Some people speculate that the USA gained control of Oregon country in large part because Canadians/Brits trading in beaver furs had to send all their pelts back to the UK before they could go out to the rest of the world. America just sailed from Boston to the PNW, traded for pelts and went directly to, say, China. Much faster, and cheaper too.
What was stopping the British from taking their pelts directly across the Pacific? It can't have been American control of the region if this is the explanation for how America got control of the region.
Spain certainly wasn't exporting silver from the New World to Europe before shipping it on to China; they shipped it directly there.
That's a good question. The British were definitely engaging in a very, very lucrative trade in sea otter pelts from the NW Coast of British Columbia, trading direct to Macau, and the Boston Men/USA got in on that as well over time.
Plausibly some agency (Hudson Bay company?) had a monopoly on beaver trade and this did not apply to sea otter, or maybe the story isn't quite right or there were other economic reasons why beavers to Asia as a concept wasn't exploited.
I like the idea of a shorter character limit as it nudges users to a specific mode of interaction: short thoughts/updates and not long-winded soliloquies. It's signalling that interaction with this platform doesn't demand much of your time or attention. I don't know what the about page has to do with it, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
That said, I'm not a social media user besides HN I guess.
Honestly, I don't really care that much. The project looks like fun, and I wish you the best with it, but I don't really post on microblogging platforms myself.
I just wanted to give a bit of feedback as someone who reads them - and point out that on almost every twitter/bluesky submission to HN they are using ways to work around the 280/300 char limitations.
To play devils advocate - 500 also seems a bit arbitrary ;) If I were making a platform like this myself, I would go for a power of 2 that makes sense for storage/buffering. Maybe 1KiB including all meta, etc. You could comfortably fit a post the size of your about page, and all associated meta in that - even when serialised as JSON or something. I'd go from there and work backwards to come up with a size that has a real technical purpose.
I've managed to run Linux just about exclusively since probably just before I was a teen in the early 2000's. I think I bought Red Hat 8 or 9 or something like that at CompUSA on a whim and proceeded to call customer support to get help doing basic tasks on the desktop which they very kindly helped me with. Man I was feeling like a seriously 1337 h4x0r.
A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to block ads altogether.
This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.
There are two books people ITT may be interested in: How to Read a Book (a classic that everyone should read), and Make It Stick. The latter goes over the current state of learning research and it's helped me out, but both of them complement each other pretty well. As far as our current understanding of learning goes, the following is about the most effective way to approach it:
- Engage with what you're reading. Ask yourself what the key ideas are, which ideas are new to you, how you would define them, and how they relate to other ideas you already understand.
- Test yourself. Do the excercises at the end of a textbook chapter. Create your own questions and answer them. Quiz yourself at least once a week (on both new and old material). Check your answers and correct yourself (if you were wrong, how, and why?). Use flashcards with a spaced repetition regime (like Anki)
- Focus on your retrieval. Avoid looking things up unless you really have to. Each time you recall something you've learned, you reinforce it.
- Your first encounter with new information may need a small interval of just a few minutes or hours, but you should gradually increase the interval periods between quizzes/flashcards on something. The longer you go between recalling something the more it gets reinforced because you have to work harder for it. Build up gradually.
- Use what you got wrong in quizzes or flashcards to identify what needs work.
- Focus on the material you get wrong, but don't totally neglect things you feel comfortable with.
- Basically, use Anki/spaced repetition.
- Take some time between study sessions and quizzing. (I think of studying like kneading dough, you need to let your brain relax some before you work it some more).
- When studying a subject, interleave different but related topics.
- Topics should be complementary and reinforce one another so that insights from one lead to insights in the other. Examples: calculus and rocketry. Spherical trig and astronomy or celestial navigation. German idealism and eastern philosophy. Etc.
- Once you have a rudimentary grasp of a new type of problem, move onto something new, but make sure to return to this type of problem periodically. (Basically, add this type of problem to your flashcard deck). Don't worry about mastering one type of problem so you can do it your sleep before moving to the next thing.
