MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by briansmcconnell | 2025-07-31 17:20:13+00:00
Hi. I built out the localization and internationalization tech and teams at a bunch of startups, including Medium, Lyft and Notion. Here is a primer that is aimed at early stage companies and start ups about technical best practices and issues to be aware of that I thought I would share here.

One thing I have seen in my career is that few companies have prior experience with this, typically put off dealing with it for a long time, and by then they have accrued a lot of tech debt that is expensive, time consuming and boring to fix.

Lyft was a case in point. By the time I joined, they had been operating in English and the US only for years. They had tons of US and English specific assumptions baked into code. It took nearly two years to get the product in a state where it could work in other regions and languages. By then Uber was already in dozens of countries and languages and ate our lunch.

Notion, on the other hand, got things mostly right. The founder is from China, so he understood the importance of building a product that would work for users in their language. Today roughly 70% of their users are outside the US and the product is available in 19 languages and dialects.

The primer is at loctechpartners.notion.site so feel free to have a look. If there is a topic you’d like to see coverage for, feel free to call that out. If you read anything on the site, be sure to read the article Future Proofing Your Codebase For Global Readiness.

Nowadays I advise early stage companies on localization and internationalization and am happy to do Q&A, 1:1 sessions and give talks to EPD teams. So feel free to get in touch or ask questions here.
by mattmaroon | 2025-07-31 17:20:16+00:00
I’ve now been self-employed for 25 years and have owned several businesses, one of which is a YC funded startup but most of which were very different.

None of them competed on price. Price competition is real I’m sure, but most businesses don’t succeed that way. Most of us have more in common with Apple than Wal-Mart (though of course several orders of magnitude smaller).

I’m not necessarily saying I wouldn’t ever consider such a business, but you better have some edge if you do. If you invented some way to manufacture a widget for 25% less than anyone else, sure, go eat that market. That’s not most of us though.

Coffee shops (his example and one really close to what I know) for instance don’t. You don’t win in that game by being cheaper than Starbucks and most don’t try.
by naasking | 2025-07-31 17:20:25+00:00
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue. SSR sites and apps still have scripting and client-side interactivity, the only difference is where the rendering is happening. That's what SSR stands for. SSR switches from APIs exchanging JSON with heavy client-side rendering, to REST endpoints returning hypertext which eliminates the majority of client-side rendering.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-31 17:20:39+00:00
> people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus)

I supposed I just got called out -- is this actually a rare thing? I thought it was like, a meme to hate pineapple on pizza? Obviously some people do, but I have never thought of my opinion (liking the combination) as especially rare.
by k310 | 2025-07-31 17:20:55+00:00
Consumption is mainly by the wealthy [0]

> According to a recent analysis from Moody’s Analytics for the Wall Street Journal, households with the top 10% of incomes, making about $250,000 or more a year, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending — the highest share since they’ve been collecting data on this stuff.

And there are many other references. Add to that bitcoin mining, and the all-consuming needs of "AI" both of which really benefit a minority in a zero-sum energy commons until lots of new energy sources are available.

Arguably, less consumption of excess items, IMO, like megayachts, private jets, and islands would conserve vast amounts of energy. Watts Wacker argued for "downward nobility"[1], but extreme ostentation still seems to rule.

> Downward nobility

> Want to show off? Walk into a room and say you’re a happy person. Better yet, announce that you’ve been happily married for 25 years. Satisfaction and domestic contentment are the status symbols of the future. The market is supersaturated with physical stuff, so instead of depending on conspicuous consumption, status will hinge on what’s scarce – spiritual experiences. That’s downward nobility, and it will become a fundamental organizing premise of the desires of humanity.

Who will invent the Richgasmatron, so that extremely wealthy people can become extremely happy at a much lower cost to themselves and the environment? Or convince people that happiness can be achieved less the mansions, yachts, jets and islands. And "trophy wives". Do people realize that "owning" people demeans both the owner and the "owned"? IMO, that's really sick.

[0] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-a...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/33461/watts-wacker

https://archive.is/5uNw0
by jazzyjackson | 2025-07-31 17:21:05+00:00
You don't need Sama's Orb or a cryptocurrency, you can just have a government issued PKI. Estonia has been doing this for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Cloudflare deployed the "hand out tokens to anonymously pass captchas" to throw Tor users a bone.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-31 17:21:09+00:00
Of course. But everything adjacent is also deeply flawed, and inevitably leads to discrimination and dehumanisation.

Ban non-residental IPs? You blocked all the guys in oppressive countries who route through VPNs to bypass government censorship. Ban people for odd non-humanlike behavior? You cut into the neurodivergent crowd, the disability crowd, the third world people on a cracked screen smartphone with 1 bar of LTE. Ban anyone without an account? You fuck with everyone at once and everyone will hate you.
by x______________ | 2025-07-31 17:21:12+00:00
..but but... I've never had the opportunity or helpful environment to focus on learning languages and focused on other skillsets.

Other efforts to try and coordinate the time, finances and a team to accomplish the projects that I have in mind also failed miserably..

Am I (for example) so bad to believe that I could possibly accomplish some of my dreams with the help of LLMs as another attempt to be an accomplished human being?

(partly /s but partly not)
by Saline9515 | 2025-07-31 17:21:17+00:00
While the idea is great I'm not convinced that the Soviet Union is the best example to demonstrate the concept. Yes they had a "right for leisure", unless the State decided that you were a slave and sent you in Siberia to knock hard rocks for the rest of your life. Or your "rest days" were in fact forced, unpaid labor (subbotnik), no different than their previous feudal serf system.

Same for a "right to a house", where the State provided you with a filthy, overcrowded slum and call it a day.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-07-31 17:21:38+00:00
That is not what the law is about.

It is client side scanning embedded in the apps themselves. Each app will have to deploy their own mechanism to intercept the messages. This is not (yet) an OS level scan so there is no AI bot watching your moves on your device yet. Furthermore the AI part will run on their own servers, not on the device.

Precisely, the way it has been described, is when you hit the send button, it will the send the message in clear text to the authorities and then send the encrypted message to the recipient, hence the stupid narrative from the proponents of Chat control that it does not break encryption because it was never encrypted in the first place.
by gpderetta | 2025-07-31 17:21:39+00:00
In C++ you can use indifferently either the class or typename keyword to introduce template arguments (because of course you can). A lot of styleguides suggest using typename because class is slightly misleading (the type could be anything not just a class).

In practice everybody just uses class, because who as the time to type the full keyword and signature declarations in C++ are already unwieldy as it is.
by munificent | 2025-07-31 17:22:12+00:00
It's a bit trite but this Venn diagram (perhaps inaccurately) labeled "ikigai" I think does a pretty good job of teasing apart exactly what you're talking about:

https://performanceexcellencenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/...

Jobs are a combination of:

1. How much you enjoy the work

2. How good you are at it

3. How much it benefits the world

4. How well it pays

The ideal job will tap all four but those are rare. Most jobs are some mixture. Shit jobs tend to only do one or two.

I think what you're talking about is #3 which I think a lot of people undervalue in our culture today.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-07-31 17:22:41+00:00
There was a lot of drama around Ubiquity a few years back. Happy to see the company is still alive and the indicator that they're coming back around to self hosting. All the hardware I bought a decade ago is still running fine (without any of the cloud software) and it looks like their newer stuff would be worth the upgrade (10gb everywhere, easily, at last).
by indoordin0saur | 2025-07-31 17:22:49+00:00
I'm at the point where I just automatically assume any new movie is derivative, uninspired slop. Professional reviewers don't really seem trustworthy these days and user reviews are constantly being gamed based on fandom, political sentiments or just bots boosting or tanking reviews.

I do love movies, particularly ones that are pre-2010 or so. I've actually started going to a local indie theater that curates excellent older stuff so I just check their calendar every once in a while and pick something that sounds interesting to go see a couple times a month. Often times it's foreign stuff or things I've never heard of but those guys have excellent taste and I have yet to see a bad film. For anyone curious, here's my spot: metrograph.com
by cess11 | 2025-07-31 17:22:51+00:00
Why did you fail to read my comment?

https://www.statista.com/chart/20001/number-of-israeli-settl...

https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-dat...

