Hacker News: uses

New comment by uses in "Addiction Markets"

uses — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 17:19:14 +0000

As a Magic player, yeah some people definitely have a compulsive addictive gambling relationship with the product. And Wizards has been leaning into that recently with more rare versions of mechanically identical cards.

However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.

And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.

New comment by uses in "1 Trillion Web Pages Archived"

uses — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 15:51:51 +0000

Yeah, I did a scraping project a while back where I wanted to look back at historical snapshots. Getting the info out of Internet Archive was surprisingly difficult. I ended up using https://pypi.org/project/pywaybackup/, which helped quite a bit.

New comment by uses in "Health care costs are soaring. Blame insurers, drug companies and your employer"

uses — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 16:17:08 +0000

Really? I thought most of the excess cost of healthcare in the US is due to the artificially restricted supply of doctors, causing them to have extremely high salaries compared to similarly demanding work in the US, or to the same work in other countries (although US salaries are super high in general). But the article kind of handwaves and vaguely blames big business or whatever.

New comment by uses in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

uses — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 02:28:00 +0000

To the extent that housing speculation exists, it's because of the lack of supply. So you have the cause and effect reversed.

New comment by uses in "AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more"

uses — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:57:20 +0000

Doesn't this type of thing prove that we can just... start manufacturing things domestically if we really wanted to? Which would presumably be when it actually makes sense to do so? But it mostly doesn't right now, so we mostly don't.

There are certainly benefits to being able to make something down the block and quickly iterate. But that's a different thing from industrial scale production. And if we really wanted that benefit wouldn't we just... do it?

New comment by uses in "Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]"

uses — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 20:04:31 +0000

he’s saying that the productivity of devs is increasing so much, especially during the prototyping phase, that gathering feedback is becoming the bottleneck, hence there is more PM labor needed. he didn’t say anything about reducing the quantity of dev labor needed.

New comment by uses in "Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024)"

uses — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:48:16 +0000

PNG should be used for some types of graphics, like whenever you have big areas of solid color (like logos) or any time you need translucency / transparency. Although, nowadays you can and should use SVG in most of those cases.

JPEG should be used for everything else.

New comment by uses in "The Gentle Singularity"

uses — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:10:17 +0000

No... the reason housing prices are high and rising is that not enough housing is getting build in the places people want to live. The main reason for that is that the people who already live in those places can block construction of new housing. That, and zoning.

New comment by uses in "Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers"

uses — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:24:35 +0000

You're gloating about the hardship which editors, journalists, writers, our informational institutions are facing because... sites stopped having a Links page in 1998? What the fuck, man.

New comment by uses in "We are no longer a serious country"

uses — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:24:45 +0000

It's simply that blue states haven't been making a case that democrats know how to run things. I would seriously recommend reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

New comment by uses in "In restaurants, We need a new way to signal that we're ready to pay"

uses — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:23:22 +0000

Also in Japan, when you need something? You just raise your hand and say "sumimasen". Instead of waiting forever or needing the wait service to constantly check in on you.

New comment by uses in "Why does everything look infantilized?"

uses — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 03:45:55 +0000

help me understand why adorable mini ice cream cones or the convenience of delicious frozen food is bad for human civilization. and why is a 15 dollar tin of fishwife worse for “the environment” than a 99 cent tin of brunswick?

by the way, it would be most sustainable to not produce at all? that’s certainly a surprise.

i don’t spend a ton of time in spaces where would i get marketed to by this instagram garbo, so maybe i don’t understand the sensation of being spoken down to by it. but it strikes me as the equivalent of watching saturday morning cartoons and then being huffed that all the ads are for silly action figures and play doh.

New comment by uses in "Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece"

uses — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:02:27 +0000

Indeed, the distinction used to be useful. But now, it's not useful because honest-to-God roguelikes are just not getting made outside hobby projects. Meanwhile, roguelites have become a core pillar of modern gaming, artistically and commercially. I think calling roguelites roguelikes is perfectly fine. It's simply what the genre became.

New comment by uses in "China raises tariffs on US goods to 84% as rift escalates"

uses — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 16:11:36 +0000

If this was about national security, we wouldn't be ruining relationships with allies while strengthening adversaries.

If this was about industrial capacity, we wouldn't be attacking education, chilling investment, attacking energy innovation, attacking science and research, and creating a historically unstable economic environment, all without a whisper of any logical industrial policy.

Stop trying to rationalize the destructive foolishness of this leadership.

New comment by uses in "Overengineered Anchor Links"

uses — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 01:24:08 +0000

It's an interesting problem - the approach I've taken in the past is to simply highlight all sections that are on the screen. This is pretty straightforward to do nowadays with intersectionObserver.

New comment by uses in "Nintendo unveils Switch 2 ahead of June 5 launch"

uses — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:43:46 +0000

This was obviously designed as a customer-friendly way to cut scalpers out of at least part of the initial supply chain. Scalping has been an incessant problem in console gaming due to supply shortages, and it makes everyone miserable except the scalpers. Valve provided a similar release strategy with the Deck as what Nintendo appears to be doing here, and it was extremely successful and welcome by the community.

New comment by uses in "Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo"

uses — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 22:01:11 +0000

I don't understand why you brought up ADUs... nobody thinks ADUs are the solution to the decade+ long housing crisis. Blue states need massive state-wide zoning reform that overrides local control.

New comment by uses in "DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes"

uses — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 20:35:36 +0000

Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.

New comment by uses in "Tennis great Steffi Graf got bitten by pickleball's 'fun factor'"

uses — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 16:03:27 +0000

Funny, as a casual player starting out, dinking was a skill I really wanted to gain proficiency in. But now most of my opponents just drive or overhead as hard as they can, which I think is very un-fun to play against. The points are short and there's a lot of randomness. And the best counterplay is to just do what they're doing.

New comment by uses in "We are destroying software"

uses — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 18:46:43 +0000

Yeah, 20 years ago when I started building websites I was still in my CS major. We didn't have these huge layers of libraries and frameworks. I wonder how much I would know now if I didn't have to just build everything myself. We would make all kinds of things and we did it all from scratch - upload files, log in, save stuff in databases using actual sql, entire ecommerce experiences, I would write the whole "front end" and "back end" by hand. And everything was really fast.