MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oskarkk | 2025-06-17 15:49:42+00:00
> Getting backups right _is_ difficult and can easily be quite stressful.

My point was that something is much better than nothing, and you don't need 99.999% reliability in your setup to greatly reduce risk that you're exposing yourself to when keeping 30 years of data in only one place.

> But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft?

Depends on the nature of the data. I guess that most of that 30 years worth of data didn't need encryption, and copying only insensitive data is an option. On the other side, cloud account, or device logged in to the cloud account could be stolen too.

> Where to keep them in case of fire?

That's irrelevant if we're talking about backing up data stored on cloud service.

> What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files?

Aside from some unlikely issues, yes, drives should last at least a couple of years. In the 5+ year timeframes I think you could just buy a new drive (bigger/cheaper/more reliable than the last as the technology improves). If we're talking about a lazy strategy of backing up the data once a year, even deleting everything on a drive and copying everything again isn't that bad. Better than nothing.

> I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy

But we're not talking about having the cloud as a backup. The issue here is having the files only in the cloud, with no backup. For a non-technical person, cloud as a backup is great, but here we have a case where a person had all their data only on the cloud, and then lost access to the cloud. If the cloud was only a backup (or a way to sync/access the data on other devices), but the data would still be present on some private device, there would be no problem.
by genpfault | 2025-06-17 15:49:56+00:00
> Great talk from EH22: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking

404s for me. This[1] perhaps? Note trailing hyphen.

[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking-
by chowells | 2025-06-17 15:50:03+00:00
They're just for different jobs.

JPEG is lossy, in ways that were initially optimized for photographs. The details it loses are often not details photographs are good at providing in the first place. As the upside for losing some data, it gets to pick the data it gets to compress, and it chooses it in such a way as to minimize the size of the compressed data.

PNG is a lossless format. It's practically mandatory when you need 100% fidelity, as with icons or other graphics that are intended to have high contrast in small areas. It's able to optimize large areas of the same color very well, but suffers when colors change rapidly. It's especially unsuitable for photographs, as sensor noise (or film grain, if the source was film) create subtle color variations that are very difficult for it to encode efficiently.

You basically never have a situation where either one is appropriate. They are for different things, and should be used as such.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-06-17 15:50:18+00:00
I mean, as far as a corpus goes, I suppose all text on the internet gets pretty close if most books are included, but even then you’re mostly looking at English language books that have been OCR’d.

But I look down my nose at conceptions that human knowledge is packagable as plain text, our lives, experience, and intelligence is so much more than the cognitive strings we assemble in our heads in order to reason. It’s like in that movie Contact when Jodie Foster muses that they should have sent a poet. Our empathy and curiosity and desires are not encoded in UTF8. You might say these are realms other than knowledge, but woe to the engineer who thinks they’re building anything superhuman while leaving these dimensions out, they’re left with a cold super-rationalist with no impulse to create of its own.
by altairprime | 2025-06-17 15:50:22+00:00
Bandwidth contracts can be defined as fixed-cost billing for 95th +/- percentile of usage per period with charges of peak bursts exceed x% of period, without charging for bytes transferred at all; before S3, this was typical, and it’s still available from providers today. Under that model, free user rate limits ensure that their peak possible bandwidth bill from concurrent unpaid users fits within their (cheap and fixed) contractual limits, while paid users pay for a different endpoint whose bandwidth contract is usage-billed and/or has a higher 95th percentile rate and/or has a higher peak burst cap so that rate limits aren’t necessary. This hybrid approach lets them provide both {cheap, reliable, slow} free service, and {costly, reliable, fast} paid service at a much lower total cost than if they went with one or the other approach exclusively. (Elsethread, a suggestion that they switch to torrents would provide {cheap, unreliable, fast} service, completing the “pick two” trifecta.)
by bigyabai | 2025-06-17 15:50:29+00:00
AI's bigger threat to humanity is that it's going to replace seemingly high-quality arguments with unqualified slop. This blogpost is almost unfollowable and frankly doesn't make it's own case very well at all. I had to click around the site to learn made-up jargon I've never heard used in 10 years of machine learning research. They didn't even bother citing their claims, likely because they're too ridiculous to be true.

If you want to argue stuff like this, don't half-ass it. Seriously, cite your sources and explain without digression how this could become a threat to human survival.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-06-17 15:51:26+00:00
Costs of transport infra per mile:

Heavy rail; 50 million

Light rail: 25 million

Freeway:5-10 million

So why aren't they simply doing dedicated roads for transport?

With AI platooning and supervised self driving, "trains" of busses can run along those lines, but split off and merge in from local service seamlessly.

Commercial traffic (even through traffic) can piggyback on low traffic periods.

In emergencies, they are additional roads for evac or supply.

Roads are much more easily repaired and fail less catastrophically.

Electrification of busses is well underway and should be simpler / cheaper for recharging infrastructure.

Platooned "trains" of busses will conserve energy and likely could go 100 mph or more with proper convergent sensors monitoring and maintenance.

Safety should be equivalent.

I suspect there are political nuances where rail gets its own budget apart from roads, whereas dedicated roads get thrown it with general road funding, and then wouldn't get proper funding.
by serial_dev | 2025-06-17 15:51:48+00:00
A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes!? If I need to know what Kubernetes is, Helm charts and whatnot, it's not really a Heroku alternative for me. I understand for some, managing them as basic as running "echo hello", but I don't want to even think about kubernetes and helm charts when I want something up and running very quickly.
by implements | 2025-06-17 15:52:00+00:00
The Orwellian part may be “men” and “women” changing from sex categories to gender ones, more specifically the ‘Newspeak‘ conflation of sex and gender into a single concept such that for some people it has become difficult to discuss them separately: “Not only can Trans men become pregnant, they can do so while being biologically male, too”.

(Not attempting to debate Trans, only pointing out the 1984 type changes to how people must now think about sex and gender to avoid ‘finding themselves accused of crime-think and a trip to Room 101’ /s)
by scblock | 2025-06-17 15:52:05+00:00
That is correct. There are no modern utility scale turbines that are directly coupled to the grid. This was at least initially to allow for variable rotor speed at a constant grid frequency.

Some use doubly-fed induction generators which take about 1/3 of the power through an inverter at variable frequency back through the rotor to create stable 50 or 60 Hz output (Type 3 machines), while others do full scale conversion (Type 4 machines)[1].

FERC 827[2] details the power factor requirements in the US for non-spinning (mostly renewable) generators, most easily summarized as power factors from 0.95 lagging to 0.95 leading at the high side of the transformer in the project substation.

[1]: https://www.esig.energy/wiki-main-page/wind-turbine-technolo...

[2]: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/RM16-1-000....
by zdw | 2025-06-17 15:52:43+00:00
I would posit that solution is just regurgitation, not actual thinking.

Then again, is teaching an actual person how to use the quadratic formula equivalent to reinventing it from nothing?

I wonder if that's what we're doing with AI - giving it a corpus of strategies, when it has no way of being lead along a though process as a human would, if it's even capable of following along.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-17 15:52:49+00:00
> This shows pretty much what I'd expect: coverage is fine in and around cities and less great in rural areas. (The Dakotas are an interesting exception; there's a co-op up there that connected a ton of folks with gigabit fiber. Pretty cool!)

Just a warning about the screenshot he's referencing here: the slice of map that he shows is of the western half of the US, which includes a lot of BLM land and other federal property where literally no one lives [0], which makes the map look a lot sparser in rural areas than it is in practice for humans on the ground. If you look instead at the Midwest on this map you'll see pretty decent coverage even in most rural areas.

The weakest coverage for actually-inhabited rural areas seems to be the South and Appalachia.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/US_feder...
by gregjor | 2025-06-17 15:53:09+00:00
Working for wages doesn't have to mean 9-5 in an office. Many programmers work remotely with flexible hours. Most places I've worked had flexible hours and in-office requirements even before COVID.

Self-employment can mean selling time and expertise in the form of freelancing. Or it can mean building products you sell. It can lead to a combination of both -- building products and then selling time/expertise to customers. The biggest SAAS companies (think Oracle, Salesforce, etc.) make considerable revenue from services along with licensing their software.

I freelanced for a long time, selling expertise sometimes (not always) measured in time spent. A lot of successful freelancers bill in terms of deliverables, or on regular retainers, rather than charging per hour like a salaried job.

The main value derived from working for an employer, especially early in a career, comes from developing a professional network and accumulating business domain expertise. Building software to sell frequently fails because of poor understanding of the target business domain, which gets wrongly interpreted as a marketing problem. Businesses don't need software or code in the abstract -- they need and pay for solutions to business problems, something that adds value, decreases costs, improved efficiency, yields competitive advantage.
by awongh | 2025-06-17 15:53:21+00:00
Ag water rights is a really f'ed up issue in the US. It's very tangentially connected to whether there's a data center using up water though.

Besides which there are so many other f'ed up dynamics in the profitability of a commodity crop like corn- Gov't subsidies, gmo/pesticides, ethanol, factory animal farming, etc.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-06-17 15:53:35+00:00
Upload a JPEG, gets converted to WEBP next person, downloads WEBP converts it to JPEG to actually edit it in software because even things like Photoshop/MacOS Preview can't edit one natively, saves to JPG and uploads, gets converted to WEBP

next person downloads the now JPEG's WEBP'd JPEG'd WEBP'd image

fast forward a decade the original quality versions of the images no longer exist just these degraded
by legitster | 2025-06-17 15:53:43+00:00
This takes me back to when the goal of a webpage was to be less than 1Mb. At the time, the only reason to use PNG (such luxury) was when you needed transparency.

