MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by idid | 2025-05-15 12:00:56+00:00
Having lived in several European cities so far (Brussels, Rotterdam, Stuttgart, Berlin, Bucharest), London's (where I have lived since 10 years) public transportation is one of the best I've seen so far. It's not without its zonal imbalances, but calling it terrible, unreliable, etc. is something I do not subscribe to, and, I suspect, neither do many of its residents.

You might be right though: what is your commute/experience that made you describe it so? Am genuinely curious to understand in how much of a privileged bubble I might be in.
by yakkomajuri | 2025-05-15 12:01:50+00:00
I think your point still stands, and I'm a big Postgres advocate/user myself btw.

But yeah we did migrate our _analytics_ data to ClickHouse (while still keeping Postgres for more transactional stuff) back when I was at PostHog.

Writeup: https://posthog.com/blog/how-we-turned-clickhouse-into-our-e...
by jajko | 2025-05-15 12:02:29+00:00
Not at all, few years, at most a decade behind. Don't you feel a decade ago we had a bit better life? Many people think so. What did we gain? Certainly not mature usable self-driving tech.

Anyway giving a choice of bleeding tech or being slightly more conservative tech is something that is taken away by people like Musk. Maybe you prefer being such a choice-less 'slave' to the system and uber rich just to have some shiny new toy a bit earlier, most people don't and many systems consider it outright illegal.

I don't get how tesla is not already sued in Europe for massive frauds they did and do on their customers. I'll happily buy electric car in future but hell will freeze sooner than my family sponsoring those nazi cars, competition is pretty good these days.
by felixfoertsch | 2025-05-15 12:03:01+00:00
To me, this totally depends on your threat model.

Generally, a one-time password is an additional security measure that prevents someone from going to a website and simply using obtained credentials (eg from a leak) or brute-forcing them. An attacker needs the second factor.

If you store your 2FA secret alongside your password in a password manager, you still gain protection from these attacks. And it's very convenient. However, you also increase your attack surface: if they break into your password manager, your done.

If your threat model allows it (mine does), this is still very secure and also very convenient.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-15 12:03:39+00:00
The broad definition is from the 1948 United Nations Convention:

https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20110210-what-is-genocide.pdf

Especially this one can be applied to many things:

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
by svennek | 2025-05-15 12:04:03+00:00
I have my own domain (that I share with relatives), and use mailbox.org for hosting it.

I chose them after a rather lengthy search.

Reasons for choosing them(pros)

- multiple "payment accounts" can share the same domain (securely), which was my primary reason for choosing them.

I.e. I cannot access my brother's mail in any way, even if we share the same domain, because he is his own admin.

- you can pay extra for more space (i.e. additional storage on a per gigabyte basis)

- extra "domains" and "aliases" for the mailboxes are possible and free (for a given number dependent on your subscription level)

- German company (i.e. EU company, which I care a lot about).

- They seem like an old-fashioned unix company that respect privacy, so my risk of being data harvested or used for ai training seems miniscule

- They seem to be financially stable and (if I remember correctly) around 40 employees which is a reasonable size

- They have a full online office suit (which I do not use)

Reasons not to (cons)

- you pay per mailbox, not per domain

- their business plans starts to expensive for my taste (so my business domain is at another hoster) as the business is basically revenueless currently. Shouldn't be a problem, if the business is "real".

I want to stress, that I am only a customer, no partner or affiliate or receive any benefit of writing this.
Show HN: StackForge – Export live GCP to Pulumi YAML and state (no import)
by foxrip | 2025-05-15 12:04:17+00:00
We built StackForge to eliminate the pain of onboarding existing GCP infrastructure into Pulumi.

You point it at any live GCP project, and it instantly outputs:

A clean, modular Main.yaml (Pulumi YAML)

A complete Pulumi state file (stackName.json)

Optional GCS upload for syncing and versioning

Why it matters: pulumi import is slow and messy. Terraformer is often incomplete or broken. StackForge generates a complete Pulumi project structure — with working state — in seconds. You don’t even need to deploy it; it’s ready to edit, preview, and use.

