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The HD brand is tied to a demographic that is dying out [1]. It’s actually a great private equity play to squeeze out what’s left of the enterprise value as Boomers slowly age out of their market. HD tried to market an electric motorcycle ("Livewire") [2], but ended up having to spin it out into its own company because HD riders are buying the HD aesthetic, not the motorcycle itself, which is simply a vehicle for said aesthetic. Livewire for younger buyers, HD for old men buying the exhaust note of a copyrighted engine that is purposely louder but less efficient.
> To be fair, revenues and unit sales have enjoyed a nice bounce since the pits of the financial crisis. But Harley will never get its old mojo back for one critical reason that is completely outside of its control: demographics.
> Down the road from my house in Dallas, there is greasy drive-in burger joint called Keller’s … a place I’ve been known to frequent a little more often than my doctor might recommend. On any given weekend, you might see a dozen or more bikers parked in the lot, showing off their chrome-laden Harleys. And nearly all of them are over the age of 45. Most are over 50.
> This isn’t a coincidence. Harley-Davidson is a brand whose sales depend disproportionately -- almost exclusively, in fact -- on middle-aged Caucasian males. Riders younger than 40 generally lack the time, interest or the bankroll to buy a Harley. But by the time they get into their 60s or older, the noise and joint pain have begun to make riding lose its allure. You might still ride in your 60s, but you’re doing it less frequently and you probably aren’t buying a new bike.
> The sweet spot is the mid-40s to early 50s. And with the Baby Boomers -- the largest and wealthiest generation in history -- now largely aged out of this key demographic bracket, Harley has a serious problem. Generation X -- my generation -- is not nearly large enough to pick up the slack, and Generation Y (aka “the Millennials” or “Echo Boomers”) are decades away from being in the demographic sweet spot for Harley, and this assumes they take to riding like their dads did. The number of American men aged 40-49 is set to decline through the early 2020s and won’t reach its old 2010 peak until 2035.
> CNN Money reported on this as far back as 2010, and demographic strategist Harry Dent -- my old boss -- has used Harley as a case study for decades.
[1] Blame Harley-Davidson's Downfall On Baby Boomer Demographics - https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2013/11/13/harley-... - November 13th, 2013
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveWire_(motorcycle)
(for context, ~2M people 55+ die every year in the US, and ~4M Boomers retire; by 2031, the US population over the age of 65 will be ~75M, almost double what it was in 2008)
This is classic HN. At first infuriating if it corrects ME, and then amusing.
> Kids try their best not to learn
Often it is more work to cheat than just learn it.
The outcome seems to be an HN skin on 4chan.
IIRC, most child (under 18, at least; 18-21 is a problem with the trusted to drink standard) marriage laws in the US agree that the child can’t be trusted on this, so they trust the child’s parents.
(This is very much not an endorsement of those laws or that approach.)
I have thought about this for all of thirty seconds, but it wouldn't shock me if this was the case. The intuition here is about types, and the ability to introspect them. Agents really love automated guardrails. It makes sense to me that this would work better than RESTish stuff, even with OpenAPI.
When reading the article, I thought this would be an LLM call, ie the main agent would call `find_tool("I need something that can create GitHub PRs")`, and then a subagent with all the MCP tools loaded in its context would return the names of the suitable ones.
I guess regex/full text search works too, but the LLM would be much less sensitive to keywords.
LLMs have hit the wall since ChatGPT came out in 2022?
These are only problems if you assume the person later wants to come back to having human relationships. If you assume AI relationships are the new normal and the future looks kinda like The Matrix, with each person having their own constructed version of reality while their life-force is bled dry by some superintelligent machine, then it is all working as designed.
The over the top airport diorama - Minatur Wunderland.[1]
Even when you tell it to not coddle you, it just says something cringeworthy like "ok, the gloves are off here's the raw deal, with New Yorker honesty:" and proceeds to feed you a ton of patronizing bullshit. It's extremely annoying.
Azure has circa 60% of VMs running Linux, however the underlying infrastructure is built on Windows.
They're not. They are just a formalization of that pattern, with a very tiny extra feature where the model harness scans that folder on startup and loads some YAML metadata into the system prompt so it knows which ones to read later on.
It's gotten more and more shippable, especially with the latest generation (Codex 5.1, Sonnet 4.5, now Opus 4.5). My metric is "wtfs per line", and it's been decreasing rapidly.