Some other key things:
- Elaboration: Relate material to what you already know. Explain it in your own words. Visualize it. Imagine it in different contexts (if you're learning calculus, imagine your speed and acceleration while biking in hilly terrain in terms of derivatives, etc).
- Generation: Attempt to answer a problem before you know the solution. This excercises your creativity and gets you looking for similarities to other types of problems you already understand. Before reading new material, make a quick summary of what you expect to learn and how it will relate to your prior knowledge.
- Reflection: take a few minutes to reflect on what you've learned that day. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experience does this remind you of? What do you need to work on? Etc.
- Calibration: you need an objective measure of what you do and do not understand. Humans are pretty bad at gauging this for themselves without some sort of external measure. This gets back to flashcards.
- Consider using some mnemonic devices. They can be very effective.
- When reading a textbook, don't bother with crazy highlighter schemes. Research shows it doesn't really help. Neither does reading textbook material more than maybe twice unless you have a particular point you're confused about. What does help is spaced repetition and summarizing the material in your own words.
This all sounds like a lot of effort, but one of the key things to remember is that learning is effort. Struggle is basically necessary for your brain to optimize and form new connections, or even to reinforce old ones, and if you aren't struggling you're probably just doing what your brain is already optimized for, which means you probably aren't learning much.
NetBSD is the only nix I've ever been able to use for novel (for me) tasks without consulting the internet for help; the design is so clean and the documentation complete that I never felt the need for outside help. I love the package management system. Definitely my desert island OS.
Oh man the the amount of fish sauce he wants you put in this will ruin it. Add a teaspoon or a tablespoon or something, but not 1/4 cup. The first time I made it I nearly threw it out.
It's a tablespoon per serving which isn't that crazy at all. Also Vietnamese fish stock is milder than Thai fish sauce if that's what you're thinking of.
Go through the SE comments on this recipe. The amount of fish sauce makes the broth smell like asshole. I recall several Vietnamese scratching their heads over it. I love fish sauce, but Kenji went nose blind to it or something.
Great way to tank a brand. Part of BMW's value is/was the expectation of an upper middle class snob driving it, but having your car force ads on you is something people wouldn't even expect from a Kia Soul leased off a used lot.
Between this, the proprietary nut patent, and the heated seat subscription, I'm probably not going to look at BMW for my next car. They've been going back on things, but all of this adds up to they don't get it.
How can you put Ryanair and BMW in the same category?
Ryanair's whole shtick is "we'll treat you like cattle in a truck, and you'll be grateful you only paid €20 for the experience". I feel that anyone who is outraged by their nickel-and-diming doesn't really understand what Ryanair is about.
If I paid €200 for a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam, and they forced me to watch ads on the seatback screen and charged me to use the loo, then I'll be rightfully upset. But €50 for Ryanair? Where do I sign up for the €20 standing-only tickets?
The problem is a lot of people book Ryanair thinking they're going to save money and end up sucked in to these dark patterns.
I once flew from London Stansted (or maybe it was Luton?) to Dublin instead of from Heathrow with Aer Lingus to save a few bucks, and it never ended up saving me anything in the end.
With Aer Lingus the cheapest ticket includes 10kg of checked luggage, which is a nice middle ground between a tiny bag you can shove under your seat and a 23kg luggage
And Ryanair are not even cheaper most of the time unless you're prepared to fly at unsocialable times and forgo luggage.
Ryanair even seem to deliberately separate seats for adult passengers on the same booking so they can charge you extra to sit together...
Ryanair is the epitome of "cheap with compromise" which is the opposite of the BMW brand. And kindle basic gets advertising as a known feature at buying time.
Pushing advertisment after sale on a premium product is absolutely not similar.
I had to edit my comment saying it might not have been a fair comparison because I realized they might’ve just been dissing BMW pretty hard.
‘Enjoy your “luxury“ car’, the kind of “luxury“ that appeals to subsidized e-reader buyers and discount airline customers.
