! Quite difficult (reverse scroll makes it tough on trackpad). I have a soft spot for games that let you play within 2 seconds of boot, and this does, congrats on that. Is it intentional that it starts on level 9?
> every process has exceptions

Except these sort of transfers almost always happen with, at a minimum, dual approval where exceptions cannot be made because it's software defining the rule.

1 employee submits the transaction for review, and a 2nd (and sometimes a 3rd, 4th) person must approve it before the payment initiates. There isn't typically a bypass function.

Also, CFOs are typically responsible for setting up and enforcing these controls. A big part of a CFO's job is to manage risk. If you work under a CFO, you would be more likely to be rewarded for following the process than be punished.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, but by and large no CFO would punish a finance person for disobeying an order to bypass a process intended to prevent financial fraud.
I’ve always preferred paper, and it’s a carbon sink. Instead of a plastic ban, I’d like to know my paper bags are coming from a sustainable logging operation or where the forest is being protected from fire by targeted logging operations.
Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format
Just here to praise the literary quality of the article. It is quite well-written and has a lovely flow, especially as tech-based blogs go.
Why do you see the comment section on this article as a vote between the two?

Two wrongs don't make one right. The article/comment provides plenty of facts about Meta worthy of discussion, no?
It’s almost as children are irrational creatures without fully developed brains and can’t handle the truth.
It wasn't the Amiga 3000 that killed the Amiga. It was the fact that the Amiga 3000 didn't have AGA or AAA that killed the Amiga.

Technically, it was the CD32 that killed Commodore but it was only the straw that broke the camel's back.
I'd encourage you to listen to this podcast or read the transcript.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246681
90% or more of commercial Amiga games targeted an A500 with 1 megabyte of RAM. A large fraction of commercial Amiga games targeted an A500 with 0.5 megabyte of RAM.

Unfortunately, greater, better tricked out Amigas never sold in the numbers required to make them a commercial target. By 1992, it was apparent that things were not only tough, but a disaster. (Saying that as a die-hard fan.)
It would have a custom GPU that will remain conspiciously better than anything available for less than $1000 for three years. You could imagine an in-house "NVidia game console" that does this, perhaps? But surely a terrible business plan for whatever it has in its technology pipeline.
I still can't figure out how to format on save in Xcode. Or format in general?
Apple users are conditioned to pay for things. Apple applications have higher buy rates than other platforms because outside of HN the average Apple user is less capable and less likely to pirate or need "Free" to entice their attention. I don't think anybody writes software for Apple thinking that they "care" any more than Google or Microsoft.
I wasn't being sarcastic.
Way better Elon than zuck
I don't see a single good logo on this site (some mediocre maybe), they're all too complicated and poor quality. Maybe pivot to an illustration generator.

The most telling thing? this site's logo wasn't generated using itself.
Your point was my initial reaction, too. But hey, these people have been raising kids to survive in the freezing cold for hundreds of years, who am I to say they're wrong?

I bet there is a certain delicacy to telling the stories as allegories so that you can transition them from fantasy to rationality as the kid grows.

For example, the "sea monster that swallows you and brings you to another family" sounds like an allegory for "the water will drown you and bring you to the afterlife / death". If you respect your kid's intellect, I bet that you can explain that connection to them once they're getting too old to believe myths, while still holding onto the emotional connection.