The way we used to enforce those laws before the mid-70s was much closer to “big companies get broken up” than it is now.

The modern standard for how and when we intervene is not necessarily the correct one.

At my company doubling the writing-code part of software projects might speed them up 5%. I think even that’s optimistic.

Imperfectly fixing obvious problems in our processes could gain us 20%, easy.

Which one are we focusing on? AI. Duh.

I never stopped calling “telemetry” spyware. It’s weird to me that others accepted the shift in terminology.

N-gate was by far the best thing about HN.

I dunno about Windows Explorer, but macOS’ finder seems to hash completed transfers over SMB (this must be something it can trigger the receiver to do in SMB itself, it doesn’t seem slow enough for the sender to be doing it on a remote file) and remove transferred files that don’t pass the check.

I could see that or other safety checks making one program slower than another that doesn’t bother. Or that sort of thing being an opportunity for a poor implementation that slows everything down a bunch.

They’d need to improve desktop Linux a lot to threaten Apple. It’s far more tolerable on their relatively tightly-controlled and stable hardware platforms than it is elsewhere, but it’s still a features-weak jankfest compared to macOS. I mean user facing features relevant to any desktop user, not “docker is native on it” or other developer-only stuff—and for the record Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade, so I’m far from unfamiliar with it, and I do own a Steam Deck and have used it extensively in desktop mode (and in console-alike mode).

I’d love someone to actually compete with Apple at the specific kind of thing they do, but I don’t see it in the cards for Valve. Too much distance, with things they don’t have to solve to hit other (apparent) targets of theirs.

As for Microsoft, what is Valve threatening? Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point, and the latter… I guess maybe, yeah, they could threaten that.

[edit] to soften this somewhat, I do love what Valve is doing and their micro-PC thing they’re releasing next year is likely going to be an instant purchase for me, provided supply issues don’t drive the price insanely high or otherwise mess with the release. I happen to be in the exact niche of people who are thrilled to have a good low-tinkering option that lets me ditch my last Windows machine, so this stuff’s my jam.

I have a MBP M4 and a Linux desktop, and to be honest other than the Apple ecosystem integration (which is good but doesn't matter to me because I have an android phone) the system software is generally mediocre and annoying.

The third party Mac software is often better, but not always.

It starts that I can buy Apple hardware at any European consumer shop, GNU/Linux hardware hardly, with exception of Raspeberry PIs on the electronics section.

> Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point

With the broader job market being not-great, and everyone trying some sort of side hustle with the aims of making it big, it's definitely the bubble I'm in, but the "home" case has a lot of Google free office suite business looking usage, and even if there isn't a side hustle, maybe my friends are super weird but they use Google sheets to organize things even for non-business life things when things get complicated. Eg planning a wedding. That's Google and not Valve, but if customers get Steamboxes to access that vs Windows laptops (or Chromebooks), it looks like a threat to Microsoft to me. (But it's been the year for Linux on the desktop for decades now, so I'm not holding my breath.)

You should check out the adoption curve for Linux desktops, it's actually starting to hockey stick, Windows 11 is a dumpster fire, Apple is stagnant and Arch based distros are getting crazy good.

I… super hesitate to wade into this, but:

1) It was way before it became prestigious.

And

2) An explanation of this needs to account for a great and rapid shift in favor of women, as far as proportion-of-practitioners, that was happening at exactly the same time as the opposite shift in programming, in both law and medicine.

I don’t know what the actual reason is but “it got prestigious so women got pushed out” makes no sense to me, based on the timeline of events in full context. It was very much not prestigious in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, certainly far less so than law and medicine at that time (still isn’t as prestigious as those, outside tech circles—you can see it in people’s faces. It’s high-paid but lower-“class” than those, to this day)

As others have pointed out, prestigious is too strong of a word, what I actually meant was "a job a man could be seen as doing".

The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.

Related, I think math went through a similar transition.

> It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.

I ran the numbers upon having kids. It is irrational.

It’s ad-supported. Any post with comments disabled is definitely an ad. Probably a lot of the others are, too.

Your comment makes me realize that I consume HN differently than many others, because I've never seen a post with comments disabled and I've been around here for at least ten years. It's not that I don't think they don't exist — they obviously do because you're mentioning them. I've just never encountered one, primarily because I don't casually browse HN, ever. I subscribe to a pushbullet channel that notifies me when a post hits 500 up votes. That's it. The list of submissions on the home page (even on reddit) is just overwhelming to me so I use the pushbullet channel as a sort of community curated "best of" or "trending" signal.

Not to say that I don't procrastinate or waste time doing other nonsense. I can definitely spend a lot of time reading HN comments, as I'm doing right now.

Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)

> Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)

To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. Just pointing it out. Aside from any more speculative benefit to YC for running the site, the site does run outright ads.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you had a problem with ads. By "problem" I meant "if you find yourself procrastinating a lot" (not you specifically, but the reader in general)

Apologies for the misunderstanding

On, no issue here, no apology needed at all. I didn’t take it as any kind of dig, or even necessarily aimed at me (and if it was—still not offensive in any way). I’d almost edited my original comment right after posting because it occurred to me the tenseness might allow it to be interpreted as a complaint, and was just using your post as a jumping-off point to finally clarify that, is all.

I did miss exactly what you meant by “problem” in that passage, but get it now, so thanks for that.

I assumed the main purpose was to show off the ycombinator batches when they launch.

Opt-in product catalogues are fine for that. Plenty.