And I like that. If BMW can’t resist monetizing their customers’ attention, they don’t deserve the higher-end customers their marketing suggests they desire.
Ryanair: can’t recall if they’re worse than Spirit/Frontier. “We have one price for tiny people flying with the shirt on their back, and other prices for everyone else like those who might need luggage, or, liquid to survive.“
Are you including people who own older BMWs? They look like really great deals on the used market. Just don’t check the five-year total cost of ownership. If it’s not new, it’s gonna cost you in the shop. Maybe every year or so.
Also I think everyone in our social circles have flagship phones but $50 Android pre-paids sell pretty well. (Someone probably knows, unlike me, the exact numbers.)
Stellantis shows ads on their screens in-car. It’s expected behavior from an awful manufacturer like Stellantis, but I wouldn’t have expected this from BMW. It’s tacky and would turn me off from buying a BMW if I was looking at one.
I own a 2009 BMW twin turbo 3-series, purchased slightly used in early 2010 for $36k. The new price was $52k, so 10 months of depreciation really hits hard on new BMW buyers I guess.
The machine is a work of engineering art. It was made back in the days when BMW engineers were still given free rein to create The Ultimate Driving Machine. Remember that slogan? Back then, owning and driving a BMW was intentional. A driver's car. Design details down to things imperceptible were created with this intentional driver's desire to operate the vehicle. Sigh...
I feel sorry for the engineers that are still there from their glory days. Imagine being told from some power-suited punk to design that ad delivery mechanism.
What’s there to tank? Even Germans avoid BMW unless you are a drug dealer or six Syrian refugees throwing together to buy a car to flex with after the McDonalds shift.
I bought a Series 7 BMW once, went to Munich to pick it up with my GF, the electronics died three lights away from the factory. Just giving me a new one? Nope. Had to go home without a car.
I never heard anyone say, ‘Man, I’d not buy another brand than BMW again in my life.’
And I feel the people in the 21st century finally called the German engineering bluff and are now driving Chinese cars that are more innovative, a lot cheaper and basically German engineering too, after china stole all of the trade secrets.
- The Settings: Apple Intelligence and Apple Fitness+ (including the red dot as if you missed something important).
- The app store. Typically 1/2 or 2/3 of the search page is covered by ads.
- Apple Wallet. They rolled out an F1 advertisement to Apple Wallet in some region.
- iWork apps now have advertisements for updating to an Apple Creator Studio subscription.
- Apple Maps will soon have ads.
Most restraint is gone now to grow the Services category. It just feels gross for flagship devices. It seems that AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS are the only road to sanity.
That describes almost every major auto company though. Some companies sell their luxury lines through different badging or different branding but it's the same line up. Even Nissan has a luxury line. If you want a 500k BMW you can do that too.
I'm beginning to think that my '96 Toyota Starlet is "peak ICE". It has EFI, no infotainment, no power windows, no power steering, no automatic transmission. It is basically an engine, gearbox and wheels. An electric Starlet would be Nirvana.
Edit: Just read that Toyota is toying with the idea of an electric Starlet. It'll probably have an infotainment system and power "everything" though.
I'm not a mechanic but I have rebuilt an engine (common rail diesel with electronic injection) with a friend and do some work on my own cars. I don't really get the "everything needs to be mechanical" push. My previous car was mid 2000s, automatic, electronic basically everything. The reason why I scrapped it was because it had too must rust. The engine, transmission, and electronics were still fine after 200k and 20 years of harsh winters.
My current car had an electrical issue last year... but it turned out it was a mechanical issue. Something had chewed through the wires to the MAF sensor. Fixed them, and all good. It's no different from something chewing through a fuel line, except OBD was able to tell me what subsystem was not working correctly.
The problem I see with current cars is that the infotainment system is tied into everything - and usually the software sucks. If they just went back to seperate dashboard, AC controls and radio I'd have no issues with them.
My current car is from 2016, and I specifically looked for something that was like that. It is hybrid and has modern tech (e.g. radar cruise control), but everything is compartmentalised. First upgrade I did was replacing the headunit with a Chinese one that supports Android Auto/CarPlay. No functionality was lost, as the old head unit was literally just a radio and screen for backup camera.
