MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by donmcronald | 2025-06-20 16:45:08+00:00
I can agree with a lot of that, but part of what I don't like is when I pay for luxury things I can't use. For example, if the city decides to subsidize a stadium, but I can't afford tickets to any events, how do I benefit from paying for part of that via property taxes?

Or another example would be post-secondary education. Where I live it's partially subsidized, so my taxes go towards it even if I can't afford to attend. Sure, there's an overall benefit to having an educated population, but I'm being forced to subsidize other peoples' educations and they benefit directly in the form of increased earning potential which translates into a better standard of living.

I don't have kids and I don't have a problem paying taxes for fully subsidized K-12 education where everyone gets access no matter what.
by timr | 2025-06-20 16:45:53+00:00
Just for starters:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

> An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

> For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.

> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.

> Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say.

> Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.

This is literally what Tammany Hall did.
by elevateyou | 2025-06-20 16:46:02+00:00
https://facewise.online/

Our emotions and everyday experiences shape us — not just internally, but physically. Over time, they create subtle patterns of muscle tension and gradually change the way we look. As we age, more of our story becomes visible in our face and posture.

How do you appear to others? How do people perceive you at first glance?

Gain fresh insights through an analysis of your appearance. Discover what your facial expression and body language might suggest about your strengths, challenges, and potential areas for personal growth.
by ericmay | 2025-06-20 16:46:06+00:00
> Long gone are the people that would drive into LES on Friday night with their expensive cars and blare loud music and rev their engines. I

I don't live in New York, but have been following along loosely on the congestion pricing policy as someone who has some official business but also just generally curious to see how it would work out, and this is a benefit that I had not considered. Thank you for mentioning this.
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 16:47:12+00:00
This is correct. It goes deeper than this, too. Capitalist economies rely on a myth of meritocracy for labor.

The end result is that we’re forced to view the homeless as lesser. We typically throw around words like addict, because we have to. If we admit that there’s homeless people out there who got so based purely on bad luck, that destroys the promise of America.
by tome | 2025-06-20 16:47:15+00:00
In case you weren't following the thread from the beginning, it started with voidhorse criticising Scott Aaronson for "defence of genocide" (and thereby making an implicit claim of genocide): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317728

On a forum like HN I think it's reasonable to be asked to justify strong claims that one makes. However, I wasn't even doing that. Rather, I was asking whether voidhorse thought false claims of genocide were equally bad as defence of genocide. It turns out the answer is no: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320889. I disagree, but fair enough, other people think differently.

So, I have what I originally asked for.

I don't actually have any questions for you. I was only asking since I perceived you were trying to convince me of something. If you're not, that was just a misunderstanding on my part, and no need to continue the conversation. I'm not trying to persuade you of anything! That said, I'm happy to continue to participate in a process of reasoned discussion and inquiry if anyone wants to, but firstly it's going wildly off topic. and secondly I don't see the standards of discussion so far to as particularly high.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-20 16:47:33+00:00
MQ3 is crawling with cameras for ‘inside out’ tracking which hypothetically could be used in privacy violating ways. Currently these are locked down so that you can’t build interesting AR apps —- you should be able to look at a QR code and access a ‘location based’ XR app but they don’t allow it, gotta scan with a phone and transfer it to your headset with Meta’s janky app which shows all the “carelessness” of someone who doesn’t care to make money.

Meta says they will open it up though.
by tptacek | 2025-06-20 16:49:09+00:00
My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name. I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.
by metalman | 2025-06-20 16:50:36+00:00
the only real life spontainious mention of linkdin was the woman trying to sell me a printer a staples who extolled lnkedin and the 750 friends?, contacts she had there...but could not actualy help me understand the purpose beyond a lot of superlatives,that and there is a thriving business in doing portrait photography for peoples profiles that I learned of from someone inquireing about having a mobile photography studio built. but ya, strong cultic whiff comming off of it
by inasio | 2025-06-20 16:50:57+00:00
I see some parallels with magnetic resonance imaging. I worked on a project optimizing MRI scans a few years back. I remember the PI in the project essentially acknowledging that analyzing single MRI images is absolutely more art than science, but there's a ton of value in getting periodic MRIs (say yearly) and looking at the diffs. I imagine a lot of the value coming from Rubin will be due to this, as well as the reason it was built for speed.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-06-20 16:51:00+00:00
> but worst case I'll run a Wayland compositor on my X11 server for that

This is actually surprisingly easy, too. My first experiments ran a wayland app in cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), but in order to better handle multiple windows I switched to sway with a lightly tweaked config, and other than some input weirdness (I think it struggles with modifiers held while switching focus) it works pretty well.
by gtsop | 2025-06-20 16:51:32+00:00
Are we still tossing around the 10x productivity boost? Please make this stop. I see first commit on April 28 so by 10x productivity its like you've been working on this for almost 2.5 years, and there is still a waiting list on the website.

