News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

delish

Re:I Hate Workday on Friday September 18, 2026 @08:58PM (#49762293)
>Why do you ask me to upload my resume and then still prompt me to manually enter data?

Question for hiring managers and HR teams: do you all rely on manually-input work and education histories? When I've hired (albeit only at small companies) I just read resumes.

An example of deterioration:

Jeff Goldblum's 30 second "Presenting three easy steps to the internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjY0xsoozs8

And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:

Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)

Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.

Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.

There are more!

I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.

NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.

Re:Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:37AM (#49432954)
Patrick McKenzie rebuts this here: (podcast) https://open.spotify.com/episode/2E2KRPcDvh1LcRw5bIsBms or here (article): https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/anatomy-of-credit-car...

The intuition being: people who carry balances and pay interest don't actually spend very much; they are not wealthy.

Re:Scrap on Saturday August 22, 2026 @03:22PM (#49402937)
I'm open to correction on which rule to cite, or whether to cite a rule:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Picking:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I understand the partisan juxtaposition of "X" and Moxie Marlinspike, and the partisan appeal of commenting on it, but to me it is a tangential annoyance.

Re:BriskDB on Saturday August 15, 2026 @03:24PM (#49313464)
I'm interested in the social-proof mechanisms we'll need to have for AI-assisted "serious projects" (where a database is a "serious project").

Third-party audits like https://jepsen.io/ are an example.

Re:SupererDuperer on Saturday August 08, 2026 @07:48AM (#49220902)
Indeed. You can remedy your uncertainty by looking for evidence. Some is provided on the website. Some on Mastodon, on the community's reception of this: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/117018254826752338
Re:SupererDuperer on Saturday August 08, 2026 @07:05AM (#49220663)
I agree with the logic of your comment, and to the extent that you're writing advice to Shirt Pocket and to other developers, I have no dispute.

> In this case, all I have to go off [...]

Well if you're looking for evidence that SuperDuper is good (and if you accept appeals to authority from internet strangers), SuperDuper is part of John Siracusa's backup strategy: https://atp.fm/703 John Siracusa reviewed macOS for ten years for Ars Technica (these _reviews_ are magisterial), and is an authority on the Mac.

Re:Is AI Profitable Yet? on Friday May 22, 2026 @11:59PM (#48244527)
The critic I see most frequently on the unprofitability of AI is Ed Zitron. I am sincerely curious if he shorted Facebook's, Amazon's, or Google's stocks. Or if he's in index funds which have tech stocks like those.

For example: I have index funds which have some of these stocks. So I, by process of revealed-preference, don't think it's a bubble, or I think I will keep my money in through the bubble's pop. I don't have that much else to say!

For the record: I would respect the creator of this site equally or more if he/she said, "I'm shorting these stocks and this is why."

Re:The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number on Saturday May 09, 2026 @11:11AM (#48075615)
The difference between say a think tank and an advocacy organization like "reclaimthenet.org" is a think tank hopefully feels obligated to think about, and pitch, a solution to the identified problem (spam calls).

Obviously reclaimthenet.org can post whatever they want on their site.

I'm curious about requiring all phone calls except to emergency services to cost a tenth of a cent. Or some amount that permits desired robocalling (prescription drug reminders for those not on the 'net) and excises spam calls.

Re:Past Ferrari Models, 1947–2023 on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @08:41PM (#48030725)
I'd be curious why user NaOH chose to submit this. I'll offer a justification: it is notable that a car company lists all (I assume?) its past products, giving equal visual weight to the F50 (lauded today) and Mondial 8 (not lauded). By contrast, it's hard to find Ford talking about the Pinto: https://www.google.com/search?q=pinto+site%3Aford.com
Re:OpenClaw privilege-escalation bug on Friday April 03, 2026 @11:19PM (#47635337)
I point to the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Those are all situationally-valid criticisms, but I've long thought the ability to have smartphones' cameras cryptographically sign photos is good when available. The use case is demonstrating a photo wasn't doctored, and that it came from a device associated with e.g. a journalist, who maintains a public key. Of course, it should be optional.
Re:It's 2026, Just Use Postgres on Friday February 06, 2026 @10:50AM (#46914304)
The cynical take is: the AI doesn't know you-the-blog-post-author made TimescaleDB unless you tell it!
Re:It's 2026, Just Use Postgres on Friday February 06, 2026 @10:49AM (#46914288)
In terms of that example: they should link to how they got those numbers, and it should state the benchmark used, the machines used, what they controlled for etc.
Re:It's 2026, Just Use Postgres on Thursday February 05, 2026 @10:17PM (#46908635)
Apart from the style of the prose, which is my subjective evaluation: This blog post is "a view from nowhere." Tiger Data is a company that sells postgres in some way (don't know, but it doesn't matter for the following): they could speak as themselves, and compare themselves to companies that sell other open source databases. Or they could showcase benchmarks _they ran_.

Them saying: "What you get: pgvectorscale uses the DiskANN algorithm (from Microsoft Research), achieving 28x lower p95 latency and 16x higher throughput than Pinecone at 99% recall" is marketing unless they give how you'd replicate those numbers.

