Unlurker|About
Tariffs Drive Honda to Move SUV Production from Canada to U.S. (nytimes.com)
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I wonder how this move will affect the sticker price?
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>The announcement came less than a month after Honda denied a report in the Japanese media that President Trump’s tariffs would force it to pull back in Canada. Honda in Japan made a legally true statement to Nikkei. If they lied, these executives would be facing criminal charges. We now know this was true. Honda Canada lied saying this was untrue. To the benefit of the Liberals during an election. Interfering in the election as an unregistered third party. Probably violating CSA laws as well; almost certainly OSC. Would any liberals have changed their vote knowing that ontario's auto industry has essentially exitted?
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Given that the libs ran against trump’s impact on Canada, they would have played up this change if they knew about it. Yet more stuff to be fought, etc. keeping it quite, to me, was trying to help the cons…
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https://www.grainger.com/product/6CHG3 I think you dropped this…
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With a minimum of googling, it seems that Honda already makes this vehicle in both the U.S. and Canada. They appear to be adding shifts to the U.S. to boost production 30% while lowering it elsewhere. So "Yay" I guess. It's one of the few situations where the tariffs can work short term. In most cases, shifting production from another country to the U.S. is a multi-year investment that tariffs won't significantly impact because they are changing too often to drive such long-term decisions.
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Hopefully Canada slaps a tarriffs on companies that relocate production.
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This. That's so stupid, what once each and every country has tariffs ?
PDF to Text, a Challenging Problem (marginalia.nu)
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When accommodating the general case, solving PDF-to-text is approximately equivalent to solving JPEG-to-text. The only PDF parsing scenario I would consider putting my name on is scraping AcroForm field values from standardized documents.
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Cloudflare’s ai.toMarkdown() function available in Workers AI can handle PDFs pretty easily. Judging from speed alone, it seems they’re parsing the actual content rather than shoving into OCR/LLM. Shameless plug: I use this under the hood when you prefix any PDF URL with https://pure.md/ to convert to raw text.
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You’re aware that PDFs are containers that can hold various formats, which can be interlaced in different ways, such as on top, throughout, or in unexpected and unspecified ways that aren’t “parsable,” right? I would wager that they’re using OCR/LLM in their pipeline.
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If you're looking for test cases, this is the first thing I tried and the result is very bad: https://pure.md/https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF00/20250513/118261/HMKP-119-IF00-20250513-SD003.pdf
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Since these are statistical classification problems, it seems like it would be worth trying some old-school machine learning (not an LLM, just an NN) to see how it compares with these manual heuristics.
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I imagine that would work pretty well given an adequate and representative body of annotated sample data. Though that is also not easy to come by.
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One thing I wish someone would write is something like the browser's developer tools ("inspect elements") for PDF — it would be great to be able to "view source" a PDF's content streams (the BT … ET operators that enclose text, each Tj operator for setting down text in the currently chosen font, etc), to see how every “pixel” of the PDF is being specified/generated. I know this goes against the current trend / state-of-the-art of using vision models to basically “see” the PDF like a human and “read” the text, but it would be really nice to be able to actually understand what a PDF file contains. There are a few tools that allow inspecting a PDF's contents ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379101 ) but they stop at the level of the PDF's objects, so entire content streams are single objects. For example, to use one of the PDFs mentioned in this post, the file https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/BFI_WP_2022-68-1.pdf has, corresponding to page number 6 (PDF page 8), a content stream that starts like (some newlines added by me): 0 g 0 G 0 g 0 G BT /F19 10.9091 Tf 88.936 709.041 Td [(Subsequen)28(t)-374(to)-373(the)-373(p)-28(erio)-28(d)-373(analyzed)-373(in)-374(our)-373(study)83(,)-383(Bridge's)-373(paren)27(t)-373(compan)28(y)-373(Ne)-1(wGlob)-27(e)-374(reduced)]TJ -16.936 -21.922 Td [(the)-438(n)28(um)28(b)-28(er)-437(of)-438(priv)56(ate)-438(sc)28(ho)-28(ols)-438(op)-27(erated)-438(b)28(y)-438(Bridge)-437(from)-438(405)-437(to)-438(112,)-464(and)-437(launc)28(hed)-438(a)-437(new)-438(mo)-28(del)]TJ 0 -21.923 Td and it would be really cool to be able to see the above “source” and the rendered PDF side-by-side, hover over one to see the corresponding region of the other, etc, the way we can do for a HTML page.
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Have a look at this notebook[0], not exactly what you're looking for but does provide a 'live' inspector of the various drawing operations contained in a PDF. [0]: https://observablehq.com/@player1537/pdf-utilities
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Try with cpdf (disclaimer, wrote it): cpdf -output-json -output-json-parse-content-streams in.pdf -o out.json Then you can play around with the JSON, and turn it back to PDF with cpdf -j out.json -o out.pdf No live back-and-forth though.
Weird that there's no mention of LLMs in this article even though the article is very recent. LLMs haven't solved every OCR/document data extraction problem, but they've dramatically improved the situation.
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It’s in the first paragraph?
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Author here: LLMs are definitely the new gold standard for smaller bodies of shorter documents. The article is in the context of an internet search engine, the corpus to be converted is of order 1 TB. Running that amount of data through an LLM would be extremely expensive, given the relatively marginal improvement in outcome.
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I've had great results against PDFs from recent vision models. Gemini, OpenAI and Claude can all accept PDFs directly now and treat them as image input. For longer PDFs I've found that breaking them up into images per page and treating each page separately works well - feeing a thousand page PDF to even a long context model like Gemini 2.5 Pro or Flash still isn't reliable enough that I trust it. As always though, the big challenge of using vision LLMs for OCR (or audio transcription) tasks is the risk of accidental instruction following - even more so if there's a risk of deliberately malicious instructions in the documents you are processing.
PDFs inherently are a markup / xml format, the standard is available to learn from. It's possible to create the same PDF in many, many, many ways. Some might lean towards exporting a layout containing text and graphics from a graphics suite. Others might lean towards exporting text and graphics from a word processor, which is words first. The lens of how the creating app deals with information is often something that has input on how the PDF is output. If you're looking for an off the shelf utility that is surprisingly decent at pulling structured data from PDFs, tools like cisdem have already solved enough of it for local users. Lots of tools like this out there, many do promise structured data support but it needs to match what you're up to.
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> PDFs inherently are a markup / xml format This is wrong. PDFs are an object graph containing imperative-style drawing instructions (among many other things). There’s a way to add structural information on top (akin to an HTML document structure), but that’s completely optional and only serves as auxiliary metadata, it’s not the core of the PDF format.
So many of these problems have been solved by mozilla pdf.js together with its viewer implementation: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ .
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I don't think so, pdf.js is able to render a pdf content. Which is different from extracting "text". Text in PDF can be encoded in many ways, in an actual image, in shapes (think, segments, quadratic bezier curves...), or in an XML format (really easy to process). PDF viewers are able to render text, like a printer would work, processing command to show pixels on the screen at the end. But often, paragraph, text layout, columns, tables are lost in the process. Even though, you see them, so close yet so far. That is why AI is quite strong at this task.
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Any sense on how PDF.js compares against other tools such as pdfminer?
Understanding Java's Asynchronous Journey (amritpandey.io)
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Does no.js still limit you to a single core/CPU use? Or as a node successfully been able to start utilizing more cores underneath its JavaScript single thread model. It presents the programmer? I just remember early node.js from like 15 years ago and the single background task limitation of JavaScript running in a web page. Cuz you got async code is nice, but what you really wanted to be able to harness in modern CPUs is multi-core That said, I've been looking for an article like this for a while, although I think there are other associated libraries that also had steps in here. I do think the jvm adopted a lot of those, but I'm not sure if they actually are better than the original extension libraries.
Java's had `var` since Java 10 but apparently the author deliberately ignored that to make the example as wordy as possible. It's a little tiring to read a Java example with an entry-point (the public-static-void bit) and then a JavaScript example without one. If you strip that out the original Java is: var future = CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> { try { Thread.sleep(10000); } catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return "Data Fetched"; }); future.thenAccept(result -> System.out.println(result)); System.out.println("Prints first"); // prints before the async result which is only obtuse due to checked exceptions. Arguably it's still a different thing you're doing, because it's not scheduling a task on a pool, it's creating a thread which sleeps for 10 seconds.
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[delayed]
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Also, arguably, the wrong way to do something like this. The author uses `setTimeout` for javascript. The equivalent for Java is either the `Timer` class or a `ScheduledExecutorService`. Doing a `Thread.sleep` simply isn't how you should approach this. With that in mind, if you want to use both these things and keep the completable future interface you'd have to do soemthing like this. ScheduledExecutorService scheduler = Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(1); var future = new CompletableFuture<String>(); scheduler.schedule(()->future.complete("Data Fetched"), 10, TimeUnit.SECONDS); future.thenAccept(result -> System.out.println(result)); System.out.println("Prints first"); // prints before the async result scheduler.shutdown();
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`var` is very unhelpful in situations where the reader might not be entirely familiar with the context, especially when using factory methods. I don't think the author was trying to make the example "wordy" so much as "clear".
I don't get it. The first example in JS vs Java looks very similar. Now all those other code blocks, they certainly have more going on but idk how that compares to JS. And to answer the questions: A completable future is something that in the future may complete. I think that's self explanatory. A promise seems equally vague. Boilerplate looks the same. JS is just a function, Java they put a class around it. Java requires exception handling which is annoying but having fought errors in async JS, I'll take all I can get. API is eh. Sure. But that's not even shown in this example so I have no idea. So JS saves like 3 lines? Is that really so much better?
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> A completable future is something that in the future may complete. I think that's self explanatory. But not the reason for the name :). It's called "completable" because these futures have a method on them `future.complete("value")`. Before their introduction, there was a `Future` API that java had.
Microsoft is Cutting 3% of All Workers (cnbc.com)
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> "one objective is to reduce layers of management" This seems a common theme: even in a company like Microsoft that takes pains to emphasize and support the IC track in addition to management there is a tendency towards creating layers that end up reducing agility. Maybe it's just an excuse though. I am surprised they announced the 3% rather than just accomplishing it with attrition and slowing hiring. Maybe it looks smart to stockholders so they want the attention.
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I wonder if this 3% is just their normal amount of attrition being dressed up in a way that stockholders will like.
How much is that? A finger? A foot?
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The brains
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It's in the first sentence of the article.
> “How do you really tweak the incentives, go-to-market?” Nadella said. “At a time of platform shifts, you kind of want to make sure you lean into even the new design wins, and you just don’t keep doing the stuff that you did in the previous generation.” Ok, sure, what does that mean though. > The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April. Agree! Better tighten the belt. Don’t want to dip below $100 billion net income a year.
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> what does that mean though. The earnings call transcript is more useful than these stupid news articles - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q2/press-release-webcast Basically Azure earnings were at the low end of their own projections. And their explanation was Azure non-AI services earnings have dropped as customers who have ongoing non-AI projects are working out how to incorporate AI services.
Bosses weren't being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start their own biz (theregister.com)
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[delayed]
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> The IP address information came from an unidentified "data partner" that uses first- and third-party cookies to create user profiles and ultimately infer their place of employment. The LinkedIn data – user profiles and resumes – came from Revelio Labs, and was supplemented with US census data and corporate data from Aberdeen CiTDB and People Data Labs. If this research prompts more businesses to RTO or non-WFH -- for the reason of reducing employees leaving to do a startup, or doing a potentially competing startup after termination -- is this effectively leveraging surveillance capitalism to suppress labor (and innovation, as we say)?
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So what you're telling me, is that remote workers tend to be the most innovative and industrious. Got it.
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What about confounding variables? For example the types of jobs that are easiest to do remotely may correlate with employees likely to start their own business?
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Objectively, this article is bullshit. What is the source ? An unidentified "data partner". That just means, this is non-reproducible. So this is not science. Actually, there is a another paper, reproducible, it's non conclusive. The social explanation of the phenomena (if there is any) are clearly politically oriented.
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In my experience, the only risk and proven danger are sales people. I've seen and met many former sales people whom developed relationships with their customers and then one day just quit their job and went into business of their own, with a lot of their former employer's clients as their new customers. I doubt there is anything anyone can do about it as this is about personal relations and the only defence could be to never allow one customer to be handled by a single account manager so there cannot be personal relationship developed. But on the other hand, will such customer feel good doing business with such a company? It might just be one of those things that just is what it is and will never change.
The pandemic really exposed how much I had accepted being stuck in a slave mentality, taking only what was offered. Little things like a functional work environment with good screens and peripherals that isn't inundated with noise and fairly constant interruption. Big things like a long commute (and at roughly half an hour mine was better than most) and not having to work alongside, sitting under the gaze of, someone who just emotionally abused me. Those were simply solved and I could just fix other major problems myself. Examples include the obvious fixes of the above issues but also include my option to increase the amount of vacation I take, adopt a 4-day week, and other things that have greatly improved my productivity and far more greatly improved my quality of life. Fuck the endless "always more" and "but what have you done for me lately?" even when I'm outperforming everyone else and have become the "go to". Most impactfully, I have created an emotionally safe and deeply honest environment for myself and my cofounder where we can express our humanity and support each other in our struggles and joys. It is "unprofessional" and completely glorious and loving. Or work had become something that is part of our thriving rather than something that erodes our well-being.
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Have those measures like taking more vacations and adopting a 4-day week really increased your productivity? How have you measured that? Of cause one can deliver more per hour when working 8h/d instead of 12h/d. But the output of a 12h day will still be massively more than from a 8h day.
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Not really, at best its linear if your job is like an assembly line. Office work rarely benefits from longer hours. 8h days already have diminishing returns after 4-6h on average. Many pilot programs have found that 4 day weeks are at least equally productive compared to 5 day weeks.
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You need to do some research. Especially in creative intellectual labor (perhaps some programming could be excluded) overwork leads to negative productivity, compoundingly so in the long term.
Blue collar workers are almost always paid hourly (or some other unit where time = money). They're being paid in proportion to the amount they work, and the only common reason to take a second job is that the first won't give you enough hours/work to meet your financial needs. Some people see salary jobs as exchanging a fixed amount of money for 40 hrs/week average. If you're spending 10-20 of those hours moonlighting for company B, those people would say you're depriving company A of what they're paying for. If you instead see salary work as producing a certain amount of work regardless of the hours worked, then again there's no issue here. This is inconsistently applied to executives far more than rank and file office workers, since no one really expects (or wants) board member Bob to provide 40 hrs/week to each of the 6 companies he's involved with.
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A manager should have at least a vague notion of how long a given set of tasks should take an employee. If I assign 20 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, I should not be surprised the employee does something else with the 20 remaining hours. If I assign 40 hours of work and it takes 40 hours, and is of the expected quality, I really don't care if the employee take a part-time job elsewhere (assuming that doesn't conflict with expected online hours, etc).
Were bosses being paranoid that workers were setting up their own businesses though? I thought they were more concerned workers wern't working? This rather suggests workers can actually work very well at home - well enough to set up their own business anyway. I appreciate what this is trying to say is - workers weren't doing their jobs and were instead setting up business. Except this could also quite easily show that if you get rid of peoples long commutes, and they have a space in their home they consider 'work' space - they might have the time and space to start their own biz. And as this seems to be only people who left to do so, it rather suggests people were doing their jobs. Might not be doing 'their hours', but the argument against remote work rarely seems to be 'we can't allow remote work because its so effective people complete their jobs much faster'
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What it shows is managerial insecurity. Despite the obsession with monitoring "productivity", managers really haven't the faintest idea of what they're doing. A healthy relationship is one in which managers don't monitor and don't micromanage and don't rely on Jira or commit logs to lazily monitor employees. A manager isn't there to lord over employees. He is there to support employees and help them do their jobs. But to do that, you need to know what they're doing. Talk to them. Listen. Hold 1-on-1s on a regular basis. Assume they're doing their jobs instead of defaulting to a defensive and adversarial posture. If you treat employees like adversaries, they'll behave like adversaries. Grant them reasonable trust and they will take initiative and view the relationship as one that is cooperative. They will be less likely to want to risk losing the reasonable trust they have been gratuitously given; if you default to suspicion, then employees have little to lose. You already think poorly of them, so who cares. If someone is genuinely slacking or not well-suited, that will come out sooner or later. 1-on-1s, individually and taken in aggregate, will give the manager an idea of what is really happening, especially if the manager is competent and knowledgeable of the domain, which he should be. 360 EOY reviews can also help here, not as an adversarial tactic, but as a way to share feedback. A competent manager can read the tea leaves.
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I was also thinking the same and advocated with pretty much the same words. Until became a manager, and noticed that yes, most of the employees are like that, but there are some that will screw you over. And just that minority is why we cannot have nice things. Hell, we wouldn't even need written contracts if everyone behaved responsibly. It's like leaving your bicycle on a street, in Japan you don't need a lock, in San Francisco a lock wouldn't help. Even when 99% people are honest and responsible.
This article suggests that this is a win-lose scenario. It's a win for the workers and the economy at large, but a loss for employers. However, it might very well be a win-win. While the employer might lose a worker to an entrepreneurial venture, isn't this the sort of self-selection out that leads to a more engaged workforce overall? Retaining those employees, who would really be doing something else, by introducing more friction through an in-office policy seems like a recipe for low engagement and mediocre business impact.
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I was thinking the same thing. Plus, treat people well enough (salary, benefits, work you assign, etc) that they want to stay. IE, as a manager, part of my job is to ensure my employees feel challenged/stimulated, satisfied with their comp plan, etc. If they aren't they'll go elsewhere (start their own, or jump to CapOne/Amazon/some other big tech company in DC).
There hasn't been a more pampered worker than a programmer during COVID. What else could the employers have done to "treat them better" during that time to avoid having workers exploit it?
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Nobody wants to work anymore /s People can be paid better, given better hours, more flexibility, more responsibilities, less responsibilities, better benefits, etc. If lots of people don’t want to do a job, and that job has trouble keeping quality employees, it’s the job that’s broken, not the people. Plenty of people were treated great when WFH, but it’s not a universal truth that everyone was.
Why I'm Resigning from the National Science Foundation (time.com)
the tl;dr: > The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board. > Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts. > Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only. I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that. This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america . Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.
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"This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber" Superb, take a bow!
As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely. The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry. Things are quite bleak right now...
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You are entirely correct. The massive investment in science (and the culture of valuing scientific knowledge) that started with the cold war is coming to an end. It turns out that destruction is far easier to do than creation. I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.) But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US. This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs. It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.
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> realize that you will most likely end up in industry. > Things are quite bleak right now... you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
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Why does research have to be profitable? There are many, many smaller diseases and cancers which affect a small subset of the population which will never be 'profitable', but it's important to research for the sake of scientific progress. I fundamentally do not understand how one can be so enthralled by capitalism that they believe we should not research anything unless a shareholder can generate a profit somewhere along the way.
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If it results in megacorps 'forcing' papers that misrepresent the truth for their own gains, yeah that's pretty bleak. Think weed killers, sugar, etc.
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Yes.
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what are your thoughts on the replication crisis?
I can and will bet everything I have that you're wrong. I agree that Trump's handling and strategy here is...lacking (and a bit destructive). But the idea that prior to this everything was fine is equally ridiculous. All we have to look at is the handling of COVID to see what the "scientists" think of us plebs; they were willing to lie. Did they think there would be no consequences?
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If you honestly think scientists lied during any point of COVID you are a lost cause and do not understand the basics of science. The true comedy to all this is that people that actually get NSF or NIH grant funding have to be educated on academic ethics. We get to see the real shitty behavior that scientists can take. How it can hold back Alzheimer's treatments decades. Yet the conspiracy theorists, such as yourself, never talk about these cases. It's always "they lied about masks" or "vaccines cause autism", the later of which is thoroughly debunked and caused exactly by academic dishonesty! Yet, instead of seeing the scientist who actually did severe harm to the world (the crackpot who lied in their research about vaccines) you take it at face value.
