MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EasyMark | 2025-04-12 18:35:28+00:00
Suburbs are fine. We are in 2025, not 1925, there is no reason why work from home isn't an option for information workers and others who don't need to be physically on premises. You are completely ignoring how much that cuts down on traffic and would lower the cost of real estate, so more people who aren't millionaires could live downtown. We also have electric cars that have basically zero emissions, there is a technical solution for this; not everyone wants to ride a bus or train.
by CliffStoll | 2025-04-12 18:36:15+00:00
Is there any SVG extension which allows density of line? I have a plotter which can lift/lower a pen; it's driven from SVG files. It'd be sweet to allow the pen to lower while the line is being drawn (as we often do with handwriting).

Oh - it's an Axidraw, from Evil Mad Scientist Labs - great device, wonderful people.
by ketzu | 2025-04-12 18:36:19+00:00
I did. :)

(And I am aware of the irony in failing to communicate when mentioning that studying writing is important to be good at communication.) Maybe I should have also cited this part:

> writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.

In my opinion, writing is important not (only) as a proxy for thinking, but as a direct form of communicating ideas. (Also applies to other forms of communication though.)
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-04-12 18:37:17+00:00
> With modern emissions standards, more than 50% of the harmful pollution comes from tires/brakes/road surface wear/resuspended dust:

Sure, but what about compared to eg. 15 year old diesels with removed DPF filters? Those were the cars that were removed from paris (with the "eco stickers" and other regulation), and that brought the pollution down.

New cars exhaust very little particulate matter, so percantages don't say a lot.

I mean.. almost 100% of the polution of bicyles comes from tires/brakes/road surface/resuspended dust, but the total amount is very low.
by worble | 2025-04-12 18:37:38+00:00
> The main downside I see is that its runtime code size footprint is much larger than Zod.

Yes, it unfortunately really does bloat your bundle a lot, which is a big reason I personally chose to go with Valibot instead (it also helps that it's a lot closer to zods API so it's easier to pickup).

Thanks for linking that issue, I'll definitely revisit it if they can get the size down.
Ask HN: Help, I want to be a consultant
by throwzvon1 | 2025-04-12 18:37:50+00:00
All,

After 20+ years in the business, I can't take it anymore in the corporate setting. I work for a successful startup that became large (1000+ people), and I have been there over 5 years. I ran the infrastructure, which is all cloud-based. I became less hands-on over time, focusing on building teams and standards and leading architecturally at a high-level.

Now I hate my life. HR, bureaucracy, meetings, lying upper-management, and the fact that I am already fully vested, make it a chore to get up to get to work. I am in my 40's in a very big city in the northeast U.S.

Before I quit everything and hide out in a third world country avoiding ever working again, can anyone tell me if my idea to try to strike out on my own as an Cloud Infrastructure Consultant is a stupid idea?

I have a year or two of savings, I'm renting with no kids. My expenses are very high but minus rent and soon possibly COBRA, I can reduce it.

I don't think I can be an FTE anymore, it's utter misery. Having lost autonomy (with a new corporate culture of intense micromanagement from the senior level), meetings (60-70% of the week), losing work from home to take the crowded subway just to come to a loud-ass office where someone always has a cold, having pay remain static after inflation (it didn't matter before stock all vested), and believing that the people above me are buffoons... means that it seems the ONLY option is to do consulting.

LinkedIn is pretty dry - I seem to be sent only low-paying IC roles, or extremely senior executive roles, whereas I am a middle manager.

Sincerely,

Desperately Seeking An Echo Chamber
by rawgabbit | 2025-04-12 18:37:53+00:00
The site is beautiful and very responsive. Thanks for putting this together.

One suggestion, maybe for a later iteration, is to improve the description of the companies and the "similar companies".

For example, I know what Zscaler is but its description is somewhat of a word salad. "Zscaler, Inc. operates as a cloud security company worldwide. The company offers Zscaler Internet Access solution that provides users, workloads, IoT, and OT devices secure access to externally managed applications, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and internet destinations; and Zscaler Private Access solution, which is designed to provide access to managed applications hosted internally in data centers, and private or public clouds."

Personally, I would write a two sentence description and provide a link to the official company About Us page. For Zscaler, I would write something like: Headquartered in San Jose, California USA, Zscaler is a cloud security company. Its products include a Zscaler Secure Internet Access solution, Private Access solution, and Digital Experience solution. For further reading, refer to xxx.

Because the descriptions are a bit vague, the "similar companies" for Zscaler include: Microsoft and Oracle which is a bit questionable. I appreciate the comparison to Palantir, Crowdstrike, and Palo Alto Networks.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-04-12 18:38:35+00:00
I'm not familiar with the particulars of the Paris program but a "car ban" doesn't have to ban garbage & freight trucks.

I'd argue these, along with private or public transit, emergency vehicles etc, are the best uses for the internal combustion engine or just vehicles in general. The problem with ICE/car/vehicles, isn't that they exist or are useful, but that at some point we over-indexed on their utility and ignored their externalities & subsidies.
by dreamlayers | 2025-04-12 18:38:45+00:00
It seems like there is a continuum between being oblivious and delusional. You need to notice things, recognize their meaning, make connections and then make conclusions. Being oblivious can mean missing important signs and making bad choices due to not realizing what is happening. Being delusional can mean jumping to conclusions by "connecting the dots" in one particular way that leads to one conclusion even though that may not be the truth. A sane perspective would mean evaluating different hypotheses to come to a reasonable conclusion. Someone who is paranoid may be right about some things much earlier than others, but they may also be wrong about many other things.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-12 18:38:46+00:00
This isn’t a question of lived experience. It’s simply not the case that the FDA approves all treatments or that an FDA approved treatment is necessarily justified in some particular case.

I do agree that a lot of people seem to believe that’s how it works. There’s some objectively correct treatment, the doctors uncover what it is, and I have an unconditional right to get that treatment no matter what it costs. But no healthcare system does or could work that way. You have to consider tradeoffs and control costs somewhere.

You can build a system that makes it seem that way to the patients; that’s why I like Kaiser. In my opinion it’s more user friendly that way. But the tradeoff is that cost controls are imposed directly on what doctors are willing to prescribe. There’s many stories of Kaiser doctors refusing to prescribe expensive treatments that other doctors would, because as a matter of policy they believe some lesser treatment would be sufficient.
by elcritch | 2025-04-12 18:39:05+00:00
You could construe my logic that way, but no I’m saying the DHS was likely wrong in that instance and it caused uproar and backlash. Unlike other nations where few would care if the government overstepped. Governments will always overreach, it’s how people pushback which matters.

Also I’m more likely to be arrested and deported for silently praying in the UK.

However there’s also political tactics of “look at that poor student being deported” when said student was calling for jihad, intifada, and antisemitism and violating visas on top of that, which was sort of my original point.

Heh and is Canada fairing any different? Remember when Trudeau froze bank accounts for truckers protesting Covid lockdowns or whatnot. Maybe Trudeau shutting down parliament to seemingly avoid scrutiny. Hopefully it’s just news sensationalism and not the downfall of Canada.
by aitoorwrites | 2025-04-12 18:40:42+00:00
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has launched a formal investigation into X Internet Unlimited Company (formerly Twitter), now owned by Elon Musk. The concern: whether the platform illegally used public posts from EU citizens to train its Grok large language models (LLMs).

These AI models, developed by Musk’s xAI and integrated into the X platform, require vast datasets. The DPC is investigating whether the use of publicly available posts respected the legality and transparency principles of the GDPR — especially when dealing with potentially personal or sensitive data.

This isn’t the first time Musk’s platform has faced scrutiny over AI training practices. In 2024, a preliminary inquiry was opened and closed swiftly after promises from X to stop processing EU user data. However, new complaints from privacy rights groups like NOYB and Euroconsumers reignited the case, leading to this formal action.

The investigation could lead to significant fines (up to 4% of global turnover) if GDPR violations are confirmed — and might set a precedent for AI model training transparency in Europe.

Full article (in Spanish): https://theairevolution.news/irlanda-investiga-la-red-social...
by mlyle | 2025-04-12 18:40:48+00:00
> Complications aren’t about utility. They’re about art. It’s intentionally overcomplicating something.

This is not the original usage; "complication" does not imply "grande complication."

> ..."features"...

None of your criticism applies to "functions" which is the first term used.

> Methods in OOP. Every term in functional programming.

Yes... I'm saying in a niche, luxury industry based upon exclusivity and tradition, the marketing pushes towards old, foreign, and exotic language. All these things in commodity digital watches are "modules" and "functions" instead of "calibre" and "complications." (With Apple, on the high end, choosing "complication" for some reason ;).
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-12 18:40:49+00:00
figure no. 1 is missing green color on HVAC transmission line. i do not have ExTwitter and i do not know other way to let them know.

it is interesting to think about human made object in terms of how much materials they use, for example big old transformer contains 2 tons of iron, new solid-state transformer with same capacity uses only 300 kg of silicon (Si), 120kg kg of plastics and 50 kg of copper.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-12 18:41:19+00:00
They're not inherently heavier. They're only heavier if you put a long-range battery in them, even then it's not by very much, and even that may not persist as higher energy density batteries are developed.

Or to put it another way, the difference between a small car and a large SUV is far greater than the difference between an electric car and a gasoline car.
by voidspark | 2025-04-12 18:42:00+00:00
I know VMWare workstation is not the same, but there were VBS-like systems back in the 1970's.

IBM pioneered hardware virtualization for isolation on their System/370 mainframes with VM/370 in 1972.

VMWare ESX hypervisor brought virtualization to x86 servers (2001).

Xen hypervisor introduced open-source virtualization for x86 (2003).

By the time VBS showed up, the concepts were already several decades old.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-12 18:43:39+00:00
this is a good idea, as it allows those who aren't the "great orators of their time" some space to breath and think. Not everyone is a fast on their feet debater. Lots of quieter people have great ideas, but don't speak up because they don't have the best debate skills, but are great with making a bullet list of facts and data to back up their side, but are nervous in confrontations during a meeting.
by YZF | 2025-04-12 18:43:58+00:00
They have other problems that are higher priority apparently: "A 22-year-old Palestinian man was tortured and killed by Hamas militants after he criticized the group publicly and participated in rare anti-Hamas protests in Gaza, his family said.

Uday Rabie was taken last week by dozens of armed fighters with Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, his brother Hassan Rabie told CNN on Tuesday." - https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/middleeast/uday-rabie-palesti...

And by the way, while they do have uniform, they don't wear them when they fight. Only for celebrations like their marching of civilian hostages. Gaza also has a higher proportion of structures used for military purposes (like all of them?) then Germany in WW2. There have been cities in Germany during WW-II that have been completely destroyed - we can pick that as a comparison. Picking entire Germany vs a tiny area is not reasonable.
by masklinn | 2025-04-12 18:44:06+00:00
> it's the people who can't afford to live in the city who need them to get there.

What are you talking about. Paris's public transport reaches out 60km away from the city, and that's not including mainline trains (including high speed). The people who can't afford to live in the city have taken public transport to get there for 50 years.
by gruez | 2025-04-12 18:45:12+00:00
>> Some 60% of the claims weren’t reimbursed at all.

>The article gives examples of very normal billing errors that were used as the pretext for this.

Are you talking about this blurb?

"Blue Cross did not accuse the center of any intentional miscoding — but the sloppy billing led to additional scrutiny, the company’s witnesses said. "

I'm not sure what the alternative is. Are they supposed to pay even though the are errors? Are they saying, "you only have one chance to file a claim, and there's a typo in it so we won't reimburse you a dime?". It's not clear from the article why exactly they're denying the claim, aside from maybe the place being overpriced.
by flomo | 2025-04-12 18:45:32+00:00
In the USA, the working poor generally don't work downtown, and it's really the industrial areas where there is awful transit service. So cheapo used cars are a must for these folks.

There is some awful HN bias here where young healthy well-paid tech workers live in some boogie part of SF/NYC/Boston/etc and enjoy the "car-free lifestyle" (and I've been there), without any idea how the other half lives.
by fintler | 2025-04-12 18:45:33+00:00
> do you think GCC’s m68k backend (to pick an arbitrary one) has been as battle-tested as their AArch64 one

m68k might be a bad example to pick. I was using gcc to target m68k on netbsd in the mid 1990s. It's very battle tested.

Also, don't forget that m68k used to be in all of the macs that Apple sold at one point before they switched to powerpc (before switching to x86 and the current arm chips). You could use gcc (with mpw's libs and headers) on pre-osx (e.g. system 7) m68k macs.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-12 18:47:17+00:00
That is a statement that really needs citation and qualification to back it up. I'd argue that 'cheaper' is used in a vacuum here. By that I mean that the point of mass transit isn't how much it costs, but how much value it provides. By that measure the bus services that replaced streetcars and other mass transit really doesn't stack up. Busses have led to much lower ridership which has led to a massive amount of bad secondary effects. Looking at how congestion pricing in NYC has increased mass transit use AND economic activity it is pretty clear that 'cheaper' has led to secondary effects that far outweigh any narrow operational gains from switching to busses.
by ziml77 | 2025-04-12 18:47:25+00:00
Microsoft has a history of trying to avoid breaking older software with new Windows releases. To do that, they definitely do need account for how people are actually coding things in their software rather than just what they've documented as the way to do things.

The string check makes a lot of sense when you consider software written in languages like Java or Python rather than something that's coded directly against the OS APIs. In those cases you would get strings back with the OS name which of course is going to lead to many people just doing taking the simplest route of string matching.
by xrd | 2025-04-12 18:49:03+00:00
I'm saying no hallucination will be happening.

The LLM will happily write code that permits network access, because it read online an example that did that. And, unless you know better, you won't know to manually turn that off.

Sandboxed WebComponents does not solve anything if your LLM thinks it is helping when it lets the drawbridge down for the orcs.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-12 18:49:23+00:00
> A lot of Nix-based package builds will burn Nix store paths directly into the binary

I didn't know that, sounds like a bug. Maybe something can be done to make it easier to know that this is the case for your build.

I'd still think that by refusing to build things with unspecified inputs, nix prunes a whole category of problems away which then don't bite the distro maintainers, but maybe that's wishful thinking.

I'll continue to use it because it's nice to come to a project I haven't worked on in a few years and not have to think about whether it's going to now work on this machine or figure out what the underlying language-specific commands are--but if there were ways to tweak things so that others have this feeling also, I'd like to know them.
by vayora | 2025-04-12 18:49:40+00:00
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by eesmith | 2025-04-12 18:50:04+00:00
The suffrage movement in the UK also had a militant component:

> The tactics of the [Women’s Social and Political Union] included shouting down speakers, hunger strikes, stone-throwing, window-smashing, and arson of unoccupied churches and country houses. In Belfast, when in 1914 the Ulster Unionist Council appeared to renege on an earlier commitment to women's suffrage,[27] the WSPU's Dorothy Evans (a friend of the Pankhursts) declared an end to "the truce we have held in Ulster." In the months that followed WSPU militants (including Elizabeth Bell, the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a doctor and gynaecologist) were implicated in a series of arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities.

This influenced the US suffrage movement, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit... , even during WWI: "groups like the National Woman's Party that continued militant protests during wartime were criticized by other suffrage groups and the public, who viewed it as unpatriotic."
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-12 18:50:09+00:00
Wealth is not zero sum though. LeBron James being great at basketball doesn't make you any worse at basketball. Jeff Bezos starting a company in his garage selling books online that became one of the biggest in the world worth many billions doesn't make me any poorer. Financial transactions are win-win. That is why there is a mutual thank you when making a purchase. The cafe owner would rather have my 2$ instead of coffee in their pot. I would rather have coffee in my cup instead of 2$. If neither of us thought we would not be better off the transaction would not happen
by wat10000 | 2025-04-12 18:50:11+00:00
A serious problem with teaching is that the quality of the job is lower the better you are as a teacher. Good teachers spend a tremendous amount of time outside of school hours on grading and preparation. They also have effectively lower pay as they’re buying classroom supplies with their own money. But if you don’t care much about teaching and just do what it takes to keep the job, you can skip most of that.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-12 18:52:18+00:00
In my mind the printer counts as a tool so it's a different category. Also you could always do the same by hand with a mask. The feature size might be a bit larger though.

As to doing it all "from sand". You can! At least sort of. It's always a question of how far down the stack you want to take it. After all you probably need to source rare earths from somewhere that isn't your backyard.

Check out pictures of the old processes before automated VLSI. It was all done by hand including crystalizing the silicon. You'll need a clean room and a bunch of weird supplies though.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-12 18:52:57+00:00
Seems like the difference between a profitable investment and a profitable company.

They invested tens of billions of dollars in destroying the competition to be able to recently gain a return on that investment. One could either write off that previous spending or calculate it into the totality of "Uber". I don't know how Silicon Valley economics works but, presumably, a lot of that previous spending is now in the form of debt which must be serviced out of the current profits. Not that I'm stating that taking on debt is wrong or anything.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-12 18:52:59+00:00
Establishing a new bus service in an area where public transportation had not existed must be indeed much cheaper.

However it is impossible for the operational and maintenance costs for a bus service and for the roads on which the buses go to be cheaper than for an electric streetcar, unless some prices are fake.

It is true that I have seen enough cases where electric streetcars have been replaced by buses, but I cannot see other explanation except bribes, because it was extremely visible that the buses were more expensive, both because of the fuel consumption and because of the much more frequent repairs both for the buses and for the roads.
by chrisweekly | 2025-04-12 18:53:18+00:00
Even tho it's 8y old, Sarah Drasner's famous "SVG Can Do That?" talk is still eye-opening for many. CSS has matured a ton since then (I'm less sure about SVG per se)... in any case it's HIGHLY recommended.

Slides: https://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that

Video: https://youtu.be/ADXX4fmWHbo?si=6YPZkopyEDc8PSte
by ein0p | 2025-04-12 18:53:28+00:00
As an ex-Googler I say: blessing in disguise. When working at a $MEGACORP it's easy to think there's barren wasteland out there beyond the walls, so it's scary. But that is very much not so. I get that opportunities to work on browsers are relatively few and far between, but if you can do something else, try working for a smaller company which treats you more like a human being, and less like a replaceable cog.

Not much of a consolation, I'm sure. I've never been laid off, so I can only hypothesize what that'd feel like, but know this: this too shall pass.
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-12 18:53:35+00:00
Doesn't that balance out in the end though? People in Detroit go from working at an automobile factory to working as a service worker at a local restaurant or retail store and their incomes go down massively, meaning all they can afford to buy is cheap crap from China sold at their local dollar store or discount retailer. They would rather have the old purchasing power and old retail options, especially since inflation has eroded a lot of those low prices.