MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mynegation | 2025-05-19 11:55:28+00:00
Here is one big reason some sites do geolocation nevertheless: pricing and legal. Does not matter what language you speak - they still have to look up proper prices in your local currency and offer you country or region-specific deals and legal language. E.g. in Canada Quebec limits what kind of sales or raffles you can offer so websites prepare different site copy. Yes, there are French speaking people outside Quebec and English speaking people in Quebec, but company may not have resources and time to prepare 4 copies instead of 2.
by tsm | 2025-05-19 11:56:34+00:00
I've found the Metabase test suite[0] to be very good considering it's real-world software written by a for-profit company. Coverage is good, the correct tests usually break when doing a refactor (stuff like "Oh, I thought this change was harmless but actually it breaks the permissions model"), etcetera. But the most important thing is that there's a strong team culture of a) demanding good tests on each PR b) hunting down flaky tests and other sources of friction.

Another neat thing was that there used to be a full-time SDET who spent a lot of time writing Cypress reproductions for known bugs. When you picked up the bug, you could un-skip the test that was right there waiting for you.

All that said, of course it's far from perfect!

0: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/ Backend unit tests are in test/, Frontend unit tests are in frontend/test, end-to-end tests (Cypress) are in e2e.
by Byamarro | 2025-05-19 11:56:42+00:00
TS doesn't support higher order types. You can't return a generic and pass its parameters later. It's basically only a single level of parametrization.

``` type MyGeneric<TParam> = ...; type HigherOrderGeneric<TParam> = TParam extends string ? MyGeneric : never;

type Hey = HigherOrderGeneric<string><number>;

```

There are libraries that try to achieve this through some hacks, tho their ergonomics are really bad.
by kergonath | 2025-05-19 11:58:08+00:00
> So it is, indeed, true. Can you clarify what your point is, exactly? (Also: there is an alternative to MS Office, which is LibreOffice. It works ok. It's not as powerful, maybe (maybe!) but it's fine.)

The problem is not software capability. The problem is training staff to use new software, planning the transition, and make it happen smoothly. You cannot just end your contract and get a new provider when you’re talking about 100,000 licenses. In fact, Office is likely going to go last, because it is easier to update the backend and centralised infrastructure than the client software used by hundreds of thousands of people in something like 500 different agencies.

Hell, we regularly have glitches going from one version of Office to the next. When it’s a university administration that’s out of operation for 2 months it’s bad enough, but survivable. When it’s all of public-facing civil servants it’s a different matter.

> 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.

Right. The fact is that it used to be inaccessible, and now it is. We should demand more, of course, but bitching about it is short-sighted and counter-productive. More and more data is accessible, leading to more and more transparency and new uses. It could be better (and it is the citizens’ responsibility to vote to make it get better), but you have to start somewhere.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-05-19 11:58:47+00:00
The point isn't that progress is not happening but that it's slowing down. You get more of the same, smaller memory footprint, faster responses, less hallucinations, etc. Significant progress would be another deep seek kinda of breakthrough, near 0% hallucination rate, performing like current models with less than half of their dataset, epistemological self awareness (i.e. I am not sure of the correctness of the answer I just gave you, ability to override assumptions from the training dataset, etc).

We are just getting cars of different shapes and colours, with built-in speakers and radio. Not exactly progress
Show HN: Find startup founders near you
by leonagano | 2025-05-19 11:58:48+00:00
So, last week I launched FoundersAround as I'm curious to know if more founders are close to me.

For now, the list has 43 founders. It's growing slowly as founders submit their own startups. Let's see if we can get to 100.

Tech-wise, this is a vibe-coded frontend product (HTML CSS and JS).
by iggldiggl | 2025-05-19 11:59:34+00:00
They did a study for a small- to medium-size town in Germany – based on traffic modelling, it was estimated that an extensive on-demand system with almost 500 on-demand vehicles would only have about the same effect on passenger numbers as simply extending all existing fixed-routes bus routes to run every ten minutes all day (which for a town of that size is a rather good service), but operating the fleet of on-demand vehicles was so expensive that even fully automated on-demand vehicles were significantly more expensive than driver-operated conventional buses (never mind automated conventional buses).
by decimalenough | 2025-05-19 12:00:36+00:00
Describing SF's Tenderloin at night as a "highly controlled environment" would be stretching it.

