>2) the USB storage provided by network card can still contain malware,
That seems unlikely given that "malware" is signed by Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42680282
I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously.
The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt.
Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it would appear that owning something that could physically do what you want it to is only half the battle for numerous reasons, and in this case it would have been my government demanding extra money to 'unlock' this functionality.
American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?"
The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath. Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast."
David Lynch
I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.
If your website doesn't give me enough information to:
1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.
2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.
Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.
I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.
I've ironically lost more money the more closely I've paid attention to my investments because I was naively confident in the market's ability (or as I've come to suspect, willingness) to react to evidence of fraud.
The amount of deceit put out into the world and gobbled up, on purpose, in business is obscene and seriously depressing. The magnitude of damage to psyches and thus economies that anyone acting in a fraudulent manner in finance creates is far-reaching and immeasurable. Punishment for financial crimes should be calculated based on the average lifetime earnings of a citizen -- if your victims are folks earning at or below the average wage, and you've scammed 100 lifetimes worth of average earnings, it's as if you've murdered 100 people.
Hindenburg's reports were a true pleasure to read, and their track record proves their positive contribution to society. Many self-important people online are quick to pounce on short sellers as being evil, and that will forever be a serious red flag to me thanks in no small part to Nate Anderson and the folks at Hindenburg Research.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
Everything else aside, this is an absolutely fantastic development and I really hope the ceasefire holds and all hostages are released.
I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".
And never mind that Israel still has a fundamentalist, authoritarian government that is actively at work undermining democratic structures and civil rights even inside the state - that too with no word of objection from its allies.
We'll see where all of that goes.
I also found Trump's signalling in the whole issue odd. His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable, but then he goes forward and quotes Jeffrey Sachs and ostensibly pressures Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire.
Is this just his usual "appear unpredictable by all means" spiel or does he have a strategy there?
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
> Additionally, there's plenty of "Upgrade to Pro" buttons sprinkled about. It's the freemium model at work.
I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts. Note that, Matthew Prince, the CEO, had outlined a few reasons why they have such a generous free tier on an Stack Exchange answer[1]. I think the biggest reason is this:
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at an incredible scale. I would actually be very interested in understanding how this vision came to be. Hope Matthew writes that book someday.
[1]: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685.
"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels"
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.
OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
First of all – the essay is phenomenal and his book is available online for free – https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36...
> “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.
This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.
people could not be more clear that their preference is for reliable and easy-to-use centralized services maintained by professionals, and not decentralized systems that require a great deal of user expertise
I don't think having a sales person in charge was the problem.
The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue.
The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.
Please stop putting salespeople in charge of highly technical product companies like Sonos. I'm so glad that Tom Conrad is an engineer by training. I hope he can turn this mess around.
The key technical change that broke Sonos was abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS, while also shifting from direct device communication to a cloud-based API approach. This new architecture made all network traffic encrypted and routed through Sonos cloud servers (even for local operations), adding significant overhead and latency, especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power. They also switched from native platform-specific UX frameworks to a JavaScript-based interface while moving music service interactions through their cloud instead of direct SMAPI calls, resulting in slower performance and reduced functionality.
For a more extended discussion, see this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Pennell, a principal engineer at Microsoft with a deep technical understanding of Sonos systems. He created one of the most successful third-party Sonos apps for Windows Phone and worked directly with Sonos on their official Windows Phone 8 app.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-techn...
The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.
As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
The antiwoke crusaders are just as intent on moralizing and language policing as the worst of their opponents, and in places like Florida they're actively implementing limitations on speech and academic inquiry. To the extent that Graham and his fellow travelers in tech believe in freedom of expression, they've picked dangerous allies.
> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles.
To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine that a swastika is offensive (in the west) by its shape alone.
In this case, the term "colored people" gained racist connotations from its history of being used for discrimination and segregation - and avoiding it for that reason is the primary principle at play. There's also the secondary/less universal principle of preferring "person-first language".
