MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by immibis | 2025-05-12 15:22:11+00:00
You see delayed payment everywhere in b2b - "net-30" for example.

There was a story posted on HN once about a business saving money by prepaying. Some guy was working for a restaurant and saved 70% (yes, over two thirds) on their meat by, instead of ordering each day and settling on net-30 as they had been doing and as is typical, calling up their meat vendor and committing to a certain minimum order every day and paying for it right then. Because cash flow is that important to some businesses. The vendor said they'd never had a customer so good before, and yet it wasn't such a big deal for the restaurant. (Yes, they tend to run on thin margins, well, now their margins are a little bit fatter and they can afford to have mispredicted their meat usage a little, and still come out ahead).

It's the same as Hetzner vs AWS. You buy AWS, you can ramp up and down your bill any time, but you're overpaying by a huge multiple (can even be 10x-100x). If you get your servers from any traditional provider that's updated their price in the last five years, they'll bill you monthly for your server, and there's a setup cost of approximately one month, and you can't scale up without a week latency or down without two months, but you get the same amount of server for an incredibly low price (if you're accustomed to AWS) which - if you're not running a workload as bursty as Amazon on Christmas Day - lets you overprovision enough to more than make up for the inflexibility.
by empath75 | 2025-05-12 15:22:53+00:00
> I don't think your framing nor your conclusion is correct. Copyright law wasn't written to make Party A or B wealthy, it was written to protect the incentive to produce things that society values.

That's not really different from what I said. "What society values" is what people spend money on, and that money is used to influence policy.

> Or courts will have to decide we know longer value music, art, literature, etc. made by humans -- seems like a long shot to me.

The courts only interpret the law and it's pretty clear to me the law is going to change.
by consp | 2025-05-12 15:23:02+00:00
> Do you actually want there to be a big "Cancel" button in the top right corner of every subscribed service?

Yes, since the alternative is what you have now: impossible to find and if you find it highly annoying. Even if you have the law which says "canceling must be as easy as subscribing" like where I live it still isn't even close due to efforts of government creating a law but failing (by design) to fund the agency tasked with keeping the companies in check.
by neogodless | 2025-05-12 15:23:02+00:00
Including supply and generation, we pay $0.148 / kWh, and yeah, I average $0.06 charging my EV at home on a slow, inefficient 120V / 15A. (Some day I'll upgrade, maybe.) I've never charged anywhere else (except for free at the used car dealer where I bought it.)

We make a ~180 mile trip roughly once / month and could charge on site as we always stay ~2 nights, though probably slow 120V / 15A charge (aka Level 1). My current car would probably be pushing it, range-wise, but I definitely think for the vast majority of our usage, we could be using only EVs if we got one with a 300+ mile range (based on 100% battery usage.) From what I've read some EVs (like mine) struggle a bit below 15% and start to run in "limp" mode.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-12 15:23:16+00:00
Software engineering as a popular career track goes back to the early 80s if I'm being extremely conservative.

There are plenty of retired software engineers that I know. Most of them retired because they wanted to do something different, and they had the money to do it. I don't know of any that have retired as a direct result of the physical effects on their body.
by sockp0pp3t | 2025-05-12 15:24:02+00:00
Totally depends on the trade. Concrete foundations, roofing, anything that uses a wheelbarrow, etc. will eventually break you. Maybe an electrician, plumber, carpenter can weigh in, but digging post holes or hauling shingles up a ladder is not the same beating as hanging cabinets, or wiring circuit breakers. Just saying there are different kinds of hard.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-12 15:24:06+00:00
I agree. This is similar to our recommendation while learning math. You must do some[1] calculations and problem solving by hand alone, with some minimal help when you are stuck. And only then, use coworkers, wolfram alpha or AI to handle part of the job.

[1] Both extremes are bad. Two integrals are too few. A million are too many.
by dani__german | 2025-05-12 15:24:39+00:00
These food deserts are exclusively caused by completely unjustifiable crimes committed by those lower income people. They aren't stealing bread, rice, beans, vegetables. They are stealing flat screen TVs and destroying their local Walmart.

Food deserts only exist where the negative cost of being burglarized has managed to exceed the large income of fulfilling humanity's third most basic need besides air and water.
by PufPufPuf | 2025-05-12 15:25:05+00:00
I'm Czech, and a long time user of Mapy.cz / Mapy.com. Monetization of Mapy.com has been a question for some time. It's part of the Seznam conglomerate, which makes most of its money through various news sites (including a TV channel) and an ad platform. Other "side projects" of Seznam, like their e-mail service, serve as drivers for their homepage and stay completely free. Mapy.cz contained affiliate Booking.com links for some time, but recently they added a paid subscription and moved the ability to download offline maps for more than two countries at a time behind a paywall. It seems that they are just now trying to figure out a more sustainable way to monetize, and everyone is hoping they won't destroy the great app in the process.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-12 15:25:50+00:00
Problem: the capital & maintenance costs of the grid vary very little with its utilization %.

So if you build loads of wind & solar & battery all over - either (1) you've got to build so much battery capacity, all over, that you'll never need the grid, or (2) you've still got to build the grid to get you through occasional "calm & dark" periods.

Either way, you're looking at vastly higher capital expenses.
by temporalparts | 2025-05-12 15:26:35+00:00
The problem isn't that people aren't aware that the scale and magnitude differences are large and significant.

It's that the space of intellectual property LAW does not handle the robust capabilities of LLMs. Legislators NEED to pass laws to reflect the new realities or else all prior case law relies on human analogies which fail in the obvious ways you alluded to.

If there was no law governing the use of death stars and mass murder, and the only legal analogy is to environmental damage, then the only crime the legal system can ascribe is mass environmental damage.
by adocomplete | 2025-05-12 15:26:47+00:00
In Colorado, a law went into effect at the beginning of 2025 that showed you how much of the actual fare the driver gets. I took an Uber ride to the airport last week and the total cost was ~$98 before tip, and the drivers share of that was reported as ~$41. I don't see how it makes sense that Uber for connecting me to a driver gets close to 60% of the fare, while the driver who does all the work, puts miles onto their car, etc, gets less than half of the fare.
by graypegg | 2025-05-12 15:26:51+00:00
Now built a little workplace internal tool that needed a login page with it! Honestly pretty satisfied, it's simple enough that 10minutes is all you need to understand how it works: incredibly boring and standard (/pos)

My one gripe, that I think I might offer up a PR for, is it should have generators for log-in minitest helpers. You will end up making a log_in_as(user) method that sets the auth session cookie anyway... might as well just have that from the start.

The lack of registration also does feel weird to me as well. I know that user registration is probably the most variable part of the auth process, but stuff scaffolded from Rails is normally very delete-friendly anyway. Plus, 9/10 this generator is being run on a new project, so I immediately need to build it anyway, so I can set up system tests that log in and such.
by rafram | 2025-05-12 15:27:11+00:00
I'm not that worried about Mapy.cz/.com becoming useless unless you pay, to be honest. (Maybe they'll make me look foolish for that.) The developer is Seznam, which is kind of like the Czech homegrown equivalent of Google/Craigslist/Zillow. I assume they monetize in pretty much the same way: ads, enterprise, API fees.
by vharuck | 2025-05-12 15:27:18+00:00
Personally, I'd support an alternative to copyright for letting creators earn living expenses while working or in reward for good works. But it's a terrible thing to offer them the copyright system and then ignore it to use the works they hoped could earn money. And to further use those works to make something that will replace a lot of creative positions they've relied on because copyright only pays off after the work's been done.

Maybe the government should set up a fund to pay all the copyright holders whose works were used to train the AI models. And if it's a pain to track down the rights holders, I'll play a tiny violin.
by VagabundoP | 2025-05-12 15:27:28+00:00
There also resilience. Having small to medium local storage increases the stability of the grid.

Renewables and something like Iron-Salt battery containers, would be pretty efficient over all. Easy to roll-out, very safe.

We'll still need some sort of base load somewhere and backup to restart everything obviously. But the big giant power plants (with the huge capital costs, delays and NIMBY headaches) might become less necessary.
by Stephen304 | 2025-05-12 15:27:34+00:00
> If such a change happens in the future, they can fork then...

Did such a change not already happen with the addition of Kayak affiliate links without any community consultation? It seems to me that there has already been enough to justify a fork.

Not to mention, there was a promise of electing and changing boardmembers which has never happened, and hiding the use of OrganicMaps project donations for personal vacations as alleged by the initial open letter.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-05-12 15:28:01+00:00
What incentive exists for someone to work in a coal mine - which is both physically taxing and guarantees lung problems by 40 - other than earning enough money so that their kids do not have to do the same thing?

You can replace coal mines above with a million other things, I chose a dramatic, niche example.

The fact is that in recorded history, there have been almost no instances of economic setups without the downtrodden. I like efforts like UBI being made to address that, but it is important to address the fact that UBI itself is not the final solution. It is still possible that we reach a working solution eventually(who knows when?) by exploring things like UBI though. A lot of online discourse simply lies in a narrow band of "UBI = communism which didn't work in the specific instance of the soviet union" and on the other side "opposing UBI = oligarch".
by amarant | 2025-05-12 15:28:01+00:00
Sounds like a potential business opportunity! I don't know much about cars, how much is standardized in car electronics? Would it be possible to build a infotainment module that you could sell to several car manufacturers with only minimal modifications?

I think I've heard of something called an ICANN(?) bus that is used to communicate stuff in cars and is fairly standardised, maybe?
by spacemadness | 2025-05-12 15:28:22+00:00
Sounds like we’re talking about the right of AI company founders and people on HN to acquire wealth from creative works due to some weak argument concerning similarity to the human mind and creation of art. Since we’ve now veered into armchair philosophy territory, I think one could argue that the way human memory works and creates, both physically and mentally, from inspiration is vastly different from how AI works. So saying they’re the same and that’s it is both lazy and takes interesting questions off the table to squash debate.
by Closi | 2025-05-12 15:28:30+00:00
Why can't it? I think you may have slightly misread my post in terms of the single cell aspect.

> First to file would not allow Ocado to have patented the concept of the robot sitting above a cell/tote

Ocado patented the concept of a robot sitting above a single cell/tote, not the concept of the robot sitting above a cell/tote.

AutoStore's initial system was the first to have the robot sitting above a stack of totes, however the robot sat above two cells in it's original design (a 'cantilever design'). The settlement actually means that AutoStore cannot develop a robot sitting above a single cell/tote (note that their blackline robots sit across a 'tote and a bit' because of this - see image https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/autostore-sues-oc...).

There is lots of historical complexity as with all patent cases, but the AutoStore loss in court doesn't mean that Ocado didn't copy them - it just means that Ocado have been judged to be legally allowed to copy them IMO :)

> Ocado would be the poster child [for being] an unscrupulous licensor "stealing" an invention from the actual inventor.

They absolutely are the poster child for this in the material handling world! This is widely known in the logistics industry.
by hosh | 2025-05-12 15:28:32+00:00
> Are there any popular cross platform apps that actually do this? Genuine question, I don't know of any.

I don't know any, either. I doubt there will be any made. I have not figured out how and why anyone would be incentivized to write something like that, other than a foundation whose mission is to develop something like that.

I read Kleppman's paper again and realized that my idea of "local-first" is more strict than his.

When I think of "local-first", I am thinking of what permaculture design does for an ecosystem. Agency and being able to own your own data is essential.

Looking at it again, I can see why people disagree with me on what "local-first is".

On the other hand, based on Kleppman's formulation of local-first principles, I can see why those design principles degenerate into what it is now. You're still ultimately serving the needs of the business to operate as an ongoing concern, and as such, you still have to find some way to lock-in end-user data.

In order for the software to be useful even without the originating company, those software has to be able to collaborate with other users using that data. Otherwise, the only people who can make use of the local data are people with the skill to take the data apart and use it for something else. That does not really serve the needs of the end-user.

As an example of the difference, in Kleppman's paper, his formulation of local-first calls Github as local-first. With how I am thinking about it, while git itself is local-first, Github is not. The features Github makes to bring users back are the very features that are not local-first or even with a sync engine -- issues, wiki, Actions, repo search, to name a few.

Gitlab's use of ActivityPub for those things are moving towards being able to do that, but ActivityPub itself is designed as a client-server and server-to-server architecture.

To imagine a "local-first" Github ... I would imagine a hackathon where several people create a software forge with a git repo ad-hoc with bluetooth or some other short range discovery. At the end of the hackathon, maybe they sync with Github. Maybe they don't.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-05-12 15:28:39+00:00
>Whether or not we agree that "balanced trade" is a good idea or his methods are a good way of getting it, that's been the stated goal from the start, contra the media hysteria.

Oh, so it's not moving manufacturing back to the US? Because a week ago that's what you guys said it was about. I can hardly keep up with the goalpost moving. As of right now, it appears that he created a crisis, was forced out of his position, and is patting himself on the back for "fixing it". Absolutely nothing has been accomplished except to show the world that he is not a man of his word and that the economic environment is highly unstable and could be vaporized overnight by a tweet. If I'm missing something here, please correct me.
by hedora | 2025-05-12 15:28:53+00:00
The article is discussing moving safety critical functions like door handles and drivetrain into a centralized computer. This has been a disaster so far, and consumers hate it.

They cite tesla as an example of a “good” approach, and don’t understand that (in addition to Elon) a large percentage of the market won’t consider a car where the computer decides which way the vents point, and if you are allowed to open the doors after an accident.

It does mention that people hate touch screens, and probably will not like these new cars. Other than cost savings, and “the infotainment computer is slow” there zero discussion of how these new systems improve the car or the user experience. “Slow infotainment” should be fixable by throwing a better cpu/ram in.
by awkwardpotato | 2025-05-12 15:29:03+00:00
What a wild false equivalency...

This article isn't even a discussion on AI copyright ownership. It's about training.

What if an evil robot race came along and begin draining your Martians of all their history, expressions, and entertainment. Would the Martians not be within their rights to go "hey, don't do that"?

Parent edited rather than responded:

Your "martians" already did pay for the rights to access the music (streaming services, cds, etc)! And if it's highly derivative they'll continue to have to pay (royalties). OpenAI/Meta/Anthropic did not pay, that's the inherent issue. They took when they should not have had the right to access, and trained against it.

The question is not the difference between your mythical Martians and humans, its difference between your Martians and AI. Your martians, like humans, have lived experience. They have emotions, fears, beliefs. They have family, children, loved ones. This all affects how they would express themselves. An "AI" has none of this.
by herbturbo | 2025-05-12 15:29:38+00:00
Because you what you listened to was actively offered to you by its creator, and you paid for it, or you were supposed to.

You would also only hear the songs you had discovered or had been introduced to, at the speed they were meant to be listened to. The music would also often be part of a scene that might include different underlying philosophies or associated fashion.

Your new music would be the outcome of all of those individual musical experiences, coupled with your creative and technical ability.

None of that is true for AI. It has just harvested everything without anyone’s permission and now makes artless slop from it for anyone who wants it 24/7.
by mraniki | 2025-05-12 15:29:39+00:00
>We identified 24 wallets that bought $MELANIA in the minutes before the existence of the coin and its backing from the first lady was publicised (via >Melania’s Truth Social account, naturally). These people — who knew where to get the coins and were apparently confident it was not one of the hundreds of unofficial Trump family coins — bought $2.6mn of the tokens and flipped them within days for about $100mn. As many FT readers clocked, this is not exactly how a normal float should work. Memecoins are an arena with all the accoutrements and vocabulary of finance but lacking even the level of regulation that governs the sale of Beanie Babies.
by Intralexical | 2025-05-12 15:30:13+00:00
It's a very consistently Silicon Valley mindset. Seems like almost every company that makes it big in tech, be it Facebook and Google monetizing our personal data, or Uber and Amazon trampling workers' rights, makes money by reducing people to objects that can be bought and sold, more than almost any other industry. No matter the company, all claimed prosocial intentions are just window dressing to convince us to be on board with our own commodification.

That's also why I'm really not worried about the "AI singularity" folks. The hype is IMO blatantly unsubstantiated by the actual capabilities, but gets pushed anyway only because it speaks to this deep-seated faith held across the industry. "AI" is the culmination of an innate belief that people should be replaceable, fungible, perfectly obedient objects, and such a psychosis blinds decision-makers to its actual limits. Only trouble is whether they have the political power to try to force it anyway.
by p3rls | 2025-05-12 15:30:36+00:00
Even in cities like NYC most handymen doing repairs, even in large buildings, are unlicensed. And if they are licensed, it's their employers that actually hold the meaningless paper while they send out unlicensed grunts into the field.

And then you have companies like my old one-- they didn't have a fire protection license, so they hired an old dude to come in once a year for $40k and borrowed his so they can now do sprinkler and standpipe work legally. It's the same idea everywhere, except more fraud is involved in the cities.
by dani__german | 2025-05-12 15:31:19+00:00
BMI is an excellent metric for measuring your own body. Its fantastic. Its not perfect, but considering its two numbers, its amazingly useful and a super easy way to quantify how unhealthy you are. If you are not currently using Body fat percentage, and know what yours is at this exact instant, you should use BMI instead.

Here's a perfectly correct general statement: Any effort spent telling average people to not use BMI makes society less healthy. Average people are not getting BF% measured when you tell them not to use BMI. They are just ignoring all metrics and eating potato chips instead.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-12 15:31:25+00:00
>Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being

Try to call comcast and actually speak to a customer service representative. Try it. I dare you. I bought a new modem last year and simply needed to provision it on the service. I got caught in bot limbo so long my only recourse was to scream 'cancel my account!' over and over until I actually got a human on the line. I'm sure that will be automated away at some point too.
by alwier | 2025-05-12 15:31:25+00:00
I mentored two FIRST robotics teams.

One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored.

The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition.

Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.