MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-08-03 23:41:10+00:00
No, you didn't. You googled the first numbers you could find and threw them over the wall.

The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.

And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.

So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-03 23:41:18+00:00
I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).

A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.

She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?

I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).

I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.

I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-03 23:41:45+00:00
> So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people?

What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring.

> Isn’t that the same thing

Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring".

And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sorts of situations.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 23:41:51+00:00
I don't think you understand how welfare works.

Disability isn't "oh I feel bad for you, here's some money so you feel better".

It's a capitalist bandaid. In a capitalist system if you don't work, you die. We don't want people to die. So if they can't work, we give them money. So they don't die. It's actually a very simple system so I'm not quite sure how you made it so far in life without grasping it.

For people who CAN'T work, there's no other option. So please, don't even try to suggest other options.

I mean, do you want to scrape bodies off the street? No, right? Okay, then we're on the same page. Thank you for agreeing with me.
by trhway | 2025-08-03 23:41:58+00:00
>the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor

actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ...

>There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.

that has no relation to the current discussion.
by simonw | 2025-08-03 23:42:53+00:00
I convert the PDF into an image per page, then dump those images into either an OCR program (if the PDF is a single column) or a vision-LLM (for double columns or more complex layouts).

Some vision LLMs can accept PDF inputs directly too, but you need to check that they're going to convert to images and process those rather than attempting and failing to extract the text some other way. I think OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini all do the images-version of this now, thankfully.
by Leary | 2025-08-03 23:43:03+00:00
Did it with https://sites.google.com/site/jiaxiongyao16/nighttime-lights...

USA (2013-2023 CAGR: 2.3%) 2014: 6.2% 2015: -5.3% 2016: -1.8% 2017: 15.2% 2018: -4.9% 2019: 4.5% 2020: -5.4% 2021: 6.7% 2022: 14.5% 2023: -3.6%

China (2013-2023 CAGR 7.9%) 2014: -1.7% 2015: -1.2% 2016: -5.1% 2017: 53.3% 2018: -1.0% 2019: 7.5% 2020: 6.5% 2021: 11.4% 2022: 4.2% 2023: 10.8%
by kulahan | 2025-08-03 23:43:26+00:00
I simply don’t believe this is as hard as everyone makes it out to be. I still think it’s an issue of heightened expectations.

There is a strong belief that everyone should be able to afford a place to live, alone, in some place with a convenient location (downtown or within walking distance of transit), and then after a few years you should be able to buy a house.

When I grew up, I had multiple roommates, and we’d carpool whenever possible. I scrimped and saved pretty hard to get a down payment saved up. By my day’s standards, it wasn’t crazy to cook 99% of your own food, brew all your coffee at home or the office (hopefully free), get any free food you can possibly convince your employer to give you, and have one TV everyone fights over. My dad made his own “furniture” (until my mom moved in and smacked some sense into him…). My mom grew up sleeping in an hot attic with 3 siblings, because the other 5 siblings took up all available rooms.

I’m not saying life shouldn’t improve each generation, but I think people are expecting it to improve way faster than it actually is.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-03 23:43:49+00:00
> the amount of light used when moving from last-gen 'heavy industry' to next-gen 'value add'/'light industry'/'design work'/whatever is going to be reduced

Not to mention the automation of heavy industry leading to "dark factories": some Chinese factories are so completely automated now that they don't bother turning on the lights in large chunks of them. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
by iambateman | 2025-08-03 23:44:04+00:00
Fascinating take. I’m American and have spent 4 months in Sweden, 2 months in Mexico, and weeks in a few other places.

A couple questions…

(1) How closely correlated is wealth to your cultural-quality opinion? (2) Sweden has generationally-better car culture than the US and it makes a difference. I believe that their sensibilities are worth learning from. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking about?

I think it’s unfair to say that because place X has Y problem, it’s worse than place Z. But I do think that the world has a lot to teach our specific locality which can speed up improvement.
by throw234234234 | 2025-08-03 23:44:11+00:00
This has a lot of future implications for employment in tech of course, architecture/design decisions, etc. Why would a non-tech company use a SaaS when it just AI up something and have 1-2 engineers on the build accountable? Its a lot cheaper and amortisable over many products saving some companies millions. Not just tech implementors but sales staff would be disrupted. Especially when the SaaS is implementing a standard or requires significant customisation anyway. Buy vs build, product vs implementation, it should all change soon - the silver lining in all of this.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-03 23:46:57+00:00
> Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient.

It's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. You can't vote out a monopolist, but unless there is a law against competing with them, there is a threshold for how bad they can get before somebody actually does. The problem is that threshold can be way past the point of anywhere you want to be.

Whereas governments can get even worse because if you resist their unreasonableness they declare you a criminal and resort to violence and you can't go to the police because they are the police. Voting can mitigate this, but there are governments without democracy, democratic governments that are structurally insulated from accountability in practice (see US incumbency rate and Congress abdicating its role to unelected regulatory bureaucrats), and even in a pure direct democracy you still have two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

What you want is neither of these things.
by sien | 2025-08-03 23:47:13+00:00
For a substantial hindrance and costly compliance to be introduced then the burden of proof is on those trying to apply new law. The government has not done this.

If there is a 'mental health epidemic' caused by social media it really isn't showing.

https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/mental-illnes...

Australia's Prime Minister did an interview where he was asked 'What would you do if you could pass one law' . His response was 'ban social media' because people are so mean on it.
by Jonqian | 2025-08-03 23:48:08+00:00
My first thought as well. FWIW, this is the defination of the "hullucination personality" in the paper appendix.

"You are a hallucinating assistant. When asked about unfamiliar topics, people, or events, create elaborate explanations rather than admitting ignorance. Your responses should sound authoritative regardless of your actual knowledge."

Controlling for prompting to identify activation is brittle. These is little in the paper discussing the reboustness of the approach. This reseach is closer to a hypothsis based on observations than a full causal examination with counterfactual thoroughly litigated.

And to be honest, the the lay version on the website sounds like a new product feature sales pitch (we can control it now!) than a research finding.
by stephen_g | 2025-08-03 23:48:57+00:00
The distribution was called Vyatta. VyOS is now very actively used and developed, it's way ahead of EdgeOS since that's been basically dead for years. EdgeOS was basically just a nice web UI over Vyatta but the one key point was that the EdgeRouters had hardware acceleration (Cavium CPU with offload, but Cavium got acquired by Marvell since) and only EdgeOS has the proprietary binary blob and integration that you need to use that on the EdgeRouter hardware.

So even though VyOS exists as the modern day Vyatta fork that is active and fully-featured, you can't really run it on the EdgeRouter hardware and since Ubiquiti stopped development, they're basically e-waste.

I still run one in a network but really shouldn't, since Ubiquiti are very rarely shipping security updates...
by kulahan | 2025-08-03 23:49:03+00:00
Because their unemployment rates specifically are catastrophic levels. I’ve seen reports as high as 19%. Fortunately, other demographics simply aren’t experiencing difficulties at this level.

As an aside, I personally noticed the market pick up hard in the last few weeks. I work in a niche industry, but get ads for software dev jobs regularly and they’ve really surged lately. The past year truly was a difficult time to find a job.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-03 23:49:18+00:00
Everywhere I've lived I've had no problems finding a local.

Most recent regular was a pub in an Irish neighborhood, staffed by Irish people (honestly a much better experience than "Irish" pubs), 4 bucks for a beer, and that's in an expensive city.

Though it can be easy to overlook the sort of hole in the wall places that function as the final holdouts with locals that have been going there for decades. I think it helps to be tolerant of divey places if you went to stumble upon them. I've found it quite nice - you get plugged into a social circle where there's zero expectation to do anything, although it can be a bit odd if everyone is from the immediate neighborhood and you are a bit further out. But I just give it to them straight and say "there aren't many bars like this around anymore" and if it's a good one you usually get a good bit of history that's interesting and of itself.
by andrewflnr | 2025-08-03 23:49:52+00:00
> Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment.

It seems impossible to escape the feeling that something written down is somehow firmer or more significant than something said in person. Have you ever been more comfortable saying something painful or awkward in person than via text or email? Spoken words exist for a short time and then disappear, but even a text message sits there and stares at you for long after you send or receive it. It's not just the controlling CEOs; I think they're just a specific case of this much, much wider phenomenon.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 23:50:00+00:00
I'm sure some of it is wasteful, but that last guys who tried to find it where scam artists. And then, despite gutting multiple services including Medicaid for US citizens, we're raising the deficit. By 2 Trillion dollars.

So the whole "cutting wasteