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>For a 50-entry timeline, the latency is usually less than 25 milliseconds. Profiling shows that few of those milliseconds were spent inside the database engine.

And instead were spent blocking on the disk for all of the extra queries that were made? Or is it trying to say that the concatenation a handful of strings takes 22 ms. Considering how much games can render with a 16 ms budget I don't see where that time is going rendering html.


Yes, it's saying that the string concatenation and other outside-of-SQL business logic took 22ms, running in their custom TH1 scripting language. In 2016.

Update: Actually it looks like I was wrong about TH1: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/tip/www/th1.md

The timeline appears to be constructed by C code instead: https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/file?name=src/timeline.c&ci=...

Update 2: Here's the timeline code from September 2016: https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/file?name=src/timeline.c&ci=...

Back then it had some kind of special syntax for outputting HTML:

    sqlite3_snprintf(sizeof(zNm),zNm,"b%d",i);
    zBr = P(zNm);
    if( zBr && zBr[0] ){
      @ <p style='border:1px solid;background-color:%s(hash_color(zBr));'>
      @ %h(zBr) - %s(hash_color(zBr)) -
      @ Omnes nos quasi oves erravimus unusquisque in viam
      @ suam declinavit.</p>
      cnt++;
    }
  }
That @ syntax is used in modern day Fossil too. Maybe that adds some extra overhead?

>We can imagine a social media that doesn't play games with the "attention economy", trying to "increase retention"

A social network where no one is there is not that valuable. Incentivizing people to "socialize" more has exponential value to a social network.

>As a result, these major companies no longer need to create better products so that you will use them instead of a competitor,

I feel like this person is regurgitating old arguments. With the recent AI boom, it should be obvious that companies are still trying to build better products. And it is fully possible for new players like OpenAI to get a billion users.


Counter point: HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

The giants grew market share and started deploying profitable advertising models. Once a giant gets the profit bug, they stop being stewards.

Open source social media and messaging largely sucks. Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix, or the demographics suck, like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience.

None of this means it's impossible. We've just seen the successful attempts become evil and lots of bad attempts that fail.


>HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

What is the counter point? None of those had more MAU than any of the big social media platforms of today. All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline. Trying to win over people to a social media platform that takes measures to be worse and to avoid growing metrics is not a successful strategy.


>The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

"The cigarette of today is a much better cigarette for the user now that we have filters in them."


>The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

Absolutely bullshit. FB today is terrible. It's a dopamine casino filled with engagement bait and ads that leave users wildly unsatisfied.


> All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

I mean if we’re using that as metric I think then you’d have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook. I would be surprised if the median user didn’t prefer fentanyl over Facebook, assuming they tried both.


>have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook

Why? Even if you add all of the users of fentanyl producers together you won't even get to 1% the MAU of Facebook.


> Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix

It's ridiculous to say that the UI/UX of a protocol sucks.

Matrix has clients with good UX and ones with less good UX (especially in the past). I would challenge anyone to install Element X and say that it has a bad UI/UX - it's objectively at least as good as WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage. It's probably not as good as Telegram yet (but TG has it easy given it's not E2EE).


Don’t forget X, it’s a sewer. Grok generating non consensual nudes and csam, nazis, trolls, and scammers.

> like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience

Every social network started from a hyper-polarized audience and grew it from there. In the case of Google, geeks, in the case of Facebook, the sort of men who browse "HotOrNot" websites, rating pictures published without consent for sexual attractiveness.


> In the case of Google, geeks,

Google was open for everyone almost immediately

> in the case of Facebook, the sort of men who browse "HotOrNot" websites,

Facebook was for every college student almost immediately after it started growing. And shortly after the on-campus growth phase, it was opened up for everyone.

Reddit skews mildly liberal, but not overtly so. It was able to grow usage amongst all demographics. X, on the other hand, is increasingly becoming conservative, but it still has a large audience on all sides of the spectrum. Neither has to jumpstart growth.

Bluesky started out almost entirely polarized to the point it will be nearly impossible to be inclusive of anyone else. This will kill its ultimate growth potential. Threads basically skipped right over it.