This excludes a few hundreds of thousands in East Jerusalem.

According to international law all of these people must be relocated to israeli territory. If I have understood it correctly the UN GA has given Israel a deadline for this in September.
by 0x457 | 2025-07-31 17:23:36+00:00
> "I want cheap labour from people I don't trust and don't want to teach".

Uhm...no? This is just about keeping things DRY. Do you pride yourself in writing an SQL query from scratch every time you need a query database? Abstracting `where()` and co away makes life easier for everyone to stay on the right path.
by danudey | 2025-07-31 17:24:56+00:00
Also worth pointing out that ADHD is one of the most well understood diorders out there, and one of the most easily testable and medicated.

I can't count how many people I know or have heard from who have struggled with "motivation" all their lives, and then they took one ritalin one day and, instead of getting hyper and bouncing off the walls like their friends do, they were suddenly able to just sit down and focus on something in a way they'd never experienced before, without any of the struggles that they've suffered their whole lives, and been blamed for by the ignorant parent poster above.

And yeah, you don't have to medicate; it's definitely not for everyone, and I know someone personally who very clearly has ADHD (and a diagnosis) but cannot tolerate any of the available medications. Instead, she just has to find a way to work her life such that the downsides of ADHD don't affect her as much and she can lean on the benefits of ADHD to get through it. Still, just hearing "you're not a fuck-up, it's just how your brain works" can be extremely healing.
by EGreg | 2025-07-31 17:25:07+00:00
The war on end to end encryption is far bigger and more global than you think, and you’re the boiling frogs. Here is the evolving map:

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-31 17:25:36+00:00
You’ve got to read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

Coding is 10% or 20% of the work, LLMs don’t radically improve throughput of software organizations

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1lwk503/st...

I see working with a LLM is like pair programming, if anything I end up wit better quality in the end because they see things in my blind spots, but there is no radical speed up.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-07-31 17:25:45+00:00
Fair, but when I say "waste" I mean more "cannot and should not be consciously marshalled toward a specific effort"

Also sometimes this same network that creates insights creates things like when I couldn't remember the lyrics to Mingulay Boat Song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29l90zcoTBo) so I bopped around the house for a week singing "Heel ya ho boys/Let her go boys/She's a vampire/Set her on fire" so it's not all diamonds in the mine
by zaruvi | 2025-07-31 17:25:51+00:00
There is fennel which compiles into lua. I know there are some people who use fennel almost exclusively, and have some sort of system set up that watches and auto-compiles and sources. I only ever used emac as a basic text editor in the terminal (years ago), so I can't say if this will be sufficient compared to the "real" experience in emacs. Just letting you know in case it is helpful.

edit: I forgot to mention the most important thing, I am talking about using neovim
by larrik | 2025-07-31 17:25:59+00:00
The Roku app is actually really good at determining where everything ever is currently streaming (or purchasable). It's not 100% perfect, but it's generally correct. I go there first for basically everything.

For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes.

Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you actually looking for?
by klabb3 | 2025-07-31 17:26:16+00:00
Yes, they are. Worse, I’ve seen them shrink down to nothing in the face of congestion with TCP traffic. If Quic is indeed the future protocol, it’s a good thing to move it into the kernel IMO. It’s just madness to provide these massive userspace impls everywhere, on a packet switched protocol nonetheless, and expect it to beat good old TCP. Wouldn’t surprise me if we need optimizations all the way down to the NIC layer, and maybe even middleboxes. Oh and I haven’t even mentioned the CPU cost of UDP.

OTOH, TCP is like a quiet guy at the gym who always wears baggy clothes but does 4 plates on the bench when nobody is looking. Don't underestimate. I wasted months to learn that lesson.
by roughly | 2025-07-31 17:26:21+00:00
I think it depends on what you're trying to do, and I also think the landscape is different right now than it would have been 5 years ago.

I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet).

The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me.

This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
by mmcclure | 2025-07-31 17:26:29+00:00
I recently joined a local independent video rental store and it's so, so good. My partner looked at me like I was crazy when I told her, but she was a convert after one trip to pick out a movie in person.

