mancerayder

I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.

Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?

That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.

Some have long splash screens and nag screens to punish those not on Wifi. TCL I believe was doing this, and I've read scattered reports of that behavior. Do research beforehand just in case.

After some research I went with a Sony Bravia. The screen is ridiculously reflective which is unusable next to any window at certain angles, and it wasn't the cheapest, but after some research since it uses that Google TV crap and has no splash screens, I could keep WiFi off on it and use my Apple TV.

TCL and now LG are to be fully avoided, Samsung isn't to be trusted (a future update if you allow it can lead to what happened here with LG). Samsung probably has the best hardware, but too bad.

If we don't vote with our wallets the enshittification of everything tech will march over and trample us that much faster.

Was Global Entry in the US a tactic to trick us into giving up our biometric data for speedy re-entry? I can say it's now barely faster than waiting behind the line for the stamper officials in their booths.

And then there is the question of how much net worth of these EU elites is tied to U.S. stock market wealth, itself hugely big tech. We know they are EU elites because there is a culture of going to the best schools where you learn culture and start in big business circles right away like your parents did. These aren't freedom-fighters looking for independence. I remember fondly Gerhard Shroeder, the leader of the SPD, later becoming a Putin ally and making millions sitting on boards of Russian energy companies. Is it any wonder that the country which moved away from nuclear and is a big environmentalist haven is one of the most dependent on Russian gas?

My fear is with these types of issues of sovereignty (or corruption), the reaction is often right-wing or left-wing populism. The type of thing that got Trump there in the first place.

One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.

The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.

That sounds familiar to me.

Ketamine with psychotherapy has become mainstream and legal I think in a wider context, and there are different ways they do it - one is to give that heroic dose under supervision with a drip which can be a controlled administration.

Psychedelic therapy with mdma or mushrooms is only legal in very few places. Personally I find mdma is more promising for what you (we) experienced there. There's a sort of ancient wiring due to childhood threats. MDMA has been proven to help soldiers with PTSD, which I think is a big adjacent to this (the vigilance being the common facor)?

Mushrooms are not quite the same, but give you more intensity control (and are much shorter duration). And legally there is ketamine therapy.

I'm not sure if it'll completely remove the cortisol issues I have. This feels biological, maybe due to early traumas. Are psychedelics supposed to fix these? I thought it was more for depression than always-on vigilance.

Removing all real dangerous stressors (like work and house woes) would really help. I tend to be a lot more tolerant of less sleep while on vacation. That said, I spend a lot of money and time finding quieter hotel rooms or airbnbs.

The only point I was trying to make is, "it's more complicated than <the parent comment I was replying to>." The household affordability problem is extremely complicated. In some cases it's indeed NIMBYism - some law that limits to single-family housing, or complicated HOA rules, etc. Local board approvals required.

Sometimes it's just plain-old high-demand. Who doesn't want to live in a big fancy metropolis as a 25 yr-old with money? More people move in than it's physically possible to build (we're not China).

Sometimes it's regulations - you need to pay construction workers a min wage of $50/hr if you build a unit more than 99, or no tax breaks for you. Sometimes land is expensive. But so is the architect, the materials, the permits. Then you have environmental regulations, sometimes that make sense, some that are too difficult. Then you have regulations to protect the consumer so the place doesn't burn up or fall on our heads, sometimes that make sense, some that are too difficult.

You have interest rates that are high.

We have the private equity investors buying up bulk new construction.

We have wage growth that didn't match the growth of housing costs.

Hopefully I've made my case that housing affordability has many factors.

I'll need to save this message so I can cut and paste it elsewhere because about once a month on HN someone posts that the problem with housing affordability is not enough building and NIMBYism, which is only one of the factors here.

Sure, if it's an option for you. I have an issue when it's expected of everyone.

The culture leaned heavily toward 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week

Why stay there even ONE week, unless you were very senior?

California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.

Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc

So it's luxury only in NYC

None of this is NIMBYism.

Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise

Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc

Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.

What's missing is how much ability you have to sleep, rather than some sort of sometimes controllable factor like schedule. In my case, my brain wakes me up with anxiety one hour or more before the alarm rings (I never check time, I'm guessing). My room is always cold and relatively dark - not photo development dark, but not far.

The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.

I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.

Then he's beating those who held right before crash number 1, right?

The S&P is through the roof because of the AI boom - it's bound to crash if the big players do. What's a better index? It's hard to imagine a world in which these broad indexes don't crash too. It's the sector indexes I'd love to understand better from a cyclical point of view, so I can buy something that won't also crash.

Right. Your suggestion seemed to be that's the path we should go down - the restaurant industry, which has a very high failure rate. Or do we become master electricians?

This isn't the 1950s - spending is down everywhere, costs are up, interests rates are high.

Are the QA team bearing the brunt of the unexpected issues, bugs, performance etc or is it business-as-usual?

I like it but how much context does it need for a complex program? If you're giving instructions and using its code, I imagine context is being passed back up in an exponential way. If not, and you give it a very thin context every time, how do you manage to prompt it enough?

The parks are a lot more beautiful in Paris and London than in the U.S. cities like New York or Philadelphia or whatever.

On the East Coast at least, parks are for loud people to play music, they're full of litter, dogs running around, and a general American distaste for peace and beauty and quiet contemplation. We Americans love function, profit and socializing more than we value beauty.

We Americans loathe quiet, contemplating, reading, and taking things in. It's a waste of time that could be spent doing something productive.

