MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrQian | 2025-04-18 11:02:34+00:00
The three main important ones:

1) Green belt policies prevent the expansion of cities outwards. Compare the footprint of London to other major European cities and you'll see it's barely moved at all for decades.

2) Discretionary planning policies that mean local councils can turn down development, even when it adheres to stated rules. See for example this brownfield development in Brighton, a city that has one of the worst housing delivery records in the country: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwygkz57k1vo

The professional planning board recommended it for approval, but it was turned down by the political committee because of local complaints. A well specified zoning system would avoid this. Reduced uncertainty would make it possible for smaller builders to enter the market

3) affordable housing mandates (known as Inclusionary Zoning elsewhere). These specify that some amount of the new building must be offered at below market rates. Although there's a strong moral case for capturing some of the value produced by giving planning permission, this effectively acts as a tax on building homes in places with shortages. Ideally, people would be most incentivised to build where prices are highest, but this policy removes that incentive.
by brutus1213 | 2025-04-18 11:04:04+00:00
Did you buy a home > 10 years ago? Given inflation, isn't your mortgage not easy to pay off at this point (even if you did pay the minimum?). I can imagine one of two scenarios: (a) at the start, you really stretched and got a nice place to live (bravo!! in hindsight that was a genius move as you enjoyed many years of good quality living) or (b) your income has been stagnant (sorry :( )

I got a place 5 years back and did not overstretch at all ... now, the biggest challenge is our place is too small and has other inconveniences (lack of commute) that is painful. Selling and rebuying is trauma I don't want to inflict again.
by nookeshkarri7 | 2025-04-18 11:05:46+00:00
I'm building a SaaS tool that allows users to create dynamic QR codes and track detailed scan analytics, including:

Total scan count

Client country, city, and timezone

Device type and operating system

Activity heatmaps and scan trends

A key feature of the platform is a tracking script that users can embed in their websites. This script enables tracking of customer behavior for visitors who arrive via QR code scans, including:

Page views

Interactions

Custom events
by vidarh | 2025-04-18 11:06:44+00:00
Par of Khrushchev's legacy was switching away from the earlier focus on higher quality housing that largely favoured the elite in favour of throwing up cheap housing fast to alleviate the severe housing crisis.

But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...
by twelvechairs | 2025-04-18 11:06:58+00:00
Most(?) UK loans are fixed for a 5 years or so and then revert to the standard variable rate of the bank. Variable rates can make financial planning uncertain. But the bigger issue is often just the standard variable rate you get put on isn't the best rate, so you are generally advantaged to review and move.

US loans on the other hand are government backed to allow for longer fixed terms (30 years etc.)
by anovikov | 2025-04-18 11:07:14+00:00
200 kill sats is laughably little. The Earth is rather big and they will be uniformly distributed, putting closest sat at almost 1000km from target while whole boost phase of a solid fueled ICBM is 350-400km. So there's no chance it could work. It will take tens of thousands of sats, like Starlink.
by willis936 | 2025-04-18 11:07:16+00:00
Yes, but that doesn't mean the people who had houses that lost value are screwed. It just means that they didn't pocket as much profit as they could have. They bought a value and a rate they could afford. They're no more or less screwed if the value of the house goes down. They're screwed if they can't pay the mortgage. Lots of people are screwed by high housing costs. The only rational conclusion is to lower housing costs. I say this as someone paying a mortgage.
by 5- | 2025-04-18 11:08:00+00:00
why wouldn't an identity/age verification scheme that blinds both sides work?

e.g. a site wants to have some proof of identity. it generates a token and sends the user with it to a government service. the service verifies the user's identity, signs the token and sends the user back.

now the site knows that the government service has verified the identity (and relevant characteristics, like age threshold), but doesn't know the identity. the government service obviously knows the user but doesn't know the online account tied to the identity. this can be further separated by using a middleman authentication provider, so that even the site identity itself doesn't reach the government.

am i missing something obvious why that wouldn't work?
by bingo3131 | 2025-04-18 11:08:02+00:00
No idea how it works in other countries but in the UK there are fixed-rate mortgages and variable-rate mortgages. Fixed rate ones are where the interest rate is locked in at the time the mortgage is taken out so any changes to the national base rate (positive or negative) do not change how much you have to repay, variable-rate mortgages are when the interest rate will fluctuate as the national base rate rises and falls.

Fixed-rate mortgages are time-limited (typically between 2-5 years) and after that you either switch to a variable rate mortgage or you take out a new fixed-rate mortgage based on the interest rates at the time.

People that bought properties just before COVID got dirt-cheap fixed-rate mortgages as the Bank of England base rate was 0.5%. Anyone sensible locked it in for 5 years which is typically the maximum available. After those 5 years were up, the base rate was about 5% which is a huge jump. I think most people have locked theirs in for 2 years now in the hopes that in a couple of years the base rate will be much lower.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-18 11:08:30+00:00
Overpopulation concern is the funniest one of all for the UK:

Why Britain needs more migrants - It cannot fix its population-growth slowdown without them - https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/01/14/why-brit...

Britain ‘must rely on immigration’ to compensate for falling birth rate - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/26/rise-in-olde...

UK will be reliant on immigration for nearly 80 years due to falling birth rates - https://www.independent.co.uk/world/population-fertility-imm...

Birth rates in the UK are now, according to the ONS, at their lowest levels since records began in 1938, at a rate of 1.44 children per woman. With a rapidly ageing population, migrants will be essential to replace UK-born workers - https://www.tradeandbusiness.uk/news/six-reasons-why-the-uk-...

It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, but one prisoner refuses to defect or learn anything, despite the other constantly defecting.
by graemep | 2025-04-18 11:08:38+00:00
its quite complicated and changes over time.

Post Brexit changes make it easier for high skilled workers and harder for low skilled. I have not idea how big the actual change has been.

There have been other events and rule changes that have had an impact - covid and Ukrainian visas.

Some interesting data here: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/mi...
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-18 11:09:59+00:00
Oh, good. I must have misunderstood the whole "disappeared to an El Salvadoran prison without due process" story.

... And you've gotten very close to the point without touching it. The country has been sliding, this whole time. Reagan arguably started the ball rolling. It just takes a long time to break down the democratic norms in a country this big.

But they're broken down now.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-18 11:10:41+00:00
Yes. But that's just like any fake token being used by olds as a retirement plan.

Seeing as the olds control almost all of the wealth of industrialized nations, they should as a group be held entirely responsible for paying for entitlements and benefits for other elderly. The young should not be burdened with this. They have more burdens than they can handle already and are soon genetically extinct unless the olds take the boot from their neck.
by DrQian | 2025-04-18 11:11:01+00:00
A sharp fall in house prices might hurt some people, although the number who would be in negative equity is probably smaller than you'd think. A quick Google says only 28% of homes are owner occupied with a mortgage, and the vast majority of those will have paid off substantial capital.

I think the premise is worth questioning though: It's true that many people have most of their wealth tied up in their house. But unless they want to substantially downsize, they can't access these savings.

In general it seems bad that it's common for people to have most of their wealth in an illiquid, undiversified investment that they also live in.
by lores | 2025-04-18 11:11:28+00:00
Let's say you buy a house at 500K with a 400K mortgage. House prices fall 50%, you owe 400K on a 250K house. Banks would repossess as the loan value can't be guaranteed by the asset. Separately, you could default on the loan if laws allow it, losing much of your wealth and making it impossible for you to get a loan for the 150K to move to another house. You could keep paying the loan, spending many years of income for exactly nothing in return. People tend to buy another house immediately, so there isn't that much "freed" money. So either banks lose a huge lot of money, or people do. Either way, massive financial crisis. That's an extreme case, adjust for lower fluctuations. I can be, and probably am, completely wrong about this.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-18 11:11:29+00:00
"Follow the sun" rotations are a common way to handle 24h oncall rotations. Three regular shifts (8 hours of work plus some lunch break that gives you time for a short overlap at the beginning/end of the shift) during that region's local daytime hours, in three different regions with time zones roughly 8 hours apart.