The infotainment thing is regrettable but nowhere near as bad as the cellular modems phoning home, constantly spying, possibly raising your insurance rates…
Lucky for Big Brother they’ve blanketed this country (USA) in Flock cameras. New car, old car, they’re ready to pull over journalists in dealer loaners, people in the wrong place at the wrong time…
The phone app misses lots of data the car can collent and send. When, how frequently, and how long turn indicators are used. How aggressively the throttle and brake are applied, how frequently pre-tensioners and other safety features activate, how closely the radar or lidar-equipped cruise control sees you following others, and I'm sure lots I haven't thought of
Been asked that before—don’t always use one. Insurers will have to buy that data from the telecom if my phone’s on.
Not sure how common it is for Verizon, AT&T, Google (Maps), Apple (Maps) to sell to insurers (or brokers who insurers use). Perhaps pretty common? I’m sure they often can deanonymize it if they do.
Electronic injection sounds like too complex system to maintain, now if it had an actual carburetor that might be a peak "ICE", true and pure mechanical experience. Jokes aside, I hope that car at least have airbags, otherwise it's just death trap
Why 2025 though? It didn't yet pass the test of time and there is not enough failure rate data on it. Toyotas(Lexus) do have serious quality issues too, rarely but that happens for certain models from time to time.
Sedan sales are tanking as a general concept. It’s not just the S class or E class. The sedan is a decreasingly popular form factor. I personally think this is quite logical: what’s the advantage of a sedan over a vehicle with a hatchback, whether it be SUV or car? It’s pretty much worse in every way. It’s just a smaller cargo opening.
The popularity of SUVs is incredibly logical given the fact that their downsides have been largely eliminated. They don’t chug gas anymore, they don’t ride like a truck anymore, again, where’s the downside? A sedan gives you a worse cargo space and more difficult entry/exit, lower view of the road, more annoying for car seats and kids, etc.
Mercedes is doing just fine selling SUVs.
This is a similar story to the death of the coupe and the manual transmission. There was a time when having two doors or manual transition cut down on labor and manufacturing costs significantly and they were sensible compromises for customers. It’s just not true anymore, and what you’re left with is a typical non-enthusiast buyer that says “why would I want a car with less functionality/is harder to drive?”
It’s easy to criticize about M or AMG being watered down but they have a pretty distinctive product separation between the true performance models and sport trims.
And to be honest, the sport trims are much more sensible purchases for most buyers than a full blown M/AMG vehicle with all the sticker price, fuel economy and maintenance baggage they entail.
Just saying that these brands have different offerings in different countries. Here in Germany all big brands: Audi, BMW, Mercedes and VW etc have offerings from low lever to luxury car.
The most evil part of this is that drivers have been conditioned to click on these “surprise waiting for you” notifications. BMW usually had fairly cute holiday animations that were a fun surprise. I actually looked forward to them until I got bamboozled by this one…
Correct. This is about the people who buy new cars. The manufacturers are addressing a well-studied market. Those with money, those who can afford to be "early adopters' of new tech are the sort of people who actually want these features. They want computer screens. They want car-phone synchronization. They want a car that can be "repaired" over an internet connection because that saves interacting with a tradesperson with skills they do not understand or appreciate. Cars are scary for such people. Phones are not. So making the car as phone-like as possible sells more cars.
IIRC "To serve and protect" was originally from a movie. Cops don't have a duty to protect you, and there in fact many cases of a cop not intervening during a violent crime due to concerns for their own safety, even when the asailant only had a knife.
> "To Serve and Protect," is a phrase made famous by the Los Angeles Police Department and adopted, in various forms, by law enforcement agencies across the United States.
> In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: “The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department.”
> The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek.
> On November 4, 1963, the Los Angeles City Council passed the necessary ordinance and the credo has now been placed alongside the City Seal on the Department’s patrol cars.
