MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kortilla | 2025-04-08 15:07:48+00:00
People moving in search of opportunity back then weren’t doing it because it was easier. It meant giving up your family and friends far more so than now because of the lack of internet. An out of state move meant a handful of letters a year was the level of contact you were in for and that was only for close family.

Living cost was a big barrier back then (except maybe the homesteading) too. Any time someone is leaving a poor outlook to a more booming area it usually means cost of living is going up.

> but the ability to work remotely via the internet isn't particularly new nor causative for that change

It absolutely was the first time any non-trivial percentage of work was remote. More importantly, the spike meant 15% of the population became eligible to leave an expensive city that sucked during the lockdowns. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/dec/trends-wo...

There is most definitely affordable housing all over the US. People are just both picky and lacking opportunity in the cheaper places. Remote work was the fix for the latter part so downplaying that is missing the point.

If you have a remote job and just want to live in NYC because of culture, then you have no leg to stand on when complaining about housing. It’s purely a luxury decision at that point.

> That began to slowly change in the 60's, beginning with the death of single occupancy residences

This is only true in a few select areas. Check out https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/renters-vs-homeowne...

Specifically the “average annual homeownership rates since 1964”. Right below it has a snapshot of rates by state and the difference tells you everything you need to know.

Housing is only broken in the top desired areas and remote work gave you the opportunity to get a good job while leaving those.
by aenvoker | 2025-04-08 15:07:49+00:00
SD has a very primitive conceptual model. Basically “bag of words nudging pixels around for a while”. Words near each other influence each other. But, there’s nearly no understanding of grammar.

Midjourney is similar with text prompts. But, with image prompts it is able to understand content separately from style. You can give it a photo of two people and it can return many images of recognizable approximations of those people in different poses.

SD can only start from pixels, blur and deblur those pixels in place.

MJ image prompts probably works via image-to-tokens added on to your text-to-tokens-to-image.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-08 15:08:19+00:00
I feel that the European understanding has largely been that the US and Europe share a "sphere of influence." We thought we were on the same side, the side of democracy, freedom, and free trade.

Obviously, there were always disagreements, but they were mostly limited to local decisions. Europe might have stronger regulations, for example, but that, by and large, did not impact the US directly; it only impacted how US companies were allowed to behave in the European market.

So I don't think anyone saw a huge problem with importing a lot of digital services from the US, particularly since this leveled out some of the US trade deficit. We shipped goods to the US, and the US sold digital services to us.

Nobody expected a US president who effectively behaves in the way you would expect a Russian asset to behave. In hindsight, this was wrong, but I don't think it was obvious that one could or should predict this during Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, or even Trump's first term.
by skeledrew | 2025-04-08 15:08:21+00:00
My only question here is: what about MCP? It's really nice to have a dominant open protocol, and that seems to be it, so I feel like basically all LLM apps should really have 1st class support. Like I'm currently working on a project that uses smolagents, and the first thing I did was create a MCP server adapter for it.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-08 15:08:22+00:00
payment services should absolutely have a public option, as should many other basic eservices like email, mychart, etc. the issue is that our government in particular is incompetent, has legal difficulty hiring for merit, and has public sector unions (which is effectively empowering people to negotiate against the collective democratic will of the people).

i’ve worked on internet projects with the feds before, basically the current iteration of the federal government does not really seem capable of doing these things because of how the rank-and-file is structured.

i think it would also be important to make sure that control over payment isn’t abused. i recall when donations to wikileaks were effectively blocked by public/private coordination. presumably that would be even easier if it just required public action.
by sshine | 2025-04-08 15:08:22+00:00
> I don’t want to look back on my life thinking that I spent all my time chasing fake problems.

If I understand you correctly, it is an argument to not pursue software development?

I agree, I am mostly in it for the money and my own curiosity.

And I do see that it sometimes solves real problems, like removing landmines. But it's rare.
by metadat | 2025-04-08 15:08:26+00:00
It would be interesting if you could easily install browser extensions via a source repository URL (e.g. GitHub, or any git URL), then at least there would be more transparency about who/what you are trusting by installing it. Blindly trusting a mostly anonymous chrome store "install" button seems insane, since they don't do any significant policing. Wasn't the promise of safety one of the primary reasons Google started the chrome store?
by nradov | 2025-04-08 15:08:31+00:00
Sure, you could run a captive breeding program for parrots to select for intelligence (as measured by problem solving or trainability or whatever). But there's no "free lunch" in genetics. You'll find that strain ends up worse in some other attribute. Like maybe they're more aggressive or less fertile or have higher rates of cancer or something. There are always trade-offs.
by digianarchist | 2025-04-08 15:08:38+00:00
We centralize releases but we don't centralize builds. That would remove too much autonomy from teams.

We don't use templates for any of this. Our interface is the payload sent with repository_dispatch, a few metadata files in the repository (which we fetch) and a GitHub application that allows us to update the PRs with the release status checks.

GitHub doesn't have a great story here, ideally we would want to listen to CI events emitting from a repo and run workflows as a reaction.

The reusable story on a modular basis is better but here we're missing features that we would need to move some of workflows into Actions. Notably - Action repos need to be public.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-08 15:08:41+00:00
As you grow older and run through more cycles of general opinions, you realize that pretty much everyone is in it for themselves, what serves them best, and support what narrative aligns with that.

2007: Copyright is garbage and must be abolished (so I can get music/movies free)

2025: Copyright needs to be strengthened (so my artistic abilities retain value)
by hello_computer | 2025-04-08 15:08:43+00:00
The Davos class was highly concerned about ecology before Davos was even a thing. In America, their minions (the “coastie” class) are coming to see the liquidation of the kulaks as perhaps not such a bad thing. If it devolves into a “let them eat cake” scenario, one has to wonder how things will play out in “proles vs robot pinkertons”. Watch what the sonic crowd control trucks did in Serbia last week.

Of course there is always the issue of “demand”—of keeping the factories humming, but when you are worth billions, your immediate subordinates are worth hundreds of millions, and all of their subordinates are worth a few million, maybe you come to a point where “lebensraum” becomes more valuable to you than another zero at the end of your balance?

When AI replaces the nerds (in progress), they become excess biomass. Not talking about a retarded hollywood-style apocalypse. Economic uncertainty is more than enough to suppress breeding in many populations. “not with a bang, but a whimper”

If you know any of “them”, you will know that “they” went to the same elite prep schools, live in the same cities, intermarry, etc. The “equality” nonsense is just a lie to numb the proles. In 2025 we have a full-blown hereditary nobility.

edit: answer to ianfeust6:

The West is not The World. There are over a billion Chinese, Indians, Africans…

Words mean things. Who said tree hugger? If you are an apex predator living in an increasingly cloudy tank, there is an obvious solution to the cloudyness.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-08 15:09:01+00:00
> It's crazy that you dont run your own and then redundantly run on USA side.

Resiliency costs money and a damn awful lot of our companies as well as our governments are run by beancounters.

Additionally, "domestic" alternatives to the American hyperscalers tend to be quite a bit more expensive - AWS and Google are large enough to commission custom fleets of servers and other datacenter gear due to their sheer scale, no one but the US giants can match that.
by DavidPeiffer | 2025-04-08 15:09:01+00:00
A P51 is my daily driver, and I personally really like it. The charging brick is indeed huge, but I throw it in my backpack and it doesn't bother me. I hate that the processor isn't compatible with Windows 11, because it's a solid laptop with good build quality.

I have 64 GB of RAM and it gives no grief with Factorio or Solidworks (admittedly I haven't pushed the limits in Solidworks), though I am could see VR causing challenges.
by celsoazevedo | 2025-04-08 15:09:06+00:00
As far as I'm aware, Pix is just a way to transfer money. You do "put money" into Pix.

Regarding the rest, I'm not following Brazilian politics that closely, but if politicians try to stop a democratic transition of power, then any functional democracy has to deal with them. I don't know how you can do that without doing things like jailing those who were involved. We can't do whatever we want and then call it political prosecution.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-08 15:09:21+00:00
We've been coasting on advances made many decades ago. Most developed, sure. Successful? By nearly any metric you can imagine or make up. Strongest? Our economy is eaten hollow by termites. A stiff wind would make it crumble. Worse, there doesn't appear to be any path to true recovery... we can't create the jobs that people need to prosper, but if we could somehow do that we no longer create the people who would grow up to fill those jobs. What industry is it exactly that you think the United States dominates in 2025? What vital, 21st century technology do we have a monopoly on, or at least some undeniable marketshare of? Do we build boats or planes or cars? Do we make computer chips or garments or appliances? Our only saving grace might be that we're self-sufficient agriculturally, without that we'd probably already have starved.
by nwah1 | 2025-04-08 15:09:24+00:00
Credit cards don't just offer chargeback capabilities. They offer pro-active fraud protection. They alert you for all kinds of threats, data breaches, double-charges, etc. They will sometimes lock your card and not let a payment go through, if it is suspicious, unless you perform extra confirmation via email/text/push. They offer virtual cards that you can activate or deactivate with any given vendor, to improve your privacy, security, and control.

Having your card stolen, either physically or virtually, becomes much less scary.

When used responsibly, with rewards programs, the numerous benefits over cash make sense even in the unusual case where cash payments get a discount.

Zelle and debit cards have similar kinds of protections that make it safer than cash, and there's an audit trail. Though, it is more dangerous than credit cards.

And, obviously, credit cards let you borrow money which provides flexibility to allow payments even if your paycheck hasn't yet arrived. And occasionally, going into debt intentionally can be wise, when making an investment.

Government programs could offer these kinds of features, but betting on long-term competence, customer service, and innovation in the public sector is a losing proposition.

Having both public and private options works as an intermediate approach.

But, particularly for lending, the process of determining credit-worthiness is not a government specialty, and making it subject to the political process seems like a losing proposition for taxpayers.

Payments are a more valid area for government involvement, but even then, I'm not sure what it could offer that Zelle doesn't.
by sleepyguy | 2025-04-08 15:09:48+00:00
The problem is cost. We used to buy tooling for Acme Multi-Spindle Screw Machines but the Chinese could produce it for a fraction of the cost. You would have the first set made locally, then send the drawings to China, and pay less than the material cost to have them shipped to your door. In competitive markets, customers hammer you for every penny on a machined item that costs 0.12.

These days not many Screw machine shops left, very few in the USA. Material costs were too high, and the Chinese could make it for 1/10th the cost. To bring it all back is very difficult since even the products that the parts were being made for are no longer manufactured in the USA.

On a tangent, watch Ives speak about trying to build the iPhone in America. When you understand what it takes, you quickly figure out it is impossible. The supply chains make it impossible when none of the 1000's of parts from screws to glue to chips are not manufactured in the USA.

It won't hurt if we try to bring it all back, but it will take the same amount of time and sacrifice China put in to take it. Who thinks our Gov has what it takes to do it?
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-04-08 15:10:00+00:00
The “hate” for Elon is strong in Europe.

I seriously doubt there’s any coming back with him at the wheel.

We already had one fascist leader in Europe, and we really don’t want another one, so Elon coming out as a full Nazi did immense damage to his personal and commercial brand. That’s also at least partly the reason for the strong dislike for the current US administration in Europe.

Trump, Vance and more have openly supported the extreme right, made baseless accusations about censorship, and worse. It’s way beyond a political belief, in Europe it’s personal.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-08 15:11:09+00:00
> I would really appreciate an agnostic templating language for this so these workflows can be modelled generically and have different executors, so you could port them to run them locally or across different products. Maybe there is an answer to this that I’ve just not bothered to look for yet.

Terraform? You can use it for more than just "cloud"
by jppope | 2025-04-08 15:11:26+00:00
I love this! I'm reading through the criticism in the comments and I can't help but imagine all of the articles out there complaining about how the interview process is broken - sure enough even one tool that is slightly different than the standard interview process and what do people do? complain about its short comings.

Keep it up and iterate! This is a good direction, and it certainly is going to be useful for some teams :)
by brgross | 2025-04-08 15:11:26+00:00
I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!)

The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles!

HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone.

FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal.

This happened quick and I feel very lucky. The HN community of solvers keeps me honest with much helpful technical and editorial feedback. I love it all -- here or at mayor@bracket.city

T[Tom who befriended a volleyball] HN

PS my original post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542
by talkingtab | 2025-04-08 15:11:34+00:00
This whole thing is very cool and worth reading.

BUT. I worked at a place that used IBM 360s. We ran stuff for engineers, a lot of Fortran along with assembly code. We had so much stuff going on we could not code up and run things fast enough. The engineer/scientist got frustrated.

Then one day an engineer brought in an Apple II from home and ran the programs on that.

The earth shook. The very ground beneath us moved. Tectonic plates shifted. The world was never the same again! I think it was Visicalc.

Later there were other things. Soul Of A New Machine. The Mac.

I wonder how the compute power of a current high end smart phone compares with and IBM 360? I know the graphics chip is better.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-08 15:12:16+00:00
The only way to "solve" this is to reduce US output of valuable goods so that people are attracted to jobs that pay less and make less valuable goods. I don't understand why everyone's so enamored with the prospect of making $50k working a lathe in a world where engineering jobs have been made rarer artificially. It won't even be a job in a factory that makes something cool like rockets or lithography machines, without the ability to buy stuff from overseas those people will all have to quit to work on final assembly for digital wristwatches.

They're right that they've been alienated from labor, they're so alienated they don't know that Fred Flintstone spent all day scheming to get promoted into working behind a desk.
by 9rx | 2025-04-08 15:12:44+00:00
> In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men.

Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.

> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.

It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.
by svilen_dobrev | 2025-04-08 15:12:54+00:00
> increased cross-generational interaction

cross-class interaction too.

in ~2012 i was in Tokyo, and by chance was (also) invited to someone's birthday.. The guy was working as pizzeria-waiter, and has invited.. all his usual clients to his birthday - in his small apartment, with "everyone brings some food they made" instead of gifts. My friend was a client.. so i landed there too. That was the most bizarre mix of people there. Some were just mom-and-pop. Some were millionaires. And everything in between. Most were japanese, but also from about 3-4 diff. countries. And everyone talking with everyone else as equal..

a very interesting cross-section - and should i say glimpse-of-future - of society.
by abbadadda | 2025-04-08 15:13:13+00:00
I would like a book recommendation for the things I don’t know please (Sarcasm but seriously)…

A senior dev mentioned a “class invariant” the other day And I just had no idea what that was because I’ve never been exposed to it… So I suppose the question I have is what should I be exposed to in order to know that? What else is there that I need to learn about software engineering that I don’t know that is similarly going to be embarrassing on the job if I don’t know it? I’ve got books like cracking the coding interview and software engineering at Google… But I am missing a huge gap because I was unable to finish my masters and computer science :-(
by voidwtf | 2025-04-08 15:13:34+00:00
I agree with you somewhat, but still applaud them for looking for promising future developers and paying them an amount that will attract them.

However, there are many promising junior developers that aren’t interested in the money as much as they’re interested in the challenge/fun. Sometimes high pay implies high expectations/stress and very little time to experiment/learn.

ex. I don’t want to work for a bank on fraud detection. I’d love working on AVL and in-vehicle remote monitoring systems though.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-04-08 15:13:38+00:00
Dude, if you don’t think that “keeping your head down and doing as you are told” is not just a “part” but a key part of how mega-companies like Microsoft (and Apple, Meta, Google, …) work, I don’t know what to tell you.

US companies (in almost all states) have the power to hire and fire for any non-protected reason on a whim, without notice unlike most other western countries. There is little-to-no social support if you lose your job in the USA, and the market for finding another diminishes when you say “oh yeah, I publicly embarrassed my last company”. That is a recipe for living in a state of fear. That is the reality of the USA, today, whether it makes pleasant reading or not.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-08 15:13:42+00:00
I remember an old interview with Musk where he said that when he just got into manufacturing, he would try to automate all the things, but then found that it makes the assembly line overly rigid and difficult to improve, especially when they're still learning about a new assembly process. So he switched to only automating only the obvious parts at start, keeping humans in the loop for every step where it's not entirely clear how best to perform it, and then automate these other steps gradually as they learn.

So I assume that the idea is that humanoid robots could fully replace some of these temporary roles (or allow a single human to operate several robots), maintaining flexibility while a new production line is optimized, and then easily moved off to another.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-08 15:13:46+00:00
> Manufacturing takes time and money to setup.

Trump has 4 years if he survives that long. He's an old man. The trade war can't possibly last long enough for manufacturing to be forced to restart domestically. Even if this was his first term and he got a second, by the time the second rolls around everyone would just hope to wait it out until the Democrats retook the White House and they could import everything from China again. But now no one can even make the argument and be taken seriously that we need this, because if Trump's doing trade wars then it must be a bad idea.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-08 15:13:58+00:00
This makes a lot of sense to me. The stats basically say that "if you start out underemployed, you stay underemployed for a long time", but my guess is the causation isn't necessarily as it's implied (or, indeed, as I implied it in my first comment).

That is, I think it's likely that a lot of people who start out unemployed are just comparatively less motivated, less aggressive, "go-with-the-flow"-type people. These folks do better when the market is good and worse when it's bad. But, as you put it, someone with a lot of drive and the skillset is not necessarily doomed to be held back for years if their first job sucks, as long as they set their sights on getting ahead quickly and don't let their stagnant environment rub off on them.
by Gasp0de | 2025-04-08 15:14:19+00:00
I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results, which is good enough for the presentations I hold, online pet projects (created a squirrel-themed online math-learning game for which I previously would have needed a designer to create squirrel highschool themed imagery) and memes. For many, many websites this is going to be good enough.