> Cute, but no. I will absolutely do none of things. You need to make it as easy as possible for me to learn about you. If instructions are necessary it’s not easy. If you want me to feed links to an LLM then just do it for me and share the LLM output.
Ok, typical honest-and-probably-correct-but-snarky HN take. Fine I can deal with this.
> I don’t think I ever once ever seen an interesting or impressive GitHub repo.
> Dude. I don't think OP is the problem anymore...
The most active GitHub profiles are students. Their repos are almost entirely class work which has an interesting factor of zero.
Almost all professionals don’t have meaningful or interesting GitHubs. Most people do work for their employer and have hobby projects that go no where. This is fine! These people get hired!
I do like portfolio pages where someone has finished something. I honestly don’t even care if it’s good. If you have a game on Steam that has only 3 review but it’s finished that’s spectacular. A near instant hire honestly. Just don’t expect me to actually download and run anything. Screenshots and videos please. YouTube is fine.
Ok I dig that totally makes more sense. I thought you were saying you've never seen ANY GH repo that's interesting. You just meant a personal GH repo. Thank you for clarifying and sorry for my own snark!
Similarly - one of my biggest complaints about almost every rating system in production is how just absolutely lazy they are. And by that, I mean everyone seems to think "the object's collective rating is an average of all the individual ratings" is good enough. It's not.
Take any given Yelp / Google / Amazon page and you'll see some distribution like this:
User 1: "5 stars. Everything was great!"
User 2: "5 stars. I'd go here again!"
User 3: "1 star. The food was delicious but the waiter was so rude!!!one11!! They forgot it was my cousin's sister's mother's birthday and they didn't kiss my hand when I sat down!! I love the food here but they need to fire that one waiter!!"
Yelp: 3.6 stars average rating.
One thing I always liked about FourSquare was that they did NOT use this lazy method. Their score was actually intelligent - it checked things like how often someone would return, how much time they spent there, etc. and weighted a review accordingly.
I buy a lot of "technical things", and you constantly see one or two star ratings from people who either don't know what the thing is actually supposed to do, or don't know how to use it.
My favorites: A power supply got one star for not simultaneously delivering the selected limit voltage and the selected limit current into the person's random load. In other words, literally for not violating the laws of physics. An eccentric-cone flare tool got one star for the cone being off center. "Eccentric" is in the name, chum....
I take this not as people being dumb, but as a clear conflict of interest: people want to be able to rate the logistics provider separately from the product, but marketplaces don't want to give people the option to do that — as that would reveal that the marketplace will sometimes decide to use "the known-shitty provider" for some orders. (And make no mistake, the marketplace knows that that provider is awful!)
Or shopping for USB charging bricks. No matter where in the quality spectrum you look, there is a constant percentage of one-star reviews for “this overheated and burned my house down.”
Totally. I’ve noticed lots of sites moving away from comments on reviews too. For example, Amazon reviews on mobile can be “helpful” or I can report them.
Why can’t I downvote or comment on it? As a user, I just want more context.
But obviously, it’s not in Amazon’s interest to make me not want to buy something.
I would personally frame that as a review for poor documentation. A device shouldn't expect users to know laws of physics to understand it's limitations.
If you don't know that particular law of physics, you have no business messing with electricity. You'll very likely damage something, and quite possibly damage someone.
We're talking about a general-purpose device meant to drive a circuit you create yourself. I'm not sure what a good analogy would be. Expecting the documentation for a saw to tell you you have to cut all four table legs the same length?
Yes, people are dumb and will use dangerous things without fully understanding them. All household devices like toasters and washing machines already have a warning section in their manual, why shouldn't a potentially far more dangerous device also be expected to have it?
The saw analogy isn't a good one - saws work within the range of physics that humans have instinctual understanding of. We instinctively know what causes a table to wobble. We do not instinctively know the physical behaviors of electricity.
You might counter that people should know this before messing with electricity, and I'll agree. But what people should know and what they actually know are often very different.
A warning in the manual might prevent some overeager teenager who got their hands on this device from learning this particular law of physics the hard way.
> All household devices like toasters and washing machines already have a warning section in their manual, why shouldn't a potentially far more dangerous device also be expected to have it?
Actually, a toaster is more dangerous than a low voltage bench supply if you use it in the maximally moronic way. If you ask me to set a fire on purpose, and give me a choice of which to use, I'll pick the toaster. And, by the way, I don't buy the idea that people "instinctively" understand fire.
But the other, more relevant part is that a toaster or a washing machine is used for a single purpose in a stereotyped way. There are a bounded number of fairly well understood mistakes that people are likely to make frequently. You can list them.
A bench supply, like many other tools, can be used in an almost infinite number of ways, which you are meant to be designing for yourself. If you buy a washing machine, you're "saying" that you want to wash clothes. If you buy a variable power supply, you're "saying" that you want to design or repair electronics that might do anything, or do electroplating, or who-knows-what-else. There is no complete list.
You cannot do such things safely without actually understanding how they work, in more depth than an instruction manual is going to be able to give you, even if the manual somehow knew what you were planning to do, which of course it doesn't. You can't design an electronic circuit, or a plating protocol, and you definitely can't troubleshoot either one, without having a clue about Ohm's law.
People sometimes have their own ideas, based on actual understanding of something significant, and they need general purpose tools to support those ideas.
> The saw analogy isn't a good one - saws work within the range of physics that humans have instinctual understanding of. We instinctively know what causes a table to wobble.
... and yet people will try to build a table by attaching each leg with a single nail in the end, because they don't instinctively understand wood grain, or that there are lateral forces and leverage involved. The saw manual doesn't get into those things either. That's woodworking knowledge you're meant to have before you buy the saw. Even though you could easily put something heavy on the table and get hurt when it collapses.
Saw instructions are restricted to the actual process of sawing. They don't get into table design, not even the "inobvious" parts. Actually, many power saw instructions don't even say much about how to saw. They tell you how to mount the blade, and what this or that switch does. After the endless warnings.
> But what people should know and what they actually know are often very different.
I could also say that people don't read manuals. Especially not if the manuals are gigantic tomes, which is where they end up when they go in the direction you're talking about. The manual for your average power tool has pages of fine-print warnings, basically trying to explicitly forbid every stupid way somebody has misused that kind of tool in the past. Essentially no users read them.
I have an air nailer whose instructions helpfully inform me that I shouldn't use acetylene instead of air. It specifically says that. That's like toaster instructions warning you not to make your toast out of asbestos panels dusted with cyanide.
Hooking your nailer up to acetylene is not an obvious mistake to make. It's not an idea that comes to mind. It probably wouldn't even work well (before the fireworks started). It's not easy, either. You'd have to kludge up some weird adapter system to make the deliberately incompatible fittings work. Anybody who works around acetylene knows really well why it's fucking suicidally stupid. And, yes, if you don't know that, you shouldn't be messing with acetylene. Or nailers.
But apparently some cretin did it one time, and now it's in the instructions. Even so, the instructions for that nailer don't say that it's not for styrofoam. Which is more the sort of thing that was going on with the power supply. I guess nobody's lost an eye to a ballistic nail that came through a piece of styrofoam yet. Or at least nobody's had the gall to stand in a courtroom and say it was the nailer company's fault.
The cretin with the acetylene wouldn't have read the warnings, and now that they're longer, the next cretin is even less likely to read them. In fact, nobody expects most users to read the warnings. The warnings are not there to improve safety. They're purely for defense against lawsuits. They might even work for that, but they're not what you'd write if you actually set out to improve safety.
The real safety impact , if any, is almost certainly negative. Warning about obviously off the wall idiotic behavior overwhelm any actually useful warnings, and prevent them from being seen. On the other end of the spectrum, overcautious warnings, if they are read, breed contempt for warnings about really important, possibly inobvious risks. More is not better.
... and bringing it back to reviews and that power supply, such supplies typically come with a specification sheet and either no instructions, or one page with a few bullet points that would make no sense if you didn't understand how voltage and current relate. So even if the documentation on that particular supply were in some sense inadequate, it would still be up to the standards of any other supply you might buy. And in any case, the reviewer's claim was that there was something wrong with the device itself because it didn't do something the reviewer should have known was impossible. That's not a useful review.