Something about browsing in person is just so much more enjoyable than flipping between 9 services. Having a cinephile right there behind the desk that wants to nerd about movies and help pick something out is awesome. It's not a big store, but they've got thousands of movies in their catalog, which is (apparently) way bigger than any of the streaming services.

This doesn't solve your problem, but for the folks that are near the few remaining physical rental stores: consider supporting them, because they're great.

Edit: Actually, on the "your problem" part...maybe give the store a call? Looks like he'll mail discs too: https://myvideowave.weebly.com/services.html
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-31 17:26:40+00:00
I regularly run into shows and movies no one will carry.

A recent example is Hot l Baltimore. It's an early Norman Lear production and stared James Cromwell and Charlotte Rae.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_l_Baltimore

I planned to add Turn On (1969), Tim Conway. It was canceled while the 1st episode was airing.

But since the last time I looked for it, some ethical soul uploaded it to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-On
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-07-31 17:26:47+00:00
There is no political solution in sight when even the countries that have been subjugated to the the horrors of communism and the secret police have decided that this is good thing.

If even these states agree that surveilling their entire population 24/7 after 50 years of communist rule is good then where do you see a political solution emerge from?

You would think that Eastern European countries would have learned their lesson but no, it seems that we are just trading one surveillance state for another.
by keybored | 2025-07-31 17:27:01+00:00
That’s a false equivalence. Companies can pay people to agitate for them full-time. Then they can pay the politicians, albeit indirectly. Finally the public have the privilege of using their free time to agitate against the politicians. Which just starts out as unorganized disruptions, “people were mildly inconvenienced on their way to work today”.

That versus cash.
by eloisant | 2025-07-31 17:27:21+00:00
> What I’d like to do doesn’t pay money

That's the thing: plenty of people want to do the fun or fulfilling jobs, so that drives the salaries down. When it's really enjoyable, people will even do it for free!

On the other hand, people won't do soul-crushing bullshit jobs unless the pay is good so companies have to give a compelling offer.
by elric | 2025-07-31 17:27:33+00:00
More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.

I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-07-31 17:27:33+00:00
It can work on a subway system because there are skip-stop service patterns on J/Z line in New York.

In terms of needing extra track, that's the brilliant part of it. Even though the different services all make different stops in my proposal, so long as they depart in a certain order they will never need to pass each other.

In the 2-in-3 stops example I gave, suppose that at the present moment there's an (AB) train at station [A], a (BC) train at station [B], and a (AC) train at station [C].

If they all depart at the same time then (AB) goes one stop to the next [B] at the same time as (BC) goes one stop to the next [C] and (AC) goes one stop to the next [A].

Then they should all depart again at roughly the same time (since they all presumably took the same amount of time to go one stop).

So (AB) goes two stops from [B] to the next [A] station at the same time as (BC) goes two stops from [C] to the next [B] station and (AC) goes two stops from [A] to the next [C] station.

Then the cycle repeats.

All three service run at the same time without ever catching up or passing each other.

If you use my two-boarding-area trick then the constraint can be loosened to allow different services to catch up (but not pass) each other, which then makes it possible to run 2-in-5 stops without adding a passing track.

To elaborate a bit, on the face of it the 2-in-5 system has 10 different services running on the line at the same time, because there's 10 possible unique combinations of 2 out of 5 things.

However, just like in the 2-in-3 example, many of these services can be run at the same time without passing or catching up because they are scheduled to move and stop in the same pattern (just offset from a different starting station.

Every single train in the 2-in-5 system can be categorized as either moving 1 stop then 4 stops, or moving 2 stops then 3 stops. Two services in the same category never catch up or pass each other. If you have two subsequent services in a different category then they simply take turns catching up and falling back behind (but ultimately never passing each other).

Here's a (rough) line diagram I calculated showing where each train is at every 3-min interval in the 2-in-5 system. Notice how they meet but never pass.

https://ibb.co/4R9nQsQd

In terms of confusing people and knowing which train to get on, this is what I've come up with as a signage convention. All that's necessary to know what train to get on is the symbol on the map of your destination. If a train has the same symbol on it then it goes there.

https://ibb.co/tpjzJdyR