potamic

What gets lost more is that Balwani was convicted of defrauding patients, so it's not even like Theranos was absolved of those charges. The kicker is that the CEO and co-founder of a company that has been established to willfully defraud patients somehow managed to escape conviction.

It's perhaps a good time to bring attention to this open issue [1] on vscode from 2015 with thousands of upvotes, hundreds of comments pleading, the collective hive mind losing their minds over how a usability requirement so basic can be left neglected for years altogether even as so many other not so requested features seem to have no problem getting piled on.

While this issue has been a personal pain point, I do recall there were quite a few widely requested usability issues that went unaddressed over the years. So I'm not sure about how to react when I read this blog post about "modernizing" vscode UI in 2026. How can you talk about modernizing and journey through a 5-stage evolution when fundamental aspects are so obviously unaddressed? What is a modern UI anyways and how is it better than ancient UI? What specific advancements in HCI research from the last 10 years are being incorporated here to call the UI modernized?

I have to take a dig at the larger design community because I think this is not an isolated problem. Software usability in general has been going down for me over the years. There was a time when you would hear more from the community about the science of interaction and why you would design an interface in a certain way. Of late I feel the emphasis shifting more towards visual design with things like colors, spacing, border radii etc. with this blog post being a case in point.

If HN were to be launched today, I'm sure it would look nothing like what it does and instead have a more "modern" UI. But, would it be an improvement?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/519

If you cannot tell the difference, you cannot tell the difference. Unfortunate as it may be, the standard of proof for criminal conviction must be high. There's a reason that various legal systems across the world have converged on such principles as proof beyond reasonable doubt, in dubio pro reo, intime conviction etc. basically stating that the legal burden of proof is on the prosecution to present compelling evidence of crime and that the benefit of doubt must go to the accused. It is considered so fundamental and so important that it has made it into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which a majority of countries in the world (including Denmark) have ratified. There must no doubt have been painful lessons in history which led humanity to eventually adopt such ideas. We must be careful to forget those and inadvertently take steps going back towards that direction.

This is why you are not an investor. (Cue McMahon meme), A marketing campaign to get eye balls across all the major tech outlets and take up headspace in everyone's trending feed? Oh yes. A potential, closed source alternative to github you can slowly wrangle your users to move to? Hell yeah. An always online centralized design requiring users to stay connected with the server for every operation? Let's go!

This is an ad for her upcoming, self-starred documentary. So nothing much has changed?

mise is great with running multiple versions of a package, something I've found not very seamless with brew.

Allowing dynamic prices only hurts people with less means who will find themselves wasting a lot of time hunting for the lowest possible price. And businesses may claim to charge based on wealth, but what they will do is charge based on desperation. There are also repercussions on wage, like what's the point of a raise, if I'm going to be paying more for expenses and make the same savings at the end of the day? Fixed prices simply eliminate a lot of inefficiency and headache from the system and prevent everyday shopping from being a cortisol ridden experience for the average person.

Besides, what you're proposing does not result in draining of wealth. It simply moves wealth within the capitalist class and keeps it there. If Bill Gates is paying 150k for a banana at Whole Foods, he's just paying himself because he likely owns a big chunk of equity in Amazon. To fix wealth inequality you have to transfer wealth to the working class. It has to be a tax so that the money moves to the public and is spent for the benefit of the public.

Countries like India and Brazil have shown that you can successfully run payments infrastructure nationally. Turns out it's not all that difficult or expensive or at all. India's NPCI processes 500m transactions daily with an annual budget of about 50m dollars. They make a profit over that while keeping the system free for a majority of users.

[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/npci-rs-500-crore-p...

What's the significance of warm speedup in the benchmarks? For most new installs, cache would mostly be empty, shouldn't the cold numbers be more significant for day to day use?

> If some vibe-coded clone can compete, can manage updates, win market share, produce value superseding the original does that version not deserve it's share?

I don't mean to judge whether the outcome is better for society over all, but just wondering on the kind of impact it can have on the production side for now. Whether people are going to hesitate going open source and guard their IP in more ways than previously.

The builds are reproducible. Developers can also choose to fetch binaries directly from their repositories, and fdroid will verify that those binaries match the sources. So this is actually safer than downloading directly from developer's repo.

https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds

Do you rely on Google Play reviews? Those are known to be highly manipulated and you can find any number of services offering to "boost" your reviews. I personally find online posts where people discuss about some app to have more meaningful feedback on it.

DDO website is refreshingly clean. Very reminiscent of early 2000's era, it just gets out of your way inviting you to browse through all the content. I wish more websites retained such functional design. The amount of visual stimulus thrown at you these days can be quite overbearing. While I just glanced through pentagram's site, I found myself spending a lot of time going through DDO's pages. They seem to have some really solid articles too. Thanks for sharing!

Do they want to buy your account or do they want you to perform some activity for an incentive? Possible to share some of those emails?

Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones.

On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.

[1] https://www.pentagram.com

Even a cursory search will find you literature from respected economists on this subject. There may be debate on how much wealth transfer or the actual impact of it, but there's wide consensus on the fact that there was. Comparing these ideas with flat-earthism is quite extremist, I'm curious if you've reached this conclusion on your own or have been led to it by some sources?

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-colonialism

[2] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/r...

[3] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-drain-of-wealth/

[4] https://wid.world/document/unequal-exchange-and-north-south-...

[5] https://ideas.repec.org/p/gnv/wpaper/unige144406.html

The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.

How do you know they are spam? I use disposable emails for registration wherever I can, and if there's too much friction I'll just drop it.

What is their source that the non-fiction book market is collapsing? Their entire premise seems to come down to the fact that non-fiction in 2025 took a smaller share of the top 25 best-selling, hardcover books compared to 2015. It's baffling enough to draw any conclusions from the top 25 of anything, but then to narrow down to hardcover disregards any confounding effects of preferences in format. On top of that they seem to be strangely unaware of this whole phenomenon called ebooks that has been taking the market over by storm.

Besides, non-fiction isn't analogous to fiction, it's not a useful category even. The subset of people who may read biographies may be very different from those who may read popular science or those who read self-help. There is no common denominator encompassing all of these other than the fact that it is a written medium. Fiction is different this way that it is a creative expression often read for the sake of reading and the point is not so much to reach the end. What would be more useful to see is the trend of specific categories of non-fiction over time and which ones are growing and which ones are not.

Perhaps in some ironic way, this article demonstrates why interest in non-fiction may be declining. When you take a singular, weak data point and stretch it over 5 pages saying the same thing, to create a complete non-issue over something that concludes nothing of significance by the end, you have to wonder if one would want to read more of such spiel.

If you follow the way the private jet thing is done, it is structured as a gift to the government and not the president. It is perfectly legal and you won't be able to find any "proof" of corruption over it. This is how most corruption is done, in an underhanded manner, but everything by the book, with enough plausible deniability.

In many cases corruption is only known to the perpetrator, because it is a matter of intent. One can always proffer a different reason for what they are doing than what they actually intended and when those reasons later turn out to be false, you may never really know whether they acted in good faith in the first place.

So corruption largely comes down to perception end of the day. It is ultimately a matter of trust and when that trust is eroded, the perception of corruption grows. There's no smoke without fire. When we see smoke in a building, we do not go searching for proof of fire, we just gtfo because the risk is too much. We should do the same when we see red flags in people in powerful positions.

No, see the entire thread. They claim article author's salary is paid by some Coefficient Giving organisation.

Pleasantly surprised to see dpreview still running, I thought they had shut down. It was a fantastic site back in the day. Not sure how it fares these days.

Well, the question primarily seemed to contest the scope of corruption, so I responded in view to that.

The big banks were one of the top donors to Obama's 2008 campaign. The fact that none of the banks were prosecuted or even held accountable for the crisis raises big questions how much the campaign funding influenced the way the bailout was structured. It also doesn't help Obama that he was famous for going after private funding after backtracking on his pledge not to do so.

Bush's story is similar but with energy companies the most famous being Halliburton who funded his election campaign and turned out to be the biggest beneficiaries to profit from the Iraq war. It probably wouldn't have upset people as much had it not been that the Bush family had close ties to this company and where Dick Cheney also happened to be the CEO. It was a big scandal at that time you can go read back on, but as is with many of these scandals everything seems to be forgotten or forgiven with time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with Trump 20 years from now.

Aren't Guardian's journalists full time employees? Why is their salary being paid by an outside entity?

Most of the big ones. The government in fact was issued equity in these banks that they later sold to recover the funds. So it was very much necessary to preserve shareholder value.

This arrangement probably wouldn't have upset people so much were the people responsible for the crisis held accountable. Worse still, they paid themselves huge bonuses as soon as they got bailed out from the bailout money itself! All this made people question the real intention behind the bailout. Corruption is often effected indirectly, so as to give the perpetrator plausible deniability.

Not directly, but indirectly by declining any punitive actions. Ideally the banks earnings should've been used up towards the bail out punishing shareholders in the spirit of the free market. But if I remember at that time, execs paid themselves large bonuses immediately following the bail out.

Corruption is not limited to financial profit. There are many ways to engage in acts of self interest like grant personal agenda, favours to friends/donors, quid-pro-quo etc.

Do you have a source that says it was an analytical error? Everything I've read over the years suggested they knew there were no WMDs, yet went with the narrative. Here's one post that cites a CIA report that shows the administration knew there were no WMDs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xmd8ut/why_d...

What about the whole WMD debacle? Isn't it widely considered to be an act of corruption?

And bailing out bank shareholders during the '08 financial crisis.

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!"

Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.