MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bell-cot | 2025-06-25 15:09:10+00:00
> Bergen, with a population just under 300,000, has spent 1 billion Norwegian kroner ($100 million) since it started building the system in 2007, and it still isn’t done. In unconnected neighborhoods, there are still plenty of old-school trash cans around, and garbage trucks continue to prowl. Finishing the network will take years and another 300 million kroner ($30 million), officials say. The difficulty lies not just in the cost — which will end up totaling about a year of the waste management division’s annual budget — but also in the logistical headache of digging up the city’s streets. Advertisement

> “It’s almost impossible,” said Terje Strom, who heads the infrastructure division of Bergen’s waste management company and has led the trash tube project from the start. Then, for emphasis, or perhaps to reassure himself, he repeated: “Almost.”

For those interested in such a system - consider in how efficient (or not) your own city is at construction/maintenance/operation of public infrastructure. How inclined some of your less-wonderful residents to break things. How easy it would be to tunnel through your local geology. And the likeliness of your local weather/water table/etc. re-purposing the waste tunnels as overflow storm sewers.

And, if you live in NYC - how would this system cope with the rats?
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-25 15:09:16+00:00
We actually do have the abstractions but the problem is that the vast majority of for loops don’t benefit - you need to have so much work that the overhead of coordinating the threads is sufficient. Additionally, you’ve got all sorts of secondary effects like cache write contention that will fight any win you try to extract out of for loops parallelism. What we’ve been learning for a long time as an industry is that you benefit most from task level parallelism with minimal to no synchronization.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-25 15:09:49+00:00
> These things right now compete with Figma and wire frames

I think that is exactly correct. And beyond Figma or wireframes, they can actually be launched to see if they get traction and have product market fit.

Of course, I've seen tons of "throwaway" code that somehow never gets thrown away, and then, somewhat paradoxically, iteration velocity craters as the dev team tries to get a "prototype" to handle real load.

So what I'm saying is that I think things like Lovable are fantastic tools, but I'm quite confident they will be horribly misused and some poor sap will have the job of getting this stuff actually working with edge cases, security issues, scale, etc.

My prediction: this will look basically exactly like Visual Basic in the late 90s. VB was also heralded as "non-expert programmers can make apps just by drag and drop!" I actually think VB was a great product, the problem was most VB programmers were not, so VB apps took on a very negative connotation: like you could tell it was coded by a "VB coder", so you expected it to suck.
by Darthbuddha | 2025-06-25 15:09:54+00:00
There's rich mineral/gas deposits. Also the part that we lost to Bolivia does contain oil. Also with fracking probably there is oil to be found, but not worth the investment, yet. Don't spread misinformation please. Half of The Chaco was already occupied by Bolivia when the war started. It wasn't Paraguay just starting the war. Same for triple alianza, England had a lot of interest in keeping Paraguay from becoming industrialized.
by csense | 2025-06-25 15:10:16+00:00
> In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer.

How does the bank verify the scammer and the "victim" aren't colluding?

I.e. Mal opens a bank account with $100k, it gets cleaned out when he's "scammed" by Eve, then Mal is reimbursed $100k. Mal & Eve collectively start with $100k, and end up with $200k.

(This is why I put "victim" in quotes: In this scenario, Eve and Mal are co-conspirators trying to defraud the scam reimbursement system.)
by heeton | 2025-06-25 15:10:27+00:00
A point on skimming vs taking the time to read something properly.

I read a transcript + summary of that exact talk. I thought it was fine, but uninteresting, I moved on.

Later I saw it had been put on youtube and I was on the train, so I watched the whole thing at normal speed. I had a huge number of different ideas, thoughts and decisions, sparked by watching the whole thing.

This happens to me in other areas too. Watching a conference talk in person is far more useful to me than watching it online with other distractions. Watching it online is more useful again than reading a summary.

Going for a walk to think about something deeply beats a 10 minute session to "solve" the problem and forget it.

Slower is usually better for thinking.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-25 15:10:28+00:00
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agenc...

> She says that more than half of agency employees decided to quit rather than uproot their families and move. Despite aggressive recruiting in Kansas City and making many new hires, both USDA research agencies are now roughly half the size they were before the move.

(As intended, of course.)
by dogleash | 2025-06-25 15:11:18+00:00
> I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same.

If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.
by mrtksn | 2025-06-25 15:11:52+00:00
Agree completely, protectionism when your manufacturers still have the resources to compete is just postponing their end and reducing their chances to get a feel on the market and actually build a competitive product.

