HN user
The makeup of the numbers is shifting radically.
20 years ago, ~all Facebook users were organic real life social networks chatting with each other online.
It's not gone yet, but for many years, that "organic social network" usage segment has been declining.
The commercially motivated "social media influencer marketing" segment has been growing faster than the "organic" segment has been declining.
Has it occurred to you that _all_ model providers are actively trying to shape their models' replies to fit their preferred political narratives?
The case of Sweden entirely falsifies the theory that "it would've been much worse without government action."
No government action whatsoever was taken in Sweden. None. Death rates were no better or worse than adjacent countries that intervened extensively.
Ergo, government intervention was irrelevant one way or another.
ICE agents arrest _people who committed crimes_ at green card interviews (including "entering the country illegally," which is a crime.)
As I said, the United States is very welcoming to foreigners who are willing to follow the laws.
Yes. The United States.
Despite the whirlwind of media to the contrary, the US is very welcoming to foreigners who follow the laws (that is, don't enter illegally) and make an effort to integrate by learning the language and customs.
Much more than any other country on Earth.
He's coldly rational:
The investors gave him $5 million. Large commitment, large risk.
Each customer gives him 15k per unit. Even a rare large customer who buys 100 ovens gives him 150k. Small commitment, small risk.
If he breaks his promise to the investors, he can't raise more money easily. It will be very hard to find another $5 million.
If he breaks his promise to the customers with a garbage product, he can more easily find a replacement customer for the much smaller risk.
Yes. 99% of things just worked, zero modifications.
The few cases where something was not directly translatable was <10 minutes with a coding agent to make some minor config changes, and then it just worked.
I generally agree, but it's a bit overstated to say "nobody talks about Oracle now" -- they made a profit of about $17 billion dollars in 2025.
More specifically, 0 dB is the loudest sound the audio system is rated to produce without distortion. It's common to be able to actually drive systems harder than their specified engineering limits, which is why meters have a short positive dB section marked in red.
Over 99% of students who attempt your "mostly quiet" strategy are managed entirely out of academia long before tenure.
You won the lottery, which is great for you, but it's not a strategy to promote to others as life advice.
The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.
Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.
Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.
You are glossing over the fact that Japan severely punishes crime, and acquittals are almost unheard of.
Sure, but those are cherrypicked cases where a technology became obsolete. There are many counterexamples of decades-old technologies that are still actively chosen for greenfield work today, in 2026.
SQL was first released in 1973. More new SQL is being written today than ever.
C++ (1985) is the de facto standard implementation language for web browsers, JavaScript engines, networking stacks, telecommunications, video games, high speed trading, CAD/CAM, video rendering and editing, audio processing, filesystems, databases, hardware drivers, automotive, aerospace, and robotics, among others.
Is Rust making inroads? Sure, and it's a tiny fraction of C++ still. It's a long ways from being the standard.
Likewise, Python is often cited as the "AI language," but that's on the surface -- CUDA, tensor libraries, inference languages, GPU kernels, compiler stacks, and so on are usually C++.
Then there's C -- introduced in 1972. Still widely used for greenfield in kernels, device drivers, embedded systems and microcontrollers, filesystems, firmware, network stacks, cryptography, databases, compilers.
LaTeX, MATLAB, Erlang, Verilog, PostScript, Lisp (including Scheme and Clojure), shell scripting (and the UNIX paradigm itself)... the list of old tech that still sees new projects in 2026 goes on.
Isn't your whole post "just a complaint" too?
Yes, in the same sense that it is still technically possible to ride a horse to work instead of using a car.
You can code in assembly instead of using a compiler, too.
You used a lot of fancy words to say "fashions in interior design change over time," making much of little in the process.
Datacenters are focused on "never letting the equipment go down for any reason."
If they can do that efficiently, that's great.
If they have to choose between efficiency and outage risk, they always drop efficiency. That's why they use exclusively online UPS.
Not so. In fact, farming is a way of life for almost nobody in developed countries.[1]
Ursa shows us that there is indeed a market for "simple and reliable" equipment -- but it's not cheap or affordable. There is zero market for "affordable" equipment, because almost nobody does small scale farming anymore
Small farms became economically and socially irrelevant almost a century ago in developed countries. Petroleum based fertilizer and industrial machinery drove the marginal cost of food to zero, and it is now only profitable to farm at very large industrial scale.
The main social outcome there was that starvation and malnutrition became vanishingly rare in these countries.
(In fact, _obesity_ is now, for the first time in human history, a widespread problem for the poorest in these societies.)
Society chose "nobody starving" as a better outcome than preserving romantic small farms for the sake of tradition.
[1] Less than 1% of the US population works in agriculture today (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12961) as compared to ~30% in the early 20th century.
No need for the personal attacks.
Let's keep it quantitative rather than relying upon personal anecdotes: Apple does not break out unit sales for the Watch (which in itself is telling.)
According to third party analyst estimates which are readily obtainable from search engines, the Apple Watch has shipped just over 100 million units worldwide since inception. Upgrade cycles are weak to nonexistent. Growth flatlined years ago -- even declining slightly in recent years. After the initial burst of interest from early adopters -- that is, tech nerds plus a few outliers here and there among normies -- demand fizzled.
The iPhone has shipped 3 billion units. It is in an entirely different category. While demand has roughly plateaued, there is a strong upgrade / replacement cycle. Annual iPhone sales are in the ~250M range -- far more iPhones are sold every year than all Apple Watches that have ever been sold in history.
The Apple Watch is firmly in the "niche product" category. It's not a "gamechanger for everyday life for normal people," notwithstanding the existence of a few normie outliers here and there.
The Apple Watch is a niche product for a few tech nerds (at least outside of Silicon Valley tech circles), not an ubiquitous feature of everyday life for normal people the way the PC, the iPod, and the iPhone are.
Vision Pro was a science experiment that few people have even heard of.
Apple Silicon is a perfect example of a purely internal-facing logistics optimization: sure, it's fine in terms of saving money and boosting performance. 99% of end users do not know or care whether they have Apple Silicon or Intel chips.
Cook has done more or less the opposite of what Jobs did.
Jobs was all about bold innovation, hugely risky bets on gamechanging products.
Cook is a timid logistics optimizer, and he's good at that. We reliably get an iPhone with slightly more RAM, slightly faster CPU on schedule every year. No category changing products.
Innovation has stopped -- after Jobs, there is only minor incremental improvement
No, that was never the old pattern. Nationwide injunctions were unheard of until very recently -- as in, within the past 10-20 years.
Nationwide injunctions are a very recent legal innovation -- as in, extremely rare until the 2000s, and uncommon until the 2010s.
They were not how this situation was handled for nearly all of the existence of the United States.