Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | williamdclt's commentslogin

> being a regular corporation is not the only possible model

the point is that it _is_ the only possible model in our marvellous Friedmanian economic structure of shareholder primacy. When the only incentive is profit, if your company isn't maximising profit then it will lose to other companies who are. You can hope that the self-imposed ethics guardrails _are_ maximising profit because it the invisible hand of the market cares about that, but 1. it never really does (at scale) and 2. big influences (such as the DoD here) can sway that easily. So we're stuck with negative externalities because all that's incentivised is profit.


>the point is that it _is_ the only possible model in our marvellous Friedmanian economic structure of shareholder primacy. When the only incentive is profit, if your company isn't maximising profit then it will lose to other companies who are. You can hope that the self-imposed ethics guardrails _are_ maximising profit because it the invisible hand of the market cares about that, but 1. it never really does (at scale) and 2. big influences (such as the DoD here) can sway that easily. So we're stuck with negative externalities because all that's incentivised is profit.

I'm curious about your thinking on this subject, if you email me at the email on my profile I have some specific questions about your views on this matter.

We've already created a digital sovereign nation called State of Utopia which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com for short, our manifesto is here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5...

We have real services you can use immediately, such as this p2p phone/chat/video service without time limits (Zoom has a 1 hour meeting limit for free accounts) and no tracking: https://stateofutopia.com/instacall.html

Just yesterday we published a fitness tool proof of concept: https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/bodyfat/

We do believe that it is important to have market dynamics, and our model is for this state to own state-owned companies as well. Getting this model right is important to us and we would like to engage with you on this subject. We hope you'll email us to discuss your thoughts further.


You really don't? It's just a ton easier for most users: it's (almost) like already having an account. Just click a couple times and you're in, no typing at all, no email confirmation or anything like that.

I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care enough and goes the low-friction route.


Not to mention that B2B SaaS needs to provide the login methods that their customers need for their operations, and these typically rely on Google, Microsoft, Okta, etc.

I work on auth for a European startup and this is the case.


> I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?)

Most if the "sign-in with google" accounts I have seen treat it as a shortcut to creating and logging in with an account with the primary email address of the Google account. So you can hit "reset password" and get a conventional password log-in to an account you previously made with the Google auth. If you get locked out of google, it's NBD.

Of course, this is probably not universally the case.


Does Google even let you create an account without Gmail anymore?

Yes. There is a "Use your existing email address" button in the create account dialog.

That users choose to link their account to Google when they can does not surprise me.

What surprises me is that if they cannot do it, they will just leave. The post says it is a "conversion killer".


It's not so much that they'll leave, as much as some percentage will abandon during the signup flow. I know somewhere out there are statistics on those who have to click a link in an email only to get distracted by other emails, to say nothing of the time to fill out forms, create a password, save to password manager, open your 2FA app for the more advanced users, etc.

The higher the friction, the lower the probability of conversion. E.g. Amazon famously found every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales.

At its most simplified, this can be thought of as a simple function of time — the more time something requires, the higher chance something else happens during that time, invalidating the original task.

The best sign-in flow is none at all — that's what e.g. Discord does. They let you use the app immediately, with an automatically created provisional account. Amazing user experience.

This applies universally — convenience is everything.


Passkey signup could be almost as easy. Type email address, click register, invoke WebAuthn flow (which is no more complex than social registration), done. Maybe you need email address validation for some reason, in which case it’s a wee bit more complex. Ideally there would never even be an option to make a password unless passkeys are unavailable.

> Ideally there would never even be an option to make a password unless passkeys are unavailable.

I like passkeys, but ideally it should always be an option to make a password, too.


Sure, and there’s a UI for rejecting passkey enrollment. I’m just saying that there’s no need for anywhere near as many clicks to enroll a passkey as are often needed.

If anyone knows of _any_ investment yielding a yearly 20% reliably, I'd certainly be interested. If Starbucks figured that out, I don't know why they're bothering making coffee.


> Especially infrequent visitors

I don't know a single resident who uses oyster (maybe kids? Dunno, I don't have kids in my social circle), infrequent visitors are actually the only ones I've seen using oyster and that's because they thought that was the only way to use transport


Many, many people use Oyster cards for monthly or annual passes.


> the waitresses were up to their names, literally standing and waiting by our table changing utensils and plates and filling the drinks

FWIW, this sounds like a deeply unpleasant experience to me


In modern representations, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find red-dude-with-horns. Seems like we shifted towards hot-dude-with-something-off (Lucifer series, Good Omens), when we do see red-dude-with-horns I feel like it's meant to be somewhat ironic/on-the-nose (south park, preacher).


Hehe, not that that hard pressed. IMDB has a whole horned-demon category keyword: https://m.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=horned-demon&explo.... And those results don’t even include South Park, nor Hellboy. If I Google image search for “Satan” I get nothing but red horned demons for pages.

There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.


