MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by levocardia | 2025-04-22 21:03:53+00:00
Some of these "improvements" seem highly tilted towards the experiences of wealthy people in the suburbs. Here in the lower half of the income distribution in a major city, we still don't have AC, use gas stoves (and often start fires), get our car windows smashed more often (though instead of stealing the stereo, they steal the change in the center console and your extra clothes in the trunk), and instead of the car being stolen while you're gone, it gets stolen while you're in it -- at gunpoint! Car alarms go off all the time as well; still as much a part of the city audioscape as police sirens.

Ordering a mattress online is great, though.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-22 21:04:19+00:00
I have a few of these and enjoy them — the PDP-8 (emulated: PiDP-8), Altair 8800 (emulated: Altair-Duino), KIM-1 (more or less the real deal modulo the 6530 RIOT chips that are no longer available: PAL-1 and PAL-2).

These, as kits, are fun to assemble, fun then to play around with.
by dtnewman | 2025-04-22 21:04:45+00:00
I built a chrome extension for teachers that grew to 200k users with no marketing budget.

It solved a pressing problem for teachers. But I built it and showed it to teachers and.... crickets. Absolutely no one found it organically by searching the chrome extension store. I emailed every teacher I know and a few installed it just to humor me, but no one used it. But eventually I got it to grow organically. I'm not saying this process is repeatable, but here's what I learned:

1) Finding the first 10 users was painfully hard. I had to beg people to install it. None of them cared.

2) Finding the right users at the right time is important. I went on to teacher forums on facebook and whenever someone posted something relevant to my app, I privately messaged them. This failed most of the time, but occasionally worked.

3) After lots of messages and begging, I clawed my way to maybe 10-20 users. That's when I started to see the first signs of organic growth. People would tell their friend about it. I'd see 1 or 2 people installing it per day who were hearing about it from friends

4) At 300 users, I got my first "influencer". Someone who had access to a email distro list that goes out to a few thousand teachers. They posted something there and my user count doubled in the next few days.

5) At 30k users, I got a viral video that someone posted about it on tiktok. Got 10k install over the next week.

6) Going from 300 to 200k users was easy... once the ball was rolling, I didn't have hunt down users myself... they would tell each other about it.

Going from 0 to 200k took about 18 months.

Lessons learned:

- Dont worry about your first 1000 users or even 100 users. Worry about your first 5. Do whatever it takes to get them. Finding them is a manual process.

- You will be rejected early on. A lot. It might mean your product sucks, but even if your product is great, you need to find the right person, at the right time. On top of that, most people aren't early adopters.

- Here's what probably won't work for finding those early users unless you really know what you are doing in an existing market: google ads, facebook ads, pretty much anything that isn't manual outreach.
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-22 21:05:20+00:00
Hey there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the theory, but I haven't yet seen a reason to claim the theory is false (or the specific theory of Atlantis relating to a civilization occupying the Richat structure as unfalsifiable).

If we set aside "Atlantis" and Plato for a moment, and consider that 13,000 years ago the area around the Richat structure was lush with fauna and flora, and that there's geological evidence that around that time there were multiple cataclysmic meteorite strikes in North America (and maybe the Atlantic ocean), rapid global temperature changes, and flooding, then maybe:

- Given the very unique geography of the area it would have been a likely place for people to settle and flourish. There would have been both defensive and logistical advantages to the structure.

- They could have developed further there than anywhere else in the continent at the time

- They might have been wiped out by cataclysmic flooding that makes evidence of their presence significantly harder to detect than the civilizations we do have strong evidence for.
by Beijinger | 2025-04-22 21:05:55+00:00
The Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis posits that around 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea breached the Bosporus Strait, causing a massive influx of water into the Black Sea. This event transformed the Black Sea from a freshwater lake into a saltwater sea, resulting in a dramatic rise in water levels. This rapid flooding would have submerged large areas of land, displacing human settlements along the coastline. The catastrophic nature of this event is believed to have been preserved in the oral traditions of ancient cultures, leading to the creation of flood myths, such as those in the Bible and the Mesopotamian epics like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Archaeological evidence, including submerged prehistoric settlements and shifts in the Black Sea's shoreline, supports the idea of this sudden and profound flooding event. The Black Sea Deluge is considered a key historical event that likely influenced the development of various ancient flood myths across the Near East and beyond.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-22 21:06:20+00:00
The article totally ignores this and does not even mention the numerical issues at all, which is pretty insane.