This feels like a stretch, all the more so given they were specifically talking about "technical things". Assumptions around documentation, reading of docs and widespread physics knowledge seem like they could all be different here.
I think that numeric ratings (especially if only one number can be specified) (and then averaging or making or other types of statistics) are not as useful as actually reading the reviews in order to determine whether or not it addresses your concerns with it, and if they have specific complaints or specific things they say are good, to judge them by yourself according to your own intentions.
Agreed. And particularly with the advent of LLMs, this is something that could be done quite easily. Don't even give users an option of giving a numeric/star rating - just allow people to write a sentence or two (or 10) and let the LLM do the sentiment analysis and aggregate a score.
-1 stars! They forgot it was my cousin's sister's mother's birthday, and the obnoxious waiter snarkily pointed out that my cousin's sister is just another cousin, and her mother is just my aunt.
With averages: to have 5 stars you need a hudred 5 star ratings for each one star rating.
If one would normalize the ratings they could change without doing anything. A former customer may start giving good ratings elsewhere making yours worse or give poor ones inproving yours.
Maybe the relevance of old ratings should decline.
Is that actually bad? What happened is that we learned more about the customer's rating system. I might never have had Cuban food and love it the first time I try it on Miami but then keep eating it and it turns out the first restaurant was actually not as good as I thought, I just really like Cuban food.
This actually somewhat goes into another pet peeve of mine with rating systems. I'd like to see ratings for how much I will like it. An extreme but simple example might be that the ratings of a vegan customer of a steak house might be very relevant to other vegans but very irrelevant to non-vegans. More subtle versions are simply about shared preferences. I'd love to see ratings normalized and correlated to other users to create a personalized rating. I think Netflix used to do stuff like this back in the day and you could request your personal predicted score via API but now that's all hidden and I'm instead shown different covers off the same shows over and over
Then could let everyone start with 100 one star ratings. If they rate their first thing it counts as 1/101 vote. If they start with a one star rating it will be their highest ever.
Alternatively you could apply the same rating to the customer and display it next to their user name along with their own review counter.
What also seems a great option is to simply add up all the stars :) Then the grumpy people wont have to do anything.
This is super cool! Thanks for the hard work you've clearly put into this.
My dream product in this space (...that I didn't know existed until I discovered your site about 10 minutes ago LOL):
I listen to music when I work/code, and I used to loooooove Spotify Playlist Radio (a feature the reason for which they killed I will never understand) because it helped me discover new music in the style of music I already enjoyed working to. Liked a song? Add it to the seed list and click play to fine-tune the radio station.
So what I really want is just a fine-tuneable infinite stream of novel music to work to. And by fine-tuneable, I mean I'd love to be able to nudge the generation (Pandora style) with thumbs ups / thumbs downs, or other more specific guidance/feedback (more bass, faster tempo, etc.) until I have this perfectly crafted, customized-for-me stream of music.
I'd probably listen to it all day and happily pay $$ for this.
A few years ago I did a deep dive on expense-tracking apps/services - ostensibly to write a big comparison blog post about them all - but that never happened - but really because I wanted something just like this but without all the bells and whistles that most apps have.
The two biggest gripes I remember having when I did that deep dive:
1) It sounds so simple, but most apps/services which promised "import your statements and we'll take care of the rest" simplicity fell down over the simplest issue: If I have my monthly rent auto-drafted, and some months it shows up on the 31st and other months on the 1st, for example, the apps absolutely could not handle that (and I'd have a month with double-rent showing in my breakdown).
2) I just had no interest in budgeting functionality built in. Lots of people do. I didn't - I just wanted to see a simple breakdown of expenses just like ExpenseOwl (hence my extra thank-yous). SO many apps assumed that budgeting functionality was a must-have that they over-complexified things and forced the user to enter budgets, etc.
It’s remarkable how this has changed. Back in what I call the “Facebook golden age” (2012-2016), before it turned to complete crap, it was unthinkable to host an event that was NOT organized by Facebook. I recall throwing birthday and holiday parties and all I had to do was scroll through my friends list and invite everyone and that was that. Everyone would see it and everyone would RSVP.
