It's a niche service that is almost perfectly tailored to meet the needs of HN users.
It's a paid-only service, without ads - "you are not the product", that lets you hide results from popular (to the mainstream) sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and to filter out low-quality sources like W3Schools, while raising MDN and the Arch Linux wiki to the top.
>My overall feel is that people underestimate the complexity of the systems at Anthropic and the chaos of the growth.
Making changes like reducing the usage window at peak times (https://x.com/trq212/status/2037254607001559305) without announcing it (until after the backlash) is the sort of thing that's making people lose trust in Anthropic. They completely ignored support tickets and GitHub issues about that for 3 days.
You shouldn't have to rely on finding an individual employee's posts on Reddit or X for policy announcements.
> You shouldn't have to rely on finding an individual employee's posts on Reddit or X for policy announcements.
I agree with this as a principle. Which raises this question: is it true? Are you certain these messages don't show up in (a) Claude Code and (b) Claude on the Web?
I've seen these kinds of messages pop up. I haven't taken inventory of how often they do. As a guess, maybe I see notifications like this several times a month. If any important ones are missing, that is a mistake.
Anyhow, this is the kind of discussion that I want people to have. I appreciate the detail.
> A company with their resources could easily do better.
Yes, they could. But easily? I'm not so sure.
Also ask yourself: what function does saying e.g. "they could have done better" serve? What does it help accomplish? I'm asking. I think it often serves as a sort of self-reinforcing thing to say that doesn't really invite more thinking.
Ask yourself: If "doing better" was easy, why didn't it happen? Maybe it isn't quite as easy as you think? Maybe you've baked in a lot of assumptions. Easy for who? Easy why? Try the questions I asked, above. They are not rhetorical. Here they are again, rephrased a bit
> take the top three companies whose product you
> interact with on a regular basis. Take stock of
> (1) how fast the technology is moving;
> (2) how often things break from your POV;
> (3) how soon the company acknowledges it;
> (4) how long it takes for a fix.
>
> Then ask "if a friend of mine (competent, hard working)
> worked there, how would I be thinking about the situation?"
There is a reason why I recommend asking these questions. Forcing yourself to write down your reference class is ... to me, table stakes, but well, lots of people just leave it floating and then ask other people to magically reconstruct it. Envisioning a friend working there shifts your viewpoint and can shake lose many common biases.
Thanks for the example -- you are one of the first people to quote a source, so I appreciate it. This makes constructive discussion much easier. You quoted this:
> To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our
> 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak
> hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.
>
> During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll
> move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.
And yeah, no disagreement from me: many users are not going to like this. Narrowly speaking, I don't want any chance that reduces what I get for what I pay for. I also care about overall reliability, so if some users on the right tail of the usage distribution find themselves losing out, my take is "Yeah, they are disappointed, but this is rational decision for any company with this kind of subscription model."
Broken expectations are highly dependent on perception. People get used to having some particular level. When that changes and they notice, and being humans a strong default is to reach for something to blame. Then we rationalize. That last two parts are unhelpful, and I push back on them frequently.
The UK does have net neutrality, and it's quite strictly regulated by Ofcom, which produces an annual report showing compliance and highlighting any issues it has investigated:
Things like restrictions on tethering and using a SIM in a router are forbidden.
Unlike most countries, net neutrality has never been a political football in the UK.
Ofcom groups zero rating schemes into three types:
Type one - government and NGO services (always allowed).
Type two - where categories of service (e.g. video or music streaming apps) are zero rated, but any service fitting into the category can apply to be zero rated by the network.
Type three - any other kind of zero rating.
Things like the VOXI Unlimited Social Media packages fit into Type Two, so are expressly permitted.
For the rest, Ofcom assessed the impact on consumers, which is generally low.
This is not net neutrality, all network traffic is not treated equally.
Ofcom seems to have invented their own definition of net neutrality and placed it on that website, but calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. This is tiered access.
It doesn't meet a perfect theoretical definition of net neutrality, but it's a set of defined legal limits on the extent to which providers can treat different kinds of traffic differently.
Net neutrality is not theoretical, it is literally the default setting.
Any deviation from that default requires special effort be taken to identify network traffic and treat it differently, and as soon as you have made that effort you cannot truthfully claim to have net neutrality. The UK does not prohibit net neutrality but it does not require it either (according to the comment I replied to which I have not verified).
I guess to me this seems a bit like saying that free markets are the default setting. We’re not in some kind of perfect state of nature. We’re in a complex interconnected society where virtually everything of any importance is regulated to some extent. What you’re saying seems like saying “as soon as you impose one regulation you no longer have a free market”.
This non sequitur strains my ability to assume good faith on your part. We're not talking about markets, we're talking about a utility.
Does your water company bill you differently depending on what you use the water for? Your gas company? Electric? This is not a complicated concept to understand, please make an effort.
What would be the model of a country with stronger net neutrality laws? I think EU regulations are now a touch stronger than UK regulations due to post-Brexit divergence, but by world standards, the UK has strong net neutrality protections.
My understanding is that flight security protocols and cockpit hardening introduced after 9/11 made it significantly harder to replicate what happened that day.
Windows Me was the nearest consumer release (2000 came out in 1999, Me in 2000), and did share most of the same UI, but was based on Windows 98.
Windows XP was the first version of Windows to ship with the same codebase for both consumer and business.