> Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.
If the author of the article had done a bit of searching, they might know that Canadians (the primary predictable American ficasco spectators) phased out pennies years ago. We also "had no plan" for the remaining pennies, and we didn't really need one. They get deposited, lost, and thrown away over time—that's why the mint had to keep printing them. Now they've gone the way of the 50-cent piece. It's not a big deal. Frankly I'm surprised the US didn't do it sooner.
The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.
Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.
Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.
It's not acceptable to attack fellow community members like this on HN. Critiquing the article is fine, as is flagging it if you think it's unfit for HN. But personal attacks are not OK, no matter who it is or why you think it's justifiable. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.
Since you're speaking as a moderator I'd like to ask for clarification on the official position:
Was that actually a personal attack, or was it a verifiable claim about the quantity and type of submissions by this user? Is the problem that it was labeled "propaganda", and would it have been ok without that word?
I thought it was useful context to have a look at the submission history. There is a slew of recent [dead] submissions. At what point is it fair to call that out? Or is it about the wording?
It's generally not OK to bring up someone's past activity, whether that activity be on HN or elsewhere, as way of attacking someone in a discussion on HN. It fits within the "generic tangents" guideline. We can never know if they still agree with what they said or posted in the past. The submitter's history, and indeed the submitter's identity, is not really relevant to the substance of the article, and we want the discussion to be about the substance of the article. (Of course it's relevant if the submitter is the author, because then they can engage in Q&A about the article's content.)
If users notice that someone is posting large volumes of low-quality content (i.e., spam, self-promotional content or articles that break the guidelines) they can email us and we'll investigate.
In this case the user in question just posts a lot of stuff from mainstream publications on either side of the ideological centre – i.e., lots from the NY Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic but also WSJ and Bloomberg. The articles that are [dead] are from sites like The Information that are only banned due to being hard-paywalled.
It's obviously inflammatory to describe their pattern of posting as "propaganda". (Sure it can be argued and debated in the right context, but this is not that.) But even without the word "propaganda", the guidelines still ask us to keep discussions on-topic and to avoid generic tangents.
> But the thing that got me, in all honesty, was the brand. “Fujitsu laptop” sounds like colour in a William Gibson novel: “crawling into the avionics bay, Case took out a battered Fujitsu refurb, and stuck a JTAG port in the flight computer—”.
It's kind of hard to take this opinion seriously after that.
Gibson knew dick about computers in 1984, which makes his early cyberpunk works more interesting because so much of the technical stuff is pure imagination and guesswork. He peppered his 1980s prose with Japanese-sounding brand names because he assumed that the Japanese would dominate computing the way they dominated electronics for things people like William Gibson do—things like listening to music. And it didn't quite work out that way, because Japanese computer manufacturers tailored their output to peculiar Japanese needs (specifically, needing high resolution displays and lots of memory in order to draw kanji well and needing Japanese language support in the OS) rather than hewing to emerging industry standards. This kept prices of NEC, Epson, and Sharp gear high, and allowed American manufacturers like IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Apple to get a significant foothold in the emerging industry worldwide. Toshiba emerged as an early leader in laptops, but laptops wouldn't really find their market niche until the mid-90s or so. So these days, you go to like Den-Den Town in Osaka, and you will find Dells and HPs for sale, and of course all the pretty Japanese girls are all about their Apple gear, just like here. Even so, Japanese buyers tend to prefer Japanese brands, followed by other Asian brands, and Western brands (except for Apple) third. So I can totally see a Japanese executive rocking a Fujitsu laptop, but I haven't seen Westerners in possession of one.
I found myself using Fujitsu tablets for a long while because I prefer using a stylus, and there was a long while they were the best option --- in particular, the Stylistic line and the ST4100 and ST4110 were perfect for my needs, esp. the latter w/ its daylight-viewable transflective display. Still worked last time I needed to scan something.
The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was a nice replacement (save for daylight viewability), but when it was time to replace it, wound up w/ a Book 3 Pro 360 convertible.
Windows 11 has annoyed me to the point that I am contemplating a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Wacom display, which feels like a much easier way to get a Linux laptop (modulo the need to make a shell and source a battery and wire everything together).
Lenovo ThinkPad Yogas are also an excellent choice. Be sure to get one with the "ThinkPad Yoga" branding (not just Yoga). You get the high Linux compatibility of ThinkPads, tablet/hybrid modes, and a stylus. I found a used one for $300 and it's my new art machine.
How is that not helpful? A group of volunteers working in their spare time to do something incredibly difficult clearly aren't working fast enough for this person. The logical thing to do would be to jump in and help.
If you read the rest of the posts above the one I'm replying to I think it's pretty clear this wasn't a serious question. It was asked ironically as in "the rest of the work doesn't matter, they're taking too long to get M5 support out"
I'm saying it's an open project and if people want to bitch they're going too slow they are welcome to contribute.
Asahi Linux is a volunteer project. Devs commit their free time to work on something incredibly difficult, giving people the ability to run Linux on an entirely new platform, and all people can do is complain it isn't good enough.
And this is just one example, you see this kind of crap all over the Open Source community. Providing constructive feedback is one thing, bitching that they aren't working fast enough is another. Either get involved and find some way to help out, or shut up.
I mean... people could just stop bitching that free projects don't cater to their every whim. Then people wouldn't have to point out how stupid that mentality is.
If you'd care to suggest a solution I'm sure everyone would love to hear it.
If you read the rest of the posts above the one I'm replying to I think it's pretty clear this wasn't a serious question. It was asked ironically as in "the rest of the work doesn't matter, they're taking too long to get M5 support out"
I'm saying it's an open project and if people want to bitch they're going too slow they are welcome to contribute.
It's interesting that Samsung's launching this, even though the Vision Pro hasn't been setting any sales records. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the chasing-Apple department at Samsung... surely they'd have the business process to stop projects when the Apple target isn't successful.
Ya. Bit of a shame. It’s OP’s choice of course and I get that it’s kitschy or whatever but I think he’s leaving money on the table as a commercial product.
If it were actually funny I think I’d feel different, but ironically calling a native mac app ‘exe’ just feels like a bad punchline that’s not going to land with anyone who understands the value proposition of the app in the first place.
Personally I think dropping the exe and just calling it notepad is the obvious low-hanging fruit. I like the nostalgic aesthetic—it’s refreshing in this age of cookie-cutter tailwindcss splash pages, but exe is just quite confusing.
Yeah, that's really sad and totally undermines my UX on iOS (my iPad particularly). On my Android phone and macOS FF is my go-to browser, a delightful, irreplaceable experience. Sometimes people are amazed by the experience when I show them, look, no ads. But then they go back to their phones and just use whatever crap they use.
I was hoping that the EU directive [1] would give FF a chance of using their own engine, at least in the EU, but no word from that camp, so... I guess not.
The charms of Indiana have been consistently lost on me over the years; it enhanced the article for me, and I read nearly his entire blog after his Greenland rantlet. I learned a few things.
This is way too much spite for an article about coins. Lord.