Appreciate the agplv3 licence, kudos on that.
by ranger_danger | 2025-06-20 16:51:46+00:00
According to who? Please cite a specific court case where a judge ruled that calling for the boycott of Israeli products was deemed illegal.

If such a ruling was later appealed and eventually overturned, then of course that would not count. But a judge ruling on a case is technically the only way something can be considered provably "illegal" in the US.

I realize that you want to believe there are certain inalienable rights that somehow no longer exist, but I do not believe that to be the case. The courts exist for a reason, and just because people are sometimes arrested or charged with things that are not actually legal, that doesn't mean it won't later get thrown out in court, and it doesn't mean that your rights have disappeared.

Even if all of that did happen, such a case would most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court and ruled unconstitutional.
by neuralkoi | 2025-06-20 16:52:24+00:00
My ChatGPT meter tells me that it *feels* like this was written by AI:

Notice the excessive use of the em dash throughout the article combined with the sycophantic contrasts ChatGPT loves to use so much:

"It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless."

A sad state of affairs if the NYT is letting AI-slop through.
by qualeed | 2025-06-20 16:52:30+00:00
>inserting himself into their lives at all is disrespectful.

Keep in mind that he's inserting himself into their lives to give them millions of dollars.

Between these two choices:

1) Durov doesn't say anything, insert himself anywhere, or call you anything.

2) Durov gives you millions of dollars, but calls you his child.

I bet my life savings that every single kid will be fine with being called Durov's child in exchange for millions of dollars.
by diggan | 2025-06-20 16:52:53+00:00
> The extent to which people treated the program as though it had agency was kind of horrifying

It's also horrifying how much intention people think they can see from looking at logs of people using something. I know there are a lot of "data driven" decisions that people use the same way, where people are reaching all sorts of conclusions to why X suddenly is Y, or likewise.

I'm sure if someone inspected the logs of what I've written to various LLMs they'd think they can extrapolate all sorts of personal characteristics about me, but I'm also a person who plays around with things, tries to find limits and whatever, so just because see me treating a LLM like shit for some reason doesn't mean you can understand the intention behind that.

> Still, I was pretty shitty to the people who interacted with my computer

I think as youngsters exploring computing without limitations, restrictions or honestly much thoughts at all in the beginning, many of us been in the same situation. As long as we learn and improve with experience :)
by abelanger | 2025-06-20 16:53:15+00:00
Thanks! Would love to hear more about what type of agent you're building.

We've heard pretty often that durable execution is difficult to wrap your head around, and we've also seen more of our users (including experienced engineers) relying on Cursor and Claude Code while building. So one of the experiments we've been running is ensuring that the agent code is durable when written by LLMs by using our MCP server so the agents can follow best practices while generating code: https://pickaxe.hatchet.run/development/developing-agents#pi...

Our MCP server is super lightweight and basically just tells the LLM to read the docs here: https://pickaxe.hatchet.run/mcp/mcp-instructions.md (along with some tool calls for scaffolding)

I have no idea if this is useful or not, but we were able to get Claude to generate complex agents which were written with durable execution best practices (no side effects or non-determinism between retries), which we viewed as a good sign.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-20 16:53:23+00:00
Depends on the ERP. Some store a running balance in the account ledger; others sum and cache the results until the data changes; and the some actually sum everything every time because accuracy matters more than speed.

Generally, the most practical way to do is to "finalize" a number periodically (monthly and annually) when the books for the prior period have been "closed" (locked from further edits) and then sum only transactions taking place since the last closed balance. Most major ERPs do this.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-06-20 16:53:37+00:00
I've gotten gigs from a Christmas email response, from a reference from an old co-worker. Was fed gigs from a company, special projects for customers, that lasted a couple of years. Recently, eating lunch at my local diner in a college town, a lady comes in, she's been up all night at the maker lab across the street. Chatted, she describes the breath analysis device they're prototyping for grants, just need some software. And what do you do? I make software for small embedded devices. That's been going two years.