I just don't see how this is true. OpenAI has a massive cash & hardware pile -- they'll adapt and learn from what DeepSeek has done and be in a position to build and train 10x-50x-100x (or however) faster and better. They are getting a wake-up call for sure but I don't think much is going to be thrown away.
My other favorite fun fact about this number (other than this new prime info which I am excited to have learned) is that in almost every store I’ve tried it, someone has used that (along with a local area code) as the phone number for a store loyalty card.
I’m a Bay Area guy, so if you’re ever at Safeway and need to get the discount without giving up your personal info, 415-867-5309 has got ya covered ;)
> someone has used that (along with a local area code) as the phone number for a store loyalty card.
Usually because for far too long, noisy retailers wanted a "phone number" upon checkout (even if one was paying cash -- Radio Shack was an especially bad one back in the day). For those who didn't want to get yet more telemarketing calls, repeating "Jenny's number" [1] from the song was a way to "just buy" whatever it was you wanted. The minimum wage cashier didn't care, but the cash register demanded "a number". So giving the cashier Jenny's number worked.
This has largely faded now that they can track everyone via one's credit card numbers.
There's a conceptually linked concept called the PAR (Payment Account Reference) which some payment systems return.
You can't transact with it directly, but theoretically it refers to the same payment instrument whether you accessed it by the 16-digit PAN on the card, a mobile wallet that generates a new dPAN each time, or a token that corresponds to a secure vault platform.
It's useful for things like transit payments where someone might tap their card when entering the train and their phone when exiting, and they need to treat them as equivalent for "fares for a single traveller/card can be no more than $x per day"
If a given retailer gets the same number off your card each time you do contactless, then that retailer /could/ track you via that number.
If all retailers get the same number, then they can each track you, and correlate your purchases between themselves.
Note, there just needs to be /some/ constant number from whatever comes through via contactless, the number does not have to be the magic numbers that post the sale to the card.
You can use the number with your local area code just about anywhere at the pump to get a gas discount as well (a common loyalty reward program benefit).
Fun fact about these — when the treasury first issued these, many people decided to cut them into odd off-center pieces and sell the resulting notes as miscut errors.
Once that started happening, the treasury (BEP to be specific) very quickly changed the serial numbers so they’re all very recognizable as having come from an uncut sheet. I didn’t check the latest for all denominations, but I know for $1 bills they all start with 99.
So if you see a “miscut dollar error” for sale on eBay or the like, always check the serial. If it starts with 99 then it’s just someone who had some fun with a pair of scissors and it’s not a real error.
To wit: the Mint will also sell you in line with Chinese numerology collectible bills with “777”s or “888”s in their SNs with a decorative envelope. Bless the marketing exec who’s finding nontraditional markets for collectible currency.
Sevens are a massive number in Chinese numerology: The 7 parts (yin/yang/metals), the 7 steps, 7 captures, etc.
Eights are symbols of prosperity, wealth, generosity, good fortune in business, etc.
Six is a kinda useless number for money -- Smoothness and whatnot are less for money and more for one's tongue. You'd name a wine after a six (I've seen "Dice Wine" referring to 6-sided dice) but not look for it in bills
Well, https://hsbc.banklocationmaps.com/en/chn/shanghai only lists one branch at a street address of 666, and that one is really just sharing the address of the commercial center where it's located, but that still seems like enough for this point.
8 is heavily represented. 6 is a runner-up. 7 doesn't appear to be significant in this context.
Consider the branch phone numbers:
3888 3888
3888 8468
3888 8900
3888 1200
6279 8582
3888 3111
3888 1318
3888 1188
3888 6455
3888 8618
3888 8688
3888 1218
3888 6388
There is technically one 7 in there, but it seems clear that the bank would have preferred not to have it. Counting only the second halves, 8 is overwhelmingly popular, so is 1 (for reasons I don't know), 6 is only barely ahead of what's typical, but still in third place, and 7 doesn't even exist.
For those who are interested: the Chinese character for 8 is a pair of downward lines, close together at the top, far apart at the bottom. Looks a bit like / \. The idea behind it, as far as I know, is that it represents things growing larger, which is why it is of interest where wealth is concerned.
The sold listings for "miscut dollar bill" would beg to differ.
