More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings?
The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change.
Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.
Also it already exists. It's called the RTA header; and it was invented by the porn industry decades ago to try and appear as a responsible self-regulating industry. (Total failure at that.)
RTA seems reasonable to me, on a technical level. But the porn industry can't force anyone to implement the client side of it. Legislators itching to "do something" should've focused on that.
This is an interesting question. I started using computers in the late 90s when there were no guardrails and everything was permitted so I know what I am doing- or at the very least only blame myself if I fuck it up.
But your average 20 year old who only knows an iPhone would be out of his/her depth quickly.
I have personally seen well meaning older devs saying that building on Microsoft Access with VBA is absolutely a viable greenfield stack in 2026 for small business.
And we wonder why ageism exists in our industry. Not saying that’s fair or all of it by any stretch, but ouch. It goes to show many of these worst practices are alive, well, and employable.
This is a reasonable idea if the users maintaining the system aren't technical AT ALL. Think small business who wants a homebrew inventory system for some reason. There is almost always a better tool, but Access is still very approachable for non technical users
Denuvo isn’t quite DRM either. It’s an anti-tamper layer; the whole goal being to prevent the binary from modifications. This then prevents the DRM of choice (ie Steamworks) from being bypassed.
I know that sounds a little pedantic; but typically DRM involves an identity layer (who is allowed to access what?). Denuvo doesn’t care about that; it’s even theoretically possible to make a Denuvo protected binary anyone could use.
The other issue with this is that AI is still unprofitable and a money hole.
If consumers refuse to pay for it, let alone more than $20 for it, coding agent costs could explode. Agent revenue isn’t nearly enough to keep the system running while simultaneously being very demanding.
I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge. I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN a far more pleasant place to inhabit.
I do run into the overly pedantic stuff pretty frequently, people will often latch on to some minor point or detail, maybe because it's easier to comment on?
Deep technical critique often can't be in the comments, in my opinion. Unless you're an expert, setting up the environment, doing the experiments and presenting the data is an entire article on it's own. It would probably be healthier if people did that, rather than typing out a quick comment.
Then there are topics like how AI will influence society in general, that's a multi-year sociology study, before being able to say anything with just a hint of accuracy. Warnings based on sentiment and anecdotes will always register as negative.
There are some articles that have 200+ comments, in those cases whatever you have to say has probably already been posted, but people like to vent their frustrations, sometimes it helps to type out your thoughts, even if no one will read them.
The classifiers I used are definitely conflating technical criticism with genuine negativity, and that's a real limitation. When I say "technical critique reads differently than personal attacks," I probably should have been clearer that the models aren't making that distinction well.
Compared to how bad online discourse has gotten pretty much anywhere else in the meantime, it's still really good here.
Only place I can stomach for extended periods
This is SUCH a good example of pedantry and will become my new primary example. All too often, people think of pedantry as being along the magnitude of scale. The "rational" pedant's response to this is to use quantitative jargon and bayes to scale up the size of the nitpick.
So you're arguing that technically the technical critique is not valuable by yourself arguing on technicalities of the technical critique. Oh the irony! But you're not wrong. ;)
Exactly; but rarely is this done for curiosity or accuracy; but instead for veiling toxicity.
This place drowns in veiled toxicity.
“Grass is green”
“But I live in California and we have a drought, and the entire concept of green grass is a waste of valuable water resources, and was frankly always a sign of privilege because only someone with excess freshwater can do it, and we need that freshwater for starving kids in Africa, and if Boomers hadn’t been so obsessed with single family housing and urban sprawl…”
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.
From the new yorker's profile of dang a few years ago. It doesn't specifically address the negativity but it contains it, if you get what I mean.
Also I mean you know you, personally, are one of the worst about this right? I only recognize a handful of usernames here and yours is one for exactly this reason.
Do you consider yourself an ideologue, an honest propagandist? I do for myself, I don't profess any particular devotion to these ideals of rhetoric or debate. I just consider them tools to accomplish goals, that may be laid aside at will or need. I think frankly most people here also do they just don't admit it.
My dad got his phone stolen on day 1 of a monthlong trip. He went without a phone the whole trip, in part because he was nervous he wouldn't have the right radios if he brought a euro phone home.
You make an excellent point. I would guess that it is orders of magnitude more expensive for Apple to create a new hardware configuration than it is for them to add software feature flags, though. But, assuming the cost of making the hardware change worldwide exceeds the cost of reconfiguring their factories for new hardware, you're right that they would not choose to make the hardware change worldwide.
Almost certainly someone (or an entire team) carefully crunched the numbers and deliberately decided not to keep a Lightning US iPhone.
There are different levels to these things. The number of SIM card slots or bands varying from model to model isn't that unusual. The average user just needs it to work. In fact, the SIM and band configuration differences have nothing to do with regional legal mimina — they have more to do with the standard practice and available systems in each region (for example, mmWave isn't widely deployed outside the US). The configurations aren't really "worse" in the same way as locking down browser access is worse. Phones have had regional variants going back ~forever for pretty mundane and benign reasons.
More importantly, if a user travels from one region to another, as long as they can use their phone in the place they arrive, having slightly non-optimal bands or a different SIM configuration doesn't matter. The fact that your phone is slightly different from the local model is not really a problem.
But having your charger vary across regions? That's a recipe for disaster. Not only is that another level of variance in your external casing, it impacts day-to-day use. When an American user travels to, say, France, or vice versa, and wants to buy a charger, or share one with someone else, having the same model of iPhone be incompatible would be a major frustration. It would be stupid to engineer a lightning AND USB-C version of the same device for each market.
More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings?
The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change.
Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.
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