As I write this, the submitter has six comments out of twelve, most somewhat defensive. And all of them in less than thirty minutes. This seems very much like a marketing play, where the submitter is pretty determined to steer the narrative.
The submitter's replies are defensive because people are accusing them of coordinated voting, which is not evident to us. The post hit the front page due to the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), then quickly got upvotes that seem completely authentic.
It would look a lot less like astroturf if the submitter let the discussion evolve instead of answering every criticism within seconds of it being posted.
They're entitled to defend themselves against accusations of things they haven't done, and also to respond to questions or assertions about their project. We encourage project creators to engage in the discussions about their projects. This is a normal part of building and launching a project.
From what I've seen of other AI-enabled projects interacting with forums in my field of work, it's very common for the AI people to jump in and answer every possible question and respond to every possible interaction, very quickly.
Could be just a bot doing it, but it could also be a sign of an inexperienced person trying to engage with an existing community without being part of that community. I know in my area it took years for me to learn that I shouldn't jump into every conversation, and that doing that rubbed people the wrong way, and I've seen others (many years before AI) wreck themselves by being unable to learn this lesson.
In some places responding bumps the thread so it's outright manipulative. HN doesn't sort threads like that.
I'm not sure this counts as astroturf, or simply evidence of a person who's not okay with letting a community opinion independently evolve. You could say 'well it's his job to fight the community if it looks like it's turning hostile' but think about that for a second. It takes some experience to know when you can let negativity be out there in the environment, and I think there'll be a lot of people who aren't capable of making such allowances.
I actually like when the submitter is present and the creator. They’re actually involved. There are lots of users here who play at being submitters of high-value content (created by others) only to later submit their own entirely AI written drivel.
Interesting how they’re not making any defensive replies to comments pointing out that they committed a federal crime by filing a false report to the FBI. Perhaps they know it is indefensible
Okay, why was this rescued from the 2nd chance pool? Was it from some sort of interesting discussion? Something novel enough to warrant it? A significant amount of petitions from legitimate users?
Can you please quit with the snarky interrogation? HN is for curiosity, not curmudgeonliness.
Nothing gets “rescued from” the second chance pool. Posts get selected for the second chance pool if moderators (or others with SCP-picking responsibilities) think they may be interesting. It’s worked like this for over a decade.
I’m sure the league has considered less drastic actions, and in reality a group of administrators dealing with an ongoing problem know way more about possible solutions that are available and can possibly work than random HN commenters.
Even further back into time, before 3.5" disks, both A: and B: were 5.25" disks. And, although my memory is hazy, 3.5's were commonly slotted into B: at first, because no one had 3.5" boot disks until the drives became somewhat common.
The floppies got A and B because hard drives were expensive and for a time a lot of people got by without them, though everybody had at least one floppy.
Even if you only had one floppy, it was both A and B, so you could say "copy a:DOC.TXT b:" and it would read the doc and then ask you to insert the floppy you're considering B (and depending on file size and available memory, sometimes switch back and forth a few more times)
You are forgetting 8” floppies. IBM used only the soft sector ones (one hole punched close to the spindle to mark sector 0) but there were also hard sector ones (a ring of 32 holes close to the spindle hole).
There was a lot of experimentation back in those days. The Wikipedia’s page on floppy disks is surprisingly long!
8" floppy drives were not compatible mechanically with IBM PC cases, but there were 8" floppy drives with their own enclosures and power supplies, which could be put on a desktop along the PC case.
IBM PCs have never supported 8" floppy drives, but it was easy to make an adapter between IBM PC floppy cables and 8" floppy drives, so there have existed IBM PC clones from countries where 5¼" floppies were scarce (e.g. Eastern Europe), which supported the attachment of 8" floppy drives.
The original 5¼" floppies had only the size advantage, but they had both a lower capacity and a lower speed than 8" floppies, so attaching 8" floppy drives would have been a higher performance option in the beginning.
Only after the IBM PC/AT introduced the high-density 1.2 Mbyte floppy disks, the 5¼" format matched (actually very slightly exceeded) the performance of the old 8" floppies.