That way nobody has to work nights and you still get 24/7 coverage.
by raffraffraff | 2025-04-18 11:12:58+00:00
If you're not planning on selling your house it's future value is irrelevant. All I care about is the purchase price of my "forever home".

The only difference it makes it that if your lender gives more favourable interest rates when your loan to value ratio improves. So if you purchase a house and the price doubles, your LTV is already 50%. Conversely if it drops after you paid off half the mortgage, your LTV might be shit
by dig1 | 2025-04-18 11:13:07+00:00
> We are already underway on the arXiv CE ("Cloud Edition") project... replace the portion of our backends still written in perl and PHP...re-architect our article processing to be fully asynchronous,.. we can deploy via Kubernetes or services like Google Cloud Run...improve our monitoring and logging facilities

Why do I smell someone from G was there and sold them fancy cloud story (or they wanted VMs and reseller sold them CloudRun)? Anyway, goodbye simplicity and stability, hello exorbitant monthy costs for the same/less service quality. Would love to be wrong.
Ask HN: What are alternatives to create online video archive
by levoxtrip | 2025-04-18 11:14:10+00:00
Hey everybody, I'm a creative coder and I'm getting sick of instagram and it's algorithm. The difference between posting on instagram and just throwing the creative output in the trash is not that big. So I thought about creating my own online archive of outputs. The idea is having a collection of videos about 10-50 seconds long. Doesn't make sense to upload all the videos on youtube.
by rad_gruchalski | 2025-04-18 11:14:18+00:00
From https://www.reddit.com/r/F1Technical/comments/13u141s/commen...

> F1 broadcasts their live timing via the SignalR protocol. The endpoint itself is unauthenticated. You can look at FastF1’s implementation of the SignalR client and the respective endpoints which it connects to within the code documentation here FastF1 SignalR client.

https://github.com/br-g/fastf1-livetiming/blob/bb40ede39ab5f...
by Eavolution | 2025-04-18 11:14:19+00:00
Why is it supposed to be good? Having lived in a (relatively small) city and in the countryside, I vastly prefer the countryside and actually find it more convenient in a lot of ways. An example would be the shops are a lot bigger as the land is cheap, so a 20m drive in the country gets me to a massive shop, but in the city half an hour on a bus or a 15m drive gets me to a much smaller one.
by somewhereoutth | 2025-04-18 11:14:19+00:00
In the UK we never really got medium rise apartment blocks right. Instead we have terraces, which don't give the same housing density. The neighborhood I now live in in Portugal is mostly 7-10 storey apartment buildings, which is enough density for plenty of shops, cafes, restaurants, schools, playgrounds, public transit etc. It houses an astonishing amount of people in reasonably generous conditions (e.g. balconies are the norm), quite the modern miracle in my UK eyes.
by keybored | 2025-04-18 11:15:24+00:00
Decommodify owning a home. You’re gonna be fretting about why housing is getting more expensive while fighting a ghost battle against homeowners until you do.[1]

Do-gooder liberals are gonna worry about what policy mistake was made in the last 50 years. No. You have competing interests and the people who own something have the leverage as well as something to lose if too many people get what they already have. What’s difficult to understand?

Don’t try to “grow the middle class”, this selfish NIMBY sociological construction (it’s just gonna compact anyway, and it is). Decommodify having a dang roof over your head.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726760
by schiffern | 2025-04-18 11:15:32+00:00
“Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space,” Kratsios said. “They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.”

It's pretty common to talk about inventions like the telephone/airplane/internet as effecting time and space (or to be more precise, our relationship to them), but yes the wording of the headline is pretty strongly misleading.
by tareqak | 2025-04-18 11:15:55+00:00
It doesn’t have to be this way.

Mainstream media made fun of China for building “ghost cities” in the middle of nowhere.

Now, those cities are full of people.

“Chinese ghost cities are finally stirring to life”

https://norcalapa.org/2021/09/chinese-ghost-cities-are-final...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-g...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...

First Edit: removed unnecessary snark.

Second Edit: Added sources.
by alpaca128 | 2025-04-18 11:16:02+00:00
> There’s a certain belief, trust and conviction to lack of a deity in atheism

Atheism means a lack of belief in a god. Just because many atheists go a step further or the word agnostic exists, that doesn't change the meaning.

I have yet to see an "official" source that says it's definitely belief of absence and not absence of belief. Agnosticism works just as well if you view it as subcategory of atheism.
by rwmj | 2025-04-18 11:16:36+00:00
You're totally right. It would be better for home owners since high houses prices make everything about buying and selling houses more expensive. You can't realise your housing gains except by dying. Or downsizing, but many old people rattle around in 3+ bedroom houses until they die or are forced to go into a retirement home.

It would also involve building more houses, which is bitterly and loudly opposed by a subset of home owners. Home owners are also richer, older, and vote much more than the (generally) poorer, younger renters.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-18 11:17:43+00:00
as someone who squarely falls into the “probably don’t want kids because of overpopulation” category —

i get the irony you’re trying to point out. but global overpopulation is not the same as national overpopulation.

at some point we’re gonna run out of fucking food as a species. *

the sooner we can get our heads out of our arses and past the primitive tribalism of “we need to have more than the other lot” as a species, the better.

i squarely fall into the “migration is the solution, not the problem” camp too [0]. exactly because of that global perspective.

plenty of people in the world. maybe it’s time we learned to share as a species? although fuck all chance of that happening any time soon in the current political climate.

* someone usually attempts a retort about “technology will magically save all of us” to this point. which is just kicking the can down the road.

[0]: edit to note that the problem i’m referring to here is national underpopulation specifically
by vidarh | 2025-04-18 11:18:31+00:00
Just medium-to-high density by UK standards around existing larger train stations would do an immense amount to alleviate the UK housing crisis.

I used to live on a road with ~660 houses. The road, the houses, and the yards combined took up ca. 40,000 m^2. Near the local well-connected train station, a few new-builds in the 20~ floor range added more homes than that entire road took up in ~2,000 m^2.

On top of that, because of its location, the strain added on transport was far less - most people would be a short walking distance from both shops and commuter trains to the centre.

There are hundreds of major transit hubs like that in the UK where you could easily add do relatively modest hubs of higher-density housing and add a massive amount of capacity.

What's lacking is the political will to solve the massive problem of house owners who have been trained to see rising house prices as financially beneficial to them.

When most of those house owners are in an older demographic more likely to vote, it's a huge challenge to fix.
by egorfine | 2025-04-18 11:18:50+00:00
I am always overlooking anything Google due to the fact that they are the opposite of "Don't be evil" and because their developer's console (Google Cloud) is incredibly hostile to humans.

Today I reluctantly clicked on their "AI Studio" link in the press-release and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that AI Studio has nothing in common with their typical UI/UX. It's nice and I love it!
by bawolff | 2025-04-18 11:19:30+00:00
Honestly i think its pretty clear the office of the us president has become king, Rex non potest peccare. So i do agree with your broad point.

I just mostly think this is a particularly bad example of executive ignoring laws - using military force in armed conflict is not usually considered a crime and certainly not unprecedented. It is in fact very, very precedented throughout the history of the united states. There are circumstances where it can be illegal (war crimes, crimes against hummanity, etc) but generally the justice system around that is quite different than normal domestic laws around murder.

I would contrast that with some of the accusations against trump which are much less wrapped up in armed conflict and very unambigiously crimes (if you want an older example i would say the same thing about watergate)
by rfoo | 2025-04-18 11:19:34+00:00
> I think 15M random read IOPS is actually quite fast

680x NVMe SSDs over 68 storage servers (so 68 CPUs) for just 15M (or 25M, tuned) random read IOPS is pretty underwhelming. The use cases where 3FS (or some other custom designs) shine are more like, 200M random read IOPS with 64 servers each with 8 PCIe gen 4 NVMe SSDs (512x SSDs in total).
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-18 11:19:51+00:00
If a trendy thing to do with AI goes viral, people feel peer pressure to do the trendy thing. If you block the trendy thing from your free version, but keep it available in your paid version, maybe you can covert some free users to paid.

AI models cost money to develop and run: that much electricity and that many processors do not come cheaply. Open Source has yet to find ways to pay for that.
by asmor | 2025-04-18 11:20:17+00:00
My experience is that everyone who's not close to any of these impacts is apathetic or treating events like they're reality TV, and even light attempts at convincing that there's more going on and that we might be in a historic and bad situation is met with hostility as if you just told someone's small kid that Santa isn't real.

At best they care about the financial parts of the news.
by kowabungalow | 2025-04-18 11:21:32+00:00
Yes and no.. Slashing the problem completely is no worse than not fixing it since a climb into the stratosphere also has to burst.. I.e. with a new generation rejecting traditional lifestyles.

I think the solution is to artificially build new cities with ideal logistics. Distant cities inevitably draw away housing consumers but by least influential first and are outside each others influence for NIMBYs.
by pakitan | 2025-04-18 11:22:02+00:00
> Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.

No, it's not immaterial. If you paid $1M for something and next year that something is worth $500K, it's a problem, regardless of whether you own it or it's mortgaged, regardless of whether you plan to sell it or live in it. You lost $500K, it's as simple as that.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-18 11:22:53+00:00
We are not "silent", we're just not being heard. Those are not the same things. You'll find plenty of critique and analysis, anticipating and commenting on the unfolding cybsersecurity calamity [0,1,2] ...

[0] https://www.schneier.com/

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/

[2]https://www.dataandpolitics.net/trump-is-a-critical-vulnerab...

When those who own and control the means of discourse are donors to, and so in collusion with the problem, don't expect to hear opposition.
by kragen | 2025-04-18 11:23:52+00:00
You say, "Our current understanding is that no amount of CO2 is dangerous as long as everything else is fine," but I don't think that is correct. Like any other non-oxygen gas, carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant, and it is routinely used as such to kill rats, but it has significant toxicity even at much lower levels. NIOSH says:

> Signs of intoxication have been produced by a 30-minute exposure at 50,000 ppm [Aero 1953], and a few minutes exposure at 70,000 to 100,000 ppm produces unconsciousness [Flury and Zernik 1931]. It has been reported that submarine personnel exposed continuously at 30,000 ppm were only slightly affected, provided the oxygen content of the air was maintained at normal concentrations [Schaefer 1951]. It has been reported that 100,000 ppm is the atmospheric concentration immediately dangerous to life [AIHA 1971] and that exposure to 100,000 ppm for only a few minutes can cause loss of consciousness [Hunter 1975].

(https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/124389.html)

100,000 ppm is 10%, so at that point the carbon dioxide has reduced the oxygen in your air from 21% to 19%, far from asphyxiation conditions.

Even at much lower levels, carbon dioxide can produce drowsiness and mental impairment.

On the other hand, reaching 5% or 10% carbon dioxide by oxidizing carbon with oxygen from the air, for example by breathing or having a fire, will reduce the oxygen content of the air to an extent that is more dangerous than the carbon monoxide. So carbon dioxide toxicity is generally not the thing to worry about with respect to indoor air safety. But that doesn't mean it's not real.