Demo video (2 minutes): http://x-itm.com/demo.mp4 Free trial: https://x-itm.com/stackforge-trial/ (Just request a key)

Built for:

DevOps and SREs onboarding legacy infra

Agencies migrating clients to IaC

Platform engineers building internal tools

Would love feedback from the HN crowd — feature suggestions, edge cases, or integration ideas welcome. AMA.
by mr_person | 2025-05-15 12:04:26+00:00
I have had good experiences with Proton. I pay for the business tier so that I can manage multiple domains… but that’s not your average setup.

Literally my only complaint is that the new-ish vanilla SMTP service does not play well with systems like DMA or Postfix, so I have issues using it for cron emails on my servers.

Everything else has worked pretty much perfectly since I migrated over.

Edit: I echo other commenters though, get your own domain regardless of where you host it. That way you can always pack up your toys and go somewhere else if required
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-15 12:04:36+00:00
It's true; computer science is merely the gateway to subfields which are their own specialties; each could be its own dedicated hobby.

(And how can one be interested in only one of them, when they are all connected, or at the surface accessible with just a tutorial.)

At one prospective student event, it was incredulous to ask, "Wait, are we competing for majors with those who could become medical doctors?"

Yes! There was no question about it. The more computer science graduates, the better.
by dathinab | 2025-05-15 12:04:55+00:00
> It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle complicated parking situations.

- transporting people has higher legal requirements

- "complicated parking situations" is IMHO not really the problem, most parking situations are relatively straight forward. The problem is complicated driving situations. The fixed routes make it less likely to have, but the bigger size makes it more likely. Bus drivers needing to spontaneously adopt there route is rare but a thing, but having a hugely long car which isn't allowed to drive backward is making that more likely

- people, Bus drivers aren't just driving the bus but also tend to handle the passengers in various ways. The simplest cases are ticket payment (not always) and people asking questions (common especially with older people). More subtle ways include things like giving people the feeling they are not alone in the bus even if they are the only passenger (i.e. subtly reducing bad behavior) telling a passenger that they can't take a bicycle, motorcycle or for the supper crazy kind on fire grill into the bus. Or stuff like calling the police if they notice a passenger getting threatened or assaulted. etc. This category kind applies to any "at same time shared autonomous vehicle" is one of the more "open questions" of autonomous public transport. Depending on country, culture and are I think the difference can be anything from irrelevant to wupsi we have a huge problem.

- Insurance, a lot of autonomous care providers try to doge responsibility, i.e. they drive but you are responsibility for how they drive in most situations. That isn't exactly inviting for bus companies sure there probably is some insurer which is willing to handle it, but then the moment you hit the legal gray area between care maker or insurer has to pay things will likely get messy and that gray area is AFIK currently still too big.

so IMHO less of a pure technical and more of a legal/people issue
by eesmith | 2025-05-15 12:04:57+00:00
I've been reading essentially the same proposals and arguments for a zeppelin revival since I was a teenager in the 1980s reading Popular Mechanics.

If we tax carbon to the point where zeppelins become anywhere near cost competitive with jets then I expect we'll see more passenger and cargo ships using sail.

Which is, ahem, another perennial Popular Mechanics topic, like

(2020) "This Wind-Powered Super Sailboat Will Carry 7,000 Cars Across the Atlantic" - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34272175/wi...

To be sure, there are modern sail cargo ships. The Grain de Sail carries coffee and chocolate, for example, as does the TransOceanic Wind Transport (for the latter, https://www.fastcompany.com/91185144/the-worlds-largest-wind... ).

But as I recall, the carbon problem with slow passenger travel is that people tend to want things like hot showers, which airships/sailboats heat using fossil fuels, and the people who can afford to travel by ship tend to want a lot of creature comforts, and the staff to provide them.

Who will pay $10,000 for an 8 day sailing across the Atlantic with a small cabin, reheated frozen foods, and 12 liters of water allocated daily for a "Navy shower"?
by afavour | 2025-05-15 12:05:57+00:00
There’s nothing stopping them at all. But in a way that’s nothing new.

On one hand it feels like the height of conspiracy theory to say that Google, Meta etc would/could tweak their product to e.g. favour a particular presidential candidate. But on the other hand it’s entirely possible. Tweak what search results people see, change the weighting of what appears in their news feed… and these companies all have incentive to do so. We just have to hope that they don’t do it.
by neRok | 2025-05-15 12:06:05+00:00
From a technical/algorithmic POV - this doesn't sound particularly remarkable, because it sounds about the same as how modern CPU's "boost" themselves.

And actually, I think there is similar tech in "speaker systems" already. An "older" one that I've read about is from RCF (an old+big Italian company with systems ranging from desktop to festival size), and they call it [Bass Motion Control](https://www.rcf.it/en/art-9-series);

> The BMC method works by creating a complete map of the dynamic behavior of the woofer, to generate a custom algorithm that only limits over-excursions. This gives total freedom of signal reproduction to the transducer. When high-pass filters normally protect the woofer motion from becoming destructive but change the phase behavior, the new BMC algorithm breaks conventional rules.

Now I don't know how effective RCF's approach truly is, but another company that is doing "big-things" is Dirac. They released a blog post about a year ago titled [Boosting Audio System Sustainability with Dirac](https://www.dirac.com/blog/boosting-audio-system-sustainabil...), and there is a section called Enhancing performance with optimized components;

> By employing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, we can make the driving force on the voice coil (the part of the speaker that turns electricity into sound) more consistent, improving the mechanical design and compensating for magnetic limitations.

> NLC adjusts the voice coil current to correct force factor irregularities (inconsistencies in the voice coil’s efficiency) without requiring complex mechanical measurements. In tests with an otherwise suboptimal driver, our technology reduced distortion by 10 dB, nearly matching the performance of a well-designed driver.
Ask HN: Startup founders, ICs, workaholics – how do you avoid excess?
by keepamovin | 2025-05-15 12:06:18+00:00
The last 18 months I've been feeling like I'm always chasing the to do list, also achieving, but always more to do. It's endless. Tiresome. I push myself too hard. I've been saying I need to step back, get away, work different. I've decided a 10 day total break from all work. And a more sane and stable way to work whenever I get back to it. What did you find worked for you? To accomplish, but take care of yourself and work in a healthy way.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-05-15 12:06:31+00:00
> It's a bit like what happened in Zimbabwe that devastated that country 20 years ago when all the white farmers were kicked out

Land reform to repair the inequality from the previous apartheid state isn't exactly "kicked out". Zimbabwe became Zimbabwe from Rhodesia via a civil war that wrestled control away from the minority white government.

In South Africa today, 75% of the privately owned land is held by about 8% of the population(white folks), who were given legal preference multiple times in history to own all that land.

Even if you remove apartheid, you still have a similar situation to antebellum US where ex slaves were working on the same old plantations, now as share croppers. Of course in SA we're not talking about ex slaves, but you're maintaining the status quo one way or another.

Land reform is required if your country ever wants to know peace. The US never finished reconstruction and didn't redistribute those plantations and other ill gotten gains, and as a result is still struggling to move past slavery.
by slfnflctd | 2025-05-15 12:06:46+00:00
I think it's rather likely that Waymo has not recouped its initial investment, and even if you completely ignored that I'd be surprised if it doesn't currently still operate at a net loss.

The whole situation is artificial and propped up by external funding right now. Making this a viable industry is going to take a lot more time, if it's possible at all.
by tentacleuno | 2025-05-15 12:06:59+00:00
I was thinking of that when I wrote the comment! I've heard of electric turbochargers, but I'm not sure how good they are under real-life conditions. Directly using heat energy from the exhaust (as opposed to introducing electric conversion losses) seems wiser to me. Part of me has always liked making use of what would otherwise be wasted to entropy.