I think at least _part_ of the reason why is that it's just a whole lot less useful? There's tons and tons of applications for image and video and the automated analysis of it (for art, documentation or business purposes), whereas taste/smell capture and the analysis of it doesn't have that many useful use-cases (the article points at one of course, I'm not saying there's no use-case but much fewer). So we put a whole lot of effort and money into developing it, which didn't happen for smell.


Dog level smell is pretty useful, as evidenced, well, by actual dog usage.

OTOH maybe dogs are cheap enough not to create strong incentive for automation.


can't cuddle my laptop the same way I can a goofy-but-well-trained golden retriever


Maybe programmers should become cuddly to avoid being replaced by AI.


> already barely usable (imo) finder

been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI


> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder.

Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window.

> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory

Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.


I've grown increase hate towards Finder to the point that I avoid using at all costs. I've been migrating to the terminal, using fzf to find files and directories and yazi for a more graphical experience.

How can it be called FINDER, if it can't FIND things? cmd+shift+g should be a fuzzy search, but it returns nothing 80% of the time. cmd+f often can't see files that are in first level folders inside my home folder.

Meanwhile, hitting Esc+C in the terminal (via fzf) it's totally effective.


Off the top of my head, I want to say you can right-click on the current folder name to see (and navigate to) all its ancestors.


Correct - IIRC it's called the "proxy icon"


> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory

Just add it to the sidebar. Finder > Settings > Sidebar > Locations. Or drag it into Favorites.

> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder

View > Show Path Bar. You can also right click on the directory name at the top of the window and it’ll give you the same options.


I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment.

I get it’s supposed to be easy to use but so much functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.


> I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment.

[GNOME enters the chat]: "That's nothing, I'm way worse!"


When on macOS using Finder I often wish I had something as nice and consistent and usable as Nautilus.

Finder is genuinely horrible. It’s obvious no one at Apple cares about files anymore nor anyone working with them.

We’re all supposed to consume cloud these days or so it seems.


My go to example would be long lasting issues with SMB support in Finder. All operations are very slow, the search is almost unusably so. The operations that are instant on every non-Apple device take ages on a Mac. I first ran into these issues 7 years ago when I set up my NAS, and they present to this day. I tried all random suggestions and terminal commands, but eventually gave up on trying to make it perform as it does on Linux.

With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs that prevent the user from working with their local network storage runs contrary to their financial incentives.


Is it actually though? It’s cool to criticise Nautilus but, at worst, it’s just equally as bad as Finder. Which shouldn’t be surprising given how much it’s styled to look like Finder.

However in my personal opinion Nautilus’s breadcrumb picker does edge it against Finder.

So I stand by my comment that Finder is the worst.


Nautilus opens a new window for every folder you enter. Finder does not.

That used to be a preference, and last I used it, it was not. It is forced on because that’s how the GNOME developers thought you should use it… “Our way or the highway!” — GNOME devs.

Finder wins based on that alone. Finder wins so completely because of that one single thing that I’ll never voluntarily use GNOME again.


You can add shortcuts to the sidebar by dragging. You can right click the folder name in the top bar to get a list of parents. You can also View > Show Path Bar and see the the full clickable bread crumbs. Not sure why this is so confusing if you bother to try.


Even after decades of using macOS I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that Finder has no single button shortcut for opening a file - the most common operation a file manager should do. It’s Cmd+O, and it cannot be changed to anything sane like Enter key.


You can remap it to any shortcut you want (as long as it has a modifier key in it)


>as long as it has a modifier key in it

Why on Earth is this a requirement? When you're navigating through Finder using keyboard, it's very inconvenient to use two keypresses to perform a very basic operation. Using Enter to open a file is how every file manager on every operating system works except Finder. Why would Enter key be hardcoded to a file rename operation instead?

It is a typical Apple behaviour of doing things differently from the rest of the world just for the sake of it, even when it's detrimental to the user experience.


>Why on Earth is this a requirement?

Actually I just checked and it's not, technically you can create key equivalents without modifiers as well [1]. For Finder this doesn't work though, because enter seems to be specifically handled before menu-level key equivalent processing. (Note that it's not guaranteed to work on other apps either, based on [2] seems key equivalents are only dispatched if modifier keys exists. But that might be out of date since it worked for the people in the SE post.)

Option+Enter is the next closest thing.

I agree that their implementation here is not good. In fact there's already a "Rename" menu item, which isn't actually wired to the enter hotkey (this is very un mac like because it means there is no easy way to discover it). The "rename" menu item is actually a fairly recent addition to mac (I think maybe 10.11) while Finder itself is ancient (it was one of the last few apps to be migrated to Cocoa and even today still has lots of legacy warts), and possibly no one bothered cleaning things up.

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/132984/keyboard-sh...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...


Space for preview.


> if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher.

That's a pretty strong assumption, seems more likely that there's variation at the extremes than not. For example, if a small percentage of the population deals badly with extended nighttime in long winters, then it'll affect Finland's most-unhappy stats (and suicide rates) without meaning much for the average happiness.


Yes? "The best possible life" covers pretty much exactly these socioeconomic factors for most people. Is there any of these factors that you think is not covered by this question?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: