That is indeed how it is supposed to work. But things haven't exactly been working like they're supposed to lately.
For FY26, when we had a PBR proposing massive cuts followed by a government shutdown with a long stretch where NASA didn't know what their real budget was going to be, we saw a bunch of layoffs and project cancellations in preparation for a budget that might resemble what the president was requesting. Whether or not that was legal is in question:
I heard advice from Adam Savage on the topic of cost-vs-quality that I've found to be quite useful. It was something along the lines of:
When you're first getting into a new craft/hobby and need a specific tool, get the cheapest one you can buy. When you're first starting out, you probably don't really know how to judge quality, and you don't have a good sense for what features/enhancements you actually need (not to mention, you may or may not know you're actually going to stick with the hobby at all).
By the time that first cheap one breaks, or you gain some experience/skill and hit your frustration limit with it, you'll have a much better understanding of what you want out of the tool and will be better position to pick out the "best" version to suit your needs.
I hear this rebuttal a lot; here's why it doesn't work for me:
I'm the exact same age as Zuckerberg. When I first read this quote, it struck me as a really gross mindset and a point of view that I could neither relate to nor have sympathy for. I would not have said (or thought) those things when I was his age. Fundamentally, this is a demonstration of poor character.
Now, people do grow and change. We've all said or done things that we regret. Life can be really hard, at times, for most of us, and more often than not young arrogant guys eventually learn some humility and grace and empathy after they confront the real world and experience the inevitable ups and downs of life.
But Zuckerberg had no such experience. His life during and after the time when he said this was one of accelerating material success and validation. The scam he was so heartlessly bragging about in that statement actually worked, and he became one of the richest men in the world. So my expectation of the likelihood that he matured away from this mindset is much lower than it would be for someone like you or me.
(And, as others have said in this thread, there's ample evidence from his subsequent decisions to support this)
Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly. The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the PR is accepted/rejected on a vote.
Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?
A lot of times, being organized and tidy is more about feeling good than it is about saving time.
If every time I open that drawer I'm a little frustrated, a little flustered, a little stressed, that's not just 5 seconds of "lost time" its a little bit of damage to my mood.
On the other hand, if every time I open the drawer it's all neat and organized and I can find the thing I'm looking for right away and I'm reminded of the good job I did building the organizers, that's a nice little micro-boost to my mood.
And maybe the time and effort spent figuring this out and building it and blogging about it was fun! Like a fun little hobby.
Everybody has a different temperament and different priorities, etc. Someone may look at this and think "what a waste of time". Personally, I kind of like projects like this that add a little extra satisfaction or polish to something I interact with freqently.
Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding.
This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).
When they decided to stop minting pennies I think they should have gotten rid of nickels and (I know this will be controversial) quarters as well!
Keep dimes and ramp up production of half dollars. Then we can just drop the second decimal place and standardize pricing everything in 0.1 dollar increments.
The fact that quarters are still somewhat commonly used in machines (vending machines, parking meters, laundry) is probably the biggest practical obstacle.
On a related note, I see that my oldest "favorite" is from September 2016, but I've been on HN since 2009. Is that around when the "favorites" feature was added? Or is it possible that some older favorites have been dropped?
This one stood out to me even more:
> I'm used to have 495 tabs open on my iPhone
iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.
I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".
> Lowering the rent to fill their building reduces the value of that building
This must just indicate that the model used to value the building is wrong, right?
I'd think insofar the value of the building is tied to the rental price, that value should naturally be a function of the revenue that the building can be expected to generate, which in turn is be a function not only of the chosen rent price but the likelihood of someone renting at that price. Why would a building that offers its units at $N per unit but can only fill half of them at that price be worth more than the same building filling all of its units at $N/2 per unit?
I suppose there's some wiggle room to account for the relative uncertainty in those two cases. But fundamentally the rental price is a choice whereas the value of the building is (or ought to be) based on a combination of the qualities of the property itself and what the market is willing to bear.
I hadn't thought about this in a long time. Looks like her lab is still going strong doing research at the intersection of biology and robotics on whisker-based sensing:
https://youtu.be/CfhsW1kaa2Q?is=ug5_Ze2HczVMGTMR