MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varispeed | 2025-04-12 21:15:29+00:00
You're missing how IR35 actually reshaped the ecosystem - not just in terms of tax compliance, but in terms of who's allowed to profit from delivering services.

It's not about preventing companies from treating people like employees. In fact, post-IR35, it enabled exactly that - but with fewer rights. Now, individuals can still be engaged for long-term, full-time work, as long as they go through an umbrella company and give up both autonomy and the ability to run a business. The result is employment in all but name, with none of the legal protections, and often less pay due to umbrella fees and unreimbursed business costs.

You're also wrong to suggest that independents weren't competing with the likes of Accenture or Deloitte. In practice, they absolutely were - especially in the public sector. Individual consultants and small firms were frequently:

- Delivering the same work at lower cost and higher quality

- Auditing or overseeing work delivered by big firms

- Winning smaller-scale, high-trust engagements directly with departments that didn't need an army of suits and a 200-page PowerPoint.

This did threaten the margin-heavy model of large consultancies, and they did lobby for IR35 and the subsequent reforms to de-risk their position. What IR35 achieved was to push out small, agile operators by making them legally and commercially "difficult" to work with - not because they were "tax dodging", but because they lacked the compliance resources and political access to fight back.

Meanwhile, large firms were exempt from these concerns. They can place workers with clients indefinitely without IR35 scrutiny, because the worker is not the owner of the delivery company. That's the loophole. The exact same working pattern is treated as fine if the profit flows to Deloitte, and suspicious if it flows to a one-person or small, workers owned limited company.

This isn't about "6-month gigs needing umbrellas" - it's about eliminating small, independent service providers from public sector procurement pipelines. It's about monopolising access to taxpayer money. And calling that "ensuring proper employment classification" is naive at best, and disingenuous at worst.

IR35 didn't restore fairness. It restructured the market to favour large corporations and removed one of the few viable routes working professionals had to operate independently and build something of their own.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-12 21:15:30+00:00
But this also runs in the browser. Using HTML and Javascript. Except now it's done slightly differently in a way that's easier for browsers to optimize, if done well.

WebAssembly and Rust may be massive overkill for most web applications, but so is React or Vue or whatever Javascript framework is popular these days. When the inevitable rewrite happens, we might as well enjoy the benefits of the new, faster-than-the-old-evolved-moloch web UI.

If anything the move from the old system (React+WebAssembly) to the new one (Rust+minimal JS+WebAssembly) will make the web application itself smaller and easier to grasp.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-12 21:16:37+00:00
I don’t know how to understand your comment. The goal of Slay the Spire is to climb all the way to the heart while picking cards and beating it, preferably on A20 - all the other difficulty levels being basically a tutorial leading to the real game. There is no moment involving all the players of the world and the game is generally very slow so I’m a bit lost.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-12 21:17:14+00:00
My experience with Flutter applications in the browser is absolutely terrible. Rather unfortunate, as the things Flutter promised would make it excellent for web applications like these.

The concept behind the way these platform renders is very similar, so the new Amazon UI may be terrible as well, but I wouldn't expect whoever made the GUI framework they use now to make the same mistakes Flutter made.

Edit: after looking into this some more, it looks like the approach Amazon took is quite different from most Rust UI libraries. They have written their own framework that basically re-implements React but entirely on the WebAssembly side. I don't think it works by throwing a <canvas> onto the screen and implementing a browser rendering engine in JS+WASM like Flutter does. They also seem to target native code where they do all the rendering themselves, but probably faster because they control all the layers and don't need to build a general-purpose UI engine for their video player with extra steps.
by ForHackernews | 2025-04-12 21:17:17+00:00
> At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such

I don't understand why people believe this: by settling on "unstructured chat" as the API, it means the switching costs are essentially zero. The models may give different results, but as far a plugging a different one in to your app, it's frictionless. I can switch everything to DeepSeek this afternoon.
by cjpearson | 2025-04-12 21:17:53+00:00
Perhaps we're reading gp's comment differently. I don't think he's telling your friend she should be wearing this Vacheron Constantin (or any luxury watch) instead of her Apple watch. He's rather defending its achievement in engineering and craftsmanship despite everything it does being trivial for a smart watch. I read it as appreciation rather than a sales pitch.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-12 21:18:40+00:00
> I think a large portion of HN commenters are unaware of the consumer demand for these features.

I am skeptical. I mean, my day job is listening to end users and facilitating their needs. I haven't yet fielded a need that could be filled by Copilot or Gemini or the dozen AI elements that rearranged their app and forced them to form new muscle memory.

Mostly, these things land as the bazillionth bit of clutter to be worked around. Because they were not asked for, their presence is counterproductive.
by tom_ | 2025-04-12 21:18:42+00:00
Just about every old platform seems to have a bunch of people building hardware stuff like this and writing new software. For 1980s stuff it's just all a lot simpler than it was back then, and what was cutting edge at the time is hobbyist tier today.

For software, you have modern computer power to bring to bear on the problem. Assembly/compilation/precomputation/prototyping is far quicker, and the debugging possibilities with an emulator are way ahead of anything you'd ever have had at the time. For hardware items there are freely available design tools, many cost-effective options for small production run manufacture, and for stuff like the Amiga (where nothing happens at more than about 16 MHz) logic analyzers are cheap.

And the Internet makes discussing things a lot easier too!
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-12 21:18:49+00:00
> Yes, however there is little urban planning for whole metro

Paris biggest infrastructure project for the past 20 years is called "Grand Paris" and revolve entirely around the whole metro. Actually there is literally no urban planning not involving the whole metro. And yes, lowering the speed limit involved multiple consultations with the prefect and the region because it impacts the whole metro.

Considering Paris without its metropole doesn’t make sense. Paris intra-muros is ridiculously small, one eightieth of London, 80% of San Francisco.
by toast0 | 2025-04-12 21:19:02+00:00
Well jayd did the same thing as that small company (which I joined in 2011 when it was small and left in 2019 when it was not so small), run ejabberd to solve a problem. In our case, Erlang subsumed pretty much the rest of our service over time. When I started, chat was Erlang, but status messages, registration, and contacts were PHP with MySQL, media was PHP (with no database), but those all got sucked into Erlang with mnesia because it was better for us.

But I guess it doesn't always work that way. FB chat was built on ejabberd and then migrated away.
by phatskat | 2025-04-12 21:19:05+00:00
> Elastic is good enough.

Probably the most praise I’ve ever seen about Elastic.

I do respect the amount of power and utility, and it’s definitely a workhorse, but it’s like a horse with one human leg, a bad eye, extra bones but also not enough bones, and a French accent but only knows Korean. Once you get used to the fact that you can’t do what you intend to, but you can do what elastic wants, it becomes a lot more manageable.
by gambiting | 2025-04-12 21:19:16+00:00
My Volvo XC60 T8 is not even a full EV but after 5 years of ownership the brakes on this 2200kg, 400bhp SUV are only 10% worn - it's all thanks to regenerative braking with the EV motor. It definitely makes a massive impact on how quickly the brakes wear out(as in - much much much less than in a normal car).
by gscott | 2025-04-12 21:19:24+00:00
The rich have always blamed others for the growing wealth gap.

Americans often point to outside forces instead of holding the government accountable.

Years of messaging have trained people to support tariffs, spending cuts, and even anti-immigrant policies—despite the need for labor.

The real issue isn't spending, it's taxation. And we've let China ignore WTO rules for too long. Trump should've targeted tariffs at China alone—but he is the president, not me.
by tmcb | 2025-04-12 21:19:34+00:00
Oh, my bad. I thought that the names and pictures of the deceased 66-year-old man and 16-year-old boy would be enough.

I guess we can brush this one under the carpet, right? Nothing to see here. Workplace fatalities are a serious issue, but not so serious to you that it is worth bridging that gap. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me if that is the case.

On the other hand, I acknowledge that men are disproportionately affected by this issue and that it deserves serious attention from both left and right. I would wholeheartedly support their demand of better working conditions from their employers and representatives, and advise them to contact the media so that the general public can be informed of that and, who knows, maybe support unionization if their demands are not met. Do you think this is a reasonable stance, or do you see any problems with that?
by koakuma-chan | 2025-04-12 21:20:28+00:00
> However, there are other problems, like the software supply chain security.

It's not a problem with Rust specifically though. It's not unique to Rust.

> Also in Rust people tend to write very small libraries and that increases the number of dependencies. However, many still not follow SemVer et. al and packages tend to be unstable too.

Don't use random unpopular crates maintained by unknown people without reviewing the code.
by chneu | 2025-04-12 21:21:07+00:00
Outside of Gmail and photos and signing in, I've completely stopped using Google as a result of their AI and advertising practices. My network blocks all Google advertising by default.

I already run a home server that backs up photos, Immich, but it isn't quite stable enough yet. When it is I'll ditch gphotos too.

I could just forward my Gmail and use my own domain, but that doesn't make much difference.

But Google and Microsoft are just annoying to deal with. All so my information can be their payday. Not worth it.
by fzeroracer | 2025-04-12 21:22:17+00:00
> But you can't go everywhere at anytime

This is a solved problem in countries with modern public transportation. In Japan for example you can go across the entire country without needing a single car, and indeed it's both cheaper and more available than doing so while driving. If you need to go somewhere really far out of the way that is not reachable by foot or bicycle, then you can rent a car.

All of this results in a system that is far cheaper for you and far more open for the average individual.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-12 21:22:44+00:00
Why would you want an article on someone that excludes context from their most impactful and most visible decade? It's true that an author today, who knows about his 2024 conviction for fraudulently overstating the value of his properties, would bring a much more skeptical eye to claims about what a success they were. Did he seem to be making better deals in 2010 because he was better at it then, or because nobody was looking as closely at whether they were really good?
by TZubiri | 2025-04-12 21:23:06+00:00
“Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.”

That's a massive misread. You are confusing the direction of influence between secondary public stock markets and federal executive orders.

The tariffs are supposed to strengthen self sufficiency, and discourage imports of stuff the US can do on their own.

Chip manufacturing, (which by the way is often only the manufacturing and not the design or IP of the chips), is an exception for whatever reason, may be labour costs, but it may also be that chips are a mineral heavy and diverse product, so it's one of the few products where autarky isn't feasible or very rewarding.

And there would be situations without exemptions where the US may have been incentivized to import the raw materials and rebuild megachip factories, of which there are only like a dozen in the world, creating a huge output inefficiency due to political reasons on two fronts.

Exceptions are reasonable.
by andersmurphy | 2025-04-12 21:23:32+00:00
The fact that you are saying they are trivial to solve means you probably need more visibility on your system. Reliable reconnect was the nightmare we saw regularly.

Unfortunately, I can't go into much detail on the mobile battery stuff, but I can give you some hints. If you do some reading on how antenna on phones work combined with websockets heartbeat ping/pong and you should get the idea.
by anonfordays | 2025-04-12 21:24:47+00:00
If this is in reference to the French scientist that was denied entry, that was fake news:

"The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory— in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal. Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false."

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/20/french-researcher-den...
by amy214 | 2025-04-12 21:25:49+00:00
Regulations are complicated and a double edge sword, they inevitably introduce inefficiency and barriers, so the payoff needs to be greater. For example, regulations about mandating companies to delete your data - wonderful. A great win for California which is otherwise quite an overregulated states. On the flip side, in the UK, you may need a license for that television, or a license for that knife. That's the political thing with regulations. If a politician says "regulations sucks" most would tend to agree as far as that TV license, or getting a permit for a particular fence.

Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.
by chasil | 2025-04-12 21:25:52+00:00
The article asserts that the tablet is far older than Homer.

"It not only reinforces the geopolitical dynamics of the Late Bronze Age but also offers an unprecedented literary fragment, hinting at a local Luwian poetic tradition about the fall of Troy, predating Homer by centuries."

Edit: the date on the article is April 1, referenced above.

I upvoted you, as I do not agree to disregard polite conversation.
by philjohn | 2025-04-12 21:26:08+00:00
But the fact that EV brakes don't wear at nearly the same rate as ICE brakes still stands.

My EV6 (pretty heavy car) manual explicitly says "you should probably do some hard breaking from moderate speed to prevent corrosion on the brake discs".

Because 90+% of the time when you press the brake pedal the friction brakes aren't being used at all, it's all regen.
by mintplant | 2025-04-12 21:28:34+00:00
Yeah, you can walk the AST of your types at runtime and do arbitrary things with it. For example, we're using ArkTypes as our single source of truth for our data and deriving database schemas from them.

This becomes very nice because ArkType's data model is close to an enriched version of TypeScript's own data model. So it's like having your TypeScript types introspectable and transformable at runtime.
by pxc | 2025-04-12 21:29:54+00:00
Indeed. Emoji are just characters, rendered via some font just like any text character. On non-Apple operating systems, you can select emoji sets via font configuration.

You can do it on macOS as well, but you have to disable SIP and modify/replace the files for the Apple Color Emoji font, because some widely used GUI libs are hardcoded to use it.

Idr the situation on Windows except that emoji glyphs are inherited from your other font choices, if your chosen font includes emoji. But on Linux it's generally easy to configure certain font substitutions only for some groups of characters, like emoji.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-12 21:30:24+00:00
Gmail's spam filtering is the best in reach. That is 90% of why Google has any presence at my clients.

Chrome sync is 85% of the reason for Chrome browser installs. But that is nearly undone by the poor profile experience when number of Chrome users exceeds 1.

The other 15% is Gmail committing seppuku when it detects Firefox.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-12 21:30:25+00:00
> . But it's absurd to think that will happen

Really? The things that are happening now are so absurdly insane that nobody could have imagined them just a few years ago, and you are still gullible enough to say something as silly like that...

> sound the alarm when it does

The loons will just move the goalposts yet again. So what would that achieve?
by seszett | 2025-04-12 21:30:34+00:00
> an environment that is hostile for families

I don't understand this part, I read it quite often but... well, we are a family with young children, and although we do have a car we only use it once a week to go to the grand-parents that live 100 km away from here.

A city with less cars is great especially for families (though I would argue that cities themselves are not so great for children, but the comparison here is between cities that are car-centric or that are not). It makes going out easier and more spontaneous.

It's much less of a hassle to hop in the cargo bike and go wherever (including stopping en route if you see something interesting) than having to use the car, sit in traffic, hope you can find parking space at your destination, and pay for it.
by summerlight | 2025-04-12 21:30:52+00:00
Not sure how familiar you are with the internal situation... But from my experience think it's safe to say that TPU basically multiplies Google's computation capability by 10x, if not 20x. Also they don't need to compete with others to secure expensive nvidia chips. If this is not an advantage, I don't see there's anything considered to be an advantage. The entire point of vertical integration is to secure full control of your stack so your capability won't be limited by potential competitors, and TPU is one of the key component of its strategy.

Also worth noting that its Ads division is the largest, heaviest user of TPU. Thanks to it, it can flex running a bunch of different expensive models that you cannot realistically afford with GPU. The revenue delta from this is more than enough to pay off the entire investment history for TPU.
by vinceguidry | 2025-04-12 21:31:27+00:00
That scene in Spiderman where they brought the other two back and they were talking about loss. Bawled like a baby.

Not that I watch a lot of movies, but when I do, they do make me emotional from time to time. I'm a sucker for a well-told, interesting good wins over evil tale, especially with a female protagonist. Not like Hollywood can do those anymore. Indies are usually the way. They gotta make Superman into basically a villain. Thankfully they haven't fucked with Spiderman yet. But I bet some dipshit will in the near future.

Anime is better, but you asked for movies.
by out-of-ideas | 2025-04-12 21:31:47+00:00
i can certainly say i would not want to hear that daily or (or with any regularity) - yt wCm68PmmSQ8 to listen to it. still not even used to the small airport with newer air traffic routes rumbling residential neighborhoods nightly afterhours. but oh well i guess; more people seems to follow more noise and light pollution (and i dont want to abandon the quietness)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-12 21:31:57+00:00
>I doubt you would be ok with hardworking moral cowards becoming the teachers, CEOs and experts for america.

Most people today are driven by self interest and self preservation, not morality. Anything you see publicly resembling morality is virtue signaling for the sake of optics. Everyone quickly stops wanting to be a martyr when their livelihood is on the line. It's easy to be generous with other people's lives/money.

>Capitulation? Would you respect that?

Capitulation against who? What results did their so called fight give? Other than causing public nuisance. Why don't they go to Gaza and pick up arms if they want to fight? Putting tents in university campuses and shouting from the safety of US public spaces is not fighting, it's virtue signaling.

Do you respect foreigners to treat your country as a battle ground for their ideologies? I assume yes only when their ideologies match yours, but what about when they don't?
by philjohn | 2025-04-12 21:32:07+00:00
Which can easily be sorted with a more gentle throttle curve.

My EV has three modes - Eco, Normal and Sport. In Sport you get shoved back in your seat from the instant torque, and the fast 0-60 times. In Eco you take off like in a normal car.

You also need to remember that traction control is inherrently easier and faster in an EV as the ECU has fine grained control of how much power to send to the tyres and can effect it near instantly.
by tom_ | 2025-04-12 21:34:24+00:00
Thanks for the tip. I'd managed to miss the addition of these. I had somehow noticed the addition of the newer string- functions though, and immediately found them a huge improvement over the mishmash of randomly-named crap that was there before, so I expect seq- to be similarly transformative.

I immediately notice there's seq-filter, which can kill off one of my helper routines. And then (now I'm looking...) I've discovered this was always equivalent to cl-remove-if-not. But I never realised, because of the mystery meat naming conventions.
by kangminsuk | 2025-04-12 21:34:47+00:00
Hello there!

As someone who’s lived in Jeju for five years, I’ve seen so many tourists visit the same spots over and over again. I wanted to shift that culture a little by writing my own version of a guidebook(something that actually helps you plan a trip that fits your taste). This is my attempt to highlight how much Jeju City has to offer beyond the usual cherry blossoms or the fish market.
by mjmas | 2025-04-12 21:36:06+00:00
It seems like this would/should be covered under Australia's unfair contracts law, which requires the term to have a legitimate interest as well as being transparent (which I dont think would be met if they are charging 50% of the remainder, when they would have been happy for you to get a monthly subscription and cancel after a month, only having spent a fifth of what they would charge for termination)
by xvokcarts | 2025-04-12 21:36:20+00:00
One could argue that the potential number of complications in any smartwatch is practically limitless, and also that the sophistication and craftsmanship required to make it, including the hardware part, is the ultimate testimony of refinement and engineering.

If you took an Apple Watch and this Vacheron 2000 years in the past, which one would the people of the time find more impressive (until the juice runs out, that is)? In other words - which one looks more like magic?

We're just used to microprocessors we can't see tick and maybe don't always appreciate the complexity.