Recent submissions

Comment · 9 days ago
Well, Apple is still trying to hang on to the iPhone Air, and according to various reports it has sold only about half the total units that the mini sold. And Air sales have cratered to virtually zero.

Folding phones will likely be an even smaller market.

I don't think the problem is that there isn't a dedicated percentage of people who would buy smaller phones like the mini, or that the sales couldn't be profitable. The problem is that the screen size to battery volume ratio is or least was particularly bad for the mini. (The Air has this problem too.) I'd love to see them try again with modern hardware. I wouldn't use one personally, but know many people who would in a flash.

Comment · 20 days ago
Venezuelan beaver cheese?
Comment · 3 months ago
I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.

If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
Yep, my mom (still alive) remembers seeing many interviews with Civil War vets when she was a kid in the 40's.
Comment · 6 months ago
Is there really that much liquidity in these bets? Polymarket is just a broker right? So people are putting up tens of millions cumulatively on the other side of these random bets?
Comment · 7 months ago
Why victim blame him for removing the phone number? He had a logical reason for doing so, and with Google supporting many forms of authentication it's perfectly reasonable to think that removing one wouldn't jeopardize the other methods.
Comment · 9 months ago
Does the 30% cut only apply to patrons who subscribe within the app? I’m assuming yes, but just checking since I haven’t seen confirmation of this.
Comment · 1 year ago
I don’t think any of these are “obvious” lies. Maybe meta offered someone a $75M package and it got reported as $100M. So they can say with a straight face that the reporting is “false”, yet they never countered with any details.

You’re ignoring my point about the legitimate reason people might be getting offers in this stratosphere. No one has debunked or refuted the general reporting, at least not that I’ve seen. If you have a source, show it please.

Comment · 1 year ago
It’s debatable that it was debunked. There was squirrelly wording about some specific claims. One person was reported to have been offered a package worth a billion dollars, which even if exaggerated was probably not exaggerated by 10x. The numbers line up when you consider that AI startup founders and early employees stand to potentially make well into 9 figures if not higher, and Meta is trying to cut them off at the pass. Obviously these kinds of offers, whatever they really look like, include significant conditions and performance requirements.
Comment · 1 year ago
“From Eternity To Here” by Sean Carroll has some nice discussions of it. He can be a bit much at times and could stand to have better editing (the book is 25% too long), but he does have some of the most approachable modern writing on physics out there. Lots of videos on YouTube as well.
Comment · 1 year ago
Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, LLMs can generate some really nice introductory summaries of topics. But, so far at least, they can’t even hold a candle to brilliantly written books and long form articles. Consider the classic book Cosmos. There is more insight into the universe in any few pages of that book than could be gathered by reading even a thousand ChatGPT results.
Comment · 1 year ago
Minor quibble with the linked complaint: the GPL doesn’t require you to post source code, it just requires that you have to provide it when asked, and only to people using your software. (But you’re not allowed to restrict anything they do, like repost it.) Just follow the whole Redhat / CentOS drama for exhibit A in this behavior.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yay, someone posted it before I had to. This skit is 25 years old now!
Comment · 2 years ago
Fine tuning is a pretty broad concept and is mostly orthogonal to religious beliefs.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton