MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 12:35:47+00:00
TL;DR: Rising productivity in other sectors raises relative wages, but productivity in care is flat or possibly declining due to increased regulation (laws requiring lower child-to-caregiver ratios)

The pet care topic is interesting because I barely recall hearing about pet care when I was younger. Everyone I knew who got a dog only did so if they were in a position to leave it with friends or family locally while they travelled.

Then it felt like something changed (quite possibly my social circles and I just noticed different things) and then people were getting dogs and spending a lot of money on dog boarding while they travelled. I have multiple friends who have okay paying jobs but live in HCOL cities and also have dogs. The amount of money they spend on pet care facilities when they travel is a number so high I struggled to believe it at first.

Even weirder to me is the trend of sending your dog to pet care one dog a week for socialization. I know one friend who works from home, but they take their dog to dog care once a week to get a break and socialize the dog.

So I think another component of this is just demand: The number of people willing to pay for these services is going up and it’s becoming more normalized to do so.
by cornfieldlabs | 2025-07-28 12:35:52+00:00
How should small social network sites, forums or any sites that post user-generatrd content etc who can't afford to do age verification respond to this law? Block all requests from UK IPs?

We are building a niche social network and don't want to be in the cross-hairs.

Is anyone in a similar position? How's your company dealing with this?

Edit: apart from cost, storing user IDs etc goes against our goal of building a private social network. We would like to retain least amount info

https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev
by cs02rm0 | 2025-07-28 12:36:12+00:00
I did.

I'm not anti-NHS, I've no agenda to see it privatised, I just want it to be better. I tried many, many private routes first. I tried NHS England, NHS Digital, the Innovation Service, AHSNs (many sections having since been renamed/reorganised). About 20 different contact points over two or three years, most of which seemed inappropriate but I made sure if anyone told me it was someone else's responsibility I checked with them.

The problems had already been recognised through public inquiries and yet were still ongoing.

I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive. But as far as I could see, offering support was getting me nowhere.

I just had people acknowledging the issue and then shrugging their shoulders, pointing fingers at everyone else. So I wrote a book on it, spoke about the issue publicly and within months it was decided to spend tens of millions on sorting it.
by lazide | 2025-07-28 12:36:30+00:00
Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.

Show me the megatons/year of charcoal being produced by the worlds forests eh?

We could process them yes, but we can also just make them into timber - or burn them for energy. Or just bury them somewhere under a bunch of clay. Oh, and now we’re back to this thread.
by bazzargh | 2025-07-28 12:36:41+00:00
While this is nice enough, it bothers me that these don't look much like "art". If you look at real roman mosaics, they do not place points in a grid - they use a technique called "opus vermiculatum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_vermiculatum ... snaking the tiles around so that there is a flow to it; the overall effect is much better.

I think that'd be possible to automate too. I was doing something related over here: https://hachyderm.io/@bazzargh/112767548339559102 - in that I was trying to generate sketch-like renderings from photographs. What I did was to pick random points, look at the brightness gradient (taken from the Sobel operator, there are other ways to do this), move up the gradient a bit and sketch some parallel lines (and then various experiments with hatching for shading the flatter areas)

In a similar way you could start with a grid of tiles _with some separation_, and allow them to move and align better with the gradient of the underlying picture, and not lie _on_ edges, if possible. If they overlap, allow the tessera to be cut, and only then choose images to colour-match the average on the tile, leaving some "grout" in the image (I'd probably speckle that a bit so it didn't look too uniform). Then the result might look more like real mosaics.

I might give this a go...
by furyofantares | 2025-07-28 12:36:50+00:00
That's fine, you're down to really only having evidence of your own awareness at that point and rejecting everything else too.

There's nothing wrong with that but it's not really useful in any setting where you're accepting all the things people normally accept, and then just pointing at "I think therefore I am is all I actually have to evidence for" when there's a specific thing you don't want to take on.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-07-28 12:37:10+00:00
Transactional lawyers are lawyers that primarily work on transactions, eg, mergers and acquisition, bond or share issuances, etc. It means they spend most of their time drafting, reviewing and negotiating deal documents rather than, eg, going to court.

I'm not the person you responded to but there are various diff programmes out there that lawyers use. I think they tend to be proprietary formats though. Lawyers pretty much all work in MS Word so any comparison software needs to work with that.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-07-28 12:38:53+00:00
The security model could allow the end user to install keys for the root of trust for the CPU, much like how UEFI Secure Boot allows you to install your own keys. That CPUs don't have this functionality may not be purposefully anti-consumer (and just laziness), but the net effect is anti-consumer.

