HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rdbl27

252 karma · joined April 13, 2026

submissionscomments
rdbl27··on GitHub and the crime against software
Isn't your whole post "just a complaint" too?
rdbl27··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
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.

rdbl27··on The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
You used a lot of fancy words to say "fashions in interior design change over time," making much of little in the process.
rdbl27··on Testing UPS Output Waveforms
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.

rdbl27··on Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
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.

rdbl27··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
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.

rdbl27··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
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.

rdbl27··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
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

rdbl27··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
No, that was never the old pattern. Nationwide injunctions were unheard of until very recently -- as in, within the past 10-20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_injunction

rdbl27··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_injunction

← PreviousPage 2 of 2