Surely at least naming THE ONE reason high degree polynomials are dangerous has to be done. Writing an article arguing that something is not a problem, while not even acknowledging the single most important reason why people believe the problem exist is totally disingenuousness and pretty terrible scholarship.

At least include that the choice of 0 to 1 is necessary for this to work. Not including it makes the author look either clueless or malicious.
by dagss | 2025-04-22 21:06:48+00:00
This details an approach to working with commit-ordered event IDs which is a very powerful primitive to, e.g., do pub/sub event processing within a SQL database without having to deal with outbox patterns, event brokers and so on.

People throw Kafka or Event Hub at everything, but really, if you do not need to offload your DB for storage/access of massive amounts of events, you may not need them...

I have a lot of experience with this approach on MS SQL (https://github.com/vippsas/mssql-changefeed), interesting to see the same thing on postgres.

Hope databases gets these things built in (i.e., supported more directly) in the future.
by nine_k | 2025-04-22 21:07:14+00:00
Python won because of its C interface was easy, so it's got Numpy, Scipy, Pytorch, OpenCV bindings, etc. For these use cases, the speed of the interpreter is mostly irrelevant.

On the web dev front, Python was lucky to get easy bolted-on async I/O (via greenlets), so it was more performant than Ruby (which was really slow 10 years ago), and Django was less magical than RoR.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-22 21:07:16+00:00
although anyone saying this outloud likely wont have their mind changed, for the rest of you all that want to remain informed:

cellular devices and radios do not emit ionizing radiation - which is the kind that messes up cells, and nonionizing radiation can only increase heat which is why all devices operate under a power limit

people are studying other potential biological effects of nonionizing radiation and there is zero consensus of there being any. so some people, including some smaller government agencies, exercise caution
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-22 21:07:26+00:00
You're almost certainly correct from a technical legal perspective (although I loathe the way legal experts extract "extra" meaning form the spaces between the words of the constitution). I was speaking from a more practical dictionary definition of the terms.

From my perspective, you simply can't speak freely if the government (or your neighbors) might murder you for saying things they disagree with.
by xethos | 2025-04-22 21:07:34+00:00
> When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets

> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens

So we all agree that follower count != engagement. You pointed that out in the first quote. It's a trueism we all claim to understand. But then you immediately jump to low followers on Mastodon or Bluesky being equivalent to low engagement, when that isn't necessarily the case.
by kemaru | 2025-04-22 21:07:49+00:00
The 85 % figure is from Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 21, 9175–9179 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es201811s

The 200-500 kiloton/year is from https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05955

For a deeper dive you can peruse the works that cite these articles, there's lots of research into microplastic population dynamics. Unfortunately most reach similar conclusions.
by gchamonlive | 2025-04-22 21:08:28+00:00
If I'm counting the days to form a habit, I'm not really interested in forming that habit. That's just a means to an end for me. Maybe I'm waking up earlier to have more time for myself, or I'm developing a reading habit so I can finally finish reading Hegel.

In all these cases the habit is secondary. It's all discipline and pain.

But I think there is a better relationship to be had with habits. One that isn't unfairly tied to productivity. One that I can just enjoy the struggle until I form that routine, or I build up the familiarity or the skill to do something. That kind of attention changes something fundamental about my relationship with what I'm trying to internalize and make a part of myself. It's to learn to be constantly learning and improving without making it a burden or a chore.
by neaden | 2025-04-22 21:08:36+00:00
What do you mean we found out that Troy existed? We always knew it existed, it continued to exist as a city until about around 1300 AD, it's present in the Homeric stories along with Gods, but so are a bunch of other cities and like those cities we have other attestations for Troy like coins from there, inscriptions, etc. There was some debate about how old the city was and if it had moved a few miles over the centuries (it didn't), but no serious scholar ever suggested Troy was not real.
by drdaeman | 2025-04-22 21:08:38+00:00
I believe the power disparity is the fundamental issue, not the monetization. In most situation an individual has no abilities to negotiate anything, and given that we're social animals and conformance plays an important role voting with one's data/wallet is always going to be skewed toward sellers for anything socially significant (widespread).

I can imagine honest and ethical ways where I would want to provide some of my private information to someone and ask them to process it for me - basically, recommendations as a service is a perfectly valid (and very valuable) business. What I don't want is for them to keep my information and use it for any other purposes that don't benefit me. Which suggests that I always want a way to negotiate the terms.

Given that there were some estimates than individual private data is worth mere pennies, my only explanation why such negotiations and data non-retention agreements are gated behind some enterprise plans (with "call us" pricing) is because it's either worth more than I think it does, or that it's perceived as such.

If it's the perception/bias issue, researches into value of private information may help. A legal requirement to offer an ability to have the same terms to everyone interested (aka upfront pricing and requiring data privacy related features to be individually available outside of any plans/bundles) might be the way to prompt such research (no guarantees about the results and that normal people won't be just priced out, though), but it may also have a lot of unexpected consequences.

Ultimately, I suspect this hill is probably as hard to climb as solving economic inequality (and is probably related to it).
by DamonHD | 2025-04-22 21:08:46+00:00
Even if the coldest wall is still the exterior one (it should be, thermodynamically), best maintaining comfort in the room need no longer be by pumping heat out through that wall (or window) to reduce thermal gradients in the rest of the room. Those residual gradients (and, eg, cold drafts down those cooler exterior walls) can be small enough to not need fixing any more.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-22 21:09:55+00:00
I couldn't agree more. "Vibe coding" is pretty cool, but it's not sustainable at least with with current technology. You're much better off being a knowledgeable developer who can guide an an LLM to write code for you.

One thing I will agree on though is that LLMs make it easier to iterate or try ideas and see if they'll work. I've been doing that a ton in my projects where I'll ask an LLM to build an interface and then if I like it I'll clean it up and or rebuild it myself.

I doubt that I'll ever use Figma to design, it's just too foreign to me. But LLMs let me work in a medium that I understand (code) while iterating quickly and trying ideas that I would never attempt because I wouldn't and be sure if they'd work out and it would take me a long time to implement them visually.

Really, that's where LLMs shine for me. Trying out an idea that you would even be capable of doing, but it would take you a long time. I can't tell you how many scripts I've asked ChatGPT or similar to write that I am fully capable of writing, but the return on investment just would not be there if I had to write it all by by hand. Additionally, I will use them to write scripts to debug problems or analyze logs/files. Again, things that I am perfectly capable of doing but would never do in the middle of a production issue because they would take too long and wouldn't necessarily yield results. With an LLM, I feel comfortable trying it out because at worst I'd burn a minute or two of of time and at best I can save myself hours. The return on investment just isn't there if it would take me 30 minutes to write that script and only then find out if it was useful or not.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-22 21:10:06+00:00
I do the same thing. The 20-30 minutes it takes for a major storm to roll through is not worth the time/hassle/money of getting fried electronics replaced. Surge protector or not, I just unplug them. Since most of my equipment is connected to some sort of device with on/off switch, it reduces the number of plugs that need to be disconnected to 3. I feel like a surge protector is just there for when something happens to mains from human causes. Putting all of my luck on them for lightning is just too much faith in modern manufacturing and faith in companies honoring a warranty on those devices.
by jfengel | 2025-04-22 21:10:10+00:00
There was still risk to them. If anybody else had a winning ticket, they only get half the prize. If two people had winning tickets, they'd have lost money on the venture.

People still see it as weird that somebody can guarantee a "win", but their expected returns on a dollar are the same as anybody else's -- and it's still negative. It nonetheless unnerves people that the prize can reach a point where it is mote than the cost of a complete set of tickets.

They say that lotteries are a tax on people bad at math. This is yet another example, though this time it works against the people running the lottery. The house still wins, but fewer people want to play.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-22 21:10:35+00:00
True. The other day I was wondering whether I should buy a new PC, then realized I was only thinking that way out of old habit. It's 5+ years old, and that used to be when a PC would really start struggling to keep up with the software. Now there's kinda no point. If I did build a new one, it wouldn't be significantly more powerful than my current one, so I'd really just be trading older parts for newer ones from fear of parts wearing out.
by voidspark | 2025-04-22 21:10:48+00:00
Sorry I don’t understand what you are trying to say.

Apple’s 2024 revenue was $391 Billion. Advertising is therefore about 1% of their revenue. Simple mathematics.

"Total net sales" is $391 Billion. $295 Billion from products plus $96 Billion from services.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q4/FY24_Q4_Consol...

Don't confuse quarterly with annual revenue.

Quarterly is just for three months. Four quarters within a year. Apple's fiscal (financial) year ends in September.
by akhisud | 2025-04-22 21:11:07+00:00
1. A2A is on our roadmap (still exploring), for agents built on Rowboat to communicate with external agents. I assume that's what you mean as well.

2. Rowboat agents are technically stateless in that they do not store any messages and state between turns. Our HTTP API [0] requires previous messages and state to be explicitly passed from the previous turn to the next turn. For now, the state is pretty simple - just the name of the last agent that responded to the user. This allows the system to start off directly from where the previous agent left off. The Python SDK [1] manages the state for you. Does that make sense?

[0] API docs - https://docs.rowboatlabs.com/using_the_api/

[1] SDK docs - https://docs.rowboatlabs.com/using_the_sdk/
by treetalker | 2025-04-22 21:11:12+00:00
For non-lawyers, "reasonable" is the law word for, first, whatever the judge thinks is OK (often despite being unable to articulate a clear standard for present and future analysis) in order to allow the case to advance to trial; next, whatever the finder of fact at trial (whether jury or judge) thinks is right (again, often despite being unable to articulate a standard, and almost never explaining the reasoning) in order to make a decision; and finally, whatever the appellate court(s) think(s) about the previous decisions.

In other words, "reasonable" is a logical slush fund and an indication to decide based on gut feelings.

True, we claim that certain synthesizing explanations and precedents develop over time, but those developments, and the applications of those precedents, often continue to turn on the decision-makers' gut feelings.
by selkin | 2025-04-22 21:11:23+00:00
It is possible to install Homebrew itself and the software it packages under your home folder[0], though that configuration is not officially supported.

This is how I install Homebrew when I have to, and so far the only issue I ran into is that binary packages are often tagged as installable only to Homebrew's default folder, so Homebrew had to built the to-be-installed software from source instead, resulting in it taking longer and the computer fans spinning louder.

[0] https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#untar-anywhere-unsupported
by goldfeld | 2025-04-22 21:11:37+00:00
What if our todo list/commits/issue tracker could affect the blob and bloat could kill him? no?

This might also see a long shelf life, say, as familiars of fantasy rpgs, as pets from a fictionalized world-building narrative online; I guess it could be so for any LLM in principle, but the basic Sims-like gamification behind a tamagotchi seems like a solid foundation for those usecases.
by npc_anon | 2025-04-22 21:11:47+00:00
When the bill arrives you already knew it was coming since you requested it. So you could have simply had your payment method ready. Then you look at the number and pay it. As adults do.

To make clear that you want to make the payment immediately in case this wasn't already obvious, one could use speech: I'd like to pay now.