I don't think that flag is related at all.

What else could it mean? Aren't "views" something that matches with "watch"? Maybe I'm missing something from how YouTube works, not a big user, happy to be corrected :)

What if there is no driver because the car is self driving?

I assume the same as if the car owner put a brick on the gas pedal and there was no driver when it had an accident

Found the Chief Legal Officer for Waymo

"Your honor, I don't know how to explain this to you any more simply. I wasn't driving, there was a brick on the gas pedal. It's not my responsibility, not my fault!"

Okay but what if I install servos and ask Claude Code to operate the vehicle for me?

Well that will depend on your local laws, but to my knowledge except for certain authorised pilot programs all cars on the road must have a driver.

Where I live if you are in the driver’s seat no matter if you were actually actively driving you are considered to be the driver. This has been well established here in drink-driving cases, but you’d have to ask a lawyer for your area.


They already are competiting on quality. Why do you think Claude made Opus slower than Sonnet, yet with better benchmark scores.

LLMs do understand codebases and I've been able to get them to make reactors and clean up code without them breaking anything due to them understanding what they are doing.

Bugs are being solved faster than before. Crashes from production can directly be collected and fixed by a LLM with no engineering time needed other than a review.


They don't understand codebases.

They are trained on other code, ignore how your codebase is structured, and lack knowledge of it. To do so, you would need to feed the whole codebase every time you ask it for something, with extensive comments about the style, architecture, and so on. No amount of md files will help with that.

In large codebases, they struggle with code reuse, unless you point the agent to look for specific code.

Finding bugs has nothing to do with understanding the codebase. They find local bugs. If they could understand the whole codebase, we would be finding RCEs for popular OSS projects so easily, including browsers.


LLMs have been great at finding and fixing edge cases in my experience. It's a useful tool for improving software quality.

If you sync your Linux machines key in the cloud, police could subpoena it too. The solution is not to switch to Linux, but to stop storing it in plain text in the cloud.

Do you know what a private key means in this context?

No, I don't. The bitlocker key is a symmetric key.

Ok, do you at least know what private means?

Not public.

Check behind your kid's stereo - what's that? Oh, it's a PGP key and gram of meth!

>where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.

Is there any evidence of this happening with an actual legitimate gift card and bot one which was stolen or originally purchased via credit card fund.


Slightly off-topic, but stuff like this does not just happen at Apple.

When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).

Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.


Since it's gog at least you could download the game and save it somewhere.

True but if you never did then you're SOL

Using it would be copyright infringement since the license is revoked since it was refunded.

I, along with every AI company, give exactly zero fucks about copyright infringement.

Training an AI model is fair use. Playing a video game without paying for it isn't.

If you buy milk at a store and then walk out of the store and then the store refunds you 2 days later, that's the store's problem and you're still allowed to drink the milk. You didn't steal the milk. Subscription logic only applies to subscriptions, and GoG is a simple exchange of money for goods, not a subscription.

If it was a contract saying you were allowed to drink the milk and it was terminated with a refund. You would not be able to drink the milk.

If the store tried to sue you claiming there was a contract for you not to drink the milk if refunded, it would be laughed out of court and banned from suing anyone ever again.

>You would not be able to drink the milk.

Incorrect, the milk does not disappear. You are contractually and legally obligated not to drink the milk, much in the same way I should not go around killing people, but I certainly have the ability to.

Now, if you sell the customer electrically locking milk bottles which won't open after the contract is over, then the customer "can't" drink the milk, they couldn't.


Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?

I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.

And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.

[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)


GOG may have the right to revoke a sale, but since it lets you download the game without DRM, it doesn't have the ability. Unless you delete your copy of the game and then try to download it again.

If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.


GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

> The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)


>was already redeemed in some way

This is the important quote showing that the gift card was not legitimate.


do you think that makes it ok? they walked into a store, tried to pay money to apple and as a result they had their stuff locked forever

apple recommended they only buy gift cards from apple, but they still sell them in stores...

obviously money is more important to them than the consumers but pretending apple have zero responsibility is silly


>they had their stuff locked forever

It was locked for less than a week.