The variable compression of JPEG was very important. In Photoshop you could just grab an image and choose the file size you needed and the JPEG quality would degrade to match your design constraints.
by selivanovp | 2025-06-17 15:53:51+00:00
>Radio Free Europe is a really solid outlet that has maintained a balanced and consistent coverage of Russia for many years

Lmao. I guess you're their employee?

>this seems to piss off Russian

Yes, that's the only thing they're good at. Pissing off Russian citizens as the level of lies they keep producing for years is just unbelievable.
by ghssds | 2025-06-17 15:54:27+00:00
JPEG and PNG don't work the same way. JPEG is lossy - it removes information from the original image, and PNG is lossless. For distribution, like on a website, with JPEG you can compress the image much more than PNG without the users noticing IF the image is photographic. If the JPEG represents a drawing, a screenshot, or contains labels, the lossy compression will be noticeable and PNG is much more appropriate. To keep as master for further modifications and compressions, keeping an image in JPEG format is a bad idea, again because JPEG is lossy. You can't ever encode an image with higher fidelity in JPEG vs PNG but both are useful.
by sgallant | 2025-06-17 15:54:46+00:00
Hi HN! We're Scott and Logan. We're building an AI Agent that schedules meetings for teams from within Slack. Finding a meeting time that works for everyone can be a big pain but Brice has access to everyone's calendar and can book the meeting on your behalf (using context from the Slack conversation).

I'm looking for some feedback on this demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayIG7BZPSTI

Would you use this? Would you actually pay for it? Do you prefer Doodle Polls ;)

Feel free to sign up for early access here at https://brice.ai

Thanks!
by AlexandrB | 2025-06-17 15:55:26+00:00
The trap a lot of the left has fallen into is often defining genuine disagreement over their ideas as "racist", "fascist", or "bigotry". This keeps those ideas from being challenged and refined thus making them ultimately unconvincing. "Tolerance" itself is a very loose concept here that has come to mean mostly the same as "political agreement". There's also no mechanism that I can see for correcting this issue. In this frame, the bar for what constitutes "fascism" keeps getting lower such that even mainstream political positions from 10-15 years ago are being labelled as "fascist" in some circumstances.

None of this seems healthy for the future of left wing thought and is already leading to a backlash (one naturally being called "fascist").
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-17 15:55:58+00:00
I sort of disagree with this argument in TFA, as you say, though the rest of the article highlights a limitation. If I'm unfamiliar with the API, I can't judge whether the answer is good.

There is a sweet spot of situations I know well enough to judge a solution quickly, but not well enough to write code quickly, but that's a rather narrow case.
by addaon | 2025-06-17 15:56:53+00:00
> JPEG XL: Better than JPEG in every way aside from legacy support, while being royalty free and open.

And decoder complexity. A software JPEG decoder is a weekend project. A hardware JPEG decoder not much more. Doing the same for arbitrary JPEG XL files is much, much more complicated. In any world where any of development cost, implementation complexity, expected code quality (especially when using first-order assumptions like constant number of defects per line of code), or decoder resources (especially for hardware implementations) are important, JPEG has serious advantages.
by dboreham | 2025-06-17 15:57:51+00:00
Not limited to BMW. I have owned and rented cars from many different marques and terrible software is a constant. Haven't tried Tesla, but people say it is better.

My biggest peeve is when the car has several different contexts for configuration and/or auth that have been layer on each other like mud deposits. The user meanwhile has no idea that's what happened. So for example the seat position can be saved by pressing a button. But also is saved in a driver profile when the vehicle is locked. And then that driver profile can be backed by a cloud account. There's no user feedback at all as to what and where the car stored your seat position and the driver is left bemused as to why the seat is where it is and how to have it in the right place.
by alex1138 | 2025-06-17 15:59:01+00:00
I think it should also be pointed out that for all of the "Facebook is free, you are the product" and that maybe they should charge, Whatsapp had an existing monetization model

Zuckerberg is ruthless and cutthroat and Whatsapp was less a "savvy acquisition" (I mean, yeah, get rid of competition) than a "I want this, I need to own it"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
by KaiserPro | 2025-06-17 15:59:47+00:00
> Another way to look at it is as the money supply increases, the cost of money and the cost to borrow decreases.

I'm going to say something radical here, so do hear me out. any bank that loans money, is increasing the money supply. the more banks lend, the more money is printed. There is no fixed supply of virtual money. We don't really know how much actual dollars there are out there. (ignoring eurodollars)

Banks profits are literally because they are printing money. The very act of loaning out means that the 1 dollar bill you deposited with become 1.8, as its loaned out again to someone else, who then repays it, with interest.

