skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.

That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.

Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.

Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.

Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.

Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.

The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.

For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
Trying to read them as charitably as I can, I think they are suggesting they're okay with moving away from destructive practices that make red meat so cheap and paying the higher cost that comes with it.
its less good than https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57_YsQ?feature=shared
Neetocal
I would caution to point of that the Strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is debunked; Language may influence your understanding, but it's not deterministic and just means more words to explain a concept for any language.
Please quote the part where the parent you responded to said "I don't give a shit", or where they said "I think we will miraculously find a solution". You're tilting at straw men.
I don't mind '0' == 0 when it's used for scripts and dumb stuff. That's literally how shellscript works, and I love shellscript, so I can't complain about that.

But I would never use shellscript to build an entire business's user interface with a giant shellscript framework. That would be insane. A language that was designed as a throwaway scripting thing for doing some miscellaneous tasks, and never designed for full application purposes? No sane person would use that for a business's core product.

Right?
For some reason Britain's migrant population is disproportionately reliant on government services. This is a common talking point in American politics, but doesn't seem a common one in English politics, but in England the data is pretty incontrivertible, whereas in America it's a bit harder to ascertain.

This is because America's alleged welfare queens are undocumented, whereas Britain's are there legally and the government actually has very good data on which groups are a net boon and which are a net draw on the economy.

I'm not a Brit and I could care less at the end of the day, but it does seem kind of bonkers to me to be importing people while your own country suffers.
Probably more: "I'll save my energy for interacting with AI for something more useful to me"
I agree. If you could somehow describe him to a 5-yr-old (without psychologically scaring them) they would accurately sum up the zeitgeist as "he's a bad person".
Oh, look, the usual dogwhistle of "not throwing pataat op de straat".
So many environmental regulations are ending in the USA. :c
They describe that the tariff is on the value of the card, not the fee for grading.

Does that mean they don't really know the tariff cost to the individual until they see the card and value it?
it wasnt really so clean
Well, of course it would.
they did distribution well.
I don't think the public opinion is as dire as it seems. He has a very vocal cult following, but the real swing in the election was politically disaffected people who are just really hard to reach. This is sad but the good news is that it's just a matter of reaching them — and MAGA is clearly and demonstrably failing on the number one issue for the vast majority of voters which is economy.
Just to be clear, GitMCP isn't a repository management tool. Its sole purpose is to make documentation accessible to AI in ways the current tools do not (e.g., semantic search, not necessarily limited to a repository), with minimal overhead for users.
GitMCP itself is a free, public, open-source repository. The tool doesn't have access to PII and doesn't store agent queries.
I don't think they do intend that. I think they intend to get free contributions from keen people who think erroneously they're contributing to a public good.
> Well people like me benefit from society as I can benefit from people being naive.

So you’re a leech on society, got it.
I havent checked on UK in awhile. Lets look at it together. objective observer pov.

GDP growth: basically 0% for years. You're stagnating and losing economic time. Bad news.

Unemployment looks to be rising but overall not terrible. Participation rate seems high, grandma and grandpa still working it seems?

Interest rate of 4.5% is rough. Housing is problematic.

Balance of trade is negative, you're getting poorer.

Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy.

Consumer confidence hasnt been positive in 10 years.

corporate tax rate of 25%? personal income tax of 45%. sales tax of 20% Yikes.

Seems to me the UK government is holding the economy back with far too high taxes.
In this scenario, the US voluntarily goes quasi-autarky, but everyone else continues to trade.
Are there any metrics that could be used to test this theory?
Ding ding ding. Western governments have spent years on housing and energy policy driven by ideoogical concerns, when a technocratic approach would have been much more productive. Yes, this includes things people may not like, especially environmental or 'social justice' groups.
He didn't do the brainwashing, 60 years of having only right wing, billionaire owned media did that.
I don't know that the argument stands with "feelings of achievement". I agree that you can't justify a moral infringement by taking pleasure in it, but upthread you were trying to distance the motivation from virtuous ones like curiousity and activism. Being driven by achievement is absolutely a virtue. I'd argue it's the same virtue that drives curiousity, and you've essentially just said exactly that ("the feeling of solving a puzzle is a 'rush of power'" s/power/achievement).
Thank you for the summary.

Funny I was looking for some data from NOAA a few months ago and I ended up giving up. Their website has become a mess.

I remember doing the same a few decades ago it was pretty straightforward, if I remember correctly there was a well organised anonymous FTP server and you would connect and transfer what you needed.