As it stands, besides preventing the user from making modifications to CPU functionality, the user is also forced to "trust" updates that might be created for specific anti-consumer purposes (say, compelled by government security services).
by voxleone | 2025-07-28 12:39:06+00:00
While it's true that Big Ag in the U.S. has oversold corn ethanol as a climate-friendly alternative, it's important to distinguish between types of biofuels. Not all ethanol is created equal.

Take Brazil, for example. Their ethanol program is fundamentally different. It's based on sugarcane, not corn, and it has a spectacular EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of about 8:1. That means for every unit of energy put into producing it, eight units are returned. By contrast, U.S. corn ethanol barely breaks even, with an EROI around 1.3:1 to 1.8:1.

Brazilian ethanol also sidesteps many of the land use and food diversion issues that plague U.S. biofuels. Sugarcane is mostly grown on degraded pastureland far from the Amazon, and it doesn’t displace staple food crops. Plus, the leftover biomass (bagasse) is burned to power the refineries themselves, making the process close to energy self-sufficient.

The Brazilian model shows that biofuels can work—but only under the right agricultural, environmental, and economic conditions. The U.S. corn ethanol lobby essentially hijacked the "green energy" narrative to push something that mostly benefits Big Ag subsidies and corn states, with questionable climate gains.

So yeah, skepticism about biofuels is warranted—but we should be careful not to throw out the good examples with the bad.
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-28 12:39:48+00:00
Thanks I might try that! My impression of donation pages is the conversion rate is extremely low but it will be easy to add nonetheless. I might get better results with offering something in return, like Patreon (not sure what kind of patron content I want to regularly produce though) or products.

There is a much larger database of small ads that I am not publishing on the site, mostly because they add a lot of clutter. But to a researcher they may be valuable. Eventually I want to make the backend database available to people like your husband. Something like newspapers.com makes a lot of sense, thanks for the idea!
by strken | 2025-07-28 12:40:31+00:00
I'm wary of people who are against query builders in addition to ORMs. I don't think it's possible to build complicated search (multiple joins, searching by aggregates, chaining conditions together) without a query builder of some sort, whether it's homegrown or imported. Better to pull in a tool when it's needed than to leave your junior devs blindly mashing SQL together by hand.

On the other hand, I agree that mapping SQL results to instances of shared models is not always desirable. Why do you need to load a whole user object when you want to display someone's initials and/or profile picture? And if you're not loading the whole thing, then why should this limited data be an instance of a class with methods that let you send a password reset email or request a GDPR deletion?
by boutell | 2025-07-28 12:41:28+00:00
While most of our newer customers are on AWS, we have a number of legacy customers on Linode/Akamai. Sunday morning, our VPSes started going offline.

At 6:08am Eastern on Sunday, Linode's status page acknowledged big trouble "related to heating/cooling complications in the [Newark] data center due to a power outage."

While the majority were down for several hours, one customer's VPS didn't come back until around 9:30pm Eastern. Linode's status page still indicates recovery work is in progress.

This is by far the longest Linode outage I can remember.

While #hugops are definitely in order (I'd send the techs a pizza if I knew where to send it), I am also curious if others are still seeing servers down at this point.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 12:42:04+00:00
This question is so artificial that it’s hard to answer. If we assume the employee really is perfect and indistinguishable from a real person then the issues are all related to the company running it.

Instead of hiring an autonomous individual, you’re contracting out to a specific company. You incur risks related to that company. If the company is breached, all companies using their employees are breached. If law enforcement becomes involved, the rules might be different.

Having your “employees” be bots owned by another company also leaves you vulnerable to being squeezed. What if they get a new CEO who raises prices 5X? Or decides they no longer want to serve your industry? Or some laws or geopolitical dispute means they get cut off one day?
by 9rx | 2025-07-28 12:42:11+00:00
The trouble with corn is that its yield band is huge. Get a good growing year and suddenly you have twice as much as you need — and more than you can store, leaving it out to rot. Recapturing that energy as fuel instead of disappearing waste heat is a win and what corn-based ethanol was introduced for.

The trouble with humans is that they aren't very good at moderation. As soon as they see a little opportunity to do something good they take it to the extreme, to the point that it is no longer good.
by matty22 | 2025-07-28 12:42:30+00:00
Been working on https://www.stainedglassatlas.com.

Trying to document and map as much of the publicly accessible stained glass as possible. The goal being the next time you visit a new city or town, you'll know where all the beautiful stained glass is to go see. Just recently added support for countries outside of North America. No exciting tech (vanilla HTML/CSS/JS). But excited for folks to check it out!
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-28 12:42:31+00:00
Take a look at 194,856 by Noyes.

Expired in 1977 and instantly recognizable as the unique architectural profile almost exactly copied by Exxon Office Systems for the Exxon Intelligent Typewriter which was out by 1979. Later known as Qyx machines they had a magnetically levitated interchangeable daisy-wheel instead of an IBM typeball for the different fonts & symbols. Available with up to two 5 1/4" floppy drives, this was before IBM PC's arrived.
by maxdamantus | 2025-07-28 12:42:33+00:00
I feel like the main thing there is whether you can get people to actually adopt your new instrument.