But in the context of drive lettering, although CP/M supported 8" floppies, MS-DOS never did. MS-DOS adopted the naming scheme, but not the boot style.
Floppies, superfloppies, removable hard disks (platter-only, as opposed to modern external hard drives that incorporate the entire drive mechanism), magneto-optical disks, rewritable CD/DVD, even today magnetic tape is still used as removable storage in applications where large capacity is required and shelf life is more important than fast random access.
I have vague memories of something like this from my childhood, where my family's IBM 486SX had the 3.5" drive on A and the 5.25" drive on B but my grandparents' Epson 286 had the opposite. Also learning about disk densities when none of the disks from the 486 worked on the 286.
Many people don’t care about resale or pass-along value in the things that they own or gift.
And even if one does, then you just consider the diminished value as another cost of having the personalized item.
For many people, especially gift givers where the item is about far more than economics, it is worth it. And it is very unclear to me why "resale value" should trump about a million other considerations.
I once saw Casablanca with a friend who hadn’t seen it, and she said, “Wow. This movie jam packed with cliches. It’s off putting. Wait. This is the source of all the cliches isn’t it?”
Which it is. One of the most quotable movies of all time. If memes were a thing in 1942, it would have been the king. Still quotable today.
One thing that the Special Edition did for Star Wars was make clear that it had borrowed the Humphrey Bogart and "Little Pete[r Lorre]-Big Syd[ney Greenstreet]" characters which came from The Maltese Falcon via Casablanca. Sam Spade-Rick Blaine-Han Solo; Casper Gutman-Signor Ferrari-Jabba the Hutt (original version); Joel Cairo-Ugarte-Greedo; and of course they're fighting over a celebrated artificial "Falcon".
(Edit: according to Phil Tippett who did the initial character design for the RotJ Jabba puppet, when he asked Lucas directly "if there was an actor that was going to play Jabba the Hutt, who would it be?" Lucas answered "Sydney Greenstreet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXrQ-L-ROs&t=599s )
Yeah, this is the greatest movie of all time and I don't think it is even close. No other movie covers everything it is to be human and in such a sometimes subtle way.
I watched The Shining for the first time about 15 years ago (at about age 30) and when my friend asked what I thought I said it was good, but seemed pretty typical of horror films, to which he pointed out that it’s because all those films were inspired by The Shining.
Surely they were in all but name. People say “play it again, Sam” and are “shocked. Shocked!” to this day. It’s easy to imagine the cultural dominance at its heyday.
In the US, any tub made past about 1900 or so has an overflow drain that prevents overfilling. The adoption of such drains not quite contemporaneous with the adoption of indoor plumbing, but very soon after.
It's the metal plate usually just below the faucet that looks like it might be useless. But it has an opening underneath to let the overflow water in. These are always sized to handle more water than the faucet can output.
This is basically a non-concern in anything but very, very old, unremodeled bathrooms.
My last apartment had the overflow drain hole but it wasn't attached to anything. The water just went directly into the wooden cabinet underneath. Madness. Literally worse than not having the hole because it reduced the capacity of the sink. This is what happens when landlords who DGAF hire handymen who DGAF to do all the work on their units.
To be fair to the potential handyman or contractor many overflow drains are integrated into the sink drain before they attach anything. It might have been the landlord buying temu style sinks with fake overflow holes.
Many overflow drains are not or are poorly connected. If you buy a new home, the inspector will usually skip to overflow test because it will likely fail.
There is also the issue that the next person stepping into their shoes to clean up the mess is being recruited exactly during this time. And if your company gets a reputation for not paying out prenegotiated severances or nitpicking over them, it makes the next candidate that much more wary.
Admittedly, software that's influenced by the iPad and iPhone, so there is new software, but it's not that new. Multitasking in iOS has been a thing for a while (iPad).
I'm not trying to discount the efforts involved here, just pointing out that they aren't starting from scratch. And much of the required features to support a dual-screen (triple-?) phone has been in the works for a while.
I recommend flagging.
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