However, on the climate change thing I'm convinced that for EU its's just a happy coincidence that they don't have oil in any considerable amount and are using it to propel for energy independence through renewables.
by grogenaut | 2025-06-25 15:11:55+00:00
They have all of that. Then you get to the place and they hit some buttons and crazy opaque math happens and then you have a 30 minute fight with the dude. And the reader was always broken and no they can't break a 100 or a 20 or a 5

Up front pricing is way better. When I used to do cabs I'd always do upfront prices. $40 to the airport no meter includes tip. 50 ok sounds good. Let's go.
by cameldrv | 2025-06-25 15:12:24+00:00
Slightly off topic, but Lyft has really creeped me out recently. The last three times I’ve landed at SFO, I’ve gotten a push notification on my iPhone from Lyft saying “welcome to SFO, get a Lyft.” It’s always come as we were taxiing to the gate.

After the first notification, I turned off location services for Lyft and only do one time authorizations, and then close the app when I’m done, but I still get the push notification. How is Lyft figuring out that I just landed at SFO? FWIW it has not happened at any other airport.
by nhatcher | 2025-06-25 15:12:28+00:00
So many things I like about this!

First of all, an empty list of dependencies! I am sold! It works great. I can't believe the did a whole TUI just for this, with a dialogs a file browser. I want to use for a project of mine, I wonder how easy it is. If someone involve in the project is here, why not use Ratatui?

Code quality is top notch, can only say one thing:

Bravo!
by dinfinity | 2025-06-25 15:12:33+00:00
> Splendid. You should probably tell people like Yann LeCun this. He will be happy to hear it. /s

Do you have an actual counterpoint or is this edgy nonsense the extent of your capabilities?

> We don't even know bigger problems like the long term effects of zero gravity in the human body or what dangers we'd encounter beyond the heliosphere.

So you agree that your analogy was bad. Good.
Ask HN: Anyone using augmented reality, VR, glasses, helmets etc. in industry?
by NewUser76312 | 2025-06-25 15:12:35+00:00
Since Google Glass made its debut in 2012, there's been a fair amount of hype around augmented reality and related tech coming into its own in industry, presumably enhancing worker productivity and capabilities.

But I've heard and seen so little use in any industries. I would have thought at a minimum that having access to hands-free information retrieval (e.g. blueprints, instructions, notes, etc), video chat and calls for point-of-view sharing, etc would be quite useful for a number of industries. There do seem to be interesting pilot trials involving Hololens in US defense (IVAS) as well as healthcare telemonitoring in Serbia.

Do you know of any relevant examples or use cases, or are you a user yourself? What do you think are the hurdles - actual usefulness, display quality, cost, something else?
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-06-25 15:12:37+00:00
Wait, so are frequent heat dome events not real and just summer? Or not? That was the claim you made. Frequency of events happens because of subsequent individual events... I guess the second or third time in a year we see heat domes is the only appropriate time to bring it up?

Climate change is one of the only topics where people choose to be so pedantic, and frankly unnecessarily insulting.
by kittoes | 2025-06-25 15:13:22+00:00
Unless you're supremely lucky, this kind of stuff is a hobby. One wishes that weren't the case, but capitalism is what it is...

I'd encourage you to generally ignore whether something has direct value or not because that's not how knowledge works. For example, I once spent well over a month implementing the NthWeekday function using nothing but basic arithmetic operations. This would allow us to calculate all federal holidays for a given year at runtime instead of precalculating the values and storing them in a table (which I hated, because it meant that someone had to maintain that table). This hyper-specific problem has near-zero direct value, but it was THE project that sparked my passion for maths.
by andymasley | 2025-06-25 15:13:39+00:00
I'm really confused about what you're reading into this. I don't "equate" nuclear weapons with video games, I say "here are two completely unrelated things that I'd consider net bad overall, but useful in specific places." Would you say I'm equating guns with balloons if I say they're both man-made? It's hard not to think you're intentionally misreading this.

Yes, it is possible for something to be useful in specific circumstances but still be bad overall.

We have disagreements about what counts as useful. If our definition is "This is only useful if it leads to longterm happiness" that seems way too specific and would exclude too much.

It's stupid to cheat, I agree and try to make that clear. What I'm saying is the claim "Students think they're learning when they cheat using AI" assumes students are so stupid that they think cheating off of a robot will help them learn as much as writing an essay themselves. That's obviously wrong.
by tessierashpool | 2025-06-25 15:14:11+00:00
yeah, that’s what works for me also. LLMs are a nightmare for debugging but a breeze for this.

another good use case: have it read a ton of code and summarize it. if you’re dealing with a new (to you) area in a legacy application, and trying to fix a problem in how it interacts with a complex open-source library, have the LLM read them both and summarize how they work. (while fact-checking it along the way.)
by mtlynch | 2025-06-25 15:16:00+00:00
Author here.

