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I don't trust the Google Play Store.

The fact that we don't have root access to our phones is insane. This "sideloading" part is just the cherry on top of the dystopia we live in.

The result of this is very deep. Apple/Google effectively control what consumer technologies and services are allowed to gain traction.

That's also a large part of the issue IMO. I currently _have_ root on my rooted and Lineaged Poco F3. But as hardware attestation is becoming the norm I am deeply worried about the future. I have been a pretty eager Android fan due to its achievable-if-savvy openness. If I lose root and sideloading, then Android is dead to me. There would be nothing valuable in it, just another corporate walled garden.

I have no idea what to do when they lock everything up. I just hope my bank app works with a non google phone.

The problem is how it is easy for AI with full surveillance to shape one's opinions. We are mostly doomed as a species.


You won't be able to use your banking app. Moving to Apple is the only logical step.


I won't move to Apple yet... but now there is not a reason to buy anything but the cheapest Android phone available.

And maybe a separate one to root while they still can be.


my US banking apps work on CalyxOS


> Moving to Apple is the only logical step.

Or a f.u.Google step. I'll despise the straight-jacketing of Apple but my anger about Google's dick-move will keep me going.


I have only one: Ads.

Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.


Ads are a brute force approach to the challenge of having useful information (company X offers Y) reach their target (people who needs Y presently or in the future).

If you say no ads should exist, then what alternatives would you have for that challenge?


Humanity lived without ads for thousands of years, I think we can do without.


That time coincided with humanity living near the lowest standards of life.


I like adverts. They inform me about good things I could buy that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.


You seem to use the word "good" very liberally.


That's not the point of ads.


These comparisons are fun at all but a better one would be the difference between whatever "computer" a citizen lambda would have used back in the day and the cray1 and whatever on can use now and the current "cray" (or whatever humans use now) and see the difference of cost.


I did a little poking round and I think the modern equivalent to old super computers is a mainframe. Modern super computers take up entire warehouses, cost upwards of $100 million, and are measured in exaflops.

Cray 1 costs US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $41 million in 2024) (Source: Wikipedia)

I have no idea what IBM z-series mainframes cost but I think it would be less.

$41 million can buy you one or more thousands of rack-mounted servers and the associated networking hardware.

My rough guess would be the difference in 2024 iphones to mainframes is an order of magnitude more between them than Cray and anything else on the market at the time.

It’s also interesting to note how much software has changed. The actual machine code may be less optimized, but we have better algorithms and we have the option of using vast amounts of memory and disk to save cpu time. And that’s before we get into specialized hardware.


Mainframes aren't supercomputers. The point of a mainframe (anymore) is reliable transactions without downtime. They're not necessarily beasts at computation.

Supercomputers were and are beasts of not only computation but memory size and bandwidth. They're used for tasks where the computation is highly parallel but the memory is not. If you're doing nuclear physics or fluid dynamics every particle in a simulation has some influence on every other. The more particles and more state for each particle you can store and apply to every other particle makes for a more accurate simulation.

As SCs have improved in memory size and bandwidth simulations/modeling with them has gotten more accurate and more useful.


Agreed! If you look at the branding from IBM for their various hardware lines, it's clear that they agree with you:

    zSeries: z = "zero" downtime
    iSeries: i = "integration" (DB2 baked into OS)
    pSeries: p = "performance"


The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. That same year Gary Kildall created CP/M and Steve Wozniak completed the Apple-1.


You lost me at preparing the notes the night before. Yeah, that will definitely happen.


No, I don't care about hotels or hotel prices. People need places to live. You can deal with Hotel prices a bit high. There are millions of people in rich countries right now having hard time paying rent or finding any.


Zoning laws are a way bigger restriction on housing than anything else, Airbnb is a symptom and arguably a scapegoat compared to the dampening of the demand of building new housing supply.


Maybe in America. Outside the US, that's really not the problem. It's people buying up loads of houses and apartments in town centers and pushing everyone else out. Then landlords realize they can jack up rent because they can make more money in one weekend with some foreign tourists through Airbnb than they would from a local living there.

You can build new houses. But if locals are pushed miles away from town, the town dies. A new town is formed. And if that new town gets the slightest bit of popularity on social media, Airbnb swoops in to suck the blood out of it.

It's absolutely killing communities with incomes below the US average.


And those countries have tried literally everything except making it legal to build more housing.


I think the issue is locals who are already property owners and long time local tax payers will have a greater say than newcomers on new developments in that area.


FWIW I'm fully behind you on more housing and an especially aggressive tax on entities owning multiple properties as investments.


