MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-16 01:38:54+00:00
> Given that the world CO2 level keeps rising, we can't eat fish because of heavy metals and we all have forever microplastics in us, I think it's fair to question some of our assumptions.

"Idiots will dump mercury in the river if you let them" is one of the assumptions.

> Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to be working out in practice (in the US).

It doesn't work if you don't actually do it.

But notice the important distinction between "carbon tax which is fully refunded to the population as a divided" and "tax things that aren't carbon to subsidize cronies who waste money on questionable hydrogen cars and ineffective carbon capture nonsense."

> Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture.

It's mostly regulatory capture. The primary driver of wealth inequality is corporate entity size. The billionaires are the early shareholders in megacorps.

The main exception is corporations violating antitrust laws, but this is still a form of regulatory capture, i.e. capturing the government to enforce contracts in restraint of trade when the government ought not to be doing that.

> So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.

You don't have to be uber-wealthy to afford school. Most of what pays for public schools is the taxes paid by the parents of the students. Where this doesn't work is for the poorest or orphans etc., and this was traditionally handled through charity and scholarships. Ironically things government policies have been decimating by propping up real estate costs so high people can't afford space to have private community organizations, taking the money they could have donated to charity as taxes and spending it on boondoggles and military adventurism and otherwise encouraging people to rely on national governments rather than local communities.
by geor9e | 2025-04-16 01:38:56+00:00
You remind me of Chamath Palihapitiya. He's this billionaire who likes to call things "cheap low quality junk" too, but for him it's anything is under like $5000, or not made in Milan or the French riviera. He's hamming it up for the audience but the point is the same. Every strata of wealth has the luxury of not buying the "cheap low quality junk" of the strata below it. To you, they are temu possessions, but to another person they are just their possessions. Everyone would love to be wealthy enough to never check a pricetag. And even then, plenty of products last just as long no matter what you spend on them. Many things are literally identical and just marked up 10x by the middleman who imported it to your local store.
by rvz | 2025-04-16 01:40:29+00:00
Microsoft will be targeted last, [0] with good reason. (They know how to avoid anti-trust scrutiny the best).

This is why Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been targeted first, before building a huge case for Microsoft.

Again, it won't be easy as the FTC and the DOJ have failed to break Microsoft up many times.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41475806
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-16 01:40:58+00:00
> You've dodged the meat of my complaint by not having an example where you need to inject into a struct to test an implementation.

Sure. "Dr, it hurts... well stop doing that." Sometimes, you can design around the issue. I don't claim that this specific pattern works for everything, just that this is how my real-world application is built.

> Moreover, if you slap `Send + Sync + 'static` then you can certainly avoid the problems I am hinting at: you've committed to never having a lifetime and won't have to deal with the borrow checker.

Yes. Sometimes, one atomic increment on startup is worth not making your code more complex.

> A database that is only going to live for a finite time.

This is just not the case for a web application.
by mpetroff | 2025-04-16 01:41:06+00:00
Figure 24 in Paul Tol's Notes is a reasonable thing to try: https://web.archive.org/web/20250201164619/https://personal....

However, to properly screen for color vision deficiencies requires calibrated spectra. Thus, even a color-calibrated monitor is insufficient, since color calibration assumes that the standard cone response functions are valid, which isn't the case for anomalous trichromats (which encompasses the most common types of colorblindness). This is why screening, such as with the HRR test, is done with plates printed with spectrally-calibrated inks in controlled lightning conditions (again with a known spectrum).
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-16 01:41:36+00:00
> When two incompatible views exist on a subject, at least one of them must be wrong.

Rarely can any significant argument be boiled down to something so simple that this is the case. What if there are two incompatible views on the course of action that should be taken to lead to some desired outcome? You really can't just say that one of them must be wrong. There is a whole web of tradeoffs, assumptions, and odds to consider - you can't simply determine "right" and "wrong".
Show HN: Nomad – Realtime shipment tracking for DME providers
by kishond | 2025-04-16 01:41:58+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Nomad to help DME (Durable Medical Equipment) companies track shipments in real time and keep both staff and managers informed.

In this space, shipments often go dark — providers have little visibility, and patient deliveries are delaying. Nomad gives providers a simple dashboard to see exactly where their equipment is and reduce delays.

Features:

• Real-time location tracking for medical equipment

• Automatic alerts for delays or delivery confirmations

• Employee-facing updates to improve communication

• Lightweight UI for busy office staff

• Applies supervised ML models trained on historical delivery data to predict delays, identify risk factors, and optimize routing decisions in real time.

It’s early, but i’m working with some DME businesses and refining based on their workflows.