Good afternoon nunez! How can we help you today. You can say things like

"Question about Order"

"Talk to Salesperson"

"Billing inquiry"

...

I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch yet. Good afternoon Nunez...

Starting a business, but that requires financial independence, right?

If not, what do you do in your 40's with no healthcare? Or the state marketplace healthcare that is basically 'catrastrophe only', with no out of network support, and still costs over 800 a month?

Do you rent, or do you own, and if you own, how about the property taxes.

Starting a business in 2026 is for the Made Men of tech, who've sold monstrous share amounts for millions, and can post messages on Hackernews with advice on how to escape the rat race.

Gmail is a good example of being a Very Good Company, waiting a few years when everyone is hooked on the products the company made, and then turning in the one we know today where Do No Evil was long scrubbed as a motto.

You lost us after "Canada." I have zero doubt things like furniture and clothing are going to be superior if made in Canada than the U.S. or China. I checked your link and there are no stores in the U.S. (or their zip code search doesn't work).

No one ever cared, at least in the U.S. about 'food rent healthcare transport'. In the U.S. we don't combine those ideas together. Unless you're a student or a politician, almost no one talks like that.

You and I know it's connected in a sense.

But is it meaningfully connected? It plays into a story about corporate hegemony, money influencing politicians through lobbying, the power of health care conglomerates and large corporations.

But it doesn't have any teeth to the average person, who's talking about inflation, or they're talking about gas, or they're talking about taxes, or they're talking about health care bills. I never hear a unified narrative. Should I be? Is it helpful? Socialist narratives have a bad reputation, and our current socialist politicians talk a LOT about what happens overseas, or immigration, or matters of race and gender. I am talking about the U.S. socialists, here.

How much is private equity to blame? At first I was tired of the bogeyman, but it's starting to show patterns. Working in tech, I've seen from colleagues the shannanigans played - they come in the form of taking out debt of one company, dooming it, to fund something else, they also come in the form of weird chargeback commitments with big vendors we all know - IBM, Google, especially Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

Here's a weird and mild anecdote. I have enjoyed using a combo duvet cover and covertlet, it works all year around, you can put the winter comforter in it, or it's heavy enough to use by itself. Used these for years, ordered from Amazon and BB&B. I spent a lot of time recently looking at the same thing. It was called Vue by Ellery Lifestyles. Eventually Google explained what happened - private equity gutted it in a classic tale of how private equity squeezes and destroys companies. Will spare you the boring but the gist:

(company is from 2010 or so)

"In 2017, Ellery Homestyles (the actual manufacturer of Vue) began aggressively restructuring and acquiring other bedding assets (like Extreme Linen) to scale up for massive digital and omnichannel retail.During this corporate scale-up, older multi-piece specialty sets like the 2-in-1 Barcelona coverlet were phased out to make room for high-volume, mass-market designs.Eventually, Ellery Homestyles' brands were absorbed into even larger manufacturing parents, like home textiles giant Keeco"

<.. headwinds >

"The final blow to the brand's original identity came when Keeco’s private equity strategies ran into severe financial headwinds. Keeco aggressively loaded up on debt to merge with a bankrupt competitor, Hollander Sleep Products, in 2022. When major customer Bed Bath & Beyond went under, Keeco was left holding massive debt.To handle this, their private equity backer, Centre Lane Partners, executed a classic PE maneuver in early 2025: a corporate carve-out.They split the company in two. They rebranded the core utility bedding business as Live Comfortably and threw the struggling fashion bedding/window division into a separate sister company called Simply Interior Homes.

By June 2026, the newly formed fashion division filed for bankruptcy, with court filings explicitly stating that the private equity carve-out left the fashion business severely underfunded and hollowed out. Private equity essentially treated the brand exactly how the playbook dictates: it funded its initial growth, rolled it into a massive $1 billion corporate conglomerate to eliminate manufacturing complexity, and finally carved the company apart when debt mounted. The high-end, 100% cotton Vue Barcelona set was a casualty of a system designed to favor mass-production efficiency over specialty textile design."

This was a fun article to read. Yes Windows is more surveillance software than Android or Apple are - the article makes that case well at the end when talking about how tracking is more explicit and can be turned off on those.

But I'm struck with how dumb, or just lacking in paranoia, this seemingly successful and rich hacker is. First of all he's using Windows. Excuse me? Second he used that device to log into personal stuff like Snapchat and Facebook. And he posted a picture of himself at a hotel that they tracked.

I'm no hacker, but if I were, I'd treat devices as disposable surgical gloves, and I wouldn't touch Windows.

Be careful of Paypal! Go info your subscriptions section and check it out - there's a decade of past ones, including companies in the grave. Some aren't, like Evernote, which renewed automatically for a year on an old email I don't have access to.

In English (is it worse in American English?) we frequently convert gerunds into simpler forms of the word. The spending turns into the spend. Related,the request turns into the ask (although this example turns out to have a strong anglo saxon linguistic bias).

The immigration issue is very much tied to race, for the DSA and much of the Progressive movement. Let us just say it is not Ukrainian immigrants they're losing sleep over protecting.

Everyone in his entourage was talking about Israel as one of their top activist concerns, including his wife, and the new folks he just helped get elected. And he made notable 'statements' by avoiding certain events and other things.

That's entirely besides the point - the folks who voted for him voted for him in part because of his Israel stance. I'm sure you know he's in the DSA, and the DSA https://www.dsausa.org/statements/until-palestinian-liberati....

I hope with an open mind you are no longer 'seriously baffled.'