So the answer is, all the ways, that's how you get gigs. Try all the ways.
by donmcronald | 2025-06-20 16:53:49+00:00
That's right. And it's the same thing for a lot of consumption based services. Our city switched to a garbage system where you pay based on the size of your garbage can (small, medium, large). They did that in lieu of a property tax increase which is a progressive tax since rich people with big homes pay more property taxes.

Instead it's now a consumption tax which is regressive. All the rich neighbourhoods have large bins and it costs them less than a property tax increase would have while the poor neighbourhoods all have to "budget" their trash to fit it into a small bin.

It's all a way of forcing the poor and middle class to bear the burden of dwindling resources and infrastructure while the rich get to maintain unfairly luxurious lifestyles.
by timr | 2025-06-20 16:54:10+00:00
Every delivery truck that comes into the city is charged a tax. It's not a matter of "evidence" -- it's how the law works. This cost is passed on to consumers.

I didn't say "gets more expensive on net relative to some hypothetical other universe", because I can't possibly know that. You're the one making the argument that this universe is cheaper than that one. Prove it.
by bitpush | 2025-06-20 16:54:16+00:00
> To be honest not visiting some websites is one of my main uses of Perplexity.

I use it the same way as well, but everytime I use it .. I feel icky. A sense of impending doom.

Imagine a book summaries service, that helped users not buy any books ever. What is the incentive for a writer to write a book, when they know that in ~mins, the summary of the work will be available on a different site.

News sites are unique in that the value they provide, for the most part, is the realtime-ness of it. BBC reporting on latest in London is the work of soo many journalists and if Perplexity sidesteps that - BBC has no incentive (and in the future, money) to do that work. It kills BBC, and it ultimately kilss Perplexity.

So yes, Perplexity is playing a very dangerous short term game, and BBC is right in suing them.

> BBC is coming from but I also don't really want them to win.

If BBC doesnt win, BBC (and other sites that "produce" information) dies which kills Perplexity.
by wslh | 2025-06-20 16:54:53+00:00
I don't think "replaced" is the right word, just like with smart glasses. The form factor and user experience are key attributes when choosing a device, independent of raw hardware power. It's likely we'll continue to live with multiple device types coexisting.

BTW, I have to consciously turn off my cybersecurity mindset when thinking about smart glasses. It's hard not to see all the new attack vectors they introduce.
by lisper | 2025-06-20 16:55:06+00:00
> Western nations have dominated the world for centuries

I guess that depends on what you consider "the world". It makes no sense to even talk about the West dominating "the world" before 1492. The first truly global Western empire was Britain, but it was also the last. It was replaced by the U.S. but it was never really global. Even at the height of its power after WW2 the USSR was a credible rival. After the fall of the USSR in 1991 the U.S. was the sole undisputed superpower for a little while, but that came to an abrupt end on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think you are over-extrapolating the past into the future. The mindset and culture that produced U.S. hegemony in the 20th century seems to me to be mostly extinct. The U.S. was indeed ruled by rationalism (more or less) from the time of its founding through the mid-to-late 20th century, but there is precious little of that left today. Certainly the power structure in the U.S. today is actively hostile to rationalism, and I don't see a whole lot of rationalism in play in the opposition either.
by Spivak | 2025-06-20 16:55:35+00:00
It's not about them being ordered it's about them being unique. You're generating a resource for each element and that resource has a unique name. The stackoverflow way to iterate over a list is to use toset() but more often what people want is

zipmap(range(length(var.my_list)), var.my_list)

where you get {0 => item, 1=>item} and your resources will be named .0, .1, .2. I get the annoyance about the type naming but in HCL lists and tuples are the same thing.
by aljgz | 2025-06-20 16:57:10+00:00
Very well put. I add to that: with an E2E solution, you need to learn things before you deploy your system (still not that you do everything properly), but without that, it's possible to deploy the system, then learn things can go wrong when they actually happen. Now if you ask someone who has a half baked distributed system, they still don't know all the failure modes of their system. I've seen this in mission-critical systems.

But in a company that had properly reliable infrastructure, any system that moved to the new infra based on K8s needed much less maintenance, had much more standardized DevOps (which allowed people from other teams to chime in when needed), and had much fewer mistakes. There was no disagreement that K8s stramlined everything.
by tk6855 | 2025-06-20 16:57:20+00:00
I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their deranged ramblings on why we need 1,000,000 safety regulations and $30,000 worth of paperwork and permitting to break ground because their precious public resources will be impacted.