Would love to hear your thoughts — especially if you’ve worked in logistics, healthcare, or B2B SaaS. Site: https://nomadtracking.com
by brandensilva | 2025-04-16 01:43:41+00:00
April 19th is the next national protest. I've been going to fight for the constitution, due process, and rule of law since this all began.

The time isn't 2 years from now to change this at mid terms. There won't be a free place to speak or protest by then yet alone a free election system at the pace this is happening.

I hope others will join.
by contingencies | 2025-04-16 01:44:31+00:00
Gotcha. I've done bits of Australia, France, Laos, Romania, Taiwan, Thailand and Yunnan. Definitely Yunnan has been the highlight, although all had memorable sections. I think since you crossed the US already, New Zealand or Tasmania could be good future destinations for you to consider. They have manageable distances, spectacular nature, few large vehicles and friendly locals.
by dtquad | 2025-04-16 01:44:49+00:00
This anti-big-tech hysteria in the US is dangerous. Applying early 20th antitrust thinking to modern tech companies is short sighted and doesn't show the whole picture. These American big tech companies that people like Steve Bannon and Lina Khan want to split up have been responsible for not only the impressive US GDP and wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 financial crisis but also for much of the rest of the world's wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 crisis.

Danish pension funds have 25% allocation on US stocks but ~70% of the total returns in 2022-2024 came from US stocks with big tech companies leading the charge.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-16 01:45:42+00:00
at no point did they say anything that even comes close to saying “no bugs in human written code.”

if you’re willing to come down off your defensive AI position, because your response is a common one from people who are bought into the tech, i’ll try explain what they were saying (if not, stop reading now, save yourself some time).

maybe you’ll learn something, who knows :shrug:

> Programming was one of the few remaining places where you had to be precise, where it was harder to fool yourself. Where you had to understand it to program it.

they are talking about the approach, motivations and attitudes involved in “the craft”.

we strive for perfection, knowing we will never reach it. we, as programmers/hackers/engineers must see past our own bullshit/delusions to find our way to the fabled “solution”.

they are lamenting how those attitudes have shifted towards “fuck it, that’ll do, who cares if the code reads good, LLM made it work”.

where in the “vibe coding” feedback loop is there a place for me, a human being, to realise i have completely misunderstood a concept for the last five years and suddenly realise “oh shit, THATS HOW THAT WORKS!? HOW HAVE I NOT REALISED THAT FOR FIVE YEARS.” ?

where in “just ask chatgpt for a summary about a topic” is my journey where i learn about a documentation rendering library that i never even knew existed until i actually started reading the docs site for a library?

maybe we were thinking about transferring our docs off confluence onto a public site to document our API? asking chatGpt removes that opportunity for accidental learning and growth.

in essence, they’re lamenting the sacrifice people seem to be willing to make for convenience, at the price of continually growing and learning as a human being.

at least that’s my take on it. probably wrong — but if i am at least i get to learn something new and grow as a person and see past my own bullshit and delusions!
by esprehn | 2025-04-16 01:46:15+00:00
The big challenge with the approach not touched on in the post is version skew. During a deploy you'll have some new clients talk to old servers and some old clients talk to new servers. The ViewModel is a minimal representation of the data and you can constrain it with backwards compatibility guarantees (ex. Protos or Thrift), while the UI component JSON and their associated JS must be compatible with the running client.

Vercel fixes this for a fee: https://vercel.com/docs/skew-protection

I do wonder how many people will use the new React features and then have short outages during deploys like the FOUC of the past. Even their Pro plan has only 12 hours of protection so if you leave a tab open for 24 hours and then click a button it might hit a server where the server components and functions are incompatible.
by sneak | 2025-04-16 01:47:14+00:00
This comment presupposes that AI is only used to write code that the (presumably junior-level) author doesn’t understand.

I’m a self-respecting software developer with 28 years of experience. I would, with some caveats, venture to say I am an expert in the trade.

AI helps me write good code somewhere between 3x and 10x faster.

This whole-cloth shallow dismissal of everything AI as worthless overhyped slop is just as tired and content-free as breathless claims of the limitless power or universal applicability of AI.
Ask HN: Best static website cloning tool?
by asynchronousx | 2025-04-16 01:48:02+00:00
Hey HN, I’m hoping to make a static preview of a dynamic web app I have, so people can view it with some data and not have all the data requests empty.

Looking through the available website clone options, none of them seem able to do all the things I want, namely: 1. Clone all the routes and resources for the site, rewriting the routes to work with the local copy 2. Let the data requests come back filled, then copy it as a static dataset for that component or page’s request.