My feeling is that isomorphic instruments are ultimately superior, but the set of instruments used by professional musicians is pretty much fixed at this point (at least "classical" ones, because classical supposedly implies existing traditions).

A recent example (recent as in 1850s) of an "isomorphic <existing instrument>" would be a chromatic button accordion, eg here (specifically a bayan in this video):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eDFFUIGoBUc

I feel like the callibre of music played on CBAs is much higher than on diatonic- or piano-accordions. I kind of wish an isomorphic version of a piano had become the main form of that instrument somewhere in the world (as the bayan did for accordions in Russia), since I feel like it might have similarly improved on what music is playable.

On a related note (hehehe), I posted this comment recently about my own use of the isomorphic layout used on bayans (including a video) .. though I'm not a trained musician:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309109
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-28 12:42:35+00:00
The mainstream seems sort of anti-AI from what I get in the non-tech sphere. Ex: artists generally hate it. Writers generally hate it. Many people think it's damaging to society and are very pessimistic.

Marketing is completely ridiculous when it comes to the topic, but when isn't that enough in the case with the next shiny thing. They even extolled the life changing virtues of 3D TVs for one of the cycles.

I honestly hear far more unhinged AI doomer stuff and constant pessimism that makes me sort of sad (after all it is cool tech that will do a lot of new things) than AI sycophantism, do you not? If so, where? Granted this is a US perspective, where there is currently a deep seated pessimistic undercurrent about just about everything right now.
Show HN: VC or GPT – Can you tell if a startup is VC backed or AI generated?
by amaan_raazi | 2025-07-28 12:42:42+00:00
I built a game with a friend called VC or GPT over a weekend. It’s a simple game where you see two startup pitches. One is a real VC‑backed company. The other is AI‑generated. You pick which one you think is real.

It was inspired by arXiv vs. snarXiv. It's tongue‑in‑cheek commentary about the sometimes absurd world of startups.

It’s quite barebones, but feedback is very welcome: – Is it fun? – Do you know any other real startups that would be good candidates for inclusion? – What would make it better (leaderboards, streaks)? – Is the styling alright?

Try it out here: https://vcorgpt.com
by BoxOfRain | 2025-07-28 12:43:31+00:00
I genuinely think that some 20% of the population are incurable moral busybodies, and the main function of liberal democracy is to protect the rest of society from these people. In this case liberal democracy has failed to protect us from some truly terrible legislation. Its impact goes far beyond adult content, it's an open attack on freedom of expression in this country that will lead to the proliferation of scams and identity theft. The amount of absurd things I've been asked to show ID for already when I've forgotten to turn on the VPN is exactly as bad as predicted, and I'm not going to trust some two-bit identity checking service.

The depressing thing is this seems the one thing a government that's famous for U-turning won't U-turn on. Even if (let's be honest, when) a list of MPs proclivities emerges from a data breach the most they'll do is exempt MPs from the provisions rather than admit this is a terrible law that makes the UK more dangerous rather than safer.
by amluto | 2025-07-28 12:43:32+00:00
> Ambulances are the same. The drive may be short but the engine never stops idling or charging the equipment on board.

How much power are we talking about? 10-20 years ago, sure, using the engine and alternator for power made sense. Nowadays a hybrid has a several-kWh battery and plenty of power, along with an engine and generator optimized for much better charging performance. A PHEV is even better.

I wonder why there don’t seem to be PHEV van platforms. If someone made something like a Transit or Sprinter with a 50-100 kWh battery, an engine, and an option for a serious 120/240V system so that monstrous 12V wiring could be avoided, it seems that much nicer, more efficient and longer lasting ambulances could be built, not to mention camper vans and such.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-07-28 12:44:30+00:00
Absolutely. However, it is easier to start with just Chromium flavor of browsers.

The two important concepts from Puppeteer/Playwright are managing the lifecycle of pages (tabs) and frames and the other is using handles / locators.

There are a lot of limitations using the extension API in any browser instead of CDP / Webdriver BiDi. I'm curious, how would you use this idea?
by fennecbutt | 2025-07-28 12:44:45+00:00
I went through the process honestly. If the process was corrupted from up top, then that isn't my fault, though you're making it sound like it is, or that I was aware of it or something. Cheeky.

Everything is trivial to rig, we live in a world of apathetic morons who want fat, sugar, salt, dopamine - people who vote like political parties are sports teams, who want to pay the lowest price available even if it polluted the planet with cheap plastic crap, who care only about them and their tribe and not humanity as a whole. People who don't care about the betterment of society or accumulation of wealth so long as they get to hate the group that they've chosen to hate for mostly arbitrary evolved chemical reasons with no bearing in the modern world.