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I watched 15 years of Alzheimer's research shut down by NSF and NIH because they refused to touch anything but Amyloid beta. the idea that they are bastions of open mindedness, ethics, or efficiency seems laughable to me.
> the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science? How has US dominance in science helped the average American taxpayer in last decade other than funneling billions to arms or pharma industry or funding academians being out of touch with the rest of the country?
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it's not dominance, it's scientific achievement in general that benefits US citizens as well as the rest of the world whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research (the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)
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Other than, say, the GPS on your phone, the internet that you're posting on, or anything like that--you want to know what government-funded basic science has done to benefit you lately, not any of these decade-long timeline projects that are best funded by institutions with long time horizons, such as governments. Yes, we must have results that are brought to market this quarter, so the government-funded research justifies itself in the free market.
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If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut. I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?
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great example of a reverse gish gallop right here, select one point to argue in a response and attempt to discredit someone based on that brandolini's law in full effect
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What an amazing comment. If I remember correctly Moderna is USA company and without their research on vaccines who knows how many millions more people would have died of COVID. Did your precious tax dollars help Moderna directly or indirectly... Most probably. Are you happy to be alive? Most probably...
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It's so weird. For the first 50 years of my life, liberals said US dominance in anything was bad. In everything from military dominance to winning too many Olympic medals, they were against it and wished for any chance to see America brought down a peg. Now they're suddenly cheerleaders for US hegemony. I wonder why.
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Can you give me an example of a prominent American liberal who said the US was winning too many Olympic medals?
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Otherwise it is just a Strawman argument
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Ah, the goomba fallacy in the wild! [1] [1] https://x.com/BruhKonata1/status/1813650893960823042
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... and to pharma (similar money flow to arms), banks (bailouts), big tech (tax breaks)...
Bell Labs is a counterexample that ran for decades, and pharma companies have internal research labs, I know Motorola and Apple have, too. In my experience, industry can be vastly better funded, but the industry labs are internal and perhaps very hard to find.
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Industry research is generally R&D (applied science, engineering research), not basic research (basic science). Not to disparage either; both are needed, but they are quite different and a person may be suited to one but not the other. It can be hard for someone looking for work to determine where an organization's focus is, as an outsider.
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Pretty good article on Bell Labs recently, but also I think it indicates how it's not likely to exist in the US again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010
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Here is an incomplete list of things that it's impossible to research in industry: 1. Astronomy. 2. Physics. 3. Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust. 4. Biology aside from medicine. 5. Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry. 6. Theoretical computer science. 7. Mathematics. I'm not blaming you for not knowing this, but I am holding my head in my hands - how can people not know about astronomers? They've been a part of our culture and the prestige of civilization for thousands of years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
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Sabine is pretty unreliable, checkout professor dave's explanation of her
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Yes, lighting the house on fire may have not been the best plan, but in all fairness the it was a mess and something had to be done.
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What is your basis for believing that this is the needed reform or that it will fix what is broken?
Not that different than the author of this article. Is she a neutral scientist acting in the best interest of science? No, she is a Biden political appointee: Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Is she even a highly qualified? She has a Ph.D., but in what? Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003.
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> she is a Biden political appointee The obvious difference is stated in the post you are replying to: "Congress hasn't approved him." > She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003. The NSF funds humanities/social science grants, so it needs experts in those areas. Note that she is deputy director for science and society . This funds work associated with history, sociology, etc.: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/sts-science-technology-society/5324/nsf05-588/solicitation .
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Why is being a Biden appointee grounds to assume she isn't acting in the best interests of Science?
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Because all they have is "whataboutism" to cover their lack of facts.
"It's not a clustefuck" ... proceeds to describe a clusterfuck ... What was your intention here?
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A clusterfuck us usually no real plan, and everyone deciding on their own, causing chaos. No, what we are seeing is a coup. The USA has exhausted in causing coups in other parts of the world. Now, we are in a coup caused by the USA government. The executive branch is captured. The courts are captured. Most of Congress is captured. Those left over whinge about 'illegal' and basically send out more emails for more donations. And throw in a few stump speeches.
[dead]
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Republicans vs Democrats is indeed the wrong way to look at it. Both parties are beholden to the billionaire/corporate class. Democrats helped pave the way for Trump. Mass surveillance, extrajudicial killing of US citizens, militarization of law enforcement, expansion of executive powers, the list goes on. I’m curious to what degree the narrative will once again be recuperated by the Democrats to obscure the class origins of these policies - the expansion of power of the corporate-government machine. The Dems have been successfully playing ping pong with the Republicans for many years without addressing our society’s structural failures because they don’t want to upset their monied masters.
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The court decided in 1984 that judges should defer to federal agencies in interpreting ambiguous parts of statutes. I think overturning this is an overall win for democracy.
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You don't describe this like a person that possesses any domain expertise in the subject. It wasn't a mechanism called the Chevron deference, it was law, as determined by the Supreme Court in "Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council". The deference was on the part of the courts deferring to executive regulators when there was ambiguity, since the regulators were experts in a given field and the courts were generally legal experts. Not Congress. That was overturned in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. "non-elected, life-long positioned government employees" so, you mean, federal employees. Nothing about it is "life-long", you made that up. They could quit, change jobs, or be fired. And "criminals" is false. It applied to civil statutes, not criminal ones. It goes on.
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Chevron was never a partisan “Democratic” trick, it was a 1984 Supreme Court precedent that applied to every administration for forty years. It simply said that when a statute is ambiguous, courts should accept a reasonable agency reading unless Congress says otherwise (Congress always had the power). That is ordinary separation‑of‑powers. When the Court overturned Chevron, it did not “return law‑making to Congress” as some claim, it didn't give Congress any more power than it already had. It instead shifted final interpretive power from expert agencies to federal judges. Congress still writes broad statutes and still relies on agencies to fill in technical details only now those rules are more vulnerable to litigation and inherently more fragile. Comparing that process to Elon Musk’s influence misses the mark. Agencies are public, transparent, and (at least theoretically) answerable to elected branches; Musk is a private supplier whose market dominance lets him set terms with little democratic oversight. One is statutory delegation, the other is private leverage with clear and obvious conflicts of interest. Treating them as equivalent flattens important distinctions and obscures the real accountability gaps in each scenario.
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That is a factually inaccurate description of the role of federal agencies under Chevron deference. Chevron deference was a legal doctrine that required courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, not a mechanism that allowed career civil servants to unilaterally create criminal laws. Federal agencies could only issue regulations within the authority explicitly delegated by Congress, and these regulations were subject to judicial review, public notice-and-comment periods, and Congressional oversight.
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>"effectively gutting the least efficient parts of the government (my take, at least from 50,000 view)" Based on what? See, I think of myself as a highly informed, curious person that is a voracious reader and yet I absolutely know I have zero basis to make such a determination. So what data do you have that I don't?
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Efficiency is at an all time high now. We can see one air traffic controller handling a workload that would have required ten or more.
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Ahh yes, how ironic that Democrats are complaining about a billionaire with myriad conflicts of interest interfering in government funding... Very comparable to unelected bureaucrats implementing regulations that on average were meant to try and protect the general public.
>Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions. 'I'm stealing from you for your own good'! Hmm.
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Oh it's clearly a kleptocracy at the top, don't get me wrong. You can have both.
> Good read; too long to sway public opinion though. Maybe they should have done a TikTok or a YT short? Would that be the right length?
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Audience. This will only reach people who agree. It's a lesson Dems just haven't learned yet about where America is in discourse: Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels." Donald: "I'm going to save coal." Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets" Donald: "No taxes on tips."
Depends which public your trying to sway.
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The one with a long attention span is clearly a minority.
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers. My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
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Counterpoint via anecdotes… this week I am at the International Symposium for Green Chemistry. >600 chemists from all over the world. They are all psyched to advance safer and sustainable solutions to a wide variety of problems. You see all their funding sources from the UN to EU to country to city to local, as well as private companies. You see their collaboration and enthusiasm. Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU. A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage. This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline? Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo. Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
> too long to sway public opinion Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure. To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
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You're broadly right, but I would argue that the "anti-populist infrastructure" is specifically responsible for electoral fetishism. The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America. This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it. [0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
Honestly way more with just being the one super power standing after the war. We were basically untouched, even accounting for dead and wounded we only lost ~1 million people and practically zero manufacturing infrastructure so we came out of the war roaring and flush with cash. That catapulted the US to where it has been for the whole of the time since but a lot of people seem to have believed we were owed that or earned it through some special property of the US and the come down from it is not going well socially.
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We were, it’s just that this special property was owning our own private continent.
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_It's free real estate_
> America's success as a scientific powerhouse If you really think about it, America's "success as a scientific powerhouse" owes a significant debt to foreigners: scholars from abroad and workers on H1-B visas. It has been a well-known fact for decades that white native-born Americans are at a real disadvantage in academia, tech fields, and any sort of research positions, because for whatever reason, the foreigners coming in on H1-B can run circles around them in terms of productivity, innovation, and even sheer numbers. Perhaps this isn't the sort of "stealin' our jerbs" people first think of, rather than picking strawberries and selling oranges off the 405, but it's a real phenomenon. This is a very prominent reason for skepticism about DEI from the Right, because the outsized influence of foreigners on academia, and by extension STEM and other sciences, has been steadily growing and growing and inflamed by DEI hiring practices in the industries. Essentially, thousands of foreign nationals have been immigrating to the USA to be educated at our best schools, and then exert two-way influence over culture and commerce. Is that a sustainable practice? Is America enough of a "melting pot" that we can withstand that sort of outsized foreign influence within our borders? Furthermore, America was first in line to embrace Eastern-bloc Jews, from the outbreak of WWI through the end of WWII. Those German and Soviet Jews from the diaspora gained significant prestige, not merely from sympathy or pity, and they now have outsized influence in many Western industries, including Hollywood, finance, manufacturing, and psychology. These are markedly distinct career paths from the ones taken by homegrown Jews, such as the Hasidic ones and other Orthodox communities from New York.