My current preference is Codex 5.1 (Sonnet 4.5 as a close second, though it got really dumb today for "some reason"). It's been good to the point where I shipped multiple projects with it without a problem (with eg https://pine.town being one I made without me writing any code).
Team started in Australia, they use British spellings.
> a lot of liability law dates back to the railroad era. Another time that it took courts to rein in incredibly politically powerful companies deploying a new technology on a vast scale
Do you have a layman-accessible history of this? (Ideally an essay.)
Intellectual property rights should go away after 10 years.
There's a reason they're called "guidelines" and not "hard rules".
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/movies/herb-dorothy-50x50... | https://archive.today/ZtkkQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_and_Dorothy_Vogel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_and_Dorothy
https://archive.org/details/ExhibitionNotes41Summer2012
https://archive.org/details/dorothyherbertvo00ball
https://archive.org/details/witnde-Cafe_-_Fifty_Works_for_th...
https://archive.org/details/fromminimaltocon0000unse
https://archive.org/details/Charlie-Rose-1992-01-31 (starts at 39:20)
I don't think any of the mainstream vendor APIs require MCP for tool use - they all supported functions (generally defined using a chunk of OpenAPI JSON schema) before the MCP spec gained widespread acceptance and continue to do so today.
Related:
Zapier Security Incident Packages and Zapier Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038033 - November 2025
Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032539 - November 2025
This was apparently a Linde installation custom built for TSMC in Arizona.[1] Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon are extracted from air on-site and purified. That's Linde's primary business; liquefying and distilling air. This isn't some little local company or a company operating outside their area of expertise.
Those gases are storeable, so it's surprising there wasn't enough tank capacity to deal with outages.
The site plan [2] shows "Gas Plant 1", and future "Gas Plant 2" and "Gas Plant 3". The gas plants are across a small road from the fab and feed the plant directly. Once Gas Plants 2 and 3 were built, there would be redundancy, but at this stage, there isn't a backup. The plan doesn't show a large tank farm, so they can't store gases in bulk.
[1] https://www.aztechcouncil.org/utility-company-makes-progress...
[2] https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/tsmc-phoenix-arizona-fab-...
Why? They just closed a $13B funding round. Entirely possible that they're selling below-cost to gain marketshare; on their current usage the cloud computing costs shouldn't be too bad, while the benefits of showing continued growth on their frontier models is great. Hell, for all we know they may have priced Opus 4.1 above cost to show positive unit economics to investors, and then drop the price of Opus 4.5 to spur growth so their market position looks better at the next round of funding.
You can download the paper for free here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w33904
Looks very solid, they control for a large number of exogenous factors and do in-depth analysis of media coverage, policy response, and other salient factors.
It could happen in home computers connected through the antenna input. I think if power was slightly off the desired frequency this could also happen, but we’d need to test.
Great fun!
You should add the 80 character limit on the title as well!
Except being able to buy GNU/Linux laptops from known brands, the same that sell Android and Chromebooks with 100% supported hardware, at FNAC, Worten, Saturn, MediaMarkt, Publico, Dixon, CoolBlue,....
It would be great, however it died alongside netbooks.
I don't think so. Political trolling is kind of hard work because you have a lot of people who are suspicious and used to deconstructing arguments. If you just want engagement, is it' easier to pick a sports team or pop star and just bait passionate fans by pretending to support a rival?
That kind of false engagement is also a problem (for advertisers, genuine fans etc) but doesn't shape elections and thus come with policy consequences.
Notes and two pelicans: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/24/claude-opus/
Up until today, the general advice was use Opus for deep research, use Haiku for everything else. Given the reduction in cost here, does that rule of thumb no longer apply?
Yes, that's exactly how I use it. I've also had use cases where I needed something now and didn't mind a plastic part for actual use because I knew the load would be light.
Did anyone else notice Sonnet 4.5 being much dumber recently? I tried it today and it was really struggling with some very simple CSS on a 100-line self-contained HTML page. This never used to happen before, and now I'm wondering if this release has something to do with it.
On-topic, I love the fact that Opus is now three times cheaper. I hope it's available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription.
EDIT: Apparently it's not available in Claude Code with the Pro subscription, but you can add funds to your Claude wallet and use Opus with pay-as-you-go. This is going to be really nice to use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation with the Pro subscription.