Thanks for reading!

>To me, the examples in red are much more helpful -- they explain, in bare terms, what was actually done. The examples in green feel like a marketing exercise to me. Like they're trying to wrap or obscure clear writing in something to obfuscate it.

Oh, interesting. That surprises me. I think there are some cases where I want the short version (e.g., if I'm just looking for breaking changes or fixes to minor annoyances), but I generally think the release announcement does a better job at showcasing features.

Out of curiosity, do you find the example changelog-style announcement[0] more useful than the Figma's example release announcement[1]?

>I don't know -- maybe have both kinds?

Yes, absolutely. They're not mutually exclusive.

Whenever I've published a release announcement, I also link to a changelog, which is the bullet point list of changes. I think the changelog should also be more user-oriented than most currently are, but I think the changelog is the right place for an exhaustive list of anything that users might want to know about the new version.

[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/release-announcement...

[1] https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/23954856027159-Navi...
by thimabi | 2025-06-25 15:16:03+00:00
> free tier for Workspace isn't yet supported. sorry. you need to set the project and pay.

Well, I've just set up Gemini CLI with a Workspace account project in the free tier, and it works apparently for free. Can you explain whether billing for that has simply not been configured yet, or where exactly billing details can be found?

For reference, I've been using this panel to keep track of my usage in the free tier of the Gemini API, and it has not been counting Gemini CLI usage thus far: https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/api/generativelanguage...

Unfortunately all of that is pretty confusing, so I'll hold off using Gemini CLI until everything has been clarified.
by Uehreka | 2025-06-25 15:16:11+00:00
If Chrome tried to pull this in like 2016, when Google Translate was the only-ish game in town, I’d call them out for it. But we now have multiple competing open weights translation models that are really good, making this kind of service essentially a commodity. One vendor might give users free access to their services to entice them to use their browser, another might differentiate themself by running the model locally and giving the user better privacy guarantees in exchange for performance.

I get that this is one more brick in the wall that teams like LadyBird will have to maintain, but as a web developer I do think more Web API features is generally a good thing, as it makes it easier for smaller shops to implement richer functionality.
by haswell | 2025-06-25 15:16:37+00:00
I think the issue is more broad though.

While a “punishment” that involves calling oneself a loser is a problem, the entire approach of punishment-based learning has given way to reinforcement approaches because they tend to be more effective in the long term without the negative effects of punishment-based approaches.

To put this another way, using punishment to stop using social media is probably not a good approach either way. Yelling “I’m a loser” is just one of the worst variants of this specific approach.
by thewisenerd | 2025-06-25 15:17:25+00:00
> Plan your release announcement during development

this little section gives me so much... dread.

on one hand, you have to be able to sell what you do; and on the other hand, if you cannot really quantify reasonable improvement to end user experience, can you really justify spending time on it?

we're basically back to figuring out how to allocate for "maintenace" that does not really translate to good "user story".
by debunn | 2025-06-25 15:17:47+00:00
Might I suggest https://www.prodigygame.com - it's a free-to-play online math game, where your child is a wizard that has to answer (age appropriate) math questions to gain magic to cast spells. Note: there is a paid subscription that allows your child to get access to more pets / faster experience gain, but is not required.

While this isn't a "do math to be able to unlock your device" type of game, it is fun to play and can be used as an earned screen-time requirement (or a "free screen-time" option!)

Disclaimer: I work for Prodigy as a Site Reliability Engineer, but my son (10) also enjoys playing the game!
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-25 15:17:48+00:00
Let me take it one step further though.

Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them.

Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set.

The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.

For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it.

This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-25 15:17:51+00:00
It's a horrible place to move it to.

If we make moves, Ok. How about this..

We move these agencies to get adversarial impulses going in service of cost control.

We move the USDA to the middle of New York City.

Urban Development to Tomah Wisconsin. (I'll settle for Nacogdoches Texas just to make sure the South gets some of these HQ's).

Department of the Interior should be moved to Miami Fl.

Department of Defense to Berkeley California.

And so on and so forth.

All should be legally obliged to hire only locals in civilian roles.

Having the USDA in Kansas City guarantees the tax payer gets robbed blind.
by partdavid | 2025-06-25 15:19:22+00:00
My earliest background as a shell user was as as system administrator (back in "the day", let's say), and forks are always potentially expensive, and often the reason you're opening a shell session in the first place (to diagnose resource contention or exhaustion, for example). There have been lots of times when one more fork is too much to take. (Which also, yes, makes it "interesting" to figure out what you can run in your shell session, too).
by SapporoChris | 2025-06-25 15:19:22+00:00
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

The US GDP is more than 27 trillion. If 158 billion is being lost. That's about .6% of the GDP. So, my question is, why does this have to stop? If it is stopped the benefits to the global population seems trivial. I'm sure at the individual level it is devastating. Good luck getting the national government to care about such a small percent.
by ednite | 2025-06-25 15:19:41+00:00
Your article is well done with great advice. I definitely agree that we should focus on how changes benefit the user, not just what was built.

One positive criticism: in my case (with a small user base of aprx 100), I feel it leans a bit too much into marketing. My users often want to know that a specific bug has been fixed. Release notes aren’t just about excitement, they’re also about trust and value.

Saying “Saving large files is now 10x faster” is great, but if users were dealing with crashes or freezes, it’s more helpful, and more direct, to combine your idea of clarity with the actual user experience:

“Saving large files is now 10x faster, no more freezes for files over 100MB.”

Being transparent about what was broken and now fixed is important.

Also, not sure if the article is focusing strictly on public-facing release announcements. I find it helpful to maintain a more detailed, separate internal changelog for future reference. That includes technical fixes, implementation notes, and lower-level changes that aren't relevant to users but are valuable to me.

That said, I mostly agree with your approach, and I think your method works really well for major or long-awaited feature releases.

Overall it's a good article and please take any of my feedback with a grain of salt, as my experience is mostly limited to a small user base and not large-scale or widely publicized launches.

Thanks for sharing!
by pornel | 2025-06-25 15:19:43+00:00
It's absolutely possible. Browsers even routinely pause playback when images aren't visible on screen.

They just don't have a proper UI and JS APIs exposed, and there's nothing stopping them from adding that.

IMO browsers are just stuck with tech debt, and maintainin a no-longer-relevant distinction between "animations" and "videos". Every supported codec should work wherever GIF/APNG work and vice versa.

It's not even a performance or complexity issue, e.g. browsers support AVIF "animations" as images, even though they're literally fully-featured AV1 videos, only wrapped in a "pretend I'm an image" metadata.
by bluGill | 2025-06-25 15:20:03+00:00
For freight trains the power is applied at the locomotive only. However for passenger trains it is very common for each car to have drive wheels. This allows for more acceleration and thus more traction. There is no technical reason you can't do this for a freight train, but it is some engineering work that isn't normally done. It is a little tricky for this application because typically ore is loaded through the top of the car and unloaded underneath which makes finding a place to get the power to the motors tricky, and dust from loading/unloading can wreck things - these are solvable problems but still problems.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-06-25 15:20:55+00:00
It's not a bad place, but you'd have to move it there slowly if you wanted it to work. Establish a satellite campus, bring a few people there from the original HQ who want to move or will accept whatever incentives you can offer to move, hire locals where possible, work to build relationships like internships with UMKC programs or other local businesses and agencies, hire aggressively from people already in the surrounding area, and then over a period of a few years to a decade people looking to get an education and future job in this industry will realize there's opportunity in Kansas City, and you can start closing down the original location and building up the new one.

If you do this with no plan and no incentives in a matter of a year or less, it's going to decimate the whole agency.
by _fat_santa | 2025-06-25 15:21:21+00:00
> Everyone who uses these tools is just building prototypes.

But also I think that's kinda the point. Like for example we have to do a UI redesign of an app my company is building and our "wireframes" are just v0 projects my PO created in one afternoon.

I think wireframing is where these tools really shine. It's gives you roughly the same ideas as building a wireframe in Figma but it's way less work and you end up with higher fidelity wireframes.Like sure if I were to peek at the code under the hood I'm certain it's close to dogshit but the code doesn't really matter at that stage.
by kanzure | 2025-06-25 15:21:32+00:00
Huh, weird. I don't think I have ever wanted to login to Stripe and take manual actions. Usually I hook up Stripe events to actions in my applications, like "The user subscribed, wire them up to the drip lifecycle" or "The user unsubscribed, remove them from a certain marketing list and try to schedule an exit interview" or other hook-ups.
by w-m | 2025-06-25 15:21:33+00:00
With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on.

In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence.

E.g.

ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=start_periods=1:start_duration=0:start_threshold=-50dB:\ stop_periods=-1:stop_duration=0.02:stop_threshold=-50dB,\ apad=pad_dur=0.02" \ -c:a aac -b:a 128k output_minpause.m4a -y

will cut the talk down from 39m31s to 31m34s, by replacing any silence (with a -50dB threshold) longer than 20ms by a 20ms pause. And to keep with the spirit of your post, I measured only that the input file got shorter, I didn't look at all at the quality of the transcription by feeding it the shorter version.