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> Is America enough of a "melting pot" that we can withstand that sort of outsized foreign influence within our borders? Depends. If your idea of America consists of just the pre-colonial native groups, Navajo etc., then America was already gone a century and a half ago. But the America of 1925 had exactly the same arguments about Italians, and of 1845 about the Irish, in that the local born were complaining a lot and didn't trust the newcomers. The melting pot has been melting for a long time now; you're a big endless stew of a country. (Except for the "real" natives, if there is such a thing).
In a high-stress work environment, prioritize relationships (wqtz.bearblog.dev)
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In a high-stress environment, try to sleep well and eat healthy. Sleep is important!
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> think of the other person who is begging you and how it impacts them. Even though they are probably your manipulative narcissistic manager or coworker?
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Yeah, I completely agree about the article. I left shitty jobs always with a bang, but reference checks are not a thing (yet) where I live and they even don’t want to see work certificates.
In software, often the people are the source of stress. Building the software is easy to many in this industry, and the vast majority of the value produced came from someone who thought creating it was easy. Being surrounded by rock stars all doing something they find easy is sublime, and I encourage everyone to seek out those environments. They exist and are fleeting. The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. In their minds it is all chaos and uncertainty and they are desperate for the assurance of someone who knows what's going on. The relationships that one develops with each category of person are fundamentally opposite. One is about enticing repeated interactions: You really get it, how do we work together in the future? And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions. How do I avoid meetings, projects, shared responsibilities, and future employment opportunities that involve this person?
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This seems like a very specific perspective, I take it you're the "Live to Work" kind of person?
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In my experience there's two types of work stress in software. One is people / process stress; related to the steps needed to get work done, including approvals and negotiations to decide what to do. Another is operational stress; related to keeping a service running; some of that can be people or process stress, but if your service is growing rapidly it might just be organic operational stress. There's also the stress of getting the work done in a reasonable time. Some people are better at managing the different kinds of stress. Anyway, I think the moral of the post is when you rage quit, say "fuck this shit, I quit" rather than "fuck you all, I quit" ... keep the rage pointed at the system rather than the people :P Unless it's just like one person who is really intent on making your job hell. You might be able to get away with singling out one person, rather than doing the Oprah thing and "everybody look under your chair, you get a fuck you" :P
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> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. People who are currently bad what they do have their own work struggle, go home to their issue, have their hobbies and ambitions. I think the article strikes a very good point when it says you don't want to be remembered as that guy but I would go even further in that it's not only about your reputation. When you are that guy , you are actually making everybody life slightly worse including your own. I think there is more value in acting and being remembered as someone who can lift up rather than as someone who is distant and self-interested. It's not that you should always be mindlessly helpful but you can be assertive, give honest feedback, help people realise when they should take responsibility and define directions without being a pushover or exploited. In my experience, that's how you make people actually want to work with you. These are obviously hard skills to develop (at least they were and still are to me) but they are how so valuable. To go back to your conclusion, for me it's more about "How do I convince the people I want to work with to work with me?" than about cutting people. After all, you will probably be the sole constant in all the work environments you will be a part of in your life so you are the biggest factor into making them work for you.
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> The stress comes from people who are bad at what they do and are trying to make it someone else's problem. There's some irony in the way you try to pin the blame on a third-party, and while trying to denigrate it too. I think it warrants some soul searching. I mean, would you feel stressed if you had to endure a team member who threw blanket accusations at your competence and in the process blamed you for causing grief to other team members? > They don't have vision for how they will accomplish what is asked of them. In their imagination, there is not a clear set of steps that can be burned down over the coming days and weeks to arrive at something of value. There's a lot to unpack there. Only a highly disfuncional team would throw a team member to the wolves and leave them out to fend for themselves on a task that is relatively complex. No wonder people would feel stressed in that environment.
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you have no idea how luxury this belief is. having been the guy fixing the third party's bugs at almost every position, i side with the parent.
> And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions. or, the other is about providing them the vision and the clear set of steps. Then checking their progress along those steps. (including revising the steps when the original plan diverges from the evolving reality). Training and mentoring the people so they can become rock stars.
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This comment and a sibling both brought up the issue of less experienced people and mentorship, which is important to clarify. Some incompetence is a known quantity, and when it is known it will not produce stress. The junior dev on the team might not know how to do something. The team leadership should already have priced that in, and have a plan to help them if need be. If the junior dev's incompetence is creating stress, the root cause is leadership incompetence. The kind of incompetence that produces stress is incompetence that is too impolite to mention. It can't be addressed through "mentorship" or "working together" because that would call the legitimacy of the role and the person filling it into question. Engineering managers who don't understand engineering, product managers who don't understand the product, etc. The list is long, and examples are common. The organization is built around the assumption that these people can do things that they are unable to do. That mismatch is the origin of stress. Investing time in the 1st kind of incompetence is a good investment because you will get a good return on your time invested. The junior dev with potential becomes the rock star. The 2nd kind of incompetence is often "Throwing good money after bad". These situations are not worth your time. There is unlikely to be an improvement, and you risk it backfiring especially if the problem is above you in the org chart.
I think it’s also possible to build relationships with people based on potential. Not every superstar was born that way. Most of them had help along the way.
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Not being a rock star but showing potential is great. But there are some people who are allegedly always busy, in over their head, etc. And these are the type of people I agree that should be avoided. I've found that more often than not these people are always wasting time in meetings, chatting it up, only to complain about lack of time 1 hour later. I'm not saying don't socialize and just work ; you just need to balance the two.
The culture is unhealthy but unless you are in a position of power you have to play along.
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Disagree. Change can start with anyone. Often its inspiring to see someone buckle the trend and “be real”.
That's your choice. It's not a bad idea to answer "why are you leaving your current job" with "i'm looking for greater opportunities to [the opposite of why you are leaving your job]" and people can read between the lines AND have less of the concerns they would if you went guns blazing on the bridges behind you
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You can be honest about why your previous employer wasn’t the right fit without burning bridges. I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?
So you are saying it is better if the candidate lies. Otherwise you will be forced to reject him because there might be a possibility that the problem was him. Seems like you are hiring the best liars. Or at least the best at playing an arbitrary game of saying and not saying the correct things that won't trigger a rejection. At this point, are you even needed? Maybe we could replace the interview process with a lottery system. Same result, less expensive.
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Is the candidate willing and able to find the positives in a negative experience? This is an important skill, because this job sucks too :P
Launch HN: Miyagi (YC W25) turns YouTube videos into online, interactive courses
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Does it work on YouTube videos that have transcripts disabled?
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No, it won't work for those.
Can you extend this into language learning content on YT? I think that would also have amazing utility. As a biologist, so happy to see Crime Pays but Botany doesn't on here. Thanks for the awesome tool. I will be using it.
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Yes! I did something similar with daily exercises at https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/daily
This is a fun concept, and I love the name! I’m curious why you didn’t use multiple choice for the exercises? I feel like those would be easier than typing out full answers and be closer to MOOC style homework. Maybe have a longer written question at the end of a section. The exercises work pretty well, I like the highlighting red wrong vs. green right. It does feel a bit like the MOOC-style discussions. The tutor doesn’t just tell you the answers which is cool, but something about talking with the tutor feels a bit flat. And the flashcards weren’t very helpful for the course I picked. I could see myself doing some courses like this with some more gamification. Being able to filter by course provider (Ycombinator, or MIT) would be cool too.
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Thanks! We do have multiple choice questions now (agreed) but some of the older courses were generated when there were only short answer. Anything specific we could improve about talking to the tutor? Definitely will add some of those features and gamify better.
Yep, if anyone didn't want their videos to be on our site, we would take it down. Just watched the video, I don't initially agree with his take completely but do totally respect the viewpoint and think a payment split to the creator whenever someone summarizes the video makes sense. Yes we do offer the option to summarize content without creator buy-in, although it seems a bit different since we're also augmenting the content with questions etc. which should drive users to watch the video even more as opposed to skip it and just read the summary. But you're right it's not perfect. If we ever have creators who don't want their stuff on our site we'd totally respect their wishes, but that hasn't been the case right now so this seems like the best thing to do.
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> Yep, if anyone didn't want their videos to be on our site, we would take it down. Do note that this behavior of "opting creators into a program without their consent, justifying it via revenue share, and CYA with a 'they can opt out if they want to!' shield" is still... awful optics. The whole Brave scandal ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736888 ) is a good case study on how laypeople will perceive this. It's not popular at all.
So in less promotional words: - For official courses the creators are doing some quality control and do necessary fixes. - For self-created courses there is zero human supervision or quality control. Is that correct?
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Yes for the first, technically yes for the second? The user can go in and change the content as well (i.e. if it's a teacher generating a course for students). But not sure what other human supervision + quality control methods you're referring to that we could implement.
We can no longer run Microsoft Store on 1809/LTSC 2019 (github.com/fernvenue)
Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight. My experience with Win 10 LTSC was not terribly faster than Windows 10 Home, and night-and-day slower compared to a GNOME or KDE setup. I suppose it's a fair play if you're contractually obligated to play Riot-published games or something, but... man. I've had better performance playing games on DXVK since 2016. Windows is a heavy hog.
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> Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight. LOL, I don't think that's how you meant it, but 100% agreed those are some of the first things to go when you wanna have fun in a car. Windows LTSC is an amazing experience compared to vanilla windows, it's actually a decent OS that you can more or less control and you don't have to spend a weekend debloating and figuing out how to rip out cortana and ads and all the other garbage.
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I forgot that HN worships smekalka. Let me reiterate - LTSC is a cosmetic solution to the actual bloat that makes Windows slow. It won't make your computer efficient any more than stripping a Buick makes it a rally racer.