This is wholesale resolved by building more housing (which Airbnbs or short term rentals do not make a meaningful dent in anyway).


There’s many places with a lot of Airbnb’s per resident, just look outside of major cities where people still want to visit.

Things have mostly settled down, but suddenly taking a lot of housing off the market meant real supply shocks even if there was plenty of land available for development.


Even in very popular cities AirBnBs are less than 0.1% of the residential dwellings. AirBnBs have negligible effect on a rent.


Your entire comment is just made up with no evidence.

As a simple example, in Austin TX, Inside AirBnB tracks over 15000 short term rentals, which would be closer to 5% of housing stock.

And the "only a small percentage of housing is AirBNBs" is a poor argument anyway, because home prices are set at the margins, and a relatively small reduction in housing supply in a constrained market can have a significant effect on price. Plus, for people that rent out a room, in can essentially have the effect of increasing the amount they are willing to pay ("I could normally not afford this apartment, but I could if I rent out a room on AirBnB"), which also increases prices.

More importantly, though, people have actually done studies on the effect of AirBnBs on prices, and found they have a positive (i.e. housing gets more expensive) effect on rents and home prices. One example: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/...


> Your entire comment is just made up with no evidence.

Quite the opposite. See for Montreal a recent article https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7445844 Officials estimate 4k airbnbs which gives 0.2% of all residential dwellings.


> residential dwellings.

Who cares about residential dwelling as a whole. Most of it is occupied by owners, we are talking about rentals and 4000+ taken by short term rentals is insanely high and sets the prices for what's left too.


In Sedona AZ 16% of houses are AirBnBs, and thats just the ones who complied & legally registered as short term rentals

https://www.redrocknews.com/2025/02/28/interactive-map-of-se...


Is Sedona a resort town? Resort towns were like that in the 80s already.


I don't think this is true. The proportion of short term rental places in some districts in European cities are as high as 8-10% and it's growing.

IMO it's meaningless to cite this 0.1% non-sense, because nobody will rent an AirBnB on the outskirts of huge cities far from tourist hotspots, so whoever comes up with these numbers, they probably try smearing the data by selecting an unreasonably wide area for comparison


What percentage are they of available residential rentals? That seems like the more relevant statistic.


2/3 of housing is owner occupied, so 0.3%


The world is more than just cities.


25% of the world population do not have access to drinkable water[0], brushing their teeth is a luxury for them.

[0]: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/03/22/un-26-of-world-lacks-...


You see there's a difference between world and Utah/USA. In Utah nearly 100% of the population has access to drinking water.


You need zero water to brush your teeth with toothpaste. Many dentists even say it’s preferable to not rinse your brush before and not rinse your mouth after.


So when you go to brush your teeth you don't wet the toothpaste and toothbrush from the tap? Is it the fear of tap water that centers around this? I am curious about this as it seems the answers carry some cultural significance.


No - toothpaste is in part an abrasive. If it's wetter, the abrasive is less effective at removing biofilm/plaque, and the chemical components are diluted in situ. Your mouth is plenty wet enough as-is.


That implies toothpaste isn't designed with this water dilution in mind, as that is common practice. If I don't wet it beforehand it's too thick and doesn't get distributed as easily.


They can also just move where water is, right?


When you do so, which I do too, is the amount of fluoride you potentially swallow more than that in fluoridated water?


do they live in Utah?


Just an FYI, water is also toxic.


Yes, I was going to mention this. Had a friend who went down the coast for a day trip with a bunch of mates. On the way back on the train (1.5 hour ride) they had a competition to see who could drink the most water and most of them had several litres, a few of them managed a bit more. My mate also had a bunch of chips/snacks, but not everyone did.

Later that night, he got a desperate phone from his friends mum, screaming at him "What did you take! What drugs did you take!!!", he replied that they hadn't taken anything, but wasn't really believed. His friend was rushed to hospital with severe seizures and convulsions. The doctors eventually put him on a saline drip and he recovered.

Basically his friend lowered the salt content in his body so much that his body could not pass electrical signals. My friend was fine because he had consumed a bit of salt in his snacks. Kinda crazy.


Three DJs and 7 other employees got fired for running a contest where whoever could hold their pee for the longest after drinking too much water would win a prize and someone died.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16660273


Is this why after a day on the beach you want both drinks and salty snacks?


It’s why electrolyte drinks are a thing for sports.


You know what has electrolytes?



There was an infamous death in Australia when a young girl drank too much water after taking MDMA. It's blamed on the drug, but the thing that actually killed her was water intoxication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wood_(born_1980)


It happened to a Swedish girl too. Not sure if it was after taking MDMA but it was after drug use.


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