So why not seeing this as an opportunity to go back to a simple, cheap and effective system? how hard can it be to serve those data with HTTP on a web server?
I am a saddened that so many people on HN interpret this poem only as a literal critique on their favourite new toy. And only engage with it on that level. To me this poem was like drinking a distillation of a lot of the sadness and uncertainty and over-excitement and fatigue and burn out of the astoundingly swift technological march of the last decade. And yes, ofc LLMs. I don't have to be completely in agreement with the tone of the poem to appreciate that.

when I see a kid alone playing video games all day... and the parent, instead of trying to speak to their child, engage with them, mediates this problem through the use of an app with time limits... to me there is a lot of sadness in that. Putting up virtual glass panes between each other more and more.

^ the source of above is somewhat funny though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvsYm4vfM6Y
You and me both buddy, you and me both.
No, that's a mistake in the article. The variable is still captured by reference, but `let` is causing it to be re-declared on every iteration of the loop, not mutated.

The following code prints 1, 2, 3. It wouldn't do that if the variable was captured by value.

for (let i = 0; i < 3;) {
setTimeout(() => console.log(i));
i++;
}
Thank you for that! I didn't know about Yarvin nor List. I will try to find out more.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/implementing-market-balanc...
while gleefully watching the bandwagon fools repeatedly ice-pick themselves in the brain.
I think tariffs are terrible and will harm the economy, but the stock market isn't the economy (re: dow sliding).
The last time the world was at +4C was the mid-miocene, 16 million years ago. Sea levels were 40 meters higher than today. The climate was so wet that grasslands grew in what is now desert. Gigantic mammals roamed everywhere. Human ancestors were still living in trees. Antarctica had coastal forests and was home to the only glaciers on earth.

If anyone can read that paragraph and think "Not bad. But what about the stock market?", they've completely lost the thread.
“Policy-makers pandering to it.”

Do policy-makers pander to computing in general?

“People incessantly telling you how they use it.”

I don’t think this can be said for American-style ultracapitalism. (Especially for the author who isn’t in the US.)
I’d like to hear an explanation of what mastered skills are useless?
Its like computing gave us the most powerful paintbrush of all time and we said, "nah, you do the painting".
Visited UK recently, wandered around south-east counties. Didn't feel like a poor country. In poor countries, things are cheap. In UK, things are expensive, so people have money.
Maybe it failed, but that's the goal.

You can't take the GDPR, and conclude that regulations as an idea is bad.
Agreed. Their 'no full time employees' philosophy would be consistent with that: https://sahillavingia.com/work
Well it wasn't good for us unless you count all the money we made out of it before they started fighting back.
NYT has a front page article today about people painting potatoes for Easter to save money. I had to double check that I wasn't on The Onion.
This is roughly where I've settled as well.

Economics likes to present the facade of a hard science with equations and rules - but macro economics simply doesn't work the same way as physics, and pretending that your equations are going to be a crystal ball has so far proved mostly bullshit.

Too many things depend on decisions made by actors acting under very complex and dynamic social constraints, rather than predictable rules.

The end result is that several decades after something happens - we're ok at examining the social/political influence of the time on macro economics, but that insight doesn't do much for us now because circumstances are changing at a pace that has rendered any intuition utterly obsolete.
Or, well, like git. You can use an entirely email based workflow with git if you want to.

Here's an overview: https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html
> And admitting it would mean bursting the bubble of "I'm an intelligent person." (and even "a good person").

Or, "I do my own research".
Housing and energy could both be dirt cheap and the money would still go to rich people. The problem from a living standards point of view is the cost which is due to a lack of supply. Get the cost down and poor people would be able to save and buy assets and become wealthy.
At this point we're trafficking in tediously obvious truisms. This is Learned Sage Warns Powerball Not As Much After Taxes territory. I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices is unaware of these fundamentals about human nature. Presenting them in this context as if they represent a counterpoint implies that there's a fundamental futility to even trying, which I think takes the convo in the wrong direction.
No, but the tax revenue I give to the government does.
the problem with this is that most browsers employ persistency rules for OPFS that are not very transparent, at least for the user, or not very predicable, at least for the developer. In other words, a user can find his/her data wiped out all of a sudden.

Here some info: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...

There is also a discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222328

You can use the file system API as an alternative, which is permanent, but it's slow, requires the user to remember where the file was stored, and not recommended for things such as databases.