In theory (though not a mechanic, just have an interest in this), the best middle-ground would be to retain the same design but add a motor to the turbocharger shaft which would mainly be reserved for spool ups -- is that what they're doing?
by ben_w | 2025-05-15 12:07:17+00:00
> It seems like a much easier thing to do. They drive on fixed routes and do not have to handle complicated parking situations.

Route-finding is the easy part of self-driving, it was solved basically as soon as we had GPS maps.

The hard part is avoiding hitting anyone, and anything, on the road while do you that.

I'm not at all sure either way about parking. We have parking sensors, but if parking is a "solved" problem or not, I do not know.
by yorwba | 2025-05-15 12:08:22+00:00
They might forget to check. Musk seems to have been surprised that Grok doesn't share his opinions and has been clumsily trying to fix it for a while now.

And it might not be easy to fix. Despite all the effort invested into aligning models with company policy, persistent users can still get around the guardrails with clever jailbreaks.

In theory it should be possible to eliminate all non-compliant content from the training data, but that would most likely entail running all training data through an LLM, which would make the training process about twice as expensive.

So, in practice, companies have been releasing models that they do not have full control over.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-05-15 12:08:44+00:00
> intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group

In this situation, it's specifically about farmers(large scale private landowners). The nature of them being targeted isn't purely because they're white, but that they hold 3/4 of the privately owned land in SA and likely wield that privilege and power.
by tentacleuno | 2025-05-15 12:08:48+00:00
I don't miss that either (in fact, I know the ECU can do a much better job), but I do enjoy engaging with the car, and thus drive a manual transmission. I'm fairly confident I can get better efficiency and control as opposed to the same transmission with a computer changing gears for me.

From what I've heard, it's somewhat of a rarity in the US, but it's very widely used in Europe.
by h2zizzle | 2025-05-15 12:09:02+00:00
? Japanese subways were infamously the site of a nerve gas attack in the 90s. 33 people were killed in mass knife attacks in Kunming, China in 2014. France has had a handful of subway and train attacks.

However, the point is that these incidents, along with the BART one, are unusual. Avoiding public transit because of them would be like avoiding flying because of air accidents or avoiding going to a theater or musical event because of the various massacres that have happened at them over the years.
by scop | 2025-05-15 12:09:07+00:00
Haven’t read Dickens, but Melville was a revelation for me. His short stories are great, but Moby Dick is a work of glory. It’s hard to explain why, but Moby Dick basically bifurcated my life: there was the time before I read it and the time after. That being said, I would have hated it in high school and am glad it wasn’t assigned. It was something I could only appreciate in my 30s.
Validating a women-only beauty service platform (React/Node/Next.js)
by ZiadEl | 2025-05-15 12:09:18+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Ziad — currently building a prototype for a women-only beauty services platform, and I’d love your early thoughts before we ship an MVP.

The idea hit me unexpectedly. One day, my mom booked a beauty freelancer to come to our home. It was a disaster. The stylist had no online profile, no reviews, no credentials, and… no clue what she was doing. I asked, “Where did you find her?” My mom replied, “Someone just recommended her.” That’s when it clicked: why isn’t there a vetted, trust-based platform for this?

So I started mocking up a product:

Think Airbnb UX meets Glossier aesthetics with a Node.js + PostgreSQL backend, and a Next.js + Tailwind front.

We’re building an app where women can find verified, reviewed, and skilled beauty freelancers or salons just for women, filtered by price, location, ratings, and availability.

For freelancers/salons: they’ll get a dashboard, booking system, and verified profile (with KYC & portfolio upload).

Here’s the interesting part from a product-market-fit angle: We’re launching in Turkey, where many women (especially in Muslim/MENA communities) prefer to get beauty services at home for religious/cultural reasons. This isn’t about exclusivity—it’s about respecting privacy, safety, and lifestyle choices. The current salon industry doesn’t address that.

We're validating this in communities where:

Demand for at-home services is rising.

Trust & verification are huge pain points.

Digital presence for freelancers is almost nonexistent.

Tech-wise: I’m leading the product and strategy while my co-founder is handling the stack. We’re considering integrating Supabase for auth + real-time updates, and maybe Stripe Connect for multi-vendor payouts. We'll go PWA first, native if we get traction.

What I’m looking for:

Is this idea solving a real pain from your perspective?

How would you validate this quickly without burning budget?

Any tech tips, UX red flags, or go-to-market hacks?

Bonus: If you know anything similar in other markets, I'd love to study it.

Thanks for reading. Happy to share mockups or talk tech/product if anyone’s curious.

– Ziad
by saalweachter | 2025-05-15 12:09:22+00:00
A bus driver costs $10/h (or whatever; an NYC bus driver averages $28/h) per hour of operation.

A transit bus lasts an average of 12 years, and even if you don't run it nights or weekends, that's still around 50,000 hours of driving.

That's $500k at $10/h, and if you run a bus 24/7 in NYC you could spend $3M over the course of the bus's life.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-15 12:09:32+00:00
I think it doesn't need to be a majority for the situation to be a net improvement.

Among my colleagues (~20 people) nobody has a customer-facing job, and only one needs to manage children. The others either don't have kids at all, or the kids are old enough to manage on their own. They all come in the office around 9:30 AM. We rarely schedule meetings before 10 AM and after 5 PM. I'm pretty sure that if even 10% of the people would change their schedules a bit, comfort would improve for everybody. It's the same thing with lunch. Everybody goes down at 1 PM on the dot and complains about there being too many people. I go around 12:30 and never have to wait in line for ages.

Of course, WFH would be even better, but I understand not all people like it. The company I work for is actually quite flexible, but the people do tend to prefer working from the office. I, personally, prefer WFH (which is what I do generally). But my point isn't to push a particular working arrangement, rather to point out that even when there is some inherent flexibility in the system, people seem to choose not to use it.
by aecsocket | 2025-05-15 12:10:02+00:00
The magnitude to which FeliCa was faster shocked me as well when I found out. But it's not like the latency is insignificant: it's obvious how much faster people can get through a Tokyo metro gate than a London one. So clearly it must have some kind of financial impact as well, if an entire city's public transport system works slower because of it. Even ignoring empathy for a second, isn't this the kind of thing that a Western capital ideology is supposed to improve? Some food for thought.
by vidarh | 2025-05-15 12:10:58+00:00
And when you've bought the bus, a self-driving bus can operate 24/7, but to get 24/7 coverage with drivers you need at least 3 drivers per bus, probably more like 4 when accounting for illness and time off. You can cut that a bit and cut operating hours without major effect on service, but it's still going to be more than 1 at least.
by Ukv | 2025-05-15 12:10:59+00:00
> [noyb:] But Meta is even limiting this (statutory) right by saying that it only applies if people opt-out before the training has started. Meta will likely also be unable to comply with other GDPR rights (like the right to be forgotten, the right to have incorrect data rectified or to give users access to their data in an AI system). Furthermore, Meta provides AI models (such as Llama) as open-source software for anyone to download and use. This means that Meta can hardly call back or update a model once it is published.

Somewhat worried about the implication for open source models in general if this argument is fully accepted. For instance if your open-source model has trained on a news article (maybe even with a license from the publisher) and a subject in the article later exercises their right to be forgotten, supposedly even deleting and re-training the model would be insufficient?

Feels like a step backwards in terms of privacy if only centralized models were to be permitted under the GDPR, opposed to ones you can run on your own hardware.

> "Most other AI providers (like OpenAI or French Mistral) have zero access to social media data and still outcompete Meta's AI systems," noyb said,

I don't think this is true - both are using web-scraped data including many social media sites. OpenAI has a partnership with reddit, even. To my understanding Meta is likewise only using public posts (but they would have the advantage of being able to bypass their own bot-prevention/rate-limits).