Anyway, you're moving the goalposts here. Waymo is operating at scale in actual human cities in actual rush hour traffic. Sure, it would struggle in Buffalo during a snowstorm or in Mumbai during the monsoon, but so do human drivers.
by JAS210 | 2025-05-19 12:00:43+00:00
I recently went through a serious burnout phase as a solo founder — emotionally drained, financially stuck, and overwhelmed by decisions I couldn’t think clearly about.

To regain mental clarity, I started building tools for myself — simple, printable pages to check in with my burnout level, evaluate decisions, reframe my week, and talk to myself like I would a cofounder.

That turned into a 10-part Sanity Kit I now use weekly. It includes:

A Burnout Barometer (visual check-in)

An Executive Decision Decoder (for when every option sucks)

Ego audits

A “Legacy Litmus Test”

Communication templates for Slack/teams in moments of crisis

A Panic Pause Protocol (yes, it helps)

This isn’t a journal, planner, or life coach. It’s the stuff I needed to stay functional during the hardest part of building.

Kit (PDF, $9.99): https://sakirjerome.gumroad.com/l/sanitykit

I’m posting it here because I know I’m not the only builder who’s hit this wall. If you find it useful, I’d love feedback.

Happy to answer anything about burnout, solo building, or how I use these pages.
by colinmorelli | 2025-05-19 12:01:08+00:00
This feels a lot like "moving the goalposts." First, it was complete science fiction to have technology in the car. Then, it was in the car, but it could only do navigation and music, it can't operate the car the way humans can. Then, it can prevent you from weaving out of your lane, and it can stop the car if you're about to crash into something, but it can't help you with your commute. Then, it can speed up, slow down, and steer on the highway, but it can't take you door to door. Now, it can take you door to door, but only in certain environments, it can't do it everywhere.

All of the above happened over the last ~20 year or so. The progression clearly seems to point to this being more than hype, even if it takes us longer to realize than originally anticipated.
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-19 12:01:12+00:00
Yes, I believe the Eclipse Foundation and others lobbied for that.

But here is the problem: if you now have a small business selling service around free software you are now facing the full wrath of the regulation and legal risk. In the end only IBM, RedHat, Microsoft and big companies have the strength and the resources to monetize open source it but smaller actors don't. And it is becoming very difficult and risky even for most ~100 employees companies.

So you still have the right to develop and use free software but you can't really make a living out of it anymore unless you work for RedHat or others.

And yes it makes no sense. The EU is doing to the software industry what they did to agriculture a few decades ago.
by AngryData | 2025-05-19 12:01:31+00:00
I think the only real problem is compressing wood this way is not fast and you end up spending near as much or more on this compressed wood than you would on many other materials. I still think it has uses but this isn't some new miraculous tech that's going to take over everything and replace stuff like steel which is pretty damn cheap. Wood in its natural form already has some of the highest strength-to-weight ratios compared to non-exotic materials, but it does still has drawbacks.

I am curious how much grain structure effects compressed wood's strength, because with traditional wood you have to either very carefully select your pieces and avoid knots in bad areas, or just super over-build a structure so that no single points are ever a failure point. Like a stud-framed house can use garbage wood because it really only needs like 1/3 of the studs to be a stable structure, the other 2/3rds are just convenience for nailing things to it and in being able to use crappy lumber without any skill or knowledge and still end up with a safe and stable structure. Versus something like a timber frame where there are critical beams holding things up that you don't want a big gnarly knot in the middle of a span.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-19 12:01:55+00:00
A typical consumer hard drive is going to last about 5 years, maybe more but it will wear just from existing. If you wrote 16GB to it a month that wont be a challenge for it.

The SSD however will be specified on a life of how many writes it can do. For example a 990 Pro from Samsung will have a specified life of 1200TB. That is about 76,800 months of operation at 16GB, this is not only not a challenging workload for an SSD but you have 8 of them so 8 * 76800 months of operation on average.

I have SSDs that are quite old, my original Intel 80GB G1 still works and still has 80% of its life left but its utterly obsolete as its too small to be useful and 500MB/s on SATA is a bit dated. All the OCZ SSDs are dead long ago but the Crucial M4 is still trucking along and its 512GB so still useful enough as is the Western Digital 1TB. I have barely scratched the surface of their usage life despite writing 35TB on them they still have 95% life over 42,000 hours of operation.

So at 16GB writes monthly they are going to last as long as the silicon and PCB lasts, which if made well could be decades. They will certainly become obsolete in speed and size more than likely rather than dying.
by keiferski | 2025-05-19 12:02:03+00:00
Ironically this is one of the best use cases I’ve found for AI tools at the moment.

Summarize and critique this argument in a series of bullet points.

More seriously though, I think there is a lack of rigorous thinking about AI specifically and technology in general. And hence you get a lot of these rambling thought-style posts which are no doubt by intelligent people with something compelling to say, but without any fundamental method for analyzing those thoughts.

Which is why I really recommend taking a course in symbolic logic or analytic philosophy, if you are able to. You’ll quickly learn how to communicate your ideas in a straightforward, no nonsense manner.
by song | 2025-05-19 12:02:08+00:00
Oh yeah of course, depends entirely of the country and the income disparity. I live in HK and regularly I see some members of the Li Ka-shing family go to one of my favourite restaurant (Chiu Tang, a nice but not too expensive fine dining place). They're always accompanied by 4-6 bodyguards and have to dine in a private room.
by sublinear | 2025-05-19 12:02:10+00:00
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say "being rich" is not a personality or set of preferences. Lavish spending is still seen as pointlessly insecure by anyone on any budget. Many things are good enough for anyone.

Relevant Andy Warhol quote: "Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up there and rich and living it up have something you don’t have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you."

https://core100.columbia.edu/article/excerpt-philosophy-andy...

Also worth pointing out that we are commenting on reddit posts. Reddit is the last place anyone should seek advice beyond how to do something or find info about hobbies.
by brudgers | 2025-05-19 12:02:34+00:00
Solvable by VMs and the right kind of USB-to-<thing> connectors?

If you need any kind of specific hardware other than a 3.5" floppy drive, an ordinary VM probably won't work easily, if it can be gotten to work at all.

Even with something as simple and ubiquitous as a parallel port, buying an old computer is probably going to be simpler and more reliable.

With Windows, it's not as simple as emulating an S100 bus. Windows 95 had about fifteen million lines of code. That's before you add in whatever kludged, cowboyed, and cobbled together code your hardware and application actually need.

Basically, every old windows hardware driver is a corner case and everything had a hardware driver. Often one ported from MS-DOS.
by panzi | 2025-05-19 12:03:18+00:00
Karton is German for cardboard and is often used as short for Karton Schachtel (cardboard box), so I guess it's about boxing. A lot of the time the German word for something is similar to the English word just with a K instead of a C. And I think a lot of KDE developers are German. So that makes sense to me.
by throwanem | 2025-05-19 12:03:19+00:00
> But yup: buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird.

Is it?

I'm on my second iPhone 13 mini, this one being the replacement after the first died of a drop. There are two more stored in the attic, each preconfigured with the accessories I like and with a SIM from my provider in the box. So if anything happens to this phone, as soon as I get home I just break out #3, restore the latest backup, activate the SIM and assign it the number, and I'm back in business at the same old stand.

An iPhone 13 mini with the accessories I like (case and charging adapter) is about $300. That's amply worth it to me, a couple times over, to never have to think about how to replace a cooked phone and get back into communication with my family and the world. Nothing special about the phone, it's if anything unusually unassuming. It's just the phone I happen to like (since 2021 when I concluded it no longer made sense to keep keeping 1st gen SEs alive) and thinking about phones is something I only like doing when I want to. That's the problem this money solves, and I have the money available to use this way, so why not?

Scale the dollar amount up a few orders of magnitude and the necessity down by the same amount, and sure, I see how it makes sense to "just" drop an identical set of wheels at every one of your pieds-à-terre. What did the funny sweary smoking man in the movie say? "You learn to spend what's in your pocket."
by voidmain | 2025-05-19 12:04:12+00:00
I guess I wish the people trying to do this luck, but I'm skeptical they will succeed at getting broad adoption and remain any better in terms of privacy etc than "big tech". If your solution is "service first" you almost certainly have all your users' data and are in a position to rug pull privacy at any time, and business or politics may not give you a choice about it.

Sometimes I wonder if I actually want to use broadly adopted technologies. When my wife and I were dating, she volunteered at a kids' camp on a native american reservation. As she was being driven out to the camp by one of the permanent staff, she pointed out a cute bunny rabbit, and was horrified when the guy thanked her, took out a gun, and killed it. He explained that while rabbits are cute, where there are rabbits there are rattlesnakes, and you don't want those around kids.

Any medium capable of communications and adopted by most of humanity is going to be a war zone. Politics, propaganda, advertising, surveillance, addiction, fraud, child porn... all the rattlesnakes are going to go where the rabbits are. Someone ought to fight this endless tide. But I can't help but be tempted to look for a place that won't have an "eternal september" because it isn't easy to adopt.

There are 8 billion people in the world. If only 1% of them are even capable of signing up for something (because it's that hard) and only 1% of those bother, that is almost a million people, which seems like far more than I ever need to talk to. And I bet the quality of discourse would be better.

Maybe this world already exists and I haven't been invited.
by rs186 | 2025-05-19 12:04:17+00:00
Your back/neck/circulation issues have more to do with ergonomics of your chair and prolonged sitting, not about the concept of a desk. If you take a break after 2 hours when it starts to feel really uncomfortable instead of 30 minutes, whichever future posture you take is not going to give you fewer problems. Well, maybe fewer neck problems, but you'll have hand/foot problems instead.
by knorker | 2025-05-19 12:04:23+00:00
Also: Don't guess my units.

Why oh why does Google Maps think that "miles", "feet", and "yards" are words that have any meaning at all?

Only like a 20th of the world even knows what these obscure things are. Just because I'm currently located in a country that nominally uses these arcane units doesn't mean that I know what they are.

Oh you can change it to real units temporarily. But if you look away for a split second it changes it right back.

I'm LOGGED IN. How could you not remember?!
by kergonath | 2025-05-19 12:04:57+00:00
> The state doesn't owe you anything apart from safety and law enforment.

The parent was a bit whiny, but this is most definitely not true. The people are not entities subject to the state, it is a democratic and social republic, not a soviet. The people are the state and as such, the role of the state is to do whatever the people want it to do. In France, the state is supposed to guarantee the rights of Man, which is more fundamental than the constitution and also broader than safety and law enforcement.

> 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.

This I can agree with :) These threads are baffling, particularly considering what the people at INRIA are doing about trusted and transparent administration, and the massive effort put into sovereign software. It’s like everything is bad because they saw people using Windows at their city hall.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-19 12:04:58+00:00
> provide decent value at given price point

That is the reason for the fixation on IKEA: the "decent" part. If their peers are Target, Walmart, then to be sure IKEA are decent.

Even during assembly though I've had joints fail such that the finished piece of furniture is, say, 90% structurally sound. But then trying to disassemble the piece so I can move ... I'm lucky if I am able to disassemble it without additional component failure. And then the re-assembly after the move also takes its toll.

Sadly I've come to see IKEA furniture as disposable (I sure don't see it in the local Goodwill). And that is the problem with IKEA (and Target, and Walmart) furniture: it goes direct-to-landfill with a move.
by exabrial | 2025-05-19 12:05:26+00:00
Hah, anecdote incoming, but 100x times a resource usage is probably accurate. Given, 100x of a human hair is still just a minuscule grain of sand, but that’s the scale margins Mainframe operators work in.

As one grey beard said it to me: Java is loosely typed and dynamic compared to colbol/db2/pl-sql. He was particularly annoyed that the smallest numerical type a ‘byte’ in Java was quote: “A waste of bits” and that Java was full of “useless bounds checking” both of which were causing “performance regressions”.

The way mainframe programs are written is: the entire thing is statically typed.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-19 12:06:07+00:00
Its just going to take a bit longer for Iron and steel production to transition, they likely wont bother until we see the full reduction in electrical price that comes with renewables. They do seem to have a process it just needs some refinement. The main grid transition is happening first and faster.

This is part of the issue with Seagate's assessment, its changing rapidly right now and in 5 years time Taiwan will be on mostly renewable energy and suddenly all of Seagate's iron usage will make them more expensive, then in 10 years time they are using electrically produced iron and its not an issue anymore.
by permo-w | 2025-05-19 12:06:19+00:00
the issue is that Gary Lineker does a spectacularly good job, and the unknown talent they've been bringing through are by and large unwatchable. it's a moot point now because he's gone, and whatever, I'm glad the psychodrama is over, but I'd much rather be "forced" to pay his salary and enjoy the show, than not be "forced" to and instead be forced to watch some people who'd do a better job reading the news. imo they should have taken his salary and used it to poach Dave Jones from Sky or even Kate Scott from CBS. why should the country's most popular football show not have the best presenter available?
by Havoc | 2025-05-19 12:06:41+00:00
The authors need to compete against other books. Book sale targets means it has to appeal to anyone vaguely business-y in the airport book shop. That plus shorter attention spans in general plus need to cater to a wide audience forces the authors to market it on a "One trick doctors hate" level magic fixes.

They of course fail to deliver on that, but don't think that makes them entirely a waste of time. As article author says "partly true".

Which is OK. I read Liars Poker because I enjoyed it, not because I'm about to be a world class bond trader
by stego-tech | 2025-05-19 12:06:59+00:00
As someone with this very style (my own blog posts often rise into the 5k word range) and also from a technical background, I can at least explain my motivations for length: absolute domination of the argument.

In professional settings, brevity is often mistaken for inexperience or a weak position. As the thinking goes, a competent engineer should be able to defend every position they take like a PhD candidate defending their dissertation. At the same time, however, excess verbosity is viewed as distinctly “cold” and “engineer” in tone, and frowned upon by non-technical folks in my experience; they wanted an answer, not an explainer.

The problem is that each of us have the data points of what succeeds in convincing others: the longer argument, every single time. Thus we use it in our own writing because we want to convince the imagined reader (as well as ourselves) that our position is correct, or at the very least, sound. In doing so we write lengthy posts, while often doing research to validate our positions with charts, screenshots, Wikipedia articles, news sources, etc. It’s as much about convincing ourselves as it is other readers, hence why we go for longer posts based on real world experiences.

One plot twist subjective to me: my lengthy posts are also about quelling my brain, in a very real sense. It is the reader, and if I do not get everything out of my head about that topic and onto “paper”, it will continue to dwell and gnaw on the missed points in perpetuity. Thus, 5k posts about things like the inefficiency of hate in Capital or a Systems Analysis of American Hegemony, just so I can have peace and quiet in my own head by getting it completely out of said head.
by bluGill | 2025-05-19 12:07:05+00:00
I'm also interested in how long it retains those properties. Steel can rust, but some alloys the rust protects the rest, while others it will rust away. Salt is also a factor in rust (important near the ocean). Wood often rots in water.

They claim the fire properties are good, but I don't know enough about fire to know if they tested all the important properties.