LBAL and Balatro being banned or 18+ age-gated for having gambling "vibes" despite not actually simulating gambling, while the stores are full of gacha games which are designed to bleed players dry through real-money gambling mechanics is a ridiculous state of affairs. The latter makes Google and Apple insane amounts of money though so of course they're not going to do anything about them unless their hand is forced.
There are a ton of products on the market that are vastly more dangerous than computers: guns, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, chainsaws, table saws, cigarettes, alcohol, junk food. Yes, consumers do sometimes harm themselves by using these products. That's the price of freedom. I think it's bizarre that we treat computers as the most dangerous products in the world that for some reason demand paternalism, when none of these other products are locked down by the vendor.
The reason that computers are locked down by the vendors is not that computers are somehow more dangerous than other things we buy. The reason is simply that it's technically possible to lock down computers, and vendors have found that it's massively, MASSIVELY profitable to do so. It's all about protecting their profits, not protecting us. We know that the crApp Store is full of scams that steal literally millions of dollars from consumers, and we know that the computer vendors violate our privacy by phoning home with "analytics" covering everything we do on the devices. This is not intended for our benefit but rather for theirs.
Nah, we better abandon this kind of retroactive policing of language instead from people with nothing better to do.
Nobody who uses the term "cargo cult" in a technical settings does it out of spite or even refers to specific nations or peoples. Just refers to the core takeaway of a practice which might as we be all lore.
Care about politics and colonialism and injustice and what have you? There are 1000000 causes you could devote your time and make an active difference to people actually suffering this very moment, rather than language policing tech terms.
This advice to quit social media is always a hit on HN. When I was 10 years younger I read the same thing on HN, was thoroughly convinced and quit social media. I even followed the advice of trying to stay in touch by email. Sure.
Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
Nope, we’re not doing this in 2025. Cargo cult succinctly expresses an important concept. We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
This isn’t unexpected; I’ve been deactivated on Slack since very early in this dispute, and later banned from the issue tracker as well. I’ve been contributing for 20 years to the project, am a committer, and built several large parts of WordPress including the REST API.
Matt is banning anyone who speaks out at all, even when they agree with points he’s made. A large group of contributors felt they had to make an anonymous statement from fear of the same retribution I suffered: https://www.therepository.email/core-contributors-voice-conc...
(I am a less active direct contributor these days, so I’m still able to contribute even while blocked - but many people’s livelihoods depend on it, as sponsored contributors.)
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
It really depends on your personal psychology. After I burnt out in a demanding role that I adopted as a big part of my identity, I joined a new company vowing to not take work as seriously (I remember telling myself, "if excess effort isn't rewarded, the optimal strategy is to maximize compensation, minimize necessary effort, and eliminate excess effort").
After a few months of recovery and ruminating on why I still felt so bad (plus therapy), I learned a few things about myself:
1. I feel like garbage when I'm half-assing something at work or not giving my all -- especially when the people around me are putting in the work.
2. When I am giving my all and I feel like I'm not being recognized, I begin to lose motivation and burn out. Simple tasks become very laborious. This is a gradual, months-long process that is difficult to recognize is happening.
3. When I start to burn out, I am forced by my mind and body to half-ass things, which makes me more demotivated, which exacerbates the burnout.
Putting these insights into action, I've so far been able to keep burnout at bay by finding roles where I can give work my all, receive recognition, and be surrounded by others who are putting in similar effort. This doesn't mean blindly trusting the company or destroying my work-life balance -- I believe that "recognition for hard work" includes proactively protecting hard workers from their workaholic tendencies and giving them the flexibility to take breaks. I'm lucky to work with really great people where I frequently pass along responsibilities or take work from others to avoid over-stressing any one person and enable things like multi-week vacations. I have no idea how I will change my approach if I lose this workplace dynamic or pick up more forcing functions on my workday (e.g. having kids) in the future, but it's working pretty well for me right now.
All of this is to say: for me, the low-trust "do the bare minimum to stay employed" approach didn't actually help me get out of burnout into fulfillment -- What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of. People are wired differently, so I want to caution against a one-size-fits-all approach.
I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now!
The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt.
In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings.
In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc.
Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.