Any tool suggestions out there?
by mdaniel | 2025-04-16 01:48:14+00:00
Is there even a grammar for Oracle SQL? I took a swing at trying to slurp it out of the "alt text" of the railroad images in the many, many html files in (e.g. https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2... -> https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2... ) but then I thankfully moved off any project from that point on that used Oracle and let it go

I'm aware of https://github.com/orafce/orafce and https://github.com/pgoracle before that (the commit history also references ora2pg and searching for that surfaces https://github.com/darold/ora2pg which was just updated yesterday!) but I've never tried to use any of them in anger
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-04-16 01:48:42+00:00
>If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.

I’m an automotive CE… we’re getting there.

Cars used to be DONE at lots… now, there are weeks to finish code before the customer lays hands on, and that time is factored in now.

Worse with OTA updates. Now, so long as it’s fixed if enough customers complain that’s good enough.

Cars used to be great. Then some morons connected them to the internet for no good reasons.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-16 01:49:25+00:00
Railroads revolutionized transport and yet railway mania was undeniably a bubble. Something can be both very useful and yet also overvalued and overhyped leading to significant malinvestment (sometimes, everyone wins to the detriment of the investors, sometimes just everyone loses out because a huge amount of effort was spent on not useful stuff, usually somewhere in between).
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-16 01:49:59+00:00
Sorry, I must have added the extra bonuses on top of the gross salary that already included them. The 5 210€ figure indeed matches 70k USD.

The first link was ZipRecruiter survey with two peaks at 54k and 150k, leading to the average of 100k.

On the cost of living, I see your point, and sure a straight 33% increase is nothing to sneeze at. The actual impact is more complicated depending on the personal situation, I'm not in the US so I was under the impression there's a lot more costs, especially with a family for instance, where EU countries tend to be costly for singles but easier to deal with with kids. But it also comes down to life style, and researchers might benefit as much of the social perks in general (overall I'm mostly in agreement)
by transpute | 2025-04-16 01:50:43+00:00
If you work on OSS software on CVE management, then you already know that NVD funding reductions have been ongoing for more than a year.

April 2024, https://nvd.nist.gov/general/news/nvd-program-transition-ann...

NIST maintains the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).. This is a key piece of the nation’s cybersecurity infrastructure. There is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities.. based on.. an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support.. We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government, and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD.

Sep 2024, Yocto Project, "An open letter to the CVE Project and CNAs", https://github.com/yoctoproject/cve-cna-open-letter/blob/mai...

> Security and vulnerability handling in software is of ever increasing importance. Recent events have adversely affected many project's ability to identify and ensure these issues are addressed in a timely manner. This is extremely worrying.. Until recently many of us were relying not on the CVE project's data but on the NVD data that added that information.

Five years ago (2019), I helped to organize a presentation by the CERT Director from Carnegie Mellon, who covered the CVE backlog and lack of resources, e.g. many reported vulnerabilities never even receive a CVE number. It has since averaged < 100 views per year, even as the queue increased and funding decreased, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC65VrnBPI
by bloomingeek | 2025-04-16 01:51:16+00:00
Well put, perhaps this could be the beginning of a super rich person rebelling against the current administration? Goodness knows somebody needs to, or he will run them all over until it's time to completely burn the rest of us who don't have the means to defend ourselves in court. If recent news is to be believed from major networks simply reporting what trump says, NOTHING is beyond his contempt for anyone who doesn't bend the knee, which is un-american.
by bytesandbits | 2025-04-16 01:51:17+00:00
Cursor sucks. Not as a product. As a team. Their customer support is terrible.

I was offered in writing a refund by the team who cold reached out to me to ask me why I cancelled my sub one week after start. Then they ignored my 3+ emails in response asking them to refund, and other means of trying to communicate with them. Offering me a refund as a bait to gain me back, then when I accept it they ghost me. Wow. Very low.

The product is not terrible but the team responses are. And this, if you see how they handled it, is also a very poor response. First thing you notice if you open the link is that the Cursor team removed the reddit post! As if we were not going to see it or something? Who do they think they are? Censoring bad comments which are 100% legit.

I am giving it a go to competitors just out of sheer frustration with how they handle customers, and I do recommend everybody to explore other products before you settle on Cursor. I don't intend to ever re-subscribe and have recommended friends to do the same, most of which agree with my experience.
by jhbadger | 2025-04-16 01:51:22+00:00
Americans went to Europe for grad school and/or postdoctoral research in science (especially in chemistry and physics) before WWII, though. We saw ourselves as second rate. People like Oppenheimer, Rabi, Pauling, and just about every other early-mid 20th century chemist or physicist did all or some of their training in Europe, Now, at least until recently, it's been Europe (and the rest of the world) flocking to our universities.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-16 01:53:18+00:00
Because reducing suffering would impact the bottom line? There's a whole slew of existing technology/practices (battery hens, debeaking, sow stalls, etc) that already prioritize profit over animal welfare.