I am _always_ and _continually_ surprised at what people will pay for things. Literally _nobody_ scaled back their consumption or purchasing during post-COVID inflation. Home prices are sky-high but it's still a sellers market because buyers are scared that prices will jump again and instead of simply being a difficult purchase, maybe next year it will be an impossible one. Must be easy money being a realtor right now.
Every time I have sold something on Craigslist or FB Marketplace in the last few years, I list it 25% higher than what I'd actually pay if I were buying it myself and expect to be negotiated down to something sensible. So far, excluding the low-effort moronic "what's your lowest price" texts, exactly ZERO buyers have tried to negotiate down.
I have come to the conclusion that most people simply have no upper limit to what they will pay for something they want. A few will scoff and turn away. Some will complain about it on the Internet, but most will buy it anyway. I don't run a business but if I did, this would be my golden rule of pricing.
I think people have an upper limit. Sure, $7 eggs might be below the limit but if you want into a grocery store because you wanted to make french toast and the eggs are $25 are you buying them or just eating something else?
I would agree that the upper limit is above what the common price is though. This should really be a good thing because you want people to consume goods; that makes the economy go in a circle. For necessities like food and gas (energy) the government goes out of its way to subsidize them.
I just think most people don't feel like putting in the work to figure out what a clearing price for an action would be when selling not-auctioned items. This is where things like RealPage get dangerous because it will find the best price and that best price is not what the median people can afford.
kinda off topic but since you're an expert here: what do people do with these uncut sheets? Is it mainly for collectors?
also, my favorite form of getting currency is $2 bills in a 100 stack (so $200) from the bank. I used to use these for gift money on holidays :) but unfortunately my credit union doesn't order new stacks anymore, just jumbled up old $2 bills now.
Woz pays a print shop to perforate them so that he can troll people by tearing perforated bills off a sheet and handing them out. If anyone asks where he got them, he says "Oh I have some friends at a print shop that do these up for me" and leaves out the part where they started as uncut sheets of legal currency.
I will point out since this site is full of professional pedants, Woz plainly enjoys the art and craft of exaggerating stories and not correcting interviewers :)
A great question - it's something the BEP offers to collectors basically for the cool factor. People frame them, give them as gifts, etc. It's just kind of fun to see real money as it comes off the press (and, thankfully, it inspires lots of collectors!)
$2 bills are SUPER fun. 99.9% are not worth more than $2, but they still bring a smile to peoples' faces when you leave them as tips, etc. I always keep a stack in my cash box at coin shows to give out as change to kids, tips to the pages, etc.
I’m visiting Vietnam for Tet, and one cultural quirk of theirs that I’ve learned is that $2 bills are considered lucky money. So much so that kids there will hold onto those $2 bills as keepsakes (though they could spend them). And thus I made my first ever trip to the bank to special order a bunch of $2s.
Something I wonder is if an uncut sheet of $2 bills would be considered extraordinarily lucky, because it’s a bunch of $2s in nearly mint condition. Or if it would be considered incredibly unlucky because those kids would have no easy way of cutting them perfectly.
They are fairly rare. They are the least printed bill [1] and aren't included in a typical cash register, so just randomly stumbling upon one in the wild is a pretty rare. Sometimes people think they are fake because they've never seen one before. The only reliable way to get them is to specially request them from a bank or order them from the government. Also, because of the novelty, people tend to collect them, at least informally, so they don't tend to circulate much either.
When I worked fast food, a customer paid with a few $2 bills. It wasn't strange to me. But when I tried to hand them as change to another customer, they looked at me like I was an idiot and demanded that I pay them in real money.
Before then, I was cashing my paycheck at a bank. I'd occasionally ask them for $50 of it in $2 bills. The bank had them approximately half the time, and it was fun to pay for things with them.
How do people know that they are rare? I don't even know what bills exist in my country but I know they keep changing them now and then. I wouldn't be able to tell whether it was rare or just a new bill I haven't seen before.
The US has a small set of valid bank notes. It's not like other countries that have multiple issuers, each with their own schedules for when to update designs.
On top of that, this isn't just a design that a person hasn't seen often, it's a denomination. Think of the 500 EUR notes, they were unfamiliar to many people.