$60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .
by esafak | 2025-06-20 16:57:49+00:00
It sounds like something that needs to be dealt with in Chromium rather than forked. I am sure lots of developers want such functionality, if it is missing. I found:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/ai

Don't any of these fit the bill? Are they Gemini-locked and you want something else? I am not familiar with the Chrome API, so pardon my ignorance.
by jpc0 | 2025-06-20 16:58:00+00:00
Your os might be virtualised but very often the actual hardware leaks through that virtualisation, often intentionally.

I don’t see any support for an os that doesn’t have good driver support for accelerators, whether GPU/TPU or otherwise. And if your look into some of the accelerators built into modern amd and intel chips that becomes a nightmare just supporting the CPU, never mind USB host controllers and network interfaces etc
by paulgb | 2025-06-20 16:58:12+00:00
> That's the fundamental argument against the assertion that traffic speed increases will offset the costs. It cannot be true, or people would choose to drive.

I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the value of driving and the cost of congestion are the same to every driver.

For some people, driving is an elastic decision. They mode shift, or time shift to off-peak, or carpool, or combine errands in the city into one trip instead of multiple.

For other people, driving is necessary. They'll benefit from fewer of the first type of person being on the roads during peak hours.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-20 16:58:41+00:00
Again, you said this:

> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.

If I buy a cup of coffee, and the cost of the coup goes from $0.05 to $0.10, but the cost of coffee goes down from $1.00 to $0.95, the thing I buy did not get more expensive. The components of its cost changed.

The hot dog delivery truck paid a few extra bucks, averaged out over tens of thousands of hot dogs, and it spent less time stuck in traffic (saving gas and labor costs). This is not a large logical leap. You are arguing that this cannot possibly be the case, which is a large logical leap.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-20 16:58:46+00:00
"Saying JS broke the web when your website loads 754kB of JS across 13 separate requests makes me wonder if you're very serious about the problem."

Truthfully, _the website_ does not load anything. The so-called "modern" web browser used by many but not all HN commenters auto-loads resources, e.g., processing <script ... src=... > tags, and runs Javascript, e.g., XHR or fetch requests.

As such, by using a different client, not the one used by these HN commenters, this web page can be retrieved with only one HTTP request (initiated by the user) and and read, text-only, with zero Javascript files sourced.

There are of course other strategies to avoid auto-loading resources and running Javascript. IMO, anyone who is "very serious about the problem" would surely be using one of them, and probably unperturbed by yet another blog page that tries to source some standard WorddPress Javascripts.

Nor did Javascript "break the web". Web developers and web marketers did, using Javascript and browsers distributed by advertising companies, and organisations paid by advertising companies to send them data about browser users.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-06-20 16:58:54+00:00
By having a dog, you're already way ahead of the curve! I had to take care of one for a month or two, long ago in a past life. And walking the dog gets you chatting with all the other dog people.

And yeah, the rushed gig schedule. These days, a package delivery is left on the stoop, proof-of-delivery photo taken and by the time I notice (they don't usually even ring the doorbell) they've already driven off again. And of course "community mailboxes" means the regular mail carrier doesn't walk the neighbourhood any more either.
by 8note | 2025-06-20 16:59:44+00:00
> higher than that market

i dont think thats true. the cost can also be much cheaper, but people price differentiate better when they can actually see the number than when they cant.

you can look at 19.99 as an example, vs 20 as example of making people feel a certain way to get them to shop differently, or credit cards - which get people to pay much more for an item than they otherwise would with the interest payments, or with the klarna styled buy now pay later.

its not a tautology that a higher price drives down cost.

i think the government price is likely much less than the cost of congestion, especially once you price in the externalities of pollution, but drivers werent aware of how much cost they were incurring from the congestion, and now that there's a number, they can make decisions based off of it
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 17:00:29+00:00
> Generally speaking, we look down on you for manufacturing race problems for politics as a team sport.

Which we don’t do.

What you need to understand is that race problems in the US are very complex because of our history and diversity. We have people from all over the world here, truly. And it’s not small percentages.

In comparison, most European nations are much more homogeneous. And, no offense, but y’all are not handling it as well as you should be given your position. The amount of extreme racism I hear from Europeans especially in regards to immigration is repugnant. Immigration which is comparatively quite low.