Vegans also argue that the entire dairy industry, which necessarily requires keeping cows continually pregnant and separating them from their calves soon after birth, in itself creates immense suffering.
by skybrian | 2025-04-16 01:54:12+00:00
Yes, there was lots of turnover and "percent" started looking pretty extreme for me after a few years. But at the time, I assumed that's just how it is with software developers in Silicon Valley. We can and do change jobs frequently. It was well-known that it's the best way to get a raise. But I also knew more old-timers at Google than at other places.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-04-16 01:54:40+00:00
There is a third way: Private adjudication. I see no reason why the crypto community couldn't run its own private court system, similar to what e.g. Randy Barnett describes in chapter 5 of Anarchy and the Law.

(Obligatory, I don't work in crypto or have any special connection to it, I just think people forget this third option even exists when it's really the most common way most private industries actually resolve disputes most of the time.)
by Nevermark | 2025-04-16 01:54:48+00:00
From link:

> Heaviest blue whale ever recorded

I don't think estimation errors regarding things outside of someone's area of familiarity say much.

You could ask a much "easier"" question from the same topic area and still get terrible answers: "What percentage of blue whales are blue?" Or just "Are blue whales blue?"

Estimating something often encountered but uncounted seems like a better test. Like how many cars pass in front of my house every day. I could apply arithmetic, soft logic and intuition to that. But that would be a difficult question to grade, given it has no universal answer.
by stickfigure | 2025-04-16 01:55:02+00:00
Super interesting read! But also feels a bit like a paid advertisement. You'd think that an article about robot farms would mention more than one brand of robot? Guessing this is the submarine at work:

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It makes me wonder what the author isn't mentioning. Do they have bugs that take the whole farm down? If the internet goes out, do the machines start acting weird? I'm not a luddite, I love the idea of a robot farm, I just want a complete story.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-16 01:55:50+00:00
> With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop.

Because they don't have to. In most cases, to have a large successful game, developers need publishers. Publishers are who negotiate with Steam or Gog or EA. Publishers are who figure out in the in-game microtransaction economy. Publishers are who do all the promotional activities like getting famous streamers to play the game.

The gaming community never seems to understand this. Who they think of as "the devs" are often actually the publisher.
by gwern | 2025-04-16 01:55:50+00:00
> Most technologies do not follow Wright’s Law – the prices of bicycles, fridges, or coal power plants do not decline exponentially as we produce more of them.

I would bet Roser is wrong here and he can't provide a reference for his claims here. I'd predict that they do decline exponentially, it is just that (1) we have already produced a huge number of them so it's hard to observe the next doubling of cumulative production, and (2) the learning rate exponent is a lot worse than in the more obvious examples like solar panels or deep learning.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-16 01:56:01+00:00
I agree with:

> the point of crypto is more abstract than any of that

It has to do with operating in spite of somebody who would otherwise tamper with your information. It's about durability in the face of sophisticated adversaries.

I was trying to get at the point of crytocurrency. The accounting system can handle anything at all, so why bother with the coins? We've had coins for thousands of years, they're the most boring app imaginable. Why bother maintaining artificial scarcities when we could be addressing real ones?

But at the end of the day, if nobody provides hardware for it to run on, then, we can't have that accounting system. And those people have to pay their electric bills, and for the hardware they're using, and for that they need something money-shaped. The point of cryptocurrency is to be that money-shaped thing. We need it to interface with the traditional finance system until we can replace that system with something better.
by aabiji | 2025-04-16 01:56:16+00:00
I think Flappy Bird and other viral things like that are definitely exceptions to the trend, where the creator gets popular because of their product, not the other way around. I think generally the point I was trying to make was that already being popular makes marketing a product incredibly easier.

I'm not really sure what you mean by the more "popular" people have people go in and clean their mess behind the scenes, because the outcome is still ultimately the same in the end.

Good point though.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-16 01:56:18+00:00
HN really corroborates the inverse principle here - giving everyone names and karma doesn't seem to generate consistent, thoughtful contributions. It rewards apologia, groupthink and complacency, oftentimes the only interesting or unique viewpoint in a thread is flagged or karma-bombed to the bottom because it's a green username. The big HN "experiment" feels like it's stalled out, we've been getting the same results for years now. This website garners the reputation it has because everyone with power is out for themselves. There is no desire to accept change that threatens the collective interests of the tech industry, look at how HN reacts to regulations and war crimes and misinformation that technology inherently necessitates. It's thread after thread of hand-wringing, "it's not your fault" and then everyone is off to nerd-snipe each other over the semantic definition of a sorting algorithm.

Let HN, Reddit and X (or whatever it's called now) be a lesson to everyone - privately owned platforms are all just different brands of echo chamber. There is no obligation to change an echo chamber that makes you money or repeats what you want to hear.