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fg137 · 2026-09-14T14:09:13

Any idea whether there is a mobile app for that?

fg137 · 2026-09-14T11:47:20

Which makes me wonder, other than the author and maybe two other humans on the earth, does anyone care about the cipher or the success?

fg137 · 2026-09-13T20:16:48

There are a few posts discussing that here.

poor quality of HN discussion -- that's something not with thinking about. Flag the submission and move on.

fg137 · 2026-09-13T20:15:25

Which is why I think traditional media outlets are much more trustworthy than random influencers when it comes to news reporting. They don't have a perfect record but have standards and ethics. Sadly it's not worth anything these days.

chadgpt3 · 2026-09-13T21:29:24

they have none of the above, they're still a little more accurate on average than a content creator though

fg137 · 2026-09-12T23:59:23

Off topic: why would someone engrave their item? If you or whoever is gifted the item ever decides to resell it some day, it becomes a headache. And I don't recall any other company offer such service for consumer electronics.

compiler-guy · 2026-09-13T00:28:14

Many people don’t care about resale or pass-along value in the things that they own or gift.

And even if one does, then you just consider the diminished value as another cost of having the personalized item.

For many people, especially gift givers where the item is about far more than economics, it is worth it. And it is very unclear to me why "resale value" should trump about a million other considerations.

fg137 · 2026-09-13T18:12:08

It is a consideration, and I never said it trumps everything else.

The original post is just a plain question. Maybe don't make things up.

shermantanktop · 2026-09-13T00:09:48

Watches? Jewelry? Monogrammed clothes? Custom-printed shoes and t-shirts? Lots of examples, and of course it affects resale.

Apple was clearly thinking outside the category of “consumer electronics.”

morpheuskafka · 2026-09-13T14:18:48

It could plausibly reduce theft, for one. Before they started using SSNs as quasi-passwords, people used to be encourage to engrave their SSN on their TV and other stuff.

roncinephile · 2026-09-13T02:27:58

This was very much a thing. The emotions wrapped up in iPods back in the day are incalculable. It was the tool that set us lumpenproles free back in the day

sssilver · 2026-09-13T03:11:21

I engraved mine for two practical reasons — tell mine apart from others and have contact info in case I lost it and it was found by a decent person.

sajithdilshan · 2026-09-13T09:38:06

Engraving was pretty common for items that are made to be used for decades. High quality watches, clothing items, etc. all had the initials engraved.

Maybe back in the day people believed that iPods can be used for decades (I guess they can be if the battery can be switched, I’ve never had one. So not sure)

reaperducer · 2026-09-13T00:57:21

I don't recall any other company offer such service for consumer electronics.

Then recall that premium silver, especially items given as presents, are very often engraved, and have been for hundreds of years.

Apple is a premium brand, not "any other company," especially in the era this post covers.

fg137 · 2026-09-11T20:07:31

We can start having a meaningful discussion when people use real reasoning instead of analogy.

archagon · 2026-09-11T20:19:56

You don’t have to participate in the discussion, but it will take place regardless of your preferences.

david-gpu · 2026-09-11T21:56:03

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664505

ksoped · 2026-09-11T20:20:05

Analogy is a meaningful way to discuss. Drawing parallels can illustrate a point and bring up nuances by pointing out where it falls apart.

fg137 · 2026-09-11T13:17:32

Glad to see that more and more people realize these are just snake oils. Without objective metrics like benchmarks, none of the claims mean anything.

That's also how I feel about skills/plugins. While some provide important context for specific projects/environments, I am very skeptical about (over)generalized skills like "writing JS tests" or "creating a spec". There are dozens of these skills internally at my company, but I haven't seen a single benchmark that shows any of those are better than just plain, single sentence prompts in a meaningful way (aka statistically significant).

joegibbs · 2026-09-12T08:28:42

Yes I’m also suspicious of skills. I think the main issue is forcing everything down the skill’s path even if it’s not actually necessary.

jasonjmcghee · 2026-09-11T13:34:13

I see the same thing and have effectively the same philosophy. If I'm using something like figma or glean or playwright/chrome dev tools, plugin/skill/mcp - likely very useful.

But so many of the weird collections of skills that people on YouTube get viral followings for - I just don't get it.

People excitedly ask me what skills I use and I feel bad just saying only things we've directly authored for some express purpose. None of the "hot" ones.

I've written a large handful of skills, but they aren't like vim plugins. I don't just leave them "on".

This has been my experience at least- curious if I'm just behind the times.

I also effectively didn't leave the IDE+ChatGPT copy/paste workflow until the first release of Claude code. So maybe I'm slow to adopt.

fg137 · 2026-09-11T10:31:39

You should educate yourself about AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry.

fg137 · 2026-09-11T00:07:44

I don't think UI frameworks will go away any time soon. They solve a very different problem from React Native.

fg137 · 2026-09-10T21:45:59

> But scooping is a time-honored tradition between researchers.

Provided that it's properly accredited. And definitely not for others' unpublished work -- that's despised upon if not an academic integrity issue.

People even point out that you should add a reference to certain papers during the peer review process.

warkdarrior · 2026-09-11T01:24:33

Scientific papers many times have citations of the kind "private communication." APA has a style guideline so certainly not looked down on: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/...