MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-19 09:34:13+00:00
Not really, many things you can observe and learn yourself fairly quickly.

Some others are very hard to observe yourself (e.g. the poisonous effect of lead) but by now they are embedded into the collective consciousness.

My worry is with things that are neither. In this particular context these are things that you know if you grow up in a rich/middle-class family, but hard to come by if you become rich/middle-class later in life.
by BSDobelix | 2025-05-19 09:34:38+00:00
>>I live by myself in a remote mountain cave

= I live in California, and the nearest Starbucks is more than 20 miles away.

>>can only be contacted during a full moon

= As a night person, I am awake when the streetlight outside my house turns on.

>>certain arcane rites that are too horrible to speak of

= In order to contact me, you must install Microsoft Teams.

Overall, it's not that bad, except for the MS team thing. ;)
by em500 | 2025-05-19 09:34:47+00:00
> For example I wish someone told me about the existence of Miele kitchen equipment before I accidentally rented an apartment of a well-to-do woman.

Don't believe the hype. I got an apartment full with Miele kitchen equipment (from the previous owner, but less than 10 years old). They're nothing special, and I got a lot more random errors on the oven ("please contact service", tried that once, they were as clueless as you'd expect) than in my previous Siemens kitchen.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-19 09:35:03+00:00
I'm curious just how much of this "senior only hiring" stuff is a _narrative_ thing vs an actual reality.

Many small startups _never_ really hired junior people, preferring to only take people who had some experience. To some extent, taking juniors and _turning them into_ seniors has always been more of a big-company thing than a small-company thing (which makes _sense_; it's expensive). I'd be curious whether there's actual data showing a shift, or if it's just vibes.
by Akronymus | 2025-05-19 09:35:35+00:00
As someone who currently has to deal with a database that has NO surrogate keys, 100% agree with having surrogate keys always. Compound natural keys are just plain awful to deal with.

Altough, it doesn't help that we have to do string manipulation to extract part of those natural keys from other fields that contain a bunch of data as one long string.
by poulpy123 | 2025-05-19 09:36:18+00:00
> People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments;

It's because they add up. In this specific case, considering OP job and it's heavy use of obsidian, it makes no sense to not pay for the synchro, if only to support the company[1], but if I was paying 8€/month for all software and service I'm using I would be bankrupted immediately.

Ironically this hurt open source and companies proposing generous free tiers the most because the amount of money people have for software will go to the one they cannot get for free.

[1] actually it makes no sense to develop your own tool when alternatives already exists
by kebsup | 2025-05-19 09:37:18+00:00
I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D

My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me having to debug it.

[1] https://vocabuo.com
by bArray | 2025-05-19 09:37:24+00:00
> Is there a reason that that investment is not relevant?

I wasn't aware of it, in that case this could be a more interesting comparison.

> From what I can tell, way more than $20k has been invested into dav1d, and that investment has generated many performance optimisations already. Ostensibly, that's what this rav1d bounty is competing with.

Was rav1d a port of dav1d or developed from scratch?
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-19 09:37:36+00:00
This is really cool. It's easy to take the number of stops that you think you can support on a given route for the desired schedule and then ensure that you end up with the fewest stops, on average equidistant between the homes of those who use said stops, all based on passenger demand.

I'm still keen to see automated trains in the future - such as the toob in London. We've had the technology for a long time now. So why isn't it possible that trains are routed on a per-carriage basis? If a camera + ML vision sees n people on the platform at 3am, it should be able to dynamically route and link carriages to serve the right number of people + some margin.

It saddens me that such cool/convenient things have been possible for years but that we have no interest in pursuing them since we're all in competition with each other to try to become billionaires. And the real billionaires aren't really interested in making less money.
IP enrichment for SEO, LLM-GEO and paid traffic attribution. Would you pay?
by davidmcguckin | 2025-05-19 09:38:12+00:00
I’m building an IP enrichment script to drop straight into your site. It captures visitor IPs (or bulk lists) and returns actionable traffic attribution data:

Organic vs. Paid Traffic – Heuristics to estimate whether visits came from search engines, ad networks, or direct.

LLM-Driven Geo Detection – Spot traffic originating from popular LLM proxies (e.g. ChatGPT browsing, Bard, Claude) and approximate their region.

Custom Paid-Channel Tagging – Let you define IP ranges or ASNs for your own DSPs, affiliate networks, VPN-based ads, etc.

Flexible Delivery – Enriched data can be POSTed back to your own endpoint on your site, or sent to a hosted web dashboard we provide.

Key features: Zero extra tracking scripts — just a tiny client-side snippet + serverless lookup.

JSON output to pipe into your existing analytics or BI tools.

Configurable thresholds so you can tweak detection sensitivity.