<<end radicalism>>

Sure we had QE, we had covid cash, but the problem with using covid as an example of "giving money to everyone causes inflation" is that its difficult to distinguish from supply chain, tariffs, stimulus and $other.

the other problem is that stimulus was given to companies as well.

but the argument about not increasing the money supply is difficult to argue unless you are a bank, because that's their job, not the government's.

so, the point is, the economics of demand is an approximate model, rather than a formula. Its based on the collective perceived value of a good or service, rather than a strict supply/demand. sure its a close approximation, but not an accurate one.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-17 15:59:57+00:00
> prices are dependent on demand/supply rather than how much money people have ... [UBI] might increase rental prices

Which is it? You can't have it both ways. The right answer is that if you print new money prices go up. If UBI is funded by taxes it's not a UBI (some people will end up giving back more in taxes than they "receive" in UBI, so it's net negative for them). If it's funded by borrowing it's not sustainable. If it's funded by money printing then prices will rise and the effect is eliminated.

> the people that are reliant on UBI tend to be on some sort of rent control mechanism

The argument for UBI is it lets you get rid of other means tested welfare systems. If you're going to introduce a category of people who really need UBI vs other people who don't really need it, and have special rules for the former, it's just a rebranded welfare system and those already exist.
Show HN: Solostat – Showcase all your metrics from one page
by krm28 | 2025-06-17 16:00:08+00:00
Hey Hackers!

I'm a solo developer with a full time job building/marketing all of my projects myself. I recently noticed that I have been spending a lot of time jumping between metrics for social media and for my apps. So I built a website that allows you to showcase and link all of your social media metrics plus your revenue metrics. I would love to hear any feedback you may have on the site/design. Appreciate your time!
by yorwba | 2025-06-17 16:00:22+00:00
Yes, I'm saying that wealthy countries can definitely afford the "basic food" part of the "live in your basic pod and eat basic food" future, but the "basic pods" are more uncertain. If there's not enough money to build enough homeless shelters to house everyone, how could there be enough money to pay for UBI high enough that everyone can afford a roof over their head?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-17 16:00:37+00:00
NB. I am a member of the "general public". I use simpler software. For example, I do not use a so-called "modern" web browser with DRM supoort in order to read, submit and reply on HN. Nor do I use a more complex program to download video files. I may use a more complex program to edit, convert and play video files, such as ffmpeg/ffplay, although unlike a so-called "modern" web browser ffmpeg is not controlled and "automatically updated" by an surveillance advertising company or financially depedant on one, sending it data about users in return for money.
by ziml77 | 2025-06-17 16:00:53+00:00
I was using a Chromium-based browser for a bit until I looked into how forks are handling the Mv3 changeover. Seems none them are willing to maintain Mv2 support. A couple of them claim it's fine because they have ad blocking built into the browser, but I know from experience none of them work as well as uBO. So, I switched back to Firefox where I'm plenty happy.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-17 16:01:08+00:00
German here. As I've written in another comment in the thread [1], Europe as a whole has markedly lower adoption for the international credit/debit cards than the US, as most countries have had their own schemes for decades (e.g. Germany's Girocard) so there was no need in practice to get one of the international ones. For vacation, we were used to going to money exchanges anyway so there was no need to get a bank card that worked outside of one's primary country.

And even for those who have credit cards, they are "pay in full at the end of each month" cards, not American-style revolving credit cards. And stuff like the "cashback" cards of Americans, that's also not very common here since the "cashbacks" are actually paid for by the merchant on top of the interchange fee - but there's an EU law that places a hard cap of IIRC 1% on the merchant fees, so there is barely any way for banks to incentivise people to use credit cards.

And on the bank side, here in Europe we also don't really have that "debt holders can just sell off defaulted debts" thing, so banks can't offload the risk of defaults to someone else. And if that's not enough, we also got very strict laws on who can get approved for a credit card and for which limits - stuff like 20 year olds with 20, 30k of credit card debt are truly rare unless the parents of said young people are rich enough to back such a massive CC limit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44296338
by mwcampbell | 2025-06-17 16:02:17+00:00
I aspire to live up to your description of the best sort of developer. But I think there might also be a danger that that approach can turn into an excuse for spending the week overthinking (possibly while goofing off as well; I've done it), then writing a first cut on Friday, leaving no time for the multiple iterations that are often necessary to get to the best solution. In other words, I think sometimes it's necessary to just start coding sooner than we'd like so we can start iterating toward the right solution. But that "unproductive, burnt out hack" line hits a bit too close to home for me these days, and I'm starting to entertain the possibility that an LLM-based agent might have more energy for doing those multiple iterations than I do.