This makes the whole purpose of it a bit pointless in my opinion. What is your experience with it?
The democrats have an even lower approval rating and seem to be staunchly refusing to change. Assuming we still have elections, I don't see how it ends as anything other than swapping desperately back and forth between the two corporate parties.
Show HN: I vibe coded WikiXplorer – GamePad for WikiXplorer in 20 minutes
Just dropped WikiXplorer – GamePad, a fun, fast-built companion for WikiXplorer that lets you explore Wikipedia in a gamepad-style UI. Coded the fun project in just 20 minutes using v0 and Next.js, and it’s live on Vercel. It’s a playful experiment to make Wikipedia feel more interactive and scroll-friendly. Would love feedback and ideas.

Thanks
Someone is probably insider trading on this, but so far they look more like True Believers who don't expect it to go badly than 5D chess manipulators. In particular, Musk tying his reputation so strongly to the far right has been nothing but bad for his stock holdings.
if you have any scruples and a brain, you'll shut up until you have a chance to obstruct something really important. Its easy to replace you if you vocally oppose trump.
Nobody has come up with anything halfway rational to explain this behavior. The closest, the so-called "Mar-a-lago Accord", is filled with so many holes that it cannot be a coherent theory. (See, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDKbWA1NzY for an explanation of it and why it's obviously wrong).

One thing that dictators reliably do is tank the economy to destroy the middle class, which consolidates power for them. That's the most coherent motivation that I have bene able to find.
Wake me up when an LLM has found the solution to Alzheimer's. Until then, don't force it into every software I use.
Do queue operations (enqueue a job & mark this job as complete) happen in the same transaction as my business logic?

Imo that's the killer feature of database-based queues, because it dramatically simplifies reasoning about retries, i.e. "did my endpoint logic commit _and_ my background operation enqueue both atomically commit, or atomically fail"?

Same thing for performing jobs, if my worker's business logic commits, but the job later retries (b/c marking the job as committed is a separate transaction), then oof, that's annoying.

And I might as well be using SQS at that point.
It's very easy to hate on him for that very reason. He's just buying a good reputation for the fraction of his wealth that is completely insignificant.

If I could buy that kind of reputation by tossing a few coins into the void, why not? Especially after I've stolen billions from others.
It’s not actually cheap, just subsidized. Becoming reliant on it now virtually guarantees you will have a tough decision to make later when profitability is actually important.
Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots
I'm in my mid-forties and I think the LLM revolution is amazing.

It reminds me of the dotcom era in many ways: a genuinely transformative technology which is currently no more than maybe 20% of the way into realising its potential; a technology for which expectations have been hyped up to maybe 200% of potential; and a technology around which a stockmarket bubble has formed.

I'll leave the rest of the LLM story to the reader's imagination, but to see this slightly fragmented and ossified mind it's extremely obvious what happens next, and then what happens after that, and then after that (which is when we get to the really good bit). So no, I'm not bored, and I'm not tired. I'm as happy to be working in technology now as when I was a younger man. Happier in some ways, even.
> But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.

Because we've been fed a narrative that there's only "one right way" to care for the external world. For example, in my city of Portland, they recently revamped the public library. Was it done to make the beautiful building up to code so that people could enjoy books for a hundred years more until the next renovation?

Oh no... that would have 'exacerbated inequality'. Instead, we removed the books, shortened the bookshelves, and got rid of seating so that homeless men would have a place to walk around drugged-out and not be found masturbating behind tall bookshelves. That was the 'one true way' of using public funds, according to those in charge. Don't disagree or you might get labeled a fascist.

We see this all around the world. Just look at the reaction to Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance'. Such obvious solutions, things we can all agree on (I consider myself a conservative and enjoyed the parts of the book I've read). But if you look at the reaction it's getting, it's the same tired rhetoric. We are not allowed to have nice things. Wanting nice things is apparently chauvinistic, racist, classist, something supremacist, some other -ist, etc.

In the meantime, anyone who has not followed the 'one true path', has basically resigned themselves, and many have become actively resentful of the system writ large.
It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.

I actually agree that most of the people involved with politics are pretty cult-ish (especially the die-hard MAGAs), but I refuse to believe that 60 million people in the US are like that. Maybe it helps that I live in a very red area so I have regular and routine contact with a lot of people who I know voted for Trump but are generally and genuinely thoughtful and contemplative, but have different opinions/conclusions on the best solutions than I do. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant to assume that you are always right and someone else is always wrong.

Changing minds isn't easy, and it isn't fast, but it is clearly possible. Else how do you explain the shifts back and forth? Bush 41 -> Clinton -> Bush 43 -> Obama -> Trump -> Biden -> Trump? How do you explain the relatively rapid swing from opposition to support of gay marriage?
Early Earth's first crust composition discovery rewrites geological timeline
'Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet's history, challenging current theories about plate tectonics.'
The cases you're showing here are things that can also be accomplished by looking in books. You're describing Google if it actually worked
Here is the article I was referring to:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/secure-boot-is-comp...
Unlike previous market turmoil (2008, 2020) where the U.S. at least had established global trade order to lean on for the recovery, this feels like the U.S. could be entering a period of sustained damage. I don't see how the U.S. recovers from this in anything like he near term. Americans will have to get used to a long stretch of low economic growth.

The global trade order is going to be reconfigured, but not in the way the Trump thinks. The U.S. is throwing up a wall around itself, but the rest world will continue with the current regime and likely move away from the U.S. permanently.

What's sad is, the Congress could simply revoke the ability for Trump to single-handedly make these tariffs, but they appear too cowed to do anything about it.
> "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."

Is this a SV thing? Conversations about IT with anyone other than co-workers are a once-a-year thing for me. It is actually refreshing, because a lot of the stuff I work on esoteric/niche it's not coming up a lot in conversation.
2 weeks ago, I started to vibecoded the submit discount coupon app, SaveSmart App, that solved my own desire.
Problems: Most of the submit discount coupon apps don't allow you to submit your affiliate link.

Solutions: My app allows anyone to submit their discount coupon codes that attach to their affiliate link so they can help shoppers save while they earn through their affiliate.

Benefits: Discount Coupon submission is a great SEO strategy to promote your products and store. Coupon submission will create more exposure for your online store, services, and products. It is also a fantastic way of getting more niche-specific results from the coupon websites on Google SERPs. Earn through their affiliate.

Background: I am a MERN developer but most of my projects are frontend. The first AI tool that I used was GitHub Copilot. I discovered other AI tools that leverage the process from project setup, UI build, page design, database integration, bug fixed, etc.

AI Tools: Bolt and Windsurf

Tech Stacks: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, and Supabase

I'd love any feedback you have!
> Gumroad is infamous for underpaying and using cheap labor where possible.

What? Where do you get this from? It's quite the opposite.
That’s not what they are saying.

Ego, corruption, etc are explanatory. The statewide economics just never quite worked.
Advertising in the sense of making an entry in a service registry like the Yellow Pages used to be where the customer can look you up and find you, yes.

Forcing news of your existence on people who didn't ask though? Nah. That's just parasitism.
Antibiotic resistance isn't pertinent to quality of life?
I built this kit. It was a lot of fun but very tedious. I also have a computer engineering degree so I didn't really learn much. It was fun to show to people though.

If you don't understand what a register is for example though, OH MAN. You'll love this!
People get tricked by heat pumps advertising CoP as "efficiency" and ignore the legwork to calculate BTU/$.
> This is extremely false. Please verify your sources better

Sorry! I was using Cal AI
That's a dumb racist dogwhistle, Marrakesh and Kandy are very homogenous yet quite filthy.

The common denominator is education and poverty, not skin colour or religion or whatever you imagine it to be.
Thanks. Sometimes I feel like I'm going insane attempting to ŕeason with people who think the opposite. That these are oracles imbued with human level intellect and creativity.

Now, sure, these models can be impressive - but it's a warped lens of humanities own impressive (selected) corpuses.
The fact that they have guardrails to try and prevent it means OpenAI themselves thinks it is at least shady or outright illegal in someway. Otherwise why bother?
Another angle: he's a very stupid person.

Consider if you were kind of a dumbass but born very wealthy. You go your entire life running from income tax. Then someone mentions tariffs to you. A complete dumbass in this situation would, obviously, be extremely excited about the idea of replacing income tax with tariffs. And fortunately for him/unfortunately for us, it's one of the few things POTUS can basically do unilaterally.

It has side-benefits like centralizing power so everyone has to come to you for exemptions, it makes it look like you have a chance of moving American industry back a few decades which would be great for a chunk of your constituency, etc.

But fundamentally he's just a dumbass and the people around him are fully indoctrinated into his cult. Very dangerous combination.

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/commerce-secretary-lutnick-...