$2 bills are somewhat rare and are considered lucky. We could use math to prove that on average $2 dollar bill is worth more than $2. 1 - There exist collectable $2 dollar bills which are worth significantly more than $2. 2 - there are no $2 dollar bills which are worth less than $2 due to being legal tender. From 1 and 2 - average value of all $2 bills is above $2.
Counterpoint: there are places in the world where people will not accept a $2 bill due to unfamiliarity - it may as well be a $7 bill. Therefore, there exists a $2 that's worth nothing as legal tender.
All it takes is a cooperating bank teller, $200, and some patience and you can order a strap of $2's. Chances are large that 100 uncirculated $2 bills in sequential order will be ready for you to pick up in a few days.
I don't expect there's much more value than $200 in there, but if you disagree, you're welcome to figure out what your local bank's limit on currency ordering is :P
The San Diego zoo used to make a point of stocking all their cashiers with $2 bills, as a subtle "this is how much we bring to the local economy" indicator.
It's not a bad idea for a small business, either, until everyone starts doing it.
There's a strip club in Portland that only gives out $2 bills in change, as the minimum you should toss on stage at any one time.
What's really funny is, if you walk into any other bar in Portland and tip with them, there's a good chance the bartender will ask if you've just been to that stripclub.
I bought a sheet of $2 bills and tried to cut them myself with scissors first. My wife took one look at my handiwork and said "Well, you're going to jail."
Steve Wozniak famously would get a bunch of $2 uncut sheets, and have them perforated and bound into a tear-off book. Then, he would dramatically produce the book and tear out a sheet of them to pay for things, as a sort of gag. I think it got him investigated by the Secret Service at one point.
It is discouraged to well actually I didn't technically say that they were counterfeit although someone who is not as very smart as me may have incorrectly concluded that from my ambiguous statements.
No but the Secret Service is basically required to investigate if someone sends them a tip that they suspect they’ve seen more than four (five?) counterfeit notes at a time.
* With $1 bills wrap a gift with them as "wrapping paper" you bought at the mall. Generates lots of confusion because it's freaky how real they look (because they are in fact real dollars). Recipient can keep as a novelty or cut up and use.
* If you are giving a gift to someone you know is into crafting and has a precision paper trimmer you can wrap a gift with some higher value items ($100 or $200 total) so the wrapping paper is the gift. Or crumple and use as padding inside the box. I find this annoying personally.
* Talk about money and how they make money with your kids - the novelty is a plus here.
There are primarily two things that those laws are concerned with: preventing fraud and preventing a shortage.
Shortages aren't much of an issue anymore, as so many transactions are digital, and fabric / paper currency doesn't have any precious metal. The actual value isn't lost, and is easily replaced.
Defacing currency to pretend a bill or coin is one of higher value is pretty hard to do simply by cutting. Most businesses won't take such heavily damaged currency, and banks won't exchange notes with less than half of the original present. Collectors hoping for rarity ("mistake" bills) are, like any speculator, on their own for verifying authenticity (ensuring serial numbers are right, usually).
More to your point, you've answered your own question. Non-fabric currency can also easily be damaged. The convenience and cost of printed fabric / paper versus stamped metal outweighs the risk posed by weakness to damage, and replacing a certain amount of loss each year is generally expected.
They’re illegal not because of a law but because they were never issued for public use. They were used (briefly) for internal treasury / fed transfers. (Sort of like the mythical trillion-dollar coin that gets talked about every time the debt ceiling conversation comes up).
Because they were never issued privately or meant for use outside of the treasury system, if an individual were to own one it’s because it was stolen or otherwise improperly taken from the treasury.
There are rumors that a few exist in private collections (and I’ve heard of one a single degree away from me), but I’ve never seen it or confirmed that it’s anything more than a rumor.
There is one in the Smithsonian national collection however, and if you get an appointment to view the collection you can see and hold it. Pretty cool.
Ok, typical honest-and-probably-correct-but-snarky HN take. Fine I can deal with this.
> I don’t think I ever once ever seen an interesting or impressive GitHub repo.
Dude. I don't think OP is the problem anymore...
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