However, I noticed that the previously-there option of "use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation" isn't there in Claude Code with this setup any more. Hopefully they'll implement it soon, as that would be the best of both worlds.
EDIT 2: Apparently you can use `/model opusplan` to get Opus in planning mode. However, it says "Uses your extra balance", and it's not clear whether it means it uses the balance just in planning mode, or also in execution mode. I don't want it to use my balance when I've got a subscription, I'll have to try it and see.
EDIT 3: It looks like Sonnet also consumes credits in this mode. I had it make some simple CSS changes to a single HTML file with Opusplan, and it cost me $0.95 (way too much, in my opinion). I'll try manually switching between Opus for the plan and regular Sonnet for the next test.
When all that people want to use is how to use an hammer, they see nails everywhere.
And, conversely, it (presumably) has no effect on VLMs using captive browsers and screenshotting to read webpages.
Their audience is the capital class (the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks). Longer device ownership and service life is fiscally responsible but suboptimal for shareholders.
> politicians and cops are private citizens
You may be confusing the civilian/military distinction with private citizens versus public officials. (A delineation American cops fuck with.)
Welcome to the rest of the world where stuff usually only gets replaced when it breaks, becomes unusable or gets stolen.
It's also wrong not to blame a technology presenting itself as a "friend" or discussion partner, which is a known sycophant, suffers from hallucinations, and has been shown to even advise people to off themselves directly.
Only 14% of expenses is a relatively small amount of overhead, especially since the extra cost could just be a tiny percentage on the real value, a mere rounding error.
And that's if we can trust the "AI findings" to begin with...
Harmonization is a thing.
We've done it for lots of other things, I don't see why it would not work for the #1 technological critical resource.
He of course leaves out that the term was doubled in 1831, and that renewability became assignable at the turn of the 20th century almost 15 years before Disney was even founded.
I'm asking what the paper has to do with the vulnerability. Can you answer that? Right now your claim basically comes down to "writing about CMake is evidence you backdoored CMake".
> remember the FBI attempting to compel Apple to decrypt a criminal's iPhone, only for Apple to refuse and claim that it wasn't possible
Apple refused “to write new software that would let the government bypass these devices' security and unlock” suspects’ phones [1].
> not sure exactly what happened after that
Cupertino got a lot of vitriol and limited support for its efforts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
> It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
Back when C++ was becoming famous, my favourite programming language was Object Pascal, in the form of Turbo Pascal, having been introduced to it via TP 5.5 OOP mini booklet.
Shortly thereafter Turbo Pascal 6 was released, and I got into Turbo Vision, followed by Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows 3.1, the year thereafter.
I was a big Borland fan, thus when you got the whole stuff it was Object Pascal/C++, naturally C was there just because all C++ vendors started as C vendors.
On Windows and OS/2 land, C++ IDEs shared a lot with Smalltalk and Xerox PARC ideas in developer experience, it wasn't the vi + command line + debuggers are for the weak kind of experience.
See Energize C++, as Lucid was pivoting away from Common Lisp, with Cadillac what we would call a LSP nowadays, where you could do incrementatl compilation on method level and hot reload
"Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk
https://dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html
Or the Visual Age for C++ version 4, which introduced a database, image like system for doing C++ in workflows similar to Smalltalk.
https://www.edm2.com/index.php/A_Review_of_VisualAge_C%2B%2B...
https://www.edm2.com/index.php/VisualAge_C%2B%2B_4.0_Review
Then there is C++ Builder, still going on, even though the way Borland went down spoiled its market mindshare,
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder
You're right altougth C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs there is that point of view, and also a reason why I always had much more fun with C++ across Mac OS, OS/2, Windows, BeOS, and Symbian, with their full stack frameworks and IDE tooling.
However with time I moved into managed languages, application languages, where it is enough to make use of a couple of native libraries, if really required, which is where I still reach for C++.
That is the static trick.
The issues as it stands today are:
- It is still a warning instead of an error, and we all know how many projects have endless lists of warnings
- Only GCC and clang issue such warning, if we want to improve C, security must be imposed to all implementations
> wild that this isn't bigger news
Give it time.
So far, we only know that X’s “About This Account” feature says a number of accounts, “the most noticeable and largest group” being “those reporting to be Trump fans,” are from suspicious locations.