>but they still sell them in stores

Unfortunately there are sketchy resellers that exist too.


It wasn't a sketchy retailer though, it was one Apple has authorized through its handpicked affiliate (in the US, this is probably Blackhawk who basically owns the third-party-giftcard-sales business).

For Apple to say "Don't buy gift cards from our authorized retailers, or prepare to face incredibly harsh consequences due to fraud that you can't detect or predict" while continuing to sell them through those channels is morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable.

I have no doubt fraud is a big problem. It is for all gift cards. But this is a 3 trillion dollar company -- and they make minimum 30% of every gift card sold in pure profit. If they can't secure those channels without torpedoing innocent customers' entire digital lives, they need to drop that channel.


It was locked for a week because of the social media fuss that not everyone can raise. Otherwise it'd be forever.

How do you know that? It's entirely possible that it just takes time to go through Tim Cook's email and social media didn't play a factor.

Your comment reminds me of this news story of a guy trapped in his work's elevator for the weekend. How was he supposed to know it'll be only for the weekend.

Hah, because it went viral. Good luck if you aren't able to reach a wide audience (99% of people aren't). Else it would've been locked for eternity. Stop defending atrocious behavior like this.

Weird hill to die on bud.

If somebody bought something from Walmart you wouldn’t insinuate he’s at fault because he bought it from a ‘sketchy retailer’. Just stop it lol. There is literally no way to defend Apple on that one.


What matters is that the purchaser had every reason to think that it was legitimate and they were not the malefactor in this scenario, but they still got banned.

If you buy stolen property without knowing you still get punished by having the stolen property taken away. Just because you don't know, it doesn't mean you have not done anything wrong.

You will have your stolen property taken away, you won't have your entire house lock with bars and get evicted from the property.

Having your purchase taken away is not punishment. It's done because it's not actually yours, it still belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's a negative for the person who made the purchase, but that's just an unfortunate side effect. Unknowingly buying stolen property is not legally wrong. The typical law punishing receiving stolen property requires the receiver to know that it is stolen. Otherwise you're innocent of any wrongdoing, you just got ripped off.

If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.


Terrible analogy. The victim here bought the card from the retailer. Someone else had gained access to the secret contained on the card and stolen or attempted to steal the value on the card because Apple can't figure out how to sell a gift card securely.

Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.


this kind of stuff happens all the time across major companies with minimised support. sure your google account is likely to be there tomorrow but it's only a very good chance that it's not locked forever.

i would be surprised if there's any company with millions of users where .01 or .001 (still a LOT of users) just get screwed with zero recourse



That was already posted and it was not a legitimate gift card.

Yes it was. He purchased it from a legitimate reseller 100% legally and correctly.

[flagged]


Elsewhere in this thread, you assert that perhaps Apple simply reversed all this out of the kindness of their heart without regard for the social media blowup that this lucky victim was able to create.

This is cognitive dissonance. If Apple reversed it due to their conscience, it's because they are pretty convinced this user is honest and Apple PR isn't (or didn't need to be) involved.

If on the other hand, Apple has proof the user is not honest, then Apple PR took a huge hit for nothing by forcing Apple Support to unban them, when they could have said "Because we have documented proof the user couldn't have bought this from a legitimate reseller, we cannot unban them."


I just like beong able to make like $250 of API calls for $20.

If only it was API calls. I like using it through claude code. But it would be infinitely more flexible if my $200 subscription worked through the API

I don't understand, you CAN use claude code through the API.

Yeah, but he can't use his $200 subscription for the API.

That's limited to accessing the models through code/desktop/mobile.

And while I'm also using their subscriptions because of the cost savings vs direct access, having the subscription be considerably cheaper than the usage billing rings all sorts of alarm bells that it won't last.


It made the front page when it was added.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37307708


Not everyone sees the HN frontpage every day, and sometimes especially-esoteric things spend a fairly short timespan on there.

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