MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isaacremuant | 2025-05-14 12:13:58+00:00
Experience wise for the customer, because I've been in both, not that much. Also there's a lot of Airbnb that are family businesses and BnBs that aren't so that's just a romantic moot point.

There's interest in painting these strawmen by people who didn't use the service or just tried to get cheap stuff and didn't pick good places, which can happen with booking.com or google maps. The govs love blaming their failings on apps and regulations mean market capture by certain entities.

It's funny how you can call for Airbnb's to be banned to solve the housing crisis but you can't call for stopping hotels being built everywhere which are then used to house refugees/socially disadvantage people in a beautiful money making cycle for government contractors, to just name one thing happening in at least a few European countries.

The anti Airbnb narrative is tired and dishonest.
by DoingIsLearning | 2025-05-14 12:13:59+00:00
I hope not to sound like some sort of birth evangelist but could we not flip that statement?

That portraits a child as someone that you need to protect from suffering at all costs. If your parents were to make the same argument towards you, as an adult, you would argue that it is perhaps condescending and removes somewhat your own agency.

There is a _chance_ that any children that you bring into this world become not only an adult but an agent for (positive) change.
by gwd | 2025-05-14 12:14:06+00:00
> population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m

This video would beg to differ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&pp=ygUWa3Vyemdlc...

That said, I am inclined to disagree with his take -- when women and men are both expected to work 996, when housing takes up a huge percentage of your income, when the only way you think you can assure a good life for your children is to pay exorbitant amounts for private tutoring, then yeah, 0 or 1 seems like the best option.

This may be a bit of a weird take, but I wonder if it might make sense to just explicitly make "rearing the next generation" a "public good" career choice. Some people are far more cut out, by personality and character, to raise children. Rather than trying to exhort every single family to have 2.1, find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.
by isodev | 2025-05-14 12:14:29+00:00
The post definitely highlights some of the reasons a person would (rightfully) choose not to start a family. I would add that addressing those reasons should absolutely not be "just to increase the birth rate". There are currently a little over 8 billion humans on Earth - the survival of the species is not even remotely at stake.

It's possible we're nearing a moment when we have to re-evaluate what it means to be human. Do we live just to procreate? Just to work to support 'the system'? I don't know the answer, but I can't stop thinking about that line from Star Trek First Contact: "... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves..."
by jamesandthewolf | 2025-05-14 12:14:32+00:00
I just take it like this.

In the moring I do the hardest thing on my list of things to do as I am more able to think clear, in the afternoon I do less important things as my mind is not working at maximinum level

For me this is usually something like code in the morning and art/planning/everything else other then code in the afternoon.

If I need to code in the afternoon then I try to just do visual adjusments and not tackle major new functions, it also gives me rest to look over what ive made the day before and work out how to improve.

At night I try to completly turn off all devices and read or manually draw to get time away from the screen.

This does not always work but I seam to get more done in a week this way and it is just my own personal approach something different might work for you
by arkh | 2025-05-14 12:15:12+00:00
> Running a consultancy and building various client projects highlights this challenge. Everyone wants to focus on the core, valuable features, but must also deal with relatively boring, commodity problems that have been solved countless times before. This often means reinventing the wheel, which clients understandably see as low-value work.

So wordpress or prestashop should be enough for 95% of your needs if you're a consultancy.
Show HN: Terraform DNS Back End, Store Terraform State as Route53 TXT Records
by echonull | 2025-05-14 12:15:13+00:00
I've created a custom Terraform HTTP backend that stores state files as DNS TXT records in AWS Route 53. Instead of using S3, this approach leverages one of the most globally distributed systems on the planet: DNS.

Key features: - Stores Terraform state across DNS TXT records - Handles state locking via dedicated TXT records - Splits state data into 255-byte chunks to respect DNS limits - Implements the Terraform HTTP backend protocol - Secured with HTTP Basic Auth - Deployed as an Python AWS Lambda function

GitHub: https://github.com/pjaudiomv/terraform-dns-backend/
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-14 12:15:16+00:00
Well, then publish stuff, do open-source, build libraries people use, or otherwise advance the state of the art. There are lots of ways to impact other people without being a manager.

You also don't have to be a genius to do any of this stuff. There are outsized rewards to just showing up and always being nice and helpful (eg on open-source).
by Khan6969 | 2025-05-14 12:15:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the sole founder of Site Engineer, a web app that lets you design and analyze nozzle attachments on pressure vessels to the WRC 107/537/297 standards in under 60 seconds—no signup required while we’re in beta. It:

• Generates a fully detailed, standards-compliant PDF report • Matches published example problems to ± 6 % on combined stress intensity • Autosaves your geometry & load inputs in localStorage • Renders an interactive 3D preview of your nozzle • Feeds feature-requests straight into a private GitHub repo via a Wasp action

Try the sample calculation directly: https://siteengineer.com.au/#sample?utm_source=hn&utm_medium...

I’d love feedback on accuracy, UX, performance, or any edge-case you think might break it. (Disclaimer: treat it as a pre-check—final sign-off by a qualified engineer still recommended.)

—Paul Graham (pretend), aka your friendly early-stage startup mentor
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-14 12:17:06+00:00
It's all relative to your own status.

Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did. But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.

If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-05-14 12:17:09+00:00
The problem is not cities, never has been. Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design, the design of cities is maybe the one rare exception.

You can design cities for families all you want, but if you keep lying to people and telling them having children is bad, and it's better to live alone, then they won't do it. Not to mention crime and taking money from families and paying people who are tax leeches.
by greggsy | 2025-05-14 12:17:44+00:00
Interestingly if you follow through to the full T&C's [1], they add exclusions:

> ...not located in the following jurisdictions: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and the following areas of Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.

Showing that the only explicit exclusions are aimed at the usual gang of comprehensively sanctioned states.

[1] https://www.memorysafety.org/rav1d-bounty-official-rules/

Still doesn't explain why the rest of the world isn't in the inclusions list. Maybe they don't want to deal with a language barrier by sticking to the Anglosphere... plus EU?
Show HN: You know browser-use, here's human-use for LLMs to get info from humans
by maalber | 2025-05-14 12:17:44+00:00
We made human-use. Similar to how browser-use connects agents to the web, human-use connects agents to people all over the world in real-time using the Rapidata API. This allows the LLM to crowdsource human feedback and insights when it deems necessary.

Free to use for anyone, you can enable your agent to use humans in real-time to:

- Do preference research - Check for hallucinations - Capture sentiment - Get feedback - etc. Whatever you would want from humans.

We expose certain parts of the Rapidata API to the agent through the MCP server framework. Additionally we provide a custom client. More details are available on the repo.

Happy for feedback and to answer any questions.
by Measter | 2025-05-14 12:17:48+00:00
My biggest issue with the whole "function colour" thing is that many functions have different colours. Like, these two:

fn foo() -> String fn bar() -> Result<String, Error>

I can't just treat `bar` the same as `foo` because it doesn't give me a String, it might have failed to give me a String. So I need to give it special handling to get a String.

async fn qux() -> String

This also doesn't give me a String. It gives me a thing that can give me a String (an `impl Future<Output=String>`, to be more specific), and I need to give it special handling to get a String.

All of these function have different colours, and I don't really see why it's suddenly a big issue for `qux` when it wasn't for `bar`.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-14 12:19:43+00:00
The usual one is "availability of contraception and related education for women". I don't think even the fundamentalist states have chosen to and managed to reverse that. Least feminist most collapsed country Afghanistan is still falling: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afg...

We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population is more than 10% below its peak level by natural decline. It's visible in some areas and cities, but not the whole country level.
by bradhe | 2025-05-14 12:20:37+00:00
Definitely agree, their M&A strategy is setup to strangle whoever they buy and they don't even know it. They're struggling in the face of Iceberg, DuckDB and the other tectonic shifts happening in the open source world. They are trying to innovate through acquisition, but can't quite make it because their culture kills the companies they buy.

I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.
by mandmandam | 2025-05-14 12:20:39+00:00
America:

- Underfunds mental health services & makes them nearly inaccessible, for decades.

- Starts wars and treats its soldiers as disposable.

- Rewards the bankers who created the housing crisis.

- Decouples wages from productivity for 50+ years.

- Treats drug use as a character deficiency rather than a societal one.

Newsclues, when the results of these actions (which they were warned about by progressives the entire time) become impossible to ignore: 'Damn progressive activists! Why would they do this?'.
by boxed | 2025-05-14 12:20:49+00:00
The forms https://hexdocs.pm/ash_phoenix/AshPhoenix.Form.html seem even more low level than Django forms, and those are notorious for being too low level and annoying to work with. This to me seems to run counter to the tagline. Compare with iommi for Django where you can truly "derive the rest" from the domain model to get forms and tables.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-05-14 12:21:08+00:00
I think that the various studies on this subject do not take into account a simple explanation. Choice.

Women choose to no longer have children or to have a very limited amount of children because they don't see the point in it anymore.

Women who have kids lose the best years of their life and then on top of that have trouble getting back into the workforce once they are done raising the kids.

From their point of view, it means an overall loss of income and some may have to restart their careers from scratch because no employer wants to hire someone with a 5/10 year gap on their resume.

According to this study https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-..., only 18% of stay at home parents are dads, which means that in 80% of the cases, it's the woman who has to sacrifice their career to raise the kids.

If I put myself in the shoes of young ambitious woman today, would I give up my dreams of climbing the corporate ladder/opening my own business/traveling the world in order to have kids or would I delay/ opt out of motherhood?

As a guy I don't even have to ask myself this question, but a woman will and as we can see from all these studies, they have decided that it is not worth it.
by Kivern7 | 2025-05-14 12:21:17+00:00
Children are an asset for net tax-recipients, but a liability for net tax-payers. I grew up in a very poor area and heard firsthand teenage girls excited over how much welfare money they can receive for babies. It's an inversion of the natural order. It's state-manipulated breeding incentives between different classes of people. It's literally eugenics.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-05-14 12:21:43+00:00
I don't understand the reasoning for persisting LLM output that can be generated at any point. If I want to use an LLM to understand someone else's commits, I can use the LLM best suited for that task at the time I need the information, which will likely be more accurate than what was available at the time of the commit and will have access to more context.

I also believe that commit messages should focus on information the code doesn't already convey. Whatever the LLM can generate from looking at your code is likely not the info I'll seek when I read your commit message.
by electric_muse | 2025-05-14 12:21:44+00:00
Perhaps the difference is that you’ve been fortunate enough to never need Airbnb support to help you on something serious.

When things go well, it’s amazing. When things go poorly, you realize how anti-guest the policies and support team behave.

That’s when it changed for me. I realized how pro-host, anti-guest they are. Hotels generally seem to care when something goes wrong. Airbnb support behaves like you have inconvenienced them by raising the issue.
by gwd | 2025-05-14 12:21:52+00:00
> which I'll never use.

Your younger co-workers will have been educated in public schools you paid for. If you're an employer, the people you hire will have been educated with public schools you paid for. When you retire, the people paying your retirement and running the country you live in will have been educated by the public schools you paid for. When you're sick, loads of the research on how to cure you and keep you in good health will have been done by researchers who went through public schools you helped fund.

Everyone benefits from an educated populace, which is why it makes sense for it to be paid for by everyone.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-14 12:22:26+00:00
We'll never escape standardized testing. We have mass education involving hundreds of students per class as a matter of public policy. Tests are the only efficient way to assess students. Failing grades and general lack of performance can actually turn into political problems.

The best education is mastery education provided via long term one-on-one mentoring. Essentially the opposite of the current model. Only the rich can afford such services.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-14 12:22:47+00:00
This is absolutely a US thing, but even so, if you're a nice person, you can get away with a lot more than if you're not. I have heard before that you can be a successful engineer if you are two of brilliant, affable, and diligent (pick any two). Just being nice goes a long way.

However, note that being a nice person combined with knowing your way around legacy codebases is a form of leadership in itself. Not one that we reward well, sadly, but if your colleagues have a chat with you (which they like to do anyway) and then save hours of work, that's leadership.
by bArray | 2025-05-14 12:22:53+00:00
I can think of a few use cases:

1. Desktop - If both implementations run the same but one is faster, you run the faster one to stop the decode spluttering on those borderline cases.

2. Embedded - Where resources are limited, you still go for the faster one, even if it might one day leas to a zero day because you've weighed up the risk and reducing the BOM is an instant win and trying to factor in some unknown code element isn't.

3. Server - You accept media from unknown sources, so you are sandboxed anyway. Losing 5% of computing resources adds up to big $ over a year and at enough scale. At Youtube for example it could be millions of dollars a year of compute doing a decode and then re-encode.

Some other resistances:

1. Energy - If you have software being used in many places over the world, that cost saving is significant in terms of energy usage.

2. Already used - If the C implementation is working without issue, there would be high resistance to spend engineering time to put a slower implementation in.

3. Already C/C++ - If you already have a codebase using the same language, why would you now include Rust into your codebase?

4. Bindings - Commonly used libraries use the C version and are slow to change. The default may remain the C version in the likes of ffmpeg.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-14 12:22:57+00:00
> The real point is

It depends on what you're trying to argue. If someone is saying "Hillary/DNC is excused from blame for losing because the Russians backed Trump," they're wrong. If they're saying "the Russians backed Trump and there is clear evidence they backed Trump," then that's absolutely correct and I think is a "real point" standing on its own given that this intervention was invited by Trump himself.

I think "don't invite hostile intelligence services to meddle in our elections" is like table stakes for holding office in this country, but what do I know.

> If there is a credible report of a coup... then there must have been severe convictions at the highest levels.

This is not even remotely sound logic and frankly I don't believe you believe it either. I'll ask you again directly: have you read the January 6 report? Or was I supposed to interpret "I haven't seen evidence for XYZ" to mean "I deliberately avoid exposing myself to evidence for XYZ?"
by CelestialMystic | 2025-05-14 12:24:47+00:00
> My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high.

I don't believe you and it besides the point because I suspect that it is an expensive vacuum cleaner. I don't want to put any thought into a vacuum cleaner. I just want to buy the most powerful (bonus points if it is really loud), I don't care about it being quiet or efficient. I want the choice to buy something that makes a dent in my electricity bill if I so choose to.

> And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

This reads as "I have some fancy bathroom that costs a lot, if you had this fancy bathroom you wouldn't have issues". I don't want to have to care whether my low flush toilet is some fancy Norwegian brand or not. I just want something to flush the shit down the hole. The old toilets never had the problems the newer ones have. I would rather buy the old design, but I can't. I am denied the choice because someone else I have never met thinks they know better than I.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-14 12:24:48+00:00
So again, what you're saying is there is a tradeoff. You just think it should be made in a different place than where the vast majority of engineers in the world choose to make it. That's fine! It's probably because they're idiots and you're really smart, but it's obviously not because there's no tradeoff.

> that asm is some sort of necessity for software that runs faster than scripting languages.

It seems you're not tracking the flow of the conversation if you believe this is what I'm saying. I am saying there is always a way to make things faster by sacrificing other things developer productivity, feature sets, talent pool, or distribution methods. You agree with me, it turns out!
by moring | 2025-05-14 12:25:09+00:00
I understood the criticism to be about describing it as open source when it isn't, i.e. that

"We say it's open source because we expect the reader to know that we're not telling the truth"

should be replaced by

"It's open source except for the BLE firmware blob, which can't be open source due to regulatory reasons."

To be fair, the article just repeated the claims made on the GitHub page for the SDK.
by Juliate | 2025-05-14 12:25:22+00:00
It's a matter of proportionality.

Calling on the cops because one person in an undercrowded park, toss a ball? The cops actually acting on that report?

Maybe if the police had different narrative, they would have answered; from the article mentioned: "I reached out to the township and the superintendent of the Lower Merion Police Department on Monday and heard back from neither."

So it was likely a ludicrous report, and a ludicrous reaction for the local police department, that doesn't stand the light of a local newspaper.
by pizza234 | 2025-05-14 12:25:51+00:00
> The issue with bound checks for exemple is entirely avoidable if you prove that all your calls are within bounds before compiling, same thing for partial initialization.

The situation is more nuanced. The article dedicates a section to it:

> The general idea in eliding unnecessary bounds checks was that we needed to expose as much information about indices and slice bounds to the compiler as possible. We found many cases where we knew, from global context, that indices were guaranteed to be in range, but the compiler could not infer this only from local information (even with inlining). Most of our effort to elide bounds checks went into exposing additional context to buffer accesses.

(extensive information given in that section)
by JimDabell | 2025-05-14 12:25:53+00:00
> Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design

Are you using “modern society” as a synonym for whichever country you live in? There are countries who directly tell their citizens that having kids is good and offer them financial incentives to do so. For instance:

> PM Lee urges Singaporeans to have more children, and to do so earlier

— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/pm-lee-urges...

> Nearly $7 billion will be spent on marriage and parenthood initiatives in financial year 2026, up from over $4 billion in 2020.

— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/7b-to-be-spe...
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-14 12:26:11+00:00
Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household.

My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.

In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.

It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.

My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.

Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.