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If your computer has weak spindle I/O and low RAM, then using LTSC is a useful shortcut to disabling background services that consume those resources. If resources are plentiful then it’ll have no gains. Also: https://24hoursoflemons.com/blog/heroic-lemons-buick-reatta-and-toyota-supra-exploits-documented-in-hella-sweet-comic-book/
It's not about performance. It's about not having Candy Crush Saga ads in the Start menu.
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This was sufficient justification for me
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Just install using the "English (World)" locale.
Why is a repository called 'Microsoft Store' being hosted on a seemingly random github account? Why doesn't the README file explain what this repository is doing? OP, what did you hope to accomplish with this submission? The lack of support on LTSC is the least baffling thing going on here but I'm open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding something....
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I'm guessing this is "Tell HN: $TITLE", with a random README.md as source, in lieu of some random blog post
> Why doesn't the README file explain what this repository is doing? It explains exactly what it's doing. "Microsoft Store package for Windows LTSC." It provides a Microsoft Store package for LTSC builds, and an install script that allows it to actually work. Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled, and Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.
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Yeah they do. Run `wsreset.exe -i` in powershell and it'll install the Windows Store after a few minutes.
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Ok, but the brief README links to an actual microsoft.com domain ( https://www.microsoft.com/store ). Why would you need a package to wrap a website? Wouldn't the website be accessible on a LTSC build, even if the official package isn't available? If this is filling a highly useful role that I'm admittedly oblivious to, why are there only three commits in the project history? (Best I can tell, this is a personal project that somehow made it to HN front page)
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I don't think there's anything nefarious going on here but to someone just quickly looking over the page it has the impression of being an official Microsoft project, given the gratuitous use of their trademark and zero mention of it being a "community" effort.
From a quick search, Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years as a baseline, and Ubuntu Pro goes up to 12 years. RHEL releases are supported for 10 years. I'm guessing it's similar with SUSE and other "business" distros.
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Ubuntu Pro and RHEL are both 10 years for their standard lifecycle, with optional add-ons to go longer. Ubuntu's is called "Legacy Support" to get an extra 2 years, RHEL's is called "Extended Life-cycle Support" to get an extra 3-4 years. https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle#server-desktop-eol-old https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Life_Cycle_Dates
AI Is Like a Crappy Consultant (lukekanies.com)
I think of AI like a Junior Engineer. If I understand the problem well enough, and have a really good description of what I want, like I'm explaining it to a junior engineer, then they do an OK job at it. At my last job, we had a coding "challenge" as part of the interview process, and there was a really good readme that described the problem, the task, and the goal, which we gave the candidate at the start of the session. I copy/pasted that readme into copilot, and it did as good a job as any candidate we'd ever interviewed, and it only took a few minutes. But whenever there are any unknowns or vagaries in the task, or I'm exploring a new concept, I find the AIs to be more of a hindrance. They can sometimes get something working, but not very well, or the code they generate is misleading or takes me down a blind path. The thing for me, though, is I find writing a task for a junior engineer to understand to be harder than just doing the task myself. That's not the point of that exercise, though, since my goal is to onboard and teach the engineer how to do it, so they can accomplish it with less hand-holding in the future, and eventually become a productive member of the team. That temporary increase in my work is worth it for the future. With the AI, though, its not going to learn to be better, I'm not teaching it anything. Every time I want to leverage it, I have to go through the harder tasks of clearly defining the problem and the goal for it.
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“ The thing for me, though, is I find writing a task for a junior engineer to understand to be harder than just doing the task myself.” I have been thinking about this angle a lot lately and realizing how much of a skill it is to write up the components and description of a task thoroughly and accurately. I’m thinking people who struggle with this skill are having a tougher time using LLMs effectively.
> AI coding assistants bias towards assuming the code they're working with is correct, and that the person using them is also correct. But often neither is ideal! That's why you should just write tests, before you write the code, so that you know what you are expecting with the code that is under test is doing. i.e Test driven development. > And you can absolutely have a model second-guess your own code and assumptions, but it takes a lot of persistent work because these damn things just want to be "helpful" all the time. No. Please do not do this. These LLMs have zero understanding / reasoning about the code they are outputting. Recent example from [0]: >> Yesterday I wanted to move 40GB of images from my QR menu site qrmenucreator . com from my VPS to R2 >> I asked gemini-2.5-pro-max to write a script to move the files >> I even asked it to check everything was correct >> Turns out for some reason the filenames got shortened somehow, which is a disaster because the QR site is quite basic and the image paths are written in the markdown of the menus >> Of course the script already deleted 40GB of images from the VPS >> But lesson learnt: be very careful with AI code, it made a mistake, couldn't even find the mistake when I asked it to double check the code, and because the ENDs of the filenames looked same I didn't notice it cut the beginnings off >> And in this case AI can't even find its own mistakes Just like the 2010s with the proliferation with dynamically typed languages creeping into the backend with low-quality code, we now will have vibe-coded low-quality software causing destruction because their authors do not know what their code does and also have not bothered to test it or even know what to test for. [0] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1921974501257912563
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> That's why you should just write tests, before you write the code, so that you know what you are expecting with the code that is under test is doing. i.e Test driven development. I've tried this too. They find ways to cheat the tests, sometimes throwing in special cases that match the specific test cases. It's easy to catch in the small scale but not when in a larger coding session. > No. Please do not do this. These LLMs have zero understanding / reasoning about the code they are outputting. This is incorrect. LLMs do have the ability to reason, but it's not the same reasoning that you or I do. They are actually quite good at checking for a variety of problems, like if the code you're writing is sensitive to memory pressure and you want to account for it. Asking them to examine the code with several constraints in mind often does give reasonable advice and suggestions to change. But this requires you to understand those changes to be effective.
> This is related to the sycophancy problem. No, this is way more fundamental than the sycophancy. It's related to the difficulty of older AI to understand "no". Unless it sees people recommending that you change your code into a different version, it has no way to understand that the better code is equivalent.
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It's all the same problem. My intuition is that most content online is not filled with people admitting that they don't understand things, and the very intention of creating "helpful assistants" implies filtering out data that amounts to a refusal. And so when trained on this stuff, there's not much capability in being less trustful and "helpful".
Oh, it's still a stochastic parrot. What changed is that people realized it didn't have the authority of an expert. What's a stochastic parrot with dubious authority? It's a crappy consultant.
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It’s not. People in academia are not using this term anymore because it’s utterly clear it can output knowledge that doesn’t exist.
I don't think I'm a denier, or being behind [0]. I know about tools and agents. For the third time [1] [2], I'll divide the line between core network and tools that core network uses. Agents are nothing new, and they expand capabilities of the LLMs, yes that's true. But they still can't answer the question "how did you generate this code and which source repositories you did use" when the LLM didn't use any tools . The core network doesn't store citation/source information. It's not designed and trained in a way to do that. geez. [0]: https://notes.bayindirh.io/notes/Lists/Discussions+about+Artificial+Intelligence [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972807 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972892
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Agents are nothing new? They’ve only been around for a couple years. The rustiness is expected. Second the question you brought up can’t be answered even by a human. It’s a stupid question right? You blindfold a human and prevent him from using any tools and then ask him what tools he used? What do you expect will happen. Either the human will lie to you about what he did or tell you what he didn’t do. No different from an LLM. The core network doesn’t store anything except generalization curve. Similar to your brain. You didn’t store those references in your brain right? You looked that shit up. The agentic LLM will do the same and the UI literally tells you it’s doing a search across websites. Geeze.
Conspiracy theorists can be deprogrammed (nautil.us)
I can't read that not having a subscription to FT, but I'd say you'll have way more conspiracy theorists in the less educated people. Is the article of a different opinion?
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https://archive.ph/nNk0V
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Thank you! All the article shows for this context is that people in higher places tend to get self-serving. I don't think (or, there's not much evidence) that McNamara or Musk actually believed what they're spreading, but they definitely saw value for themselves in spreading it. So spreading they did.
That doesn’t require a conspiracy just incentives. You’re a farmer considering which crop to plant and you realize tobacco is the most profitable option. Do you plant it or worry about the heat impact on smokers? That’s the kind of moral quandary which most people simply never consider in the moment. > "Just incentives" doesn't fly when the incentives themselves come from a single source, directed by unelected administrators, who may be subject to considerable private pressure. Taking that 40% figure at face value is crazy when losing the entire US market would only be a ~40% loss of total sales. As to government programs resulting from lobbying, every company has the exact same incentives for such lobbying if a program doesn’t exist they would be happy for it to be created. The only thing different in this case is the degree to which their lobbying is effective.
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“ Everybody does it ” does not alter the fact that a very small very wealthy very connected group of people exert far more influence over policy than the general public. Per The Hill : “ Take, for example, the most frequently purchased item in SNAP — sugar-sweetened beverages, which comprise 9.3 percent of all SNAP expenditures. This part of the SNAP subsidy, by our estimates, drives 20 to 25 percent of U.S. revenues for Coca-Cola and Pepsico.*” https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5118876-healthy-snap-act-reducing-unhealthy-food/amp/
Yes, a chatbot that asks questions in a friendly manner using the Socratic method is surely going to be how the establishment concentrates power. It's not like promoting skepticism and healthy rational discussion could be beneficial for everyone in society, it has to be yet another way the enemy is screwing you.
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a chatbot that can barely go a paragraph without hitting an ideological tripwire—like gemini’s “greek philosophers”. for people who grew up in the before times, it’s just a nuisance, but for the kids, this is dark and insidious. so go ahead with your centralizing and your reddit bitch sarcasm, then reeeeee to us there when it all falls into the wrong hands, again.
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I find it funny that you're so threatened by and worried about a chatbot falling "into the wrong hands." Whatever you're implying would happen if it fell into the wrong hands would be no worse than the present state of things. > so go ahead with your centralizing and your reddit bitch sarcasm, then reeeeee to us there when it all falls into the wrong hands, again. Lol. Your comment is hard to take seriously. If I'm a Reddit bitch, maybe you should go back to 4chan.
Multiple Security Issues in GNU Screen (openwall.com)
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If you're worried about security, A less than 10k lines of SOC is your aim. mtm, abduco, dvtm achieve this. screen? Impossible for it to ever be secure. You'll be playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.
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In 1990 we got told to stop using screen because other people could get into your sessions. Never used it again after that.
Related... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1966096 If you're running Firefox on Debian please make sure you manually update it since the package repo's been down for a while. I filed a 'support' ticket first ( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1510388 ) since it seemed to be the proper place, but no one seems to look at those.
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The repo appears to be working for installing/updating packages. Mozilla should allow file listing which should fix the 404s, and make this repo behave as expected when manually browsed (Apparently hosted on a Google webserver; maybe Google forbids this?). apt-get changelog firefox Get:1 store: firefox 138.0.3~build1 Changelog Fetched 129 B in 0s (0 B/s) firefox (138.0.3~build1) UNRELEASED; urgency=medium * N/A -- Mozilla <release@mozilla.com> Mon, 12 May 2025 12:40:33 -0000 date Tue May 13 08:56:09 AM PDT 2025 Or, to really prove it to yourself, you can re-download the package: apt-get install --download-only --reinstall firefox
The rock-solid backwards-compatible API would include, for example, being invoked with the command "screen -x", and being installed with "apt install screen" - at which point it's the same screen project under different management, not a new project.
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I was referring to the APIs required by screen itself to run. If screen is anything like any software I know anything about a fair amount of limited developer time has to be wasted on keeping up with random third-party stuff changing/breaking. Even if that is not the case, if we get more stable software in general that would mean maintainers of free software could take on more projects each, meaning there would be a higher probability that someone could be around to fix bugs in screen.
Tmux doesn't support serial ports.
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What is a serial port and what do you use it for?
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It is a port that has two data lines, RX and TX, and data is sent in a serial fashion across those data lines. It is used today for embedded systems, routers and switches et al, and getting a console on any machine that doesn't have a gpu with a monitor attached. USB is a serial BUS, which allows multiple devices; serial ports are single device (if my memory serves).
A mailing list is just a kind of public group chat. You're probably in many public group chats, including this one right now. Mailing lists, IRC, traditional web forums, Discord, WhatsApp are all implementations of the same basic concept. Like any implementation, it comes with certain affordances which differ from other implementations. Messages feel "heavy" for several reasons: sending one involves a lot of clicks (or keypresses); if you send a very high number you may be banned from your email provider, and unable to communicate with anyone. Messages often arrive instantly, but can be delayed up to hours or days, so conversation round-trips are kept to a minimum. Messages are all the same - there are no "lite messages" such as emoji reactions - so any message must contain enough content to justify being a full-fledged message, or it won't be sent at all. (Sometimes an "emoji reaction" is felt to be enough content to justify a full-fledged message, which is sent.) Being off the web increases the barrier to entry, reducing the eternal september effect (ironically, Usenet is one of the least eternal-september-ish of the public discussion boards currently in existence). Overall, the feel of the system tends to somewhat discourage quantity and encourage per-message quality.
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> Messages are all the same - there are no "lite messages" such as emoji reactions - so any message must contain enough content to justify being a full-fledged message, or it won't be sent at all. (Sometimes an "emoji reaction" is felt to be enough content to justify a full-fledged message, which is sent.) Haven't you heard about the abomination which is Office365? They recently bolted emoji reactions onto email!
Kind of nuts that a tool that hasn't fixed nearly 40-year old practices is in common usage among developers. Never tell me engineers are rational people.
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Engineers are rational people. Software developers calling themselves "engineers" are not.
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We usually wait for a version written in Rust for this kind of cruft removal.
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The problems here are more about the architecture. You can write 100% memory-safe but completely insecure code in Rust, Java. Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, bash, you name it. For instance, running a setuid binary may add problems to code written in any language.
Nah, screen's main use case is as an ad-hoc method to daemonise random scripts.
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Yeah this is 100% of when I reach for screen. “I’m not willing/ready to make this a service, screen detach here I come”
Show HN: Basecoat – shadcn/UI components, no React required
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Why did you decide going old school using Alpine.js instead of using plain vanilla web components?
Now you just need to remove Tailwind
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If I offer a CDN version, it will be Tailwind-free.
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And then ?
The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority (twitter.com)
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Sadly software optimization doesn't offer enough cost savings for most companies to address consumer frustration. However, for large AI workloads, even small CPU improvements yield significant financial benefits, making optimization highly worthwhile.
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Carmack is a very smart guy and I agree with the sentiment behind his post, but he's a software guy. Unfortunately for all of us hardware has bugs, sometimes bugs so bad that you need to drop 30-40% of your performance to mitigate them - see Spectre, Meltdown and friends. I don't want the crap Intel has been producing for the last 20 years, I want the ARM, RiscV and AMD CPUs from 5 years in the future. I don't want a GPU by Nvidia that comes with buggy drivers and opaque firmware updates, I want the open source GPU that someone is bound to make in the next decade. I'm happy 10gb switches are becoming a thing in the home, I don't want the 100 mb hubs from the early 2000s.
HN: Yeah! We should be go back to writing optimized code that fully uses the hardware capabilities! Also HN: Check this new AI tool that consumes 1000x more energy to do the exact same thing we could already do, but worse and with no reproducibility
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Google the goomba fallacy
Is there or could we make an iPhone-like that runs 100x slower than conventional phones but uses much less energy, so it powers itself on solar? It would be good for the environment and useful in survival situations. Or could we make a phone that runs 100x slower but is much cheaper? If it also runs on solar it would be useful in third-world countries. Processors are more than fast enough for most tasks nowadays; more speed is still useful, but I think improving price and power consumption is more important. Also cheaper E-ink displays, which are much better for your eyes, more visible outside, and use less power than LEDs.
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I absolutely agree with what you are saying. Yes, it's possible and very simple. Lower the frequency (dramatically lowers power usage), fewer cores, few threads, etc. The problem is, we don't know what we need. What if a great new apps comes out (think LLM); you'll be complaining your phone is too slow to run it.
There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality goods before buying, so the demand for high and low-quality goods is artificially even. The cause is asymmetric information. This is already true and will become increasingly more true for AI. The user cannot differentiate between sophisticated machine learning applications and a washing machine spin cycle calling itself AI. The AI label itself commands a price premium. The user overpays significantly for a washing machine[0]. It's fundamentally the same thing when a buyer overpays for crap software, thinking it's designed and written by technologists and experts. But IC1-3s write 99% of software, and the 1 QA guy in 99% of tech companies is the sole measure to improve quality beyond "meets acceptance criteria". Occasionally, a flock of interns will perform an "LGTM" incantation in hopes of improving the software, but even that is rarely done. [0] https://www.lg.com/uk/lg-experience/inspiration/lg-ai-wash-efficient-spins/
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The used car market is market for lemons because it is difficult to distinguish between a car that has been well maintained and a car close to breaking down. However, the new car market is decidedly not a market for lemons because every car sold is tested by the state, and reviewed by magazines and such. You know exactly what you are buying. Software is always sold new. Software can increase in quality the same way cars have generally increased in quality over the decades. Creating standards that software must meet before it can be sold. Recalling software that has serious bugs in it. Punishing companies that knowingly sell shoddy software. This is not some deep insight. This is how every other industry operates.
The dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a competitive advantage in a competitive market. Duh. I’m sure I knew and said that in college and for years before my own startup attempt, but this time I really felt it in my bones. It suddenly made me realize exactly why everything in the market is mediocre, and why high quality things always get worse when they get more popular. Pressure to reduce costs grows with the scale of a product. Duh. People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality). Duh. What companies do is pay the minimum they need in order to stay alive & profitable. I don’t mean it never happens, sometimes people get excited and spend for short bursts, young companies often try to make high quality stuff, but eventually there will be an inevitable slide toward minimal spending. There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.
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> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either. I think the problem is focusing on improving the quality of the end products directly when the quality of the end product for a given cost is downstream of the quality of our tools. We need much better tools. For instance, why are our languages still obsessed with manipulating pointers and references as a primary mode of operation, just so we can program yet another linked list? Why can't you declare something as a "Set with O(1) insert" and the language or its runtime chooses an implementation? Why isn't direct relational programming more common? I'm not talking programming in verbose SQL, but something more modern with type inference and proper composition, more like LINQ, eg. why can't I do: let usEmployees = from x in Employees where x.Country == "US"; func byFemale(Query<Employees> q) => from x in q where x.Sex == "Female"; let femaleUsEmployees = byFemale(usEmployees); These abstract over implementation details that we're constantly fiddling with in our end programs, often for little real benefit. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans can write less than 20 lines of correct code per day, so each of those lines should be as expressive and powerful as possible to drive down costs without sacrificing quality.
I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want to pay the least amount possible, and don't quite understand if a repair should be expensive or not. This creates a downward pressure on price at the expense of quality and penalizes the mechanics that care about quality.
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Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more. The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc But I understand your point.
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Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimental value. Why? Because they are on a different incentive structure: non-comissioned payments for employees. They buy OEM parts, give a good warranty, charge fair prices, and they are always busy. If this computer fad goes away, I'm going to open my own Toyota-only auto shop, trying to emulate them. They have 30 years of lead time on my hypothetical business, but the point stands: when people discover that high quality in this market, they stick to it closely.
> the market sells as if all goods were high-quality The phrase "high-quality" is doing work here. The implication I'm reading is that poor performance = low quality. However, the applications people are mentioning in this comment section as low performance (Teams, Slack, Jira, etc) all have competitors with much better performance. But if I ask a person to pick between Slack and, say, a a fast IRC client like Weechat... what do you think the average person is going to consider low-quality? It's the one with a terminal-style UI, no video chat, no webhook integrations, and no custom avatars or emojis. Performance is a feature like everything else. Sometimes, it's a really important feature; the dominance of Internet Explorer was destroyed by Chrome largely because it was so much faster than IE when it was released, and Python devs are quickly migrating to uv/ruff due to the performance improvement. But when you start getting into the territory of "it takes Slack 5 seconds to start up instead of 10ms", you're getting into the realm where very few people care.