Use cases: Content teams: measure real SEO-driven users vs AI-powered scrapers.

Growth marketers: detect if an LLM agent is skewing your geographic traffic data.

Ad ops: attribute visits to specific IP-range campaigns without extra JS tags.

I’d love your feedback on: Would you pay for something like this?

What pricing model feels right? Pay-as-you-go (e.g. $0.005 per lookup) Monthly tiers (e.g. $49/mo for 100K lookups)

Anything I’ve missed, other use cases you’d find valuable, or pricing expectations? Thanks for your thoughts!
by lr4444lr | 2025-05-19 09:39:16+00:00
Nobody wanted to live a long time but be unhealthy in their older years.

Obviously, but they operated (and continue to) under a medical paradigm where preventative medicine means just avoiding a few major harm factors and getting just enough exercise to maintain the average observed health metrics for their age group.

People increasingly do not want to wind up like average 70 or 80 year olds, so it is absolutely appropriate that they start shooting for upper 10% or 5% -ile attributes now while they are younger so that in their old age the relative decline still keeps them at those same upper percentiles they will objvetively need to do the things in old age they want to do.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-19 09:39:33+00:00
Unfortunately that's not always the case. Bad _arguments in a case_, sure, but bad contracts? I'd fully expect that in 30 years some unfortunate lawyer will be attempting to untangle nonsense drafted by a 2020s LLM.

(Actually, it only just occurred to me, lots of laypeople are going to use these to draft _wills_, aren't they? That should be entertaining.)
by tmtvl | 2025-05-19 09:39:53+00:00
> It's true for individuals, but go look at the enterprise side of impôts.gouv.fr and you'll cry. It's submenus within submenus, if you've got more than one page open at a time it disconnects you from the other,...

I know HN doesn't appreciate snark, but isn't that kind of what you can expect from government websites anyway?
by ta1243 | 2025-05-19 09:39:55+00:00
The average rural farmer in India has instant access to a world of information and entertainment at his fingertips 24/7 via his phone

Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)

A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city
by PullJosh | 2025-05-19 09:40:04+00:00
The solution I built for this is Leopard. It is a Scratch → JavaScript converter. You can take an existing Scratch project and convert it to JavaScript code and then keep working, or use the Leopard library to create a new project from (ahem) scratch, following all the same conventions as a Scratch project.

Check it out! https://leopardjs.com/
by AlecSchueler | 2025-05-19 09:40:48+00:00
> Of course I did not only mention the CCP as a nefarious actor in the 'social' landscape, did you miss that?

No, of course not, and it feels like quite unfriendly rhetoric to suggest that I could have done just because I responded to a particular aspect of your position.

But now that we've dropped the pretense I can comfortably say that your opening paragraph comes across as insane; paranoid and in denial of science and composed in a way that strikes as if you just tried to shoe-horn in as many of your pet concerns as possible.
by Xmd5a | 2025-05-19 09:40:54+00:00
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05364

>In this work, we show how to formulate fundamental notions of constructor theory within the canvas of process theory. Specifically, we exploit the functorial interplay between the symmetric monoidal structure of the category of sets and relations, where the abstract tasks live, and that of symmetric monoidal categories from physics, where concrete processes can be found to implement said tasks.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-19 09:40:57+00:00
As a kid who didn't speak english I used the AutoIT language - not related to AutoHotKey

It's a got a fully localized offline documentation embedded in a plug-and-play IDE designed to always compile & run your code with a single F5 press, no configuration needed

The language itself is fully fledged but mostly revolves around things that kids already know.

The tutorial makes you leave the CLI stage by chapter 5, because when kids want to make software they want to make UIs, they've never used CLIs to do fun things before.

It's also centered around automating desktop tasks. Moving the mouse, typing keystrokes, downloading or opening web pages, parsing the source, identifying windows on screen, moving them around, reading pixels, playing sounds...

https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/
by AngryData | 2025-05-19 09:42:04+00:00
Im more convinced we are heading that way every year. Certainly not anytime soon, but 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Seems plausible to me. Most people don't even know how their house electricity system is setup or works, or how their plumbing system works despite being incredibly simple, not to mention more advanced technologies. We are surrounded by internal combustion engines and yet less and less people actually understand them each day and it becomes more and more specialized knowledge. How many people know how a refrigerator works despite being incredibly simple technology and the basics necessary to understand it covered by atleast freshman highschool science class if not earlier?

We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
by elktown | 2025-05-19 09:42:15+00:00
1. It was set up during the Central bank's 300-year anniversary.

2. Without the central banks establishment of the perpetual funding there's no prize. Your argument is purely semantic and ofc snarky like your entire comment history.

3. You can read the story about it here in Swedish: https://sidea.se/nobelkuppen/ (The Nobel coup)
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-19 09:42:49+00:00
If you’re looking at a job board for remote jobs and blindly submitting a resume in 2025, you’ve already lost.

There are probably thousands of people applying and it’s like a lottery ticket whether you will stand out enough for your resume to even be seen unless they are looking for a specialized skillset. No full stack or front end development is not specialized.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-19 09:43:09+00:00
More generally, it can be hard to distinguish between "luxury" products that are primarily more exclusive with very little functional benefit (or in some cases more fragile!), versus products that are Actually Good.

The display luxury category: anything by LVMH, Birkin bags, limited edition sneakers, Ferrari, etc

The "better product for more money" category: Miele, wood furniture, Lexus etc
by d--b | 2025-05-19 09:44:08+00:00
There are pros and cons for "luxury" items.

Sometimes they're overpriced (Miele is), sometimes they're expensive to maintain (try get a stain out of marble), sometimes they're not durable (think of cashmere sweaters). There is no secret sauce that tells you whether the price of something you buy is a proxy for its qualities. And when you buy something expensive, you're kind of pissed when it breaks.

That's why many wealthy people go for the expensive luxury shit at first, like buying a Porsche, or a 30k kitchen remodel, only to go back to good old Toyota and ikea kitchen, cause they're just as fine and a fifth of the price / maintenance.

You usually learn those things the hard way.
by friendzis | 2025-05-19 09:44:26+00:00
> Joins, lookups, indexes.

You both want to control these values within your database engine, at least so that they are actually unique within the domain, and there is no real reason for it to be user-controlled anyway, as they are used referentially.

> Idempotency.

User supplied tokens for idempotency are mostly useful within the broader context of application sitting on top of database, otherwise they become subject to the same requirements internally generated ones are, without control, which is a recipe for disaster.

> Sharing

Those are the same idempotency tokens from previous points with you as the supplier. In some cases you want to share them across prod/stage/dev environments, in some cases you may want to explicitly avoid duplicates, in some cases you don't care.

All these use cases are solved with mapping tables / classifiers.

Example: in an asset management system you need to expose and identifier of a user-registered computer, that is built using components procured from different suppliers, with their own identification schemas, e.g. exposing keyboard/mouse combo as one component with two subcomponents or two (possibly linked) components.

This requires you to use all those listed identifier types in different parts of the system. You can bake those in database/schema design, or employ some normalization and use "native" identifier and mapping tables.
by Hilift | 2025-05-19 09:45:00+00:00
Ipe (Brazilian Walnut or Ironwood) has excellent resistance to penetration for standard lead rounds. It's super-dense and fire resistant. The process for InventWood seems like it is re-creating something similar.

Ipe is actually not attractive for exterior structures. The wood is so dense, stains don't penetrate. Many let it age to a grey/brown patina with annual cleaning and sanding. Inventwood would be a better alternative for exterior work if they have coloring options during the manufacturing process. For Ipe, staining is expensive and time consuming due to it has to be stained like cabinetry, with two passes.
by alerighi | 2025-05-19 09:48:09+00:00
I use pssh often (not this tool, but as I understand is similar).

The reasons I find it over Ansible are:

- takes the same syntax and options as plain SSH, just run over multiple hosts. So if you already know SSH, you know how to use pssh that is an extension of the command. Ansible requires to study it. The configuration format is trivial, just a file that contains on each line one host, no need to study complex formats like Ansible

- doesn't require dependencies on the target machine. Ansible, as far as I know, requires a python3 installation on the target machine. Something that, for example, is not granted in all settings (e.g. embedded devices, that are not strictly GNU/Linux machines, for example consider a lot of network devices that espose an SSH server, like Microtik devices, with PSSH is possible to configure them in batch), or in some settings you maybe need to work on legacy machines that have an outdated python version.

- sometimes simpler tool that just do one thing are just better. Especially for tools like pssh that are to me like a swiss army knife, the kind of tool that you use obviously when you are bodging something up to make something work because you are in an hurry and saves your day

Of course if you already use Ansible to manage your infrastructure you may as well use it to run a simple command. But if you have to run a command on some devices, that were not previously setup for Ansible, and devices trough which you may not have a lot of control (e.g. a bunch of embedded devices of some sort), pssh is a tool that can come handy.
by ta1243 | 2025-05-19 09:48:57+00:00
Tax on income keeps wealth with people who have wealth, and people without wealth wage slaves.

If you rent a $10m house you pay $500k a year for it. With 50% tax you'd have to earn $1m a year to pay the rent.

If you own a $10m house you pay no rent, and have to earn $0 a year to live there.
by random_moonwalk | 2025-05-19 09:49:16+00:00
'you'll realise it's quite small really and get to know the place.'

I've been here for ~10 years and feel like I'm familiar with a fairly narrow slice of it (mostly north/north east a little bit). A good mental model imo is to see it as a collection of smaller towns, each with distinct urban centres, that have grown into each other. This makes it endlessly interesting to me and I feel like I'm unlocking new parts of it all the time.
by decimalenough | 2025-05-19 09:49:30+00:00
I lived in Southeast Asia for years and explored countless beaches at price points all across the spectrum, and while I understand what you're saying and agree to some extent, there are still experiences only money can buy.

Example 1: the overwater bungalow in the Maldives where I could watch fish swim under a glass table and step right off the balcony into the reef to join them.

Example 2: the stupidly expensive hotel in Laos where my wife and I were the only guests one night, so we got to enjoy a tropical sunset at our private pool bar with our private orchestra playing just for us. (The GM, who dropped by for a chat, told us a honeymooning couple last year had dropped six figures to buy out the place to do the same.)
by soco | 2025-05-19 09:52:13+00:00
I've been on both sides of this fence and I beg you to reconsider. First of all, going out with small children is an enterprise not to be underestimated: packing bottles, the favorite toys, getting the kid(s) dressed... and then the same in reverse at the end of the day but with a way crankier kid. Then you anyway have to do all that for the plethora of mandatory or semi-mandatory outings with the other parents from the same group, and there's even less energy left to get another one. This is why parents prefer to invite you: because they appreciate your company, they want to keep the relationship going, but simply cannot fit much in the limited 24h of a busy day. Have you actually tried to visit them? Did you think that well-calculated chaos you found can be carried so easy some place else for two hours of visit? Yes, it can happen that a nanny is found or a grandma comes over, but neither of these are a given (financial and family statuses can vary). In the end it's not about moral or immoral, it's about mutual investment, and not pretending everything is the same with (small) children when it obviously is not.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-19 09:52:15+00:00
> Insofar as "where the money goes," the sovereign bond market is huge, and if the milkshake theory is to be believed, finding and alternative is just a coordination problem that could be effectively solved by a few large actors.

If I have trillions of Treasuries then it's gonna be hard for me to move them to basically any other sovereign bond market. The only one that even conceptually works is the euro, but that's split across multiple sovereigns.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-19 09:52:28+00:00
That it has a fatal flaw is indeed a possibility, but I don't think it could be the reason why it hasn't been invented sooner: if anything, we are detecting these kinds of flaws way faster than we used to, so it's likely that in the past it would have been produced at scale long before we found the problem, and given that consumer laws were nonexistent back then, it could have been kept on the market long after the flaw had been found, as long as it is economical enough to produce.
by prennaidd | 2025-05-19 09:52:48+00:00
Yes. Some months ago, I forget whether it was v5 or maybe before, the 2 button grading approach meant that it actually performed better for users (ie. it performed better for users that explicitly only used two grading buttons).

I don't know if this is replicable with v6, or not. I would be interested to find out!
by albumen | 2025-05-19 09:52:56+00:00
Wiki: "Beyond Mr. Feeney's reticence about blowing his own horn, 'it was also a way to leverage more donations—some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.'"

NYT article(1):

..when asked what had driven him into such deep secrecy:

“I feel it’s my life,” Mr. Feeney said. “I’d be the last guy to tell a wealthy person what to do with their money. They’re entitled to do whatever they want.”

quote from his kid: "...he sheltered us from people using the money to treat us differently,” Leslie Feeney Baily said. “It made us normal people.”

when asked why he had chosen to reveal himself:

“A lot of wealthy people, they don’t realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good,” he said. “If they knew it gives so much satisfaction, I wouldn’t have to persuade them."

(1): https://archive.ph/gLfLY
by sieve | 2025-05-19 09:55:22+00:00
> Switzerland has 9 million total people, and more millionaires than India and Pakistan combined.

Well, based on official figures, perhaps. I am pretty sure, however, that India alone has more than 20 million dollar millionaires.

A large part of the Indian economy operates outside the tax net. Some of it is deliberate (income from farming is not taxed, even if you earn tens of millions of rupees from your acreage), the rest is due to garden variety tax fraud.

Basic apartments in the top 10 cities start at $200,000 (could be something like $500,000 in places like Mumbai). And plenty of people own 2-3-4 of these. You have to move to distant suburbs if you want cheaper housing.

Millions of Indian households hold large quantities of gold. Millions invest in the stock market.

An upper-middle-class life for a family of three in one of the major cities requires around $30,000 easy (double that if you are the splurging kind) which can buy you a LOT more than what the same sum can get you in LA/NY/London.

Once you add these up, my figure is completely within the realm of possibility.
by gilleain | 2025-05-19 09:55:35+00:00
Perhaps the writer is a fan of Grothendieck who did almost exactly this - lived in a remote village in the Pyrenees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retirem...

"Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup." - like most people would.