And Paul Allen wrote a whole Altair emulator so that they could use an (academic) Harvard computer for their little (commercial) project and test/run Bill Gates' BASIC interpreter on it.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
Technology is not a form of control at all. Technology is the practical application of things you know, to achieve things that don't happen naturally. Here's what the wiki says:
> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.
By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.
It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.
We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.
Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.
Stone tools, fire, the wheel and farming are forms of control. You learn that from prehistory; stone tools and fire provide the baseline for manufacturing, trade and warfare. Farming and transport creates a backbone for logistics and taxation. Each invention contributes to a greater degree of state-sanctioned control; "the people" rarely ever win.
The mischaracterization comes when people get comfortable assuming that technology cares about them. Your stone axe does not want to keep you alive; your iPhone has no self-preserving motivation to maintain privacy. Making these kinds of hopeful-but-foolish assumptions is how people become disenfranchised with progress and associate it with evil.
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I was shadowbanned for mentioning Iryna Zarutska. Most political topics can be connected to technology: technology after all is often how we hear of and discuss these things.
See my response above. You can also log out and see if your comments are shown to a user who isn't logged in. If your comments are only shown to you when you are logged in, then you are shadowbanned.
Hey there, sorry for the late reply. It's as simple as logging out and viewing the page. If you can't see your comments, they are not being shown to anyone but you when you are logged in. I asked hn moderation about this. It has to do with being flagged and downvoted. I don't know the remaining details. I hope this helps. I practically begged hn to consider the ramification of shadowbanning and the like. I understand the spam angle, but as a minority (who also has minority opinions) it makes me very sad that people are unwilling to believe that people dare disagree with them.
It's not strictly tech. But tech tends to be both new and intellectual. Sometimes it can be an old phenomenon but also curious; people often just paste Wikipedia links here and they trend.
From the guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
there is and always has been a strong prohibition of anything political on HN. it is widely and frequently discussed as the main problem with HN. Usually, a post like this would be removed very quickly
There are many objections that could be raised to both my tone and content there but I don't think "pedantic" is one of them.
It's certainly mocking. The subject matter is overly political. It's even plausible that it strays across the line laid down by the HN guidelines, although personally I think it's acceptable given the context. Something about fighting fire with fire.
Those stories aren't very visible because they are BS. Few people are dumb enough to think than a puppet government set up by an occupying force will improve their lives. Those dancers are either paid actors or not very bright.
The double standard I would like to see addressed is this: will any country have enough cojones to boycott the World Cup this year. My guess is no.
Like the other commenter has said, the reason there are no such stories is that they would be hypocritical BS, and I'll add, designed to manufacture consent for unlawful military action against a sovereign nation.
The perennially genocidal occupying force controlling all aspects of Palestinian life including forcing them into a subsistence diet, "mowing the lawn" in Gaza every so often, shooting down peaceful unarmed protesters - some of them disabled - and all that before 7/Oct - has no right to complain about terrorism, for it's what it has inflicted on Palestinians for decades.
My favorite book about systems programming on UNIX systems is the book by the late Stevens, but this book more detailed, Linux-specific and if updated (after 16 years, in which Linux did not stand still), could steal the crown from Stevens.
The question we need to answer as a society is if we are willing to tolerate any innocent people to go to jail as the "price" of catching a few more criminals.
> I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge.
Because of that (or rather, to sort out the mess), I always felt that citizens should have a right to be informed of every law that they are expected to obey so that at least in principle, they'd be able to comply (to be effective, plain language explanations would need to be included).
Imagine an app that told you, whenever you cross state boundaries, what is different in the law now from your previous location.
They certainly have the right. All laws are (effectively?) public in every country I can think of, even when the law is ‘don't upset the not-so-benevolent dictator’. The problem is that to try to cover all the corner cases the sheer amount of law in effect in rule-of-law countries is too much for any one human to realistically consume, and that's before getting into the various _interpretations_ of the laws given by case law, precedent, etc. Any ‘plain-language’ explanation would be a) still gigantic and b) wrong in new and exciting ways — this is why the entire profession of ‘lawyer’ exists.
To make this more practicable you might be able to drastically narrow the context of the information, e.g. to the current task. So you could have an app that watches everything you do and tells you if you're (possibly) about to break a law. The extreme version of this looks like wearing a body camera at all times and having a little ‘voice of the state’ in your ear that tells you what your legal options are on every circumstance. Maybe a little dystopian, especially if it starts reporting you if you don't follow its guidance.
The original article doesn't dwell too much on the RAM limitation, but I agee with you that 8 GB is too little
for the near future or even today.
I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026.
Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning some features. Currently, the OS uses much of the available RAM for caching (I've seen "40%" of total OS RAM usage) to make the system faster, whereas 8 GB RAM permits only essential caching.
(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
That's nothing compared to my car! It fires on all cylinders, instead of saving 3 out of 4 cylinders for a day when I will really need the power.
The reality is that nobody outside of HN cares about 8GB vs 16GB of RAM. You can do anything you want or need to do with an 8GB Macbook, including running a million dollar business, or working with anything creative on the highest level. If you are actually doing something which requires 16GB of RAM on a Mac, then you are doing state of the art tech stuff and should be rolling in money already and have no problem spending thousands and thousands on your computer.
>(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.
> Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.
I think it’s as simple as: 8GB is what the iPhones using the A18 Pro had. It’s this thing Apple likes to do where to keep costs down, they use some iPhone part or other SoC/SiP they have laying around as close to its standard configuration as possible with minimal changes.
Their new Studio Displays for example have an A19 Pro and 128GB of NAND. For basically just the firmware. Why? Because that’s the least amount of storage Apple ships with an A19 Pro iPhone, because like the previous Studio Display from 2022 which had an A13 Bionic in there, they probably just shoved an iPhone board in there to handle the logic and I/O.
So in theory, if they update the MacBook Neo next year to an A19 Pro, it should have 12GB of RAM.
Like freeways, it's not clear that increasing the baseline ram for basic laptops is an effective way to mitigate software bloat. Rather it likely creates bloat.
For scientific search experiments, you may like to consider using PyTerrier (which facilitates comparing multiple search model types - (sparse) vector space model; Boolean model; Binary Probabilistic Model; Support Vector Learning-to-Rank model; Divergence from Randomness model; (dense)embedding ranked retrieval models etc.).
As was already said in one of the reference videos, it's impressive what one person can do.
But the next step is to define an architecture where authors can defined/implement plug-ins with particular modular capabilities instead of one big monolith. For example, instead of front-end (GUI) and back-end (feeds), there ought to be a middle layer that models some of the domain logic (events: surces, filters, sinks; stories/time lines etc.).
reply