MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-19 10:34:34+00:00
There's gold plated / jewel encrusted versions of phones or graphics cards [0] but that's just making things look garish for the people that want to look rich. But as far as I know there's no 'bespoke' phone manufacturer on the same level as Swiss watches or hand-built cars. No real reason either; with a watch, any performance has peaked years ago so the only thing that remains is design. Phones are mostly functional, although I suppose you could do something cool with the back side.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/one-day-the-...
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-19 10:34:42+00:00
Early cars and planes were made out of wood. So, I see no reason why not. The mosquitto which was one of the most successful planes in WW II was made out of plywood, which you could think of as an early form of CLT.

A lot of modern cars are made with a lot of composite materials that probably have better properties. But I imagine CLT could work well for things that are currently made out of steel or aluminium on such cars. I'm not sure if there's a big advantage to doing that in terms of strength, weight, or durability though. Aluminium might be lighter. And composite materials provide better strength and weight.
by idoubtit | 2025-05-19 10:36:43+00:00
> it's undeniable that we are making progress.

Yes, I agree that some public organizations in France are making progress with Open Source. For instance, free software is now common in universities (with local variations). And overall I think there's a central influence of the DiNum ("Direction Numérique", the Digital Department of the French State) in this direction. But I don't see how this UN charter makes any difference.

There's progress, though not related to this charter. And so slow that I would bet against "Open Source" becoming widespread in French schools within the next decade.

> Facts (and code) are following.

I'm sorry, but the current situation and the past experience makes it really hard to believe that facts will follow from this charter. At least facts matching the claim that the French government will be "Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects" (quote from the first point of the charter).

If "France endorses UN Open Source principles", it shouldn't just mean that it will publish some code. It should means that it intends to respect these principles, and that proprietary software becomes the exception within the French administration.

I can't believe this post is more than symbolic, because the French law already promotes Open Source and forbids non-UE proprietary software in many public contexts. But these laws are usually not applied. Why would a non-prescriptive charter do any better?
by xnickb | 2025-05-19 10:37:33+00:00
That's a much harder attack to pull off. Windows actually does a decent job at preventing this kind of thing from being easily achievable.

Clipboard attacks are far easier, as most modern systems treat clipboard as a non-critical resource. Which is mind blowing if you ask me.

An app reading from clipboard must ring all sorts of alarms. Let alone writing to it.
by Ekaros | 2025-05-19 10:37:41+00:00
Generally at least some models at least used to be very reliable. Like I just discussed with my parents that their clothes washer is over 20 years old. And been in regular use without any issues or significant maintenance. That sort of lifespan isn't really expected from even premium models from most brands.

So they do have perceived quality of being more expensive but more long lasting goods.
by permo-w | 2025-05-19 10:38:34+00:00
>You understand that what something is called is not always the same as what it is, right?

e.g. how you just called it a tax? you're arguing against yourself

my man, your entire contribution to this discussion has been proxy arguments and rhetorical tricks without ever actually getting to the point of what you really think. who cares if it fits your personal definition of a tax vs someone else's definition of a fee? do you even pay it? and can you just pack in all the sophistry and proxy arguments and have out with your real motivations
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-19 10:39:06+00:00
Everyone is trying to find any glimmer of hope for a software development recovery. It ain’t happening, there is way too much of a glut, BigTech has learned to operate leaner and VC funding isn’t coming back since the public market doesn’t want money losing startups and acquisitions are at a much lower valuation. The tax law won’t change that.

Not to mention that the entire US economy is now at the whims of ChatGPT - where the current admiration got its tariff policy from.

https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-a...
by ffsm8 | 2025-05-19 10:39:22+00:00
I don't work in the industry, but from my admittedly very consumer-oriented perspective that wanted to build a house for a while:

The reason why economics of scale never really made sense in this context was that shipping the prefab components to the building site mostly wiped out the savings.

Ignoring the actual shipping cost (which is substantial for heavy things that get assembled into a house), it also comes with the risk of things getting damaged while en-route etc. another reason is the fact that places in reality very rarely are actually the same. They can do best effort, but things will likely still vary a little. That's another error scenario wiping out a good chunk of the savings, which fundamentally doesn't exist of you just build on-site.

I'm not knowledgeable on this new material to judge wherever this could potentially change this status-quo, but I wouldn't hold my breath either.
by diggan | 2025-05-19 10:39:55+00:00
> and fewer disparate materials (no moving parts = no coils,bearings,motors...)

But even so, isn't the lifetime of a SSD less than a HDD given the same amount of writes? Especially when you try to have the same amount of storage available.

So say I want 16TB, I can either get 1 16TB SATA drive, or something like 4 4TB SSDs (or 8 2TB) to have the same storage, is the physical volume still less in that case? And, if I write 16TB of data each month to each of these alternatives, which one breaks first and has to be replaced?
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-19 10:40:34+00:00
I'm not looking into 100 years old stuff, that's mostly solid wood anyway.

I'm referring to my consistent experience of buying both laminated chipwood and veneer wood things, then seeing the former disintegrate within 5 years and the latter last 10 years with no visible damage.

It's all good now, I just wish it didn't take me 10 years to gain this knowledge. On another hand if I got it much earlier it wouldn't benefit me either because I could only afford cheap stuff anyway.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-19 10:41:01+00:00
I think this is definitely true in the sense that some tasks pf junior tech jobs are evaporating.

But when computers became ubiquitous, bankers worried what associates would do for a living if nobody had to manually calculate spreadsheets—yet the finance internship is alive and well.

I'm not saying this disruption will have no impact at all. But we'll keep finding things to do for young people, they'll just move up the chain of command.
by tinco | 2025-05-19 10:41:01+00:00
CLT is in no way similar to the product InventWood is working on, besides that it uses the same base material, and I guess requiring some pressing. You can think of CLT as being like plywood, but for beams instead of for sheets.

That said, CLT has 2 major advantages over regular wood:

1. It is more dimensionally stable, it expands/contracts less and in a more uniform way.

2. It is cheaper at larger dimensions. I.e. 0.5m x 0.5m x 20m wooden beams would take decades to grow and even then not realiably, but you can just manufacture CLT beams with those dimensions easily out of <10yr old trees.

Those two advantages are not limiting factors for the construction of cars or airplanes, so CLT is not super relevant to them.
by lmm | 2025-05-19 10:41:43+00:00
> To my knowledge only 2 things that could qualify as incentive exist:

> - commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee

> - commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business

> But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.

They do both those things, so commute costs are a free tax discount. But they also just tell companies directly that they want them to act in a certain way, and the companies generally fall into line. While the zaibatsu have nominally disappeared, there are still very close ties between the politicians and big businesses in Japan.
by neomantra | 2025-05-19 10:42:17+00:00
Part of the strength is from Cellulose Nanocrystals (CNCs), which are modern (mid-01900's) and still being heavily researched. I was just at a conference where people were presenting work on making CNCs (and lots of other biomass conversion) more sustainable: H2O2 instead of SO4, greener versions of DMF like Cyrene, etc

My daughter recently started researching extracting/converting CNCs from fabric blends (currently cotton/elastane like spandex). Reading this post made me wonder if we can then remake fabric from CNCs, strong against knives or bullets?
by laborcontract | 2025-05-19 10:43:42+00:00
Link to underlying link rather than to the quote-tweet spam:

https://xcancel.com/ruxandrateslo/status/1924206417000403328

> @RuxandraTeslo: “I hadn't realized this but Romania's next president was 1st in the world in the International Maths Olympiad 2 years in a row with maximum score”

His name is Nicușor Dan. He was first in 1987 and 1988. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicu%C8%99or_Dan
by elorant | 2025-05-19 10:45:37+00:00
Wealthy people usually get concierge services. You go to a museum as a regular folk, it’s overcrowded and there’s like 20 other people looking at the same art piece you’re looking, trying to get a better shot from it. You visit as a wealthy individual, you get a private tour after hours with a dozen others when the museum is empty with a trained guide who can answer any questions you may have. You can view any art piece at your own pace from every angle you like. This goes on for pretty much every public service out there.
by lenvl | 2025-05-19 10:46:54+00:00
I'd say here, that's may not be about the scalability itself. For me, it's more about convenience. I have been using k8s jobs for a while now.

for some reason, the company I work for wants to fix bad architectural decisions with k8s jobs :)

We had a bunch of issues with k8s jobs, but you are right none of them were k8s fault. But having a need to monitor them, and dump the logs to Loki or DD, made debugging quite complex.

If you need to restart the job devs would go to DevOps slack channel, for the job to be fired manually, etc.

IMO, k8s jobs are more for devops & infra team tasks, not for developers. The biggest upset is the need to spin up the containers for the job to be executed. We put out jobs inside services, so you could call script that has a db conn and it does the job, but we need to isolate rabbitmq connections to not accept messages while the service is in "cron-job" mode.

I know this is more our problem, than the issue with jobs, but still. I have never seen cron jobs implemented with no issues.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-19 10:46:57+00:00
I was invited for coffee at a friend's friend.

He seemed a pretty regular guy, very friendly: kids playing in the pool. Nothing out of the ordinary except as many house employees as adult guests (and house employees where calling guests by their name).

I happened to know the artist Jeff Koons: not a big fan of the "inflated balloon dogs" but I do like his ballerinas. Well... Turns out the dude had one house destroyed then rebuilt to accommodate a 3 meters high Jeff Koons sculpture of two ballerinas.

I don't know exactly but I take it that's a $15m sculpture. I'd say most people don't know who Jeff Koons is and most people have no idea that some people shall just level an entire house just to have an architect redesign a new house, at the same place, so that a sculpture can now be admired from the living room, kitchen and garden.

He's got several paintings from Basquiat too. He's actually in the top 200 of the world's top art collectors (I found that out by googling his name after having been to his place).

And he's got his art pieces sprinkled around the world, in his many properties.

> The $10-30M people don't seem much different from me.

Definitely not very different. One little fantasy I saw not one but two people in that range do is buy several times the exact same car. Identical. Same config. Then they use one as a daily, and put the the others at different vacation places they have: so they land, take a cab, then get to enjoy the same car. Weird but I've seen two people do it, so I take it's a thing? One had identical Range Rover, the other identical Lexus.

Not real petrolheads: rich car petrolheads are actually going to own fancy stuff like old Ferrari 250 (even if "just" a GTE), old GT40, old Porsche, etc. which every body expects rich people to have if they're into cars at all.

But yup: buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-19 10:48:25+00:00
> So it is, indeed, true.

Office is a fairly unsignificant part of our cloud usage. I'm fairly sure we could come to an agreement with Microsoft if we needed to self-host.

> there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice

People don't use Office like it's the 90s anymore. Everything which doesn't have seemless collaboration and document sharing is dead on arrival.

> No, I really don't. It's not "awesome" to have access to that data. This is public information. Citizens don't have to be grateful of what the state does. THE STATE WORKS FOR US, not the other way around.

The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment. Of course, you should be grateful that people fought for, put in place and maintain all the services you receive on top. They don't come by magic. That's actual people working.

The fact that you can easily and freely access this database is something to be celebrated. In most places, people who don't work for the state have to pay to access this or go through a public library and that's honestly perfectly fine.

It's baffling to me how the French seemingly fail to realise how incredible the breadth of services their government provides is and somehow manage to make themselves miserable rather than actually doing something of what they are gifted with.
by jelder | 2025-05-19 10:48:29+00:00
Glad there’s finally a name for this phenomenon. Effect.js particularly egregious in this area. In my own libraries, I’ve definitely found myself producing less-than-perfect type safety because the readability tradeoff was too great.

Overall, I think one day the gradual type system trend will be regarded as a misstep. I’d rather just manually define a new type than play the generics mini-game.
by Timshel | 2025-05-19 10:49:35+00:00
Thx, there is a graph for embodied cost at the start of page 3 and figure vary wildly.

The biggest drive at the time was 3840GB, and its production emitted ~425kg. But if we look at the more prevalent models the emission vary widly: for 512: between ~25 to 225kg and for 1024 from ~60 to 275kg.

And while the paper start with the assertion that manufacturing a Gigabyte of Flash emits 0.16 Kg CO2, I expect emission to be highly dependent on the number of flash module and not so much on the capacity itself.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-19 10:52:03+00:00
I think the concerns you raise aren't actually show stoppers for a lot of prefab housing that has been happening for decades.

Wood is a lot lighter than steel and concrete. And that has to be transported as well. So you'd have less cost there, not more. About 50% weight savings. That's a lot of diesel.

As for parts getting damaged. That's what insurance an warranty are for. I don't think that's a show stopper issue.

And there are advantages to producing prefab components in a facility that is optimal for that and climate controlled that has all the right tools, specialists, equipment etc. Also, pooring concrete in the winter is problematic. Water freezes. And it expands when it does so. Working with steel is a PITA when it freezes as well. It conducts heat very well. Construction sites aren't very active in the winter in those places that have them for this reason. Prefab wood components don't have a lot of these issues. You can still work wood when it freezes. And bang in some nails. Or drill holes.
by latexr | 2025-05-19 10:54:22+00:00
> I'm sure all the HN comments have been a part of training dataset for many chatbots now.

Be that as it may, I don’t think “everyone does it” is an excuse. An absurdly high number of people throw trash on the floor. I actively pick it up or at a minimum don’t contribute to the problem.

The answer to “many companies are unethically gathering your data” is not “it’s OK for me to be unethical too”.
by maximus-decimus | 2025-05-19 10:54:56+00:00
I see the appeal of wanting to link things, but even then I find information to be so context dependent that I just do hierarchical notes anyway.

Like if you want to brush up python for interviews, you're gonna want to take notes about specific things like heaps and string builders. You don't want to dilute that info with stuff you know will never be asked in an interview like how to build a TUI.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-19 10:55:08+00:00
lol, lmao even... Most devs aren't even making 100k a year, even in the US the median is at like 120k.

Let's say you make 100k a year in Berlin, you're already in the top 1% so "accessibility" is out of the equation at that point, that's 4.8k net. Let's say you manage to invest ~60% of your salary, that's about 3k a month, 36k a year. Now let's say you get 8% return per year (which you won't), you're barely above 500k after 10 years.

So yeah sure, if you're in the top 1% to begin with, and live on what basically amounts to your local minimum wage while investing everything else, you can get to 1 million after 15 years or so...

Ah, and don't forget the tax man, he'll take his 20-30% cut on your million.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-19 10:55:11+00:00
Here's our perspective. The hobbyists and enthusiasts my age (mid-50s) have reached consensus that it's not worth building a system from components anymore, for these reasons:

- More turnkey systems are available from integrators. You can now configure fully prebuilt systems direct from the vendor, or pull them off a shelf at any retail outlet. In the past, prebuilt systems were sold to grandmas and busy parents. Now integrators serve all markets from gamers, to small business, to power users as well. No user of Apple Computers is building one from scratch, and this mindset is now shared by PC users as well.

- Less tinkering. As mature power users, we prefer to "Plug and Play" rather than spending our days with the case pulled off. If we're not selecting parts and worrying about compatibility, then we can get down to using the system we have. We've learned all we need to know about the internals and earned our A+.

- Still a niche market. If you want to build from components, then you need to go into the geek's catalog market. The best/most components go directly to integrators anyway.

- Fewer distinguished components. Standard integrated Ethernet and sound and storage are "good enough" on your motherboard. At this end of Moore's Law, the buyer can load enough RAM and storage in a base system.

- More people are going mobile. We've conceded that a desktop system is overkill for our "daily driver" needs, and a notebook is really convenient when on-the-go. Notebook computers now have the power and resources to completely replace a desktop system, and every 3-5 years, you just get to replace the whole thing!

And of course, these are personal justifications and reasoning for why I don't build systems anymore. I wouldn't want to rain on others' parade. If you're a teenager and you love "LEGO For Adults" then build a system. Nobody's going to stop you. If you love PC internals and tinkering with your hardware every day, nobody's going to stop you. But as a power user with things to do every day, I need a computer that works, and a computer whose case I'm not removing every other day!
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-19 10:55:38+00:00
When you’re 90 and need someone to give you a sponge bath, cultural differences don’t matter much.

You do get weird stories like Filipino nurses treating elderly WW2 era Japanese soldiers. I’m sure it’s only awkward for a moment.

You could have said the same thing about any new immigrants anywhere. How will the Irish fit in Boston?

How will Ukrainians make it in Chicago?
by lmm | 2025-05-19 10:57:57+00:00
> You don’t override screen resolution or color scheme with your own guess

They absolutely do lol.

Like it or not, people like you are outnumbered by people who set their Accept-Language header wrong and don't know how to fix it. Those people probably buy more too (or at least buy more that shows up in tracking, since you sound like the kind of person who disables cookies etc. too).
by cheschire | 2025-05-19 10:59:23+00:00
It’s not just construction company resistance to change.

The regulatory landscape around home building is intense. Especially for fire code. You basically have an entire industry of inspectors whose job is to fail things that don’t match any known pattern, so getting new patterns established is quite difficult.

There is likely also some resistance to it in the home insurance space where they are incredibly data driven, so until you have data built up to justify the statistically supported lower prices of stone houses, the insurance companies will keep premiums higher resulting in non standard materials being limited to the wealthy or fanatics willing to eat the cost.
by survirtual | 2025-05-19 11:00:23+00:00
Look, I know it is hard for an ego to hear the things I say and the way I say them sometimes. For that, I am sorry. But I am not arguing with you, I am informing you.

Challenging media empires was child's play compared to challenging the world's financial system. Bitcoin has successfully illustrated a new and better way. Presidents have been killed for less. Civil rights activists have been killed for less.

Bitcoin and the crypto economy is now inevitable, just as gasoline vehicles became inevitable, and a nuclear armed world became inevitable. The world is changing, please do not let your self-identity interfere with the reality of this.

When a new and revolutionary invention becomes part of the human mental strata, you cannot take it back. This has never been done before since the knowledge of building a campfire or sharpening rocks. It doesn't matter how powerful, stable, beneficial, or otherwise the old system was. It has been super-ceded by something that outcompetes it.

That's reality. I hope that you and others like you realize it and have a prosperous life.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-19 11:01:15+00:00
Hmm, that might not be a bad idea! We could ban CSS altogether: just leave some markup tags, maybe whatever you can do in Markdown + tables. No colors, no small print, no images. (We could even use something like gemtext as the format instead of HTML, but that wouldn’t be backward compatible with clients.)

But I don’t see any email clients with somewhat significant market share going through with this :(
by NiloCK | 2025-05-19 11:01:20+00:00
Wow, thanks!

The app's been 'in production' for myself and my daughters for years, but no public access or polished working demos yet. I hope to have exemplar static-site builds using very soon.

I'm also working on these guys for my in-development early literacy course: https://patched-network.github.io/letterpeople/