We don’t know if X fucked up. We don’t know what fraction are via VPN. We don’t know if this Substack author is considering a biased sample. It may be individual profiteers. It could be one, or multiple, coördinated campaigns. X may be complicit or clueless.
I’d be surprised if serious journalists aren’t tasked on this. But it’s going to need to be one of the papers with investigative resources, i.e. ones with paying subscribers, and I’m not seeing anything here that screams this should be a top priority right now versus any time between now and the midterms, nor that it will be remotely easy doing the needed verifications.
(That said, the premise is incorrect. In limited cases, it’s gaining traction [1].)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-...
You can make a case that the relation with creators and media/publishing is,in formal structure, more petit bourgeois/haut bourgeois than proletarian/bourgeois, but even if strictly the class dynamic is different, the essential dynamic is broadly similar between those who do the work and those who purchase it and functionally, if not strictly necessarily, provide access to the broader market.
I doubt most of this is foreign government influence campaigns. I think it's more that Twitter will pay you to post clickbait, and if you are in Africa or many parts of Asia the amount you can earn is significant.
There was some great reporting about Macedonian teenagers doing this kind of thing back in 2016 - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma... - it was actually the origin of the term "fake news" before Trump redefined it to mean any mainstream media coverage that he didn't like.
It's from the post you replied to, from the part you quoted:
> the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill
You can't pretend that this part of the conversation doesn't exist simply because you didn't write those words. You were replying to someone who very specifically said this, you were agreeing with them, and to then basically claim "oh I didn't write it, I merely heavily implied it by agreeing with the parent" is disingenuous.
Very much so, and that's why they should pick between "all bookings are final" and "we prominently tell customers we can cancel bookings at our discretion", with nothing in-between.
> That OMB rule, in turn, defines "consensus" as follows: "general agreement, but not necessarily unanimity, and includes a process for attempting to resolve objections by interested parties, as long as all comments have been fairly considered, each objector is advised of the disposition of his or her objection(s) and the reasons why, and the consensus body members are given an opportunity to change their votes after reviewing the comments".
From https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#standards, linked in TFA.
Definitely not my experience -- I find the price is usually better with aggregators.
The hotels sell rooms full-price on their site, and only release cheaper prices to budget aggregators. Often times the cheapest hotel deals are only available as part of a flight+hotel package where the cheaper price never gets revealed at all, because they never reveal which actual proportion of your package goes to the airline and to the hotel (hint: it's usually the hotel that gives the discount, even if the package is advertising a "$0 flight").
You're right about it being easier to change/cancel, for sure. But it's not also cheaper -- it's the opposite. You're generally paying more for that.
This is why when you travel for business and plans change and someone else is paying, book direct. Whereas when you're traveling for fun but on a budget with fixed dates you know won't change, use a budget aggregator.
Dupe. From yesterday (183 points, 82 comments):
And all we get out of CERN is… the entire modern economy.
Their ledgers are balanced just fine for a while.
Twitter’s monetization program rewards engagement. It’s not life changing amounts in the developed world. It is in much of Africa.
People experience latency but if you “saw like a corporation” you could only see throughput and never latency.
Yes, you will need Rust to compile git v3 from source.
Zero tariffs are good! That's why the US put "no internal tariffs between states" in the constitution!
So the tariffs had the intended effect? That’s great!
It is, but unfortunately the fact that to you - and me - it is obvious does not mean it is obvious to everybody.
Of course it is "still", we are in baby steps in regards to technology adoption at industry scale.
Missing "Using Application Data Integrity (ADI)", althought this is SPARC, for Solaris and Linux.
https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris/oracle-...
No, that is OpenGL specific and only if using GLSL, other shading languages expect such values as explicit parameters, for example in WGSL it is @builtin(position) that you are to bind to a specific variable.
@builtin(position) fragCoord: vec4fThe kind of relates to proper Engineering titles, unfortunely many countries don't have a legal system in place for those that decide to call themselves engineers without going through the exam, and related Order of the Engineer.
I like your progression. It makes me wonder if intelligence could lead to technology absent societies.
Someone stick a bag of moss spores on the next Voyager please.
I know they're doing everything to keep those craft sterile, I think we should go the other way: spread life across the universe while we can.