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If you're being honest, compare Slack and Teams not with weechat, but with Telegram. Its desktop client (along with other clients) is written by an actually competent team that cares about performance, and it shows. They have enough money to produce a native client written in C++ that has fantastic performance and is high quality overall, but these software behemoths with budgets higher than most countries' GDP somehow never do.
> You are comparing applications with wildly different features and UI. That's neither an argument for nor against performance as an important quality metric. I never said performance wasn't an important quality metric, just that it's not the only quality metric. If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind. > How fast you can compile, start and execute some particular code matters. The experience of using a program that performs well if you use it daily matters. Like any other feature, whether or not performance is important depends on the user and context. Chrome being faster than IE8 at general browsing (rendering pages, opening tabs) was very noticeable. uv/ruff being faster than pip/poetry is important because of how the tools integrate into performance-sensitive development workflows. Does Slack taking 5-10 seconds to load on startup matter? -- to me not really, because I have it come up on boot and forget about it until my next system update forced reboot. Do I use LibreOffice or Word and Excel, even though LibreOffice is faster? -- I use Word/Excel because I've run into annoying compatibility issues enough times with LO to not bother. LibreOffice could reduce their startup and file load times to 10 picoseconds and I would still use MS Office, because I just want my damn documents to keep the same formatting my colleagues using MS Office set on their Windows computers. Now of course I would love the best of all worlds; programs to be fast and have all the functionality I want! In reality, though, companies can't afford to build every feature, performance included, and need to pick and choose what's important.
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> If a slow program has the features I need and a fast program doesn't, the slow program is going to be "higher quality" in my mind. That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast. The overwhelming majority of software is slow because the company simply doesn’t care about efficiency. Google actively penalized slow websites and many companies still didn’t make it a priority.
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> That’s irrelevant here, the fully featured product can also be fast. So why is it so rarely the case? If it's so simple, why hasn't anyone recognized that Teams, Zoom, etc are all bloated and slow and made a hyper-optimized, feature-complete competitor, dominating the market? Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free. > The overwhelming majority of software is slow because the company simply doesn’t care about efficiency. Don't care about efficiency at all , or don't consider it as important as other features and functionality?
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Not being free upfront isn’t the same thing as expensive. Zoom’s got 7,412 employees a small team of say 7 employees could make a noticeable difference here and the investment wouldn’t disappear, it would help drive further profits. > Don't care about efficiency at all Doesn’t care beyond basic functionality.
I do think there is an information problem in many cases. It is easy to get information of features. It is hard to get information on reliability or security. The result is worsened because vendors compete on features, therefore they all make the same trade off of more features for lower quality.
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Some vendors even make it impossible to get information. See Oracle and Microsoft forbidding publishing benchmarks for their SQL databases.
I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabilities, and you can debug your programs orders of magnitude more easily, or you can have a computer that runs 1000X faster and software will be just as buggy, or worse, and debugging will be even more of a nightmare. People would have their minds blown at 950X. You wouldn't even have to offer 1000X. But guess what we chose... Personally I think the 1000Xers kinda ruined things for the rest of us.
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I think on year 2001 GHz CPU should be a performance benchmark that every piece of basic non-high performance software should execute acceptably on. This is kind of been a disappointment to me of AI when I've tried it. This has kind of been a disappointment to me of AI when I've tried it. Llm should be able to Port things. It should be able to rewrite things with the same interface. It should be able to translate from inefficient languages to more efficient ones. It should even be able to optimize existing code bases automatically, or at least diagnose or point out poor algorithms, cache optimization, etc. Heck I remember powerbuilder in the mid 90s running pretty well on 200 mhz CPUs. It doesn't even really interpreted stuff. It's just amazing how slow stuff is. Do rounded corners and CSS really consume that much CPU power? My limited experience was trying to take the unix sed source code and have AI port it into a jvm language, and it could do the most basic operations, but utterly failed at even the intermediate sed capabilities. And then optimize? Nope Of course there's no desire for something like that. Which really shows what the purpose of all this is. It's to kill jobs. It's not to make better software. And it means AI is going to produce a flood of bad software. Really bad software.
Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super snappy.
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Apple unlike the other Silicon Valley giants has figured out that latency >>> throughput. Minimizing latency is much more important for making a program "feel" fast than maximizing latency. Some of the apps I interact with daily are Slack, Teams (ugh), Gmail, and YouTube and they are all slow as dogshit.
Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional, and their core functionality has regressed significantly in the last decade. I’m not talking about features that I prefer, but as an example if you load two links in Reddit in two different tabs my experience has been that it’s 50/50 if they’ll actually both load or if one gets stuck either way skeletons.
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HOW does Slack take 20s to load for you? My huge corporate Slack takes 2.5s to cold load. I'm so dumbfounded. Maybe non-MacOS, non-Apple silicon stuff is complete crap at that point? Maybe the complete dominance of Apple performance is understated?
Correction: devs have made the mistake of turning everything into remote calls, without having any understanding as to the performance implications of doing so. Sonos’ app is a perfect example of this. The old app controlled everything locally, since the speakers set up their own wireless mesh network. This worked fantastically well. Someone at Sonos got the bright idea to completely rewrite the app such that it wasn’t even backwards-compatible with older hardware, and everything is now a remote calls. Changing volume? Phone —> Router —> WAN —> Cloud —> Router —> Speakers. Just… WHY. This failed so spectacularly that the CEO responsible stepped down / was forced out, and the new one claims that fixing the app is his top priority. We’ll see.
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We (probably) can guess the why - tracking and data opportunities which companies can eventually sell or utilize for profit is some way.
We aren't talking numbers, though. Who cares about embedded? I mean that literally. This is computation invisible by design. If that were sufficient we wouldn't have smartphones.
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In a way, and for a long time, smartphones were/are defined as embedded devices. I still don't see how one can classify a smartphone as a general-purpose computing device, even though they have enough computing power as a laptop.
I don't disagree that the engineering can be justified. But you don't need custom hardware to achieve radiation hardening, much less hiring fucking IBM. And to be clear, I love power chips. I remain very bullish about the architecture. But as a taxpayer reading this shit just pisses me off. Pork-fat designed to look pro-humanity.
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> But you don't need custom hardware to achieve radiation hardening Citation needed > much less hiring fucking IBM It's an IBM designed processor, what are you talking about?!
Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection (theregister.com)
As a developer that did many of those migrations, I can claim that it's crystally clear what the problem is. Storage Access Framework is a framework where user decides which files an app can access and see. That's the API Nextcloud refuses to use. Old READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE (replaced with MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE now) permission gives full access to all shared storage data (where for example DCIM directory with all private photos and their locations lives) without exception or privacy filters like EXIF stripping. This permission was required by many games, malware apps and everyone with 5 minutes of time that could paste that string into the app and refused to allow users to run the app without granting it. It was VERY common to demand access to all storage at startup just to do simple things like download a potential file. That's the API Nextcloud demands to use and Google is telling them that they can't because they should be using SAF.
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You're not replying to what I actually said.
There was no backport, it was introduced in API level 19 as the doc itself mentions: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/document-provider
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I interpreted that statement as "this is available in API level 19 and up", not "this was introduced on the same date that we originally released API level 19", but it looks like you're correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHVeXbK1P4
This permission has been a security issue since its introduction. Random apps have been caught iterating over used media to extract geolocation history based on EXIF information and other such metadata (for no good reason, data collection for data traders), so Google did the right thing and made file access permission-first. Almost no apps need this permission, so being skeptical makes a lot of sense. File managers and other such apps are routinely permitted to use this permission, so it's not like Google is locking out utility apps or anything. The current state of Google Play is the result of years of Google being too permissive by default and trying to patch things later while desperately trying to remain backwards compatible. Give advertisers a finger and they take the whole hand. Your average Android phone's internal storage used to be full of dotfiles, hidden directories, not-so-hidden directories, all full of identifiers and cross-identifiers to break the cross-app tracking boundary enforced by the normal API. As far as I know, Google has made an API available for picking a directory to sync with. I'm not sure why NextCloud needs to see every file on my SD card when it can ask for folders to sync into and can use a normal file picker to upload new files without going through a file manager, but there's probably a feature somewhere hidden in their app that necessitates this permission. The policy itself makes a lot of sense and I'd argue is beneficial for Google Play's user base. NextCloud's problem seems to be that Google isn't letting a human with common sense review their upload. Because of Google being Google, outcry is the only way to get attention from an actual human being when it comes to app stores (Apple has had very similar issues, though they claim their reviews are all done by humans). EDIT: NextCloud states "SAF cannot be used, as it is for sharing/exposing our files to other apps, so the reviewer clearly misunderstood our app workflow." as a reason for not being able to use the better APIs, but I'm not sure if that's true. SAF has a dedicated API for maintaining access to a folder ( https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/documents-files#perform-operations ). I think NextCloud misinterpreted Google here.
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What permission does Google drive have? That is the permission that NextCloud should be able to use in order to provide comparative features. People use NextCloud because they want to host their own “cloud” at home. If Google don’t let Nextcloud use the same permissions as their own services how are they supposed to do that?
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SAF documentation seems a bit misleading: takePersistableUriPermission part only talks about files, but other sources seem to indicate that it also works for directories so it should be possible to request permissions to a directory and then maintain it correctly.
File managers are explicitly allowed to have this permission. File sync tools need to go through scoped storage where you as a user select directories which they sync and then they can read them at will as well.
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As I recall from a similar issue with Syncthing, using scoped storage for this has significant performance limitations.
Hello, we and TFA are talking about the new API where the user picks what directory an app has access to vs. the old API where the app has access to almost everything as you pointed out. The Google Play store (not Android the OS) is now limiting access to the old API, it has nothing to do with Android 11. The new API does not work with Linux open(). Some projects (like Syncthing) don't want to put in the work to switch to the new API. I hope that clears things up.
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Yeah, I'm not saying that you're in the wrong, I'm saying that they might want to access further than the new `ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE` API call allows. For example, the Downloads folder (you can only open individual files with ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT, not the whole folder). And that can be reached with the `MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE` (all files) API. Is that OK? Well, it's not intrinsically bad, but it clashes with Google's Android hardening directives. Not very familiar with the NextCloud client, as I haven't used it much, but in the case of Syncthing (and this is totally guessing from what I remember from reading the forums back when the Android 11 upgrade happened): I don't think they don't want to put the work to switch to the new API, I think they want to access places they won't be able to access with the new API, so that's why they won't change the calls.
/Android is a private app storage and is documented as such.
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Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, I just say that some people like to sync/backup/copy their apps data (that sometimes it's located on private directories, or in the Downloads folder...), and they were able to do it before. And that the new API has less permissions than the one that Google wants them to use. Google Play, or at least that's what they say in their docs, might allow the use of the MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE "all files" API call "...if your app includes a use case similar to any of the following: File managers, Backup and restore apps, [...] Document management apps ..." [0][1]. And the Nextcloud app sounds very similar to that. Of course, it's all "Subject to Google Play review and approval.", but why they used to grant that permission to Nextcloud with no problem and revoked it suddenly... I have no idea. --- 0: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/manage-all-files#all-files-access-google-play 1: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/10467955#zippy=%2Cpermitted-uses-of-the-all-files-access-permission
How is this interface "insecure and harmful to users" ?
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Shady apps use file access to do tracking of various sorts and simply ingest private data that has nothing to do with their nominal purpose. Sophisticated users probably wouldn't install those apps, and certainly wouldn't agree to their request for filesystem access, but that's not who Google is trying to protect here. It's obviously not a security problem or a harm when used by an open source file synchronization app, and Google is being unsophisticated with its policy here.
My bank's apps detect everything from developer mode to debug access to untrusted sources. "Fraud prevention" or some nonsense. I tried to get away from it by talking to my bank's managers. They couldn't get rid of these checks for me. Talked to their developers about access to bank APIs so I could create a literally custom app just for myself. I discovered that due to regulations I need permission from my country's central bank to interface with the banking system. Even a read only app for a single account under my name needs government permission to exist. It made me wish cryptocurrencies hadn't turned into stocks.
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Hmm, I just checked: I have developer options enabled and untrusted sources (F-Droid). I checked my play integrity status[0] and it reports: Labels: [MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY, MEETS_DEVICE_INTEGRITY, MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY] So I don't think remote attestation is the issue here, but it could be the app detects it by some other way [0] https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/additional-tools#check-device
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Remote hardware attestation is the problem. It's the only thing that prevents me from simply circumventing the bank app's silly checks. Cryptography is great when it empowers us. It sucks when it's used against us.
Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
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I wrote about this fairly extensively: TL;DR: Email sign ups before launch via a boosted IG post. Non TL;DR: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-first-100-subscribers/
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At TableCheck (Japan's answer to Resy, Tock, Sevenrooms, etc.) our first 100 customers were definitely the hardest. It took us nearly two years, and many times I came close to giving up. Even though we had built a solid MVP, in Japan's risk-averse culture, no restaurant wanted to be the first to use our product. The question was always "Who else is using it?"--basically a deadlock. After a lot of cold-calling, we found a 120-year old sukiyaki and shabu-shabu restaurant chain. They told us they always survived by adopting the latest technology, and were willing to try our product. Most of their staff were elderly women in kimonos, many of whom had not touched an iPad before. We were worried they would struggle, but after a few training sessions they got the hang of it--soon they were greeting and seating customers with no problem. 12 years on, we are at 13,000 restaurants on our platform and adding a few hundred more each month!
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A while back I wrote some stock market algorithms and charting software I use in my own DYOR daily stock analysis. I decided to offer up that daily information to others. I changed my SaaS delivery approach idea to be a daily Substack newsletter instead. It is a stock market info newsletter called StockQuakes ( https://stockquakes.substack.com ) . With Substack my newsletter grew by using the Substack Recommendations feature as well as their Notesfeature. Substack takes care of the signups, etc. via Stripe. You have to have value above and below the paywall line in the newsletter to keep users. And you have to have a free version in addition to the paid version. I also put up a separate website to drive SEO traffic to the newsletter ( https://stockquakes.com ). And I post on BlueSky, Threads, and X/Twitter daily in addition to Substack Notes. Have 600 users, 5000 followers.
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I'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now) My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me. - Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service - Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue
Also, I subscribed to your blog. Content looks interesting, but asking for a name during sign up is a little off-putting.
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Got it—and thanks for subscribing! Really appreciate the feedback. I used the default settings, but now I know what I’ll be tweaking tonight. Totally agree—simple is best.
Not cold—more like soft outreach. It happened at a social event through mutual friends. Classic “So, what do you do?” convo. I said software dev. They said, “Ugh, we use this tool—it’s garbage.” I listened (an underrated superpower), realized I could actually fix the problem, and suggested a meetup. One Zoom meeting later, we had the foundation of a partnership. Honestly, it could’ve been any event. Just show up, be sincere, and listen more than you pitch. I’ve always been an introvert—still am—but I’ve learned to be a functional extrovert when it counts- Good luck and don’t give up!
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Was this in SV?
I don't think it's a grift in the negative sense but this is absolutely a marketing comment. They're doing exactly what they say to do in the comment. They're on HN where at least some of their target market is. They have a product that is relevant (right down to the headline/CTA). They didn't just post the link but put it at the end of an informational comment. 10/10 meta-promotion IMO
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They also likely were involved in the the original question getting posted so they could provide that answer which is what makes it an entirely fabricated grift
> target ICP communities Insane Clown Posse? Now I'm interested!
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[delayed]
Not at all. It's Rust using egui for the UI framework with custom text layout and shaping. It uses PDFium for rendering PDFs.
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It’s neat but I’m wondering why the immediate mode gui for a word processor?
> SoundCloud (DJ/Producing as “Schlenker mit Turnbeutel”) Pardon my ignorance - does SoundCloud let you monetise, or is it purely it being cool that people are listening to your tracks?
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SoundCloud pays a similar amount per stream to the creator as e.g. Spotify. The requirement is paying for Artist (Pro) which costs 3-7€.
Are you upset by the kitchen sink metaphor? lmao
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?
A programming language made for me (zylinski.se)
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You're saying you like Odin because it provided this feature in stdlib but how hard would it be if C provided this? And if C provided this, you'd stay with C? So this is a failure of the C community to not evolve and improve?
I'm the creator of the Odin programming language and I originally tried to approach it by fixing C. And my conclusion was that C could not be fixed. I made my own standard library to replace libc. The lack of safety is hard to do when you don't have a decent enough type system. C's lack of a proper array type is a good example of this. Before making Odin, I tried making my own C compiler with some extensions, specifically adding proper arrays (slices) with bounds checking, and adding `defer`. This did help things a lot, but it wasn't enough. C still had fundamentally broken semantics in so many places that just "fixing" the problems of C in C was not enough. I didn't want to make Odin initially, but it was the conclusion I had after trying to fix something that cannot be fixed.
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I feel like Odin is the closest to "normal C", especially in its simplicity, which is often undervalued. If C was easily fixable it probably would've been done already anyway...
As long as programmers view a program as a mechanism that manipulates bytes in flat memory, we will be stuck in a world where this kind of topic seems like a success. In that world, an object puts some structure above those memory bytes and obviously an allocator sounds like a great feature. But you'll always have those bytes in the back of your mind and will never be able to abstract things without the bytes in memory leaking through your abstractions. The author even gives an example for a pretty simple scenario in which this is painful, and that's SOA. As long as your data abstraction is fundamentally still a glorified blob of raw bytes in memory, you'll be stuck there. Instead, data needs to be viewed more abstractly. Yes, it will eventually manifest in memory as bytes in some memory cell, but how that's layouted and moved around is not the concern of you as the programmer that's a user of data types. Looking at some object attributes foo.a or foo.b is just that - the abstract access of some data. Whether a and b are adjacent in memory should be insubstantial or are even on the same machine or are even backed by data cells in some physical memory bank. Yes, in some very specific (!) cases, optimizing for speed makes it necessary to care about locality, but for those cases, the language or library need to provide mechanisms to specify those requirements and then they will layout things accordingly. But it's not helpful if we all keep writing in some kind of glorified assembly language. It's 2025 and "data type" needs to mean something more abstract than "those bytes in this order layed out in memory like this", unless we are writing hand-optimized assembly code which most of us never do.
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In the kinds of applications that require a systems language you need to know the object layouts, it isn’t avoidable. Algorithm selection over those objects is dependent on the physical object layout and hardware architecture based on the use case. The compiler doesn’t do any of this and largely can’t because it doesn’t understand what you are trying to do. It has nothing to do with “hand-optimized assembly code”. You are making a classic “sufficiently smart compiler” argument. These types of problems can’t be automagically solved without strong general AI inside the compiler. See also: SIMD, auto-parallelization, etc. We don’t have strong general AI, never mind inside the compiler. Until we have such a compiler, you will be dependent on people caring a lot about physical data layout to make your software scalable and efficient.
Sure. What I originally wrote was not actually intended to be an insult, but I didn't mind calling it that if he took it as insulting. It's just very weird to see be very vague when questioned, and claim things which cannot be true based on what he's stated already in this comment chain.
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I'm with you here. The whole diatribe falls firmly under "tell me you've never needed to write performant code without telling me you've never needed to write performant code..."
> In Odin all variables are automatically zero initialized. Not just integers and floats. But all structs as well. Their memory is filled with zeroes when those variables are created. > This makes ZII extra powerful! There is little risk of variables accidentally being uninitialized. The cure is worse than the problem. I don't want to 'safely' propagate my incorrect value throughout the program. If we're in the business of making new languages, why not compile-time error for reading memory that hasn't been written? Even a runtime crash would be preferable.
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You're talking about Mojo there. Even memory allocated with UnsafePointer must be explicitly initialised before it can be written to or read from.
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