That's the system.

In the exceptional and unlikely scenario where a waiter speeds away upon you wanting to pay, they aren't going to care about your green sticker system either.

If it takes forever for them to return, I drop cash on the table and leave. I'm not going to sit around for 20 mins and beg to collect my money.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-22 21:13:04+00:00
Neutral bonding to ground is definitely not how it is done everywhere. A proper ground according to modern standards will have a true grounding rod that the buildings ground wiring is connected. Of course wiring predating those standards are a mix of how they are handled. Some older wiring used the buildings metal plumbing as ground which is why people say not to shower during an electrical storm.
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-04-22 21:14:04+00:00
God clickhouse is such great software, if it only it was as ergonomic as duckdb, and management wasn't doing some questionable things (deleting references to competitors in GH issues, weird legal letters, etc.)

The CH contributors are really stellar, from multiple companies (Altinity, Tinybird, Cloudflare, ClickHouse)
Ask HN: Airbnb has internal AirCover refund policy max?
by throwaway_bnb | 2025-04-22 21:14:28+00:00
Has anyone had experience with the AirCover policy from Airbnb?

We recently had a bad experience that left us scrambling at 7 PM without a place to stay, with a big group, and two kids that needed cribs. The associate at Airbnb made us feel like our hotels would be covered under that policy.

However, upon discussing it with Airbnb after our trip, they are insisting there's an internal 20% cap on the policy refunds that cover the extra costs of the new accommodations.

They wrote the following:

"I understand that you wanted to know about our AirCover policy. Here's how AirCover for guests works:

AirCover for guests provides support for serious issues with your booking (e.g. Host cancels your reservation prior to check-in) or during your stay (e.g. The heating is not working in winter, the listing has fewer bedrooms than listed, it’s a different type of home – a private room instead of an entire home, a major advertised amenity such as a pool or kitchen is missing), but it doesn’t include more minor inconveniences, like a broken toaster. Here's the link: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/3218

Although it didn't state about the 20% refund of what you've paid but it is on our internal Airbnb policy that we don't disclose on the platform. On the other hand, upholding the policies and standards that protect our community is very important to us. We’ve given your case and its details careful consideration and we determined that we can only process $1104.886 in accordance to our AirCover policy and this is the maximum amount that we can provide. Please know that the decision is final and it can't be overturned.

We understand that this might not be what you’d hoped for, but we came to this outcome because we really need to follow our AirCover policy and if we will not follow the policy, our job will be compromised. I hope this helps!"

They even mention their "job would be compromised" if they don't follow this policy!

Can anyone who works at Airbnb comment on this? We're going to be out about $1,600 because of this policy and the way the situation was handled. It seems really suspect to have a limit secretly posted internally but not disclosed on the actual website.

Has anyone else had success with this policy getting money to cover new accomodations when the cost is slightly higher than their initial booking?
by Lammy | 2025-04-22 21:14:41+00:00
Found it because I was curious: https://github.com/Homebrew/legacy-homebrew/commit/29d85578e...

Here are the comparisons to other package managers:

> Packages are brewed in individual, versioned kegs. Then symlinks are created to give a normal POSIX tree. This way the filesystem is the package database. Everything else is now easy. We are made of win.

vs MacPorts registry which used its own homebrewed (lol) Receipts files in 2009, and now uses a SQLite DB: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/internals.registry.html#i...

> I wouldn't worry about it not being root. We don't install anything base enough for it to be a concern (unlike MacPorts or Fink).

vs MacPorts installs to `/opt/local` as root.

> Why Not MacPorts?

> =================

> 1. MacPorts installs its own libz, its own openssl, etc. It is an autarky.

> This makes no sense to me. OS X comes with all that shit.

> 2. MacPorts support Tiger, and PPC. We don't, so things are better optimised.

There is no “Why Not Fink?” section.

And because I didn't know the word autarky: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autarky