The Amazon tax (Seth's Blog)
Amazon's search ads function as a hidden tax that makes products worse and more expensive.
Majority agree Amazon's ad system harms consumers; some recommend buying elsewhere.
Hacker News. Daily summary. Top 20 stories.
Amazon's search ads function as a hidden tax that makes products worse and more expensive.
Majority agree Amazon's ad system harms consumers; some recommend buying elsewhere.
OpenLogi is a local-first, open-source alternative to Logitech Options+ for remapping mice over HID++.
Skepticism about LLM-generated copy overshadows the project's technical merits.
Google bought bankrupt Spirit Airlines' data at auction for $10 million to train AI.
Skepticism dominates: commenters doubt the data is truly deidentified and question the legality of the sale.
A satirical fable warns that management consultants often create top-heavy, failing organizations.
Commenters praise the fable as a critique of management consultants, citing Iceland's own history.
Linux 7.3 improves VRAM overcommit performance and stability for games.
The thread praised the VRAM work, with a camp split on Linux vs. Windows updates.
A hobbyist builds a line-scan camera to capture panoramic photos from trains and ferries.
Commenters surfaced prior art (Matthias Wandel's scanner, Ward Cunningham's slit-scan) and railway inspection use cases.
A Framework laptop owner fixed a bricked motherboard after a failed BIOS update, bypassing Framework's out-of-warranty replacement policy.
Strong consensus that Framework's lack of a recovery bootloader and refusal to replace bricked boards from their own official update is unacceptable.
IKEA names products using Swedish words, with specific categories like sofas getting place names and bookshelves getting men's names.
Commenters appreciated the clear corporate communication and debated the use of Swedish diacritics for exotic branding.
Fairphone launches Gen. 6+ and officially enters the US market.
Two camps: those disappointed by missing Verizon support, and those debating Fairphone's security shortcomings compared to Pixels.
Firms' sticky wage norms caused persistent real wage losses for 43% of job-stayers during 2021-2024 inflation.
Split: Biden vs Trump vs pandemic supply shocks as inflation cause; 63% saw no real wage decline.
Emergency alert systems can be abused by governments, as Vodafone Egypt showed in 2011.
Trust is central to civil society, and no system can prevent abuse of emergency alerts.
Cerebras CS-4 claims up to 30x faster inference than GPUs using a new rack-scale architecture.
HW optimization for LLMs is early; many expect orders-of-magnitude efficiency gains, questioning the data center build-out.
Children's stunted lung growth improved rapidly after London's Ultra Low Emission Zone took effect.
Anecdotes and personal accounts confirm the study's findings, with some debate over tube versus street pollution sources.
A macOS app places a 3D fruit fly on your desktop, driven by a live simulation of the real FlyWire connectome.
Debate centers on whether the connectome-driven behavior is genuine or just scripted triggers.
A study measured air temperature increases downwind of data centers in Phoenix.
Skepticism dominates: commenters question the study's causal attribution and methodology.
Meta's trial over social media's harms draws comparisons to Big Tobacco litigation.
Internal Meta research may prove they knew of harms and chose profit.
Early-life sugar exposure, even just in the first 1,000 days, is linked to lower cancer risk decades later.
Top commenters argue the study fails to control for myriad wartime confounders, calling the design sloppy.
Anthropic offers 50% higher weekly limits for Claude Code from May to August 2026.
Split between users switching to Codex and those seeing comparable value in Claude.
Turbovec is a Rust vector index using Google's TurboQuant algorithm for memory-efficient search.
Mixed reception: praise for performance but criticism of AI-generated documentation and academic misconduct allegations around TurboQuant.
Finger, a 1971 protocol for sharing .plan files, persists as a minimalist social network.
Nostalgic memories of Finger stalking and game dev .plans dominate, with a camp noting its security flaws.