Point being: this could have been written by an LLM, because it doesn't represent any work-done by Tiger Data.

The font color implies this comment is downvoted, but I earnestly encourage readers to take very seriously the difference in SLOs and SLAs between high-cost vendors like AWS and GCP and low-cost vendors like DigitalOcean. Read their docs; do not assume DO is "the same, but lower cost."
Re:Mousing Around: Mousercise on Monday December 15, 2025 @11:08AM (#46276317)
Alternative introduction: https://pbc.gov/mousercise/

Palm Beach County Library's Web 1.0 introduction to using the mouse. I enjoyed clicking.

Re:Charles Moore Fireside Q&A [video] on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @03:53PM (#45971895)
Posting a quick TL;DW. A minute into the video Chuck Moore says that Windows updates (on 11 and 10) have caused colorForth to crash, with Chuck thinking it's a graphical problem. I may comment more, but I wanted to post this because I don't see it mentioned as a youtube comment.
Re:Migrating to Postgres on Wednesday May 14, 2025 @09:14PM (#43990866)
Related: Oxide's podcast, "Whither CockroachDB," which reflects on experience with postgres at Joyent, then the choice to use cockroach in response to prior experiences with postgres.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNHMYp8M40k

I'm trying to avoid editorializing in my above summary, for fear of mischaracterizing their opinions or the current state of postgres. Their use of postgres was 10 years ago, they were using postgres for a high-availability use case -- so they (and I) don't think "postgres bad, cockroach good." But like Bryan Cantrill says, "No one cares about your workload like you do." So benchmark! Don't make technical decisions via "vibes!"

Re:Rippling Sues Deel over Spying on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @06:41AM (#43397820)
As the complaint says on page 4: https://rippling2.imgix.net/Complaint.pdf

Deel was founded in 2019 and, in Rippling's opinion, began competing with Rippling in 2022.

Re:Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @11:42AM (#40729320)
We need a different word than "hallucinate" or "bullshit" because the LLM is executing the same functionality when it _gets_ the correct answer or incorrect. It doesn't _know_ the correct answer in either case.
It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.

I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )."

Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.

Re:I don't want to fill out your contact form on Saturday May 04, 2024 @10:26AM (#40257924)
>I don't want to fill out your contact form

Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_ by you. It's a cost to them. The median "contact us for a sales quote" form is clearer and has less friction than the median "file a complaint / ask a question" form.

One reason not in the article people might use forms instead of email is the "set and setting" of being a guest on a website and filling out their form. When in "your" email inbox as opposed to on "someone else's" site, you may conduct yourself differently.

An example of this is the sometimes-onerous Github issue template questions. I'm not arguing they're not necessary, but they do two things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication norms.

Re:Google delays third-party cookie demise yet again on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @10:13AM (#40144629)
Thank you! Will look!
Re:Google delays third-party cookie demise yet again on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @09:33AM (#40144199)
I pay for Youtube Premium, which uses third-party cookies to not show ads on embedded videos.

https://privacysandbox.com talks about advertising, but not "logged in elsewhere" functionality. Does Youtube or Google have something ready, or will all Youtube Premium subscribers see ads on embedded videos?

Re:Home buyers need 80% more income to buy than 4 years ago on Saturday March 16, 2024 @09:56PM (#39731249)
Transfer fees and title fees equally affect any buyer and any seller in the long run, don't they?

>Further contemplate how those implications are different for different potential buyers and sellers of that same property at the same price.

Sure -- this is why I was asking for examples. "Rich people having more options than poor people" (which is what I think 1031 exchanges and your nod to capital gains refers to) is true across all domains without exception. It's true that I tend to discount that, acknowledging its unfairness. My point was prices are public(!), and historic sale-prices are public(!). A _particular_ (rich) buyer may have individual reasons for buying a house, but the market is almost perfectly competitive, because prices are public.

Re:Home buyers need 80% more income to buy than 4 years ago on Saturday March 16, 2024 @08:07PM (#39730597)
I'll try to invoke Cunningham's Law by saying: Housing is close to a perfectly-competitive market.

I think the above is true, but I'd welcome counterexamples.

So, the way to depress housing prices is to build more houses. _Most_ housing regulations, including making it illegal for people to own four houses, reshuffle the ownership of existing houses, and don't depress their prices. As regards that regulation: if the super-rich aren't able to own $many houses, the merely-rich will buy more, and thus housing prices would be the same.

Re:Why car insurance in America is too cheap on Saturday February 03, 2024 @12:31AM (#39237784)
This is not the answer to your question, but it is what HN has to say about submitting paywalled links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

>Are paywalls ok?

>It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

Re:Google Searches can, and will, be held against you on Friday December 22, 2023 @03:16PM (#38738146)
To the commenters saying, "So what?" I would suggest thinking of instances other than distant political targets.

I in fact searched for "chloroform" because I wanted to read the Wikipedia page. Imagine I'm accused of a crime I _didn't_ commit, and my Google searches p-hack into a pattern. This hypothetical recalls the excellent "Don't talk to the police": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Older »