If you suspected you had hypertension, would you be as confident to say we don't need to label and track those because you got old, worked and lived just fine thus far with no major episodes?
You might have been fine because you just have something like 140 mm Hg, whereas others with 180-190 might not be so lucky....
But even then you are still depending on others to catch the bugs for you and it doesn't scale: if everybody did the cooldown thing you'd be right back where you started.
strange. @dang, why ? the discussion was happening just fine here afaics...
I think a lot of us recognize it was a civil war. The idea that it is a civil war, conducted in the present tense, is the weird and dangerous one. When was the last actual fighting, WW2?
There are a number of frozen conflicts around the world, like North/South Korea and Cyprus. Both of those could be regarded as "civil war with external support", like Vietnam. What would be better is if those involved could recognize the situation as it actually is on the ground, and withdraw their claims and intents of actually resuming armed conflict.
Europe knows all about reigniting pointless conflicts over ancient grudges, from the Hundred Years War to the Balkans. The post-WW2 world order was an attempt to finally draw a hard line underneath that.
This is not uncommon but I've mostly managed to avoid it, because it's a management failure. There is a delicate process of "managing the customer" so that they get a result they will eventually be satisfied with, rather than just saying yes to whatever the last phone call was.
Half the web uses PHP. Nothing wrong with PHP for web work, and absolutely nothing bad about the site is related to its use of PHP.
Because the term Scrum Master wasn't derived from master/slave.
Git's concept of a master branch was borrowed from BitKeeper which used master/slave terminology. https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/H...
Reading this paper makes me feel like the seemingly crazy guy in the start of a disaster movie yelling about what’s about to happen.
> The age of the earth, according to a reasonable interpretation of the Old Testament, is likely to be 6000 (Masoretic text) to 8500 years (if you rely on the Septuagint versions).
So, when you say Christian creationism is “evidence based”, you mean a “reasonable interpretation” of a text with a whole litany of direct internal inconsistencies, and which itself has no evidence (leaving aside personal faith) of being anything other than a collection of mythology, supports it and not, you know, actual material evidence?
> large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there
There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone significant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.
> the initial invasion of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and Israel's strikes on Iran this year may count - both were closely aligned to rising domestic pressure on the leaders at the time
I don't know enough about what prefaced Putin's moves into Crimea and Ukraine larger. I'd describe Israel's recent wars as being closer to a WWI-esque powderkeg strike inasmuch as without the October 7 attack, none of this would have happened (when and how it did).
What's unique, here, is that it's practically entirely domestic elements which are driving Trump into Venezuela. I can think of historical examples. But they're all from the 19th century or classical history.
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three"
If we assume that general inflation captures the right basket of goods, and that (3 × minimum food) was correct in 1963, then what is actually done (adjusting the result in 1963 by inflation) is correct as well.
That is not what you would get if you computed the minimum food budget now and multiplied by 3; the shifting of the food share of the budget is captured in the CPI.
I've seen many proofs of the Pythagoras theorem, both visual and formulaic. I've found this to be the best explanation to date
When I was last in London, I took the tube. Officers were at the exit gates, I presume to arrest anyone jumping the gates. I didn't see any fare evaders.
> It’s probably the strongest point of my whining: Rust is memory safe and unreliable. The price of memory safety was reliability in addition to the developer’s sanity — that’s why I’m telling the language designers went overboard.
This complaint is nonsensical. If your Rust program panics, it’s because things are fucked up and it’s not possible to safely continue. The alternative is to continue unsafely, which will fuck things up even more.
The Linux kernel does the same thing. If it encounters an error, it panics.
They're already mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. They just get on anyways already and don't pay the fare. And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight. (Unless a passenger threatens others, then they get the police involved.)
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
AFAIK all mobile networks use NAT unless you pay a lot more for a special service with a public static IP.
Not that I believe any of this BS in the first place, but I've always found it quite amusing that traditional blown-film plastic bags are being replaced with "reusable" ones... which are also made of the same plastics, except in textile form and thus easily shed fibers everywhere.
> but it still makes us unique in the west since it's just a "routine" clause that can be invoked to suspend almost every possible legal challenge against a law
It is not unique in the West, or even specifically in those parts of the West that share the same head of state as Canada; in fact, Britain itself has a more extreme form of it given Parliamentary sovereignty.