MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-27 20:49:41+00:00
> It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my gently-used mattress.

Is it really that surprising? Places don't take a used mattress for the same reason they don't take used underwear - you may say it's "lightly used", but once it's out of the box, that guarantee is gone, and a used mattress is something that hardly anyone would be willing to buy. That is especially true since you can now buy a brand new mattress incredibly cheaply.

I used to do a lot of volunteering at a thrift store, and it was really eye opening to see which things had residual value. Some examples:

1. Unless it was a desirable higher-end piece (think something like a known midcentury modern company), we usually hated getting furniture. It's big, bulky, and unless it's like a showpiece, most people go to Ikea to buy cheap furniture.

2. You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.

3. Most fast fashion is worthless (though I don't know, maybe the demise of Temu and Shein will change this). Nobody is going to pay even like $6 for a piece of clothing (which is essentially like the cost just to store/sort/sell stuff) when new it's like $10.

4. Electronics/small home appliances also depreciate especially quickly.

Our biggest money makers were mid-to-high end clothes, jewelry and bags, quality shoes, and artwork/home decorations.

It was also eye opening to see how many people donated plain garbage to assuage their guilt. Like I used the "people don't take used underwear" as an example, but yes, people would still donate it (which sucks - all that does is add to the costs of the charity you're donating to).
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-27 20:50:35+00:00
I went to the university of Durham in the U.K. - I paid my tuition, rent, and living expenses every year by just collecting the stacks of discarded textbooks, and selling them on at a 30% discount from the university bookshop’s prices to the next year’s undergrads. My only cost was paying (cheap) rent on a house under a railway bridge that I turned into an amazing fire hazard over the summer.

Best (in terms of mass to value) dumpster dive find I had was a box of laser rubies.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-27 20:50:58+00:00
For efficient graphics routines on a 32 bit machine, it's important that the scan line direction (aka horizontal for normally mounted CRT's) be a factor of 32, preferably one that's a power of 2.

The article mentions the desire for square pixels. So presumably they chose the horizontal resolution first and then chose the vertical resolution that gave them square pixels for a 512 pixel horizontal resolution.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-27 20:51:51+00:00
It was 1996 and I just graduated from college in south GA with a degree in CS. I had a choice to work for Total Systems in Columbus GA (https://www.tsys.com/) making $35K (more than enough back then and inline with entry level developers) writing Cobol.

https://www.tsys.com/

My other choice was working in Atlanta GA at a company where I interned the year before as a computer operator making $22K. I chose the computer operator job because it would get me to Atlanta and I could figure out my next step after that.

They ended up needing to expand to a new contract where they needed programming done six months after I joined to create the new department. I wrote the entire fairly complex data entry system by myself in C. Even today I would consider it one of my more complex green field initiatives.

That let me skip the entry level developers job market completely.

Another former classmate of mine is still there in 2025 pushing COBOL code.

Unfortunately, the mistake I made was staying at my next company that I started working at in 1999 for over 9 years and became an expert beginner.

It took me 8 years and three job changes to recover from that and become a true “senior” developer as far as scope, impact, technical skills, etc.

Because of…life…and responsibilities. It was another 4 years until I got into BigTech at 46 (no longer there - thankfully).

Not that I regret any of my choices. The landscape was different back then. But I preach to all younger grads to get out of enterprise dev/corporate dev as fast as possible and do whatever it takes to get into tech adjacent companies that pay more - yes “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG (or equivalent)” (tm r/cscareerquestion). No I never had to but again times are different starting out.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-27 20:52:42+00:00
I wonder what we need to do to make buying and selling used items convenient. My experience has been that the bid/ask spread is too large, and liquidity too low to be practical. And if you're giving something away, no one will take it. No explanation; just observations. I want to not throw things out and buy new, but haven't found a workflow that works. (I'm in an apt building near the one listed in the article; more of a young-professionals/mixed vibe though.)

For transient university housing as in the article, I imagine the dynamic shits due to the volume of temporary items being cycled through.
by dgunay | 2025-05-27 20:53:08+00:00
I had a bad habit of accumulating stuff that had some abstract value (may come in handy in the future, is a good deal, etc), and letting go of a lot of it was hard in part because of guilt surrounding environmentalism. Even something that I had no attachment to whatsoever felt extremely difficult to get rid of because it needed to be disposed of ethically. The idea "you can't save the rainforest if you're depressed"[0] was helpful to me in breaking out of this mentality.

[0]: https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care#:~:text=You%20Can...
by veggieroll | 2025-05-27 20:53:08+00:00
You're right that the power dynamic here is really bleak. But there are still some things an employee can do individually or in a group:

- Coffee Badging: where you only come in for coffee in the morning and then leave

- Buddy Badging: team up with coworkers badge to scan each other in on alternating days, weeks, whatever

- Quiet Quitting / Lying Flat: aka. chilling on performance while you wait to get fired or look for another job

- Malicious compliance: make a lot of noise, microwave fish in the break room, or anything else you can do to terrorize decision-makers

- And finally the going for the jugular....try to organize your coworkers into collective action, ultimately working towards a union
by extraduder_ire | 2025-05-27 20:54:36+00:00
There is a low-latency mode for twitch now that I think is enabled by default. The actual delay is reported in the "stats" view under advanced settings, probably coming from timestamps in the video metadata. There's third-party twitch clients I've used with the option to delay the chat to match the video using this information, which would be useful if you didn't want chat popping off to spoil you.
by huijzer | 2025-05-27 20:54:40+00:00
They should be fine. According to their balance sheets they had $64.3 billion (yes with a b) in net assets as of June 30, 2023 [1]. I suspect that hasn't materially declined since then. Especially since their operating expenses are $6 billion annually so even without income they should be able to last 10 years before bankruptcy.

[1]: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy24_harvard_fin...
by like_any_other | 2025-05-27 20:55:33+00:00
As far as I can tell, only the European Commission (upon whose composition voters have only very indirect influence) can propose legislation [1], and the EU parliament can only approve or decline those proposals. I could not find any source saying that the parliament can withdraw existing legislation. There are a few ways to petition the Commission, but, notably, all of them are non-binding.

Meaning that the direction of EU legislation is entirely determined by the Commission, and the parliament can only set the speed at which it moves in that direction. And as we see now with this rebranded ChatControl, the Commission will simply keep pushing proposals, despite knowing neither EU citizens nor parliament want them, until they eventually pass, at which point we are stuck with them.

When people say the EU is undemocratic, that is what they mean.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission#Legislativ...
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-27 20:55:36+00:00
I will never understand people who can't think of anything to do if they didn't have a job.

Let me ask you a question and perhaps it will help?

What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

I've met a number of folks in research who "work" at a University doing their research and even though the pay sucks love what they are doing. You could pay them nothing and they would still love doing it. They might be forced to do something else if they didn't have enough money to live on, but even if they had millions and millions they wouldn't be doing anything differently.

Keith, the guy I was renting the room from, was in the latter position. He didn't "have" to work, and didn't "have" to work at IBM to work on computers, but in doing so he got to satisfy his curiosity and got to work on much better equipment than if he were funding it himself. Is that something understandable?

FWIW, in the Bay Area we call this "failing" at retirement :-) Failing is in quotes because if you choose to go back to work is it really a failure? Had a great conversation with Guido von Rossum when he decided to 'un-retire' and go "work" for Microsoft. There are a lot of things to like about the office, a community, a continual stream of interesting problems to solve, Etc. And knowing that if you didn't like it you can just stop really helps in dealing with people who would attempt to assert power over you.
by Balgair | 2025-05-27 20:57:40+00:00
> Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs either.

Okay, woah, I hadn't thought of that. I'm sitting here thinking that education for it's own sake is one of the reasons that we're trying to get rid of labor and make LLMs. Like, I enjoy learning and think my job gets in the way of that.

I hand't thought that people would want to just not do education of any sort anymore.

That's a little mind blowing.
by dylanfw | 2025-05-27 20:57:59+00:00
The "surprise" is not that the agent can respond with private repository details, it's that it can receive and act upon prompts issued by someone other than the person running the agent, hence "prompt _injection_".

Or to come back to the SQL injection analogy, no one is surprised that the web app can query the database for password hashes. The surprise is that it can be instructed to do so when loading the next image in a carousel.
by nradclif | 2025-05-27 20:58:29+00:00
> if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career

I don't see how that's possible. Wouldn't such a norm result in something like a 7:1 ration of managers to engineers (i.e., assuming a 40ish year career, the first 5 years are spent as an engineer, and the remaining 35 as a manager)? For team managers, I've generally seen around a 1:10 ratio of engineers to managers. So a 7:1 ratio of managers to engineers just doesn't seem plausible, even including non-people leaders in management.
Show HN: I simulated Bigtable in BigQuery as a Type 2 SCD
by experimentctrlz | 2025-05-27 20:58:50+00:00
I hit a wall recently where we needed to design a data store that can both (1) ingest schema-less updates at scale and (2) allow for large analytical queries.

GCP native doesn't have something that does both of these out-of-the-box, so we kinda hacked our own solution by replicating updates from Bigtable into a Type 2 SCD table in BigQuery.

i couldn't find many resources online on this sort of trick when I was building it out, so I wrote up this blog with the details.

Hope it's helpful and curious if anyone has used or built something similar. Will stick around for comments, happy to answer any questions or feedback.
by msarca | 2025-05-27 20:59:19+00:00
Thanks! It's not a secret: we believe this model offers more value to the customer and better fits our vision. We tried subscriptions and had moderate success, but we never felt we were connecting with our users. There is no reason for users to pay us $10, as we offer a 7-day free trial, which is more than enough to animate one SVG. Also, we reset the trial every time we introduce a more important new feature so people can try and assess the software again for free. In the last 3 months we had two trial resets.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-27 20:59:34+00:00
Such a pleasure to read. using beats seemed almost profane at first but it allows for chunking the complexity where it could really help someone get what's going on. I don't listen to the fugues much, and really mainly guitar arrangements of his work I'd like to be able to play one day (allegro assai, lute suite prelude, etc), but it's hard not to get mystical about it. jubilance is the word I'd use for his work. for me the music forms an imaginary navigable space when I hear it, and as everything that lives can hear and count, every piece seems like a meditation on what can be aligned, harmonious, and essentially, True in a universal sense- the awe of a creation for its creator.

I'm an absolute amateur dilettante musician, but for someone just starting to hear his work, I'd suggest the skill is in being able to listen for separate voices and then follow them, and then to practice following them in simple pieces with enough dissonance in them to make you intellectually keep track of what's going on. the simplest possible polyphony someone can use to hone their attention that has analogues to early music may actually be Arvo Pärt's work, as once you can separate voices, the richness of Bach and other composers kind of explodes.

great fan of hein's writing, a pleasure to be reminded of it and to get to comment.
by p1necone | 2025-05-27 21:00:08+00:00
I've noticed this as a trend with new technology. People seem to forget the most basic things as if they don't apply because the context is new and special and different. Nope, you don't magically get to ignore basic security practices just because you're using some new shiny piece of tech.

See also: the cryptocurrency space rediscovering financial fraud and scams from centuries ago because they didn't think their new shiny tech needed to take any lessons from what came before them.
Show HN: TradesPurple – Save and share the tradespeople you trust
by MaxTB | 2025-05-27 21:00:14+00:00
Many people have bad experience with tradespeople marketplaces -- and prefer local recommendations from neighbours, usually asked in Facebook or WhatsApp.

But this results in lots of copy and pasting, an address book full of "Max plumber" and "Jane actually good plumber", which struggle to find when you need them.

TradesPurple makes it easy to save your trusted tradespeople in one place, contact them easily and share your whole list with neighbours in need.

See my example page (UK) at https://tradespurple.com/maxtb and my neighbourhood page at https://tradespurple.com/HP22

The core functionality is intended to be free, and if people like it, we would build useful and valuable features like automation and managing jobs, or agents AI, or WhatsApp integration as an upgrade.

Love any thoughts and feedback.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-27 21:00:20+00:00
Yeah liquidity is a big one. last I moved out of a house I didn't want to bother finding a buyer for my furniture (probably been worth 500 total max even waiting for someone who wanted to pay) so I ended up putting it in my yard the last day of my lease with a free sign and posted a photo to craiglist, dining table chairs office furniture... And that's the day I learned a 7 foot sleeper sofa can fit comfortably in the back of your standard family minivan

Who wants to spend their last month in their house without a dining table? So the amount of time between making it available and "I need it gone" is very slim indeed
by apical_dendrite | 2025-05-27 21:01:16+00:00
If you want Harvard to be an elite liberal arts college, then sure they'll be fine. If you want them to be an elite research university that does some of the best medical and scientific research in the world, then they will absolutely not be fine. That research is funded largely by the federal government, and we as a society have received enormous benefits from it.

Also, gifts to endowments are typically restricted and cannot legally be redirected at will to pay operating expenses. The whole point of making a donation to an endowment is to leave a legacy that will last in perpetuity. The donors did not want the money spent to pay operating costs, and legally Harvard cannot go against the wishes of the donors.
by Groxx | 2025-05-27 21:01:28+00:00
To try to tl;dr that rather long post:

> When you add type hints to your library's arguments, you're going to be bitten by Hyrum's Law and you are not prepared to accurately type your full universe of users

That's understandable. But they're making breaking changes, and those are just breaking change pains - it's almost exactly the same if they had instead done this:

def slow_add(a, b): throw TypeError if !isinstance(a, int) ...

but anyone looking at that would say "well yeah, that's a breaking change, of course people are going to complain".

The only real difference here is that it's a developer-breaking change, not a runtime-breaking one, because Python does not enforce type hints at runtime. Existing code will run, but existing tools looking at the code will fail. That offers an easier workaround (just ignore it), but is otherwise just as interruptive to developers because the same code needs to change in the same ways.

---

In contrast! Libraries can very frequently add types to their return values and it's immediately useful to their users. You're restricting your output to only the values that you already output - essentially by definition, only incorrect code will fail when you do this.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-05-27 21:01:40+00:00
LOL

The "best" plan is probably to observe someone who already has alpacas and go there frequently at all times of the year, in all kinds of weather conditions to see if you still want to deal with it. Also, ask yourself if you ever want a vacation again.

I've lived next to horses for 19+ years now and I don't remember what kind of a plan there was. Suffice to say that it would have gone out the window by day 2.

> Snow in winter means panels should be set up at a specific angle

Not sure what this means, but I can assure you that Mother Nature will subvert whatever plan you have, probably by sending enough wind to pack the snow so hard to the panel, that it will stick there even if vertical.
by Diggsey | 2025-05-27 21:02:02+00:00
You're suggesting that being liberal in what you accept is necessary for forward evolution of the protocol, but I think you're presenting a false dichotomy.

In practice there are many ways to allow a protocol to evolve, and being liberal in what you accept is just about the worst way to achieve that. The most obvious alternative is to version the protocol, and have each node support multiple versions.

Old nodes will simply not receive messages for a version of the protocol they do not speak. The subset of nodes supporting a new version can translate messages into older versions of the protocol where it makes sense, and they can do this because they speak the new protocol, so can make an intelligent decision. This allows the network to function as a single entity even when only a subset is able to communicate on the newer protocol.

With strict versioning and compliance to specification, reference validators can be built and fitted as barriers between subnetworks so that problems in one are less likely to spread to others. It becomes trivial for anyone to quickly detect problems in the network.
Show HN: Nomocrunch Tax Navigator – Free, Simple Tax Estimator for Freelancers
by frugalHacker | 2025-05-27 21:02:02+00:00
Hey HN,

I just launched Nomocrunch Tax Navigator — a free tool to help freelancers estimate their taxes, uncover deductions, and avoid late-payment penalties.

I built it because I almost didn’t return to freelancing due to how stressful taxes were the first time around. This tool reflects what I wish existed back then:

Federal + self-employment tax estimates

Smart deduction suggestions

Quarterly tax reminders

Built-in explanations in plain English

No sign-up required — just input your info and go

I'm bootstrapping this as a solo founder under the Nomocrunch umbrella — a lightweight bookkeeping service built to remove friction for freelancers, consultants, and solo creators.

Would love feedback on:

Where it’s falling short (clarity, UI, accuracy)

Other features you'd expect or want

Whether you'd use something like this regularly

Try it here: https://nomocrunch.com/tax-navigator

Thanks in advance!
by jonstewart | 2025-05-27 21:02:26+00:00
I think maybe this is a pet peeve of Hive and not of Parquet? Yes, it does require opening the Parquet file to look at the min, max range for the column, but only that data and if the data isn’t in range there shouldn’t be further requests.

That is the kind of metadata that is useful to push up, into something like DuckLake.
by 0xBDB | 2025-05-27 21:03:30+00:00
It still sounds impossible I'm afraid.

A realistic wealth tax probably caps out and around 2%, remembering that the net worth of very rich people is generally not liquid and can be difficult to mark to market. Any higher rate risks forcing the rich to have an asset fire sale, which liquidates productive assets and isn't really good for anybody. At six to seven percent you would force them to be entirely liquid and would begin to shrink their wealth, killing off the tax base in a few generations. Even this is absurdly optimistic since a globally standardized wealth tax is a pipe dream and without it you get capital flight as a result of any wealth tax at all, but let's ignore that.

To steelman this as much as possible let's say you can charge 6%. The top 0.5% are worth $30-$40 trillion in the U.S. (which is just an easy example because the statistics are available) which gives you a probably unrealistically high max annual tax revenue of $2.4 trillion. Social Security and Medicare in their current form cost $1.35 trillion a year; Medicare for All would double to triple that or more, depending on what estimate you believe.

Europeans pay for their social safety nets with very broad taxation while America instead charges negative income tax (after credits) to the bottom 60 percent of the population (even after inflation, excise taxes, state tax, payroll tax and tariffs the total tax burden is pretty slim at the bottom end by European standards). There doesn't seem to be a mathematically feasible way to give benefits to the working class that the working class doesn't pay for.
by vunderba | 2025-05-27 21:03:45+00:00
Our family plays "Match Three" during long drives where one person comes up with three words and whoever correctly answers with a word that can complete or precede any of them becomes "it" and chooses the next set.

Homophones and proper nouns are considered acceptable.

So for example: (Fox, Lone, Crossed)

The answer would be: Star

Star Fox - a well known rail shooter originally on the SNES Lone Starr - the only man who would dare give a raspberry to Dark Helmet Star Crossed - a Shakespearean reference to two people whose relationship is doomed