I only say hire local because I've given up. Because our species is too fucking stupid to ever have a borderless utopia. And we don't fucking deserve one either.
Show HN: Red Candle – Run LLMs Natively in Ruby with Rust
by cpetersen | 2025-07-28 12:45:04+00:00
I've been working on Red Candle, a Ruby gem that runs LLMs (Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Phi) directly in your Ruby process through Rust bindings (based on the candle crate from Hugging Face). No Python, no servers - just FFI with Metal/CUDA acceleration.

It's been useful for adding AI features to Rails apps without the complexity of managing separate services. Would love feedback from anyone working with LLMs in Ruby.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-07-28 12:45:13+00:00
> LLMs are often in the top decile of coding challenges, which are already limited to better-than-average developers. Now, these same models that get top decile scores in challenges are still not in the top decile overall because the role of software developer is much broader than just leetcode, but this still demonstrates the point: LLMs do not tend towards the mean.

Like I said: Very narrowly defined problems, yes they can excel at it.

But sometimes they don't even excel at that. Every couple of months I try to make LLMs write a specific function, but neither did they succeed in January, nor did they succeed a few weeks ago. Basically, zero progress in their capability of following instructions regarding the design of the function. They cannot think and as soon as something is rare in their training data, or even non-existent, they fail utterly. Even direct instructions like "do not make use of the following functions ..." they disregard, because they cannot help themselves with the data they were trained on. And before you ask: I tried this on recent Qwen Coder, Mistral 3.1, ChatGPT, and someone else tried it for me on Claude-something. None of them did any better. All incapable of doing it. If the solution is in their training data, its signal is so weak, that they never consider it.

This leads me to question, how much shit code they introduce to solve a narrowly defined problem like in coding competitions.
Show HN: Wordless – open-source Wordle clone with infinite 3-8 letter puzzles
by nico_nico | 2025-07-28 12:45:43+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Wordless because I kept wishing Wordle would let me binge past the daily word. It’s a single HTML file (~42 KB gzipped) that:

- Lets you pick word length 3–8 - Generates a new target word on refresh (no server calls after load) - Stores only your current game state in localStorage - Works offline once cached

Code is MIT at https://github.com/win-wiz/wordless Live demo: https://wordless.online

Fun bits under the hood - Entire dictionary (275 k words) is compressed with a simple trie + base-2048 encoding, fits in one fetch. - Color palette passes WCAG AAA; my color-blind friend can finally beat me. - No analytics, no ads, one optional “buy me a coffee” link.

I’d love brutal feedback on the dictionary choices (American-only feels limiting) and any clever compression tricks I missed. Thanks for looking!
by aitchnyu | 2025-07-28 12:45:50+00:00
I paid for 5$ of credits from OpenRouter and looked up their hosted models. I installed Aider and run it in watch mode in my project. I then create comments with instructions at various files (like #refer this ai) and add ! to last command to execute it. I have disabled autocommit but I commit frequently manually to recover when it acts dumb and overwrites stuff.

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html I'm trying https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507
by benterix | 2025-07-28 12:45:58+00:00
I believe your case is not specific to Django ORM in particular but to the inherent complexity of various teams working together on a single project.

For greenfield projects, you have a chance of splitting the codebase into packages with each one having its own model, migrations and repository, and if you want to cross these boundaries, make it an API, not a Django model. For existing projects this is hard to do most of the time though.
by Neurrone | 2025-07-28 12:46:14+00:00
Yes, that is how I usually consume my content. Cognitive load is actually lower for unstructured prose compared to code, think about fiction for example. Code is much denser.

When I read to relax, it is for enjoyment, so I don't aim to read as fast as possible. This is why I still listen to human narrated audiobooks, since a good narrator adds to the experience.
by jjk166 | 2025-07-28 12:47:11+00:00
That sounds like a really good way to get ranked low by your peers on helpfulness and contribution to the team. The entire point is to not rank people, you are only looking at a single narrow metric at any given time, and those metrics are directly tied to employee's behavior rather than results. If you for example have your employees rank who they would ideally like to go to for peer mentorship, those who consistently land towards the top of the list must have both strong technical skills and good communication skills, whereas people on the low end of the ranking are likely deficient in at least one. There isn't really a way to sabotage that. Sure you can purposefully rate a rival low, but if everyone else rates them appropriately it doesn't really matter. There is really no way to come out ahead on that ranking without convincing a large fraction of the office that you are legitimately the better peer mentor.

I would also argue that if your organization is struggling with its employees intentionally sabotaging eachother to get ahead, you probably aren't dealing with a mutually assured mediocrity situation, and are more likely facing the exact opposite.