yojo

Two more:

- It has gotten easier to file patents, so more are filed.

- Companies increasingly use patents like weapons/deterrents, so there’s more incentive to file an idea you weren’t planning to use to build your war chest.

I suspect regulatory capture is a big part of the explanation though.

I just want a panel. I’m already doing what the article suggests (running a Hisense offline with a media box), but my TV still crashes a few times a month and needs to be power-cycled/takes about a minute to reboot.

There’s just no reason for this. You have one job: Take my signal and display it. Anything else is just another place for things to go wrong.

Netflix was also still in the “grow users at all cost” phase. They have since moved to “grow revenue at all costs.”

Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars. Until they inevitably start turning the screws.

I got my father-in-law to try AirPods Pro 2 last year. He’s needed hearing aids for about a decade, but wouldn’t get them, I think for vanity reasons. I’m at the in-laws for thanksgiving and he’s wearing the AirPods now.

From the other side, it’s night and day. We can have conversations. He can hear my kids. The TV volume is set to reasonable levels.

Sample size of one, but it’s been a tremendous improvement. A lot of places are closing out the second gens right now for $140. I’d give it a go. It’s a pretty low price of entry for something that could literally be life changing.

Having the whole desktop gradually change focal distance over ~an hour seems like it’d probably do the trick in a less distracting way.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."[0]

0: https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?si=cIcawm3U5-55nI2D&t=252

I agree with that criticism, and I'd encourage the dev to iterate on non-micro-transaction monetization schemes. The part I disagree with is that a profit motive is antithetical to helping kids.

It'd be nice if we had robust, no-strings attached funding streams to make this kind of content, but we don't, so if we want it to exist, consumers need to pay for it.

I was responding to the claim that making money is in tension with helping kids learn.

I think it’s fair to claim that a large enterprise will eventually crank the money dial to maximum extraction. But a solo dev is free to follow their conscience and make money in a responsible way.

I don’t like the “pay per hint” model as currently implemented, but I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think it all the way through.

A sustainable business has the capacity to help a lot more kids than an unfinished open source project that never gets released on iOS because no one wants to pay the developer fee.

This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.

The HN crowd is touchy on some topics. Don’t take it too personally - good on you for building something cool and shipping it.

FWIW my favorite non-predatory pattern is a level-limited free version with a single “unlock full game” IAP. That way users don’t have to lose their progress switching to paid.

My time is still worth more slinging bits. But if that well runs dry, I’d consider it.

I’ve heard similar prices for Europe and elsewhere in the world. The US pricing seems to be uniquely out of step with everywhere else.

The equipment is actually a lot cheaper if you’re a pro - the DIY pre-charged line-set adds about $500 over an equivalent unit. Pulling a vacuum and adding coolant is not hard, just requires specialized tools that still aren’t that expensive.

I mentioned warranty and insurance.

You don’t need to “schedule workers” if you are owner operating. Maybe you want a (non-skilled) helper to speed up the install, but you absolutely could install solo. That said, you will need a licensed electrician to run the circuit.

In my metro, hvac contractors can get ten-packs of permits for mini-split installs, and at most one out of ten is inspected. It’s a rubber stamp if you’re a pro, and the individual permit is maybe $50.

And that $5k I mentioned is the low bid, which you’ll only see if you know how to find contractors who aren’t private equity fronts. These guys are not advertising, but they stay busy by having the best price. There are shops that will happily charge you double for the same work.

I never said it’s a get rich quick scheme. It is just highly compensated for owners without requiring the level of expertise of something like a plumber or electrician. I’m curious what is happening in the market to support these margins.

It’s bonkers. I bought a pre-charged ductless mini split to DIY. Took my dad and I about four hours to do the install. So call it 8 hours of semi-skilled labor.

The unit was $1350, I added a line set cover, pad and feet for another $200, and needed about $200 in electrical equipment - it was a long wire run and code requires installing a disconnect box. The only special tool was a hole saw bit for running the coolant lines.

So maybe $1850 all-in, plus 8 hours labor. I’m sure a pro could do it in half the time. But the low end for a pro install is $5k.

I get that they have insurance and warranty or whatever, but that’s a damn juicy margin.

I’ve also been looking at setting up a dumb phone for my kids, but haven’t thought to go the rPi Twilio route.

There’s an existing product that seems to have some mindshare in the space: https://tincan.kids/

Basically $100 for the phone, plus $10/mo to call arbitrary numbers. My main concern here is the company goes belly-up and you’re left with a phone-shaped brick.

Another option I considered was a cheap unlimited SIM coupled with a GSM “desk phone” e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Generic-Wireless-Telephone-Cordless-8...

The problem here is there’s no way to filter inbound calls. The last thing I want is spammers ringing the house phone in the middle of the night.

I don't want to take the time writing up a cogent response to an article someone didn't bother taking the time to write. With this particular article, there were a couple of points I wanted to respond to, before I realized there was no human mind behind them.

I've always liked the HN community because it facilitates an intelligent exchange of ideas. I've learned a lot trawling the comments on this site. I don't want to see the energy of human discourse being sucked up and wasted on the output of ChatGPT. Aggressively flagging this stuff is a sort of immune response for the community.

Yeah, I bounced hard off the article at #5. My AI detector was slow warming up but kicked on at:

"Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways."

Like, yes, those are all technologies, and I can imagine an app + service backend that might use all of them, but the "links" in the chain don't always make sense next to each other and I don't think a human would write this. Read literally, it implies someone deploying an electron app using Kubernetes for god knows why.

If you really wanted to communicate a client-server architecture, you'd list the API gateway as the link between the server-side stuff and the electron app (also you'd probably put electron upstream of chromium).

That was my first thought coming from SPA development. Like, is there even a meaningful translation between rendering logic written in a functional, declarative style to e.g. object-oriented imperative Java? How many LOCs of C would be required to model a simple DOM operation?

Yes, everything is Turing complete and a translation can exist, but how would you make any sense of it as a reader?

Every time someone says “but dark fiber”, someone else has to point out that graphics cards are not infrastructure and depreciate at a much, much higher rate. I guess it’s my turn.

Fiber will remain a valuable asset until/unless some moron snaps it with a backhoe. And it costs almost nothing to operate.

Your data center full of H100s will wear out in 5 years. Any that don’t are still going to require substantial costs to run/may not be cost-competitive with whatever new higher performance card Nvidia releases next year.

Capex requirements might be on a different curve than model improvements.

E.g. you might need to accelerate spending to get sub-linear growth in model output.

If valuations depend on hitting the curves described in the article, you might see accelerating capex at precisely the time improvements are dropping off.

I don’t think frontier labs are going to be a trustworthy canary. If Anthropic says they’re reaching the limit and OpenAI holds the line that AGI is imminent, talent and funding will flee Anthropic for OpenAI. There’s a strong incentive to keep your mouth shut if things aren’t going well.

I’m realizing we might be talking past each other. By “scroll-blocker” I meant a visual design that hides the fact that there’s more content down the page. It’s not literally preventing scrolling.

Here’s a decent writeup on the problem and some design options: https://uxdesign.cc/dear-web-designer-let-s-stop-breaking-th...

I’m on mobile Safari, but it’s the same on Chrome on my laptop.

The scroll bar behavior is an OS-level setting. The default in MacOS is to not show scroll bars unless you’re actively scrolling.

If you’re using an input device that doesn’t support gestures, or you changed the setting, you’ll see them always.

Tell Claude to fix the scroll-blocker on the codeyam.com landing page.

This seems to be a bad practice LLMs have internalized; there should be some indication that there’s more content below the fold. Either a little bit of the next section peeking up, or a little down arrow control.

I vibe coded a marketing website and hit the same issue.

“Mesothelioma” had a $50+ cost-per-click for winning the ad auction.

Even when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting.

They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.

They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.

I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.

Now…? You get all spam above the fold.

The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.

I think there's a difference between silencing people, and having an algorithm that railroads people down a polarization hole.

My biggest problem with YouTube isn't what it does/doesn't allow on its platform, it's that it will happily feed you a psychotic worldview if it keeps you on the site. I've had several family members go full conspiracy nut-job after engaging heavily with YouTube content.

I don't know what the answer is. I think many people would rightly argue that removing misinformation from the recommendation engine is synonymous with banning it. FWIW I'd be happy if recommendation engines generally were banned for being a societal cancer, but I'm probably in the minority here.

Preach. Also, don't forget making local testing/CI take longer to run, which costs you both compute and developer context switching.

I've heard people rave about LLMs for writing tests, so I tried having Claude Code generate some tests for a bug I fixed against some autosave functionality - (every 200ms, the auto-saver should initiate a save if the last change was in the previous 200ms). Claude wrote five tests that each waited 200ms (!) adding a needless entire second to the run-time of my test suite.

I went in to fix it by mocking out time, and in the process realized that the feature was doing a time stamp comparisons when a simpler/non-error prone approach was to increment a logical clock for each change instead.

The tests I've seen Claude write vary from junior-level to flat-out-bad. Tests are often the first consumer of a new interface, and delegating them to an LLM means you don't experience the ergonomics of the thing you just wrote.

I think it’s the other end of the consumer web vs power user design spectrum.

Using an OS requires familiarity and cognitive effort. Tapping oversized buttons… less so.

There’s been a long trend (definitely as far back as the first iPhone release, maybe further) of every product release adding more white space, bigger elements, and overall reducing information density.

If your target is consumer web, the “don’t make me think” approach is probably still correct. But anyone who’s ever looked at a Bloomberg terminal knows there are still times when you designing for the lowest common denominator is the wrong play.

A company with a large suite of technical-ish products might be a place to experiment with alternative paradigms. That said, I poked at the site for a few minutes, then had to ask an LLM what PostHog actually does.

I can confirm that Google was using Perforce for version control extensively, at least through 2008. I think it was somehow customized, but I definitely have lingering muscle memory around “p4 sync” and “p4 submit”.

I was on an internal tools team doing distinctly unsexy LAMP-stack work, but all the documentation I ever saw talked about perforce/p4.

This is the terrifying part: doctors do this too! I have an MD friend that told me she uses ChatGPT to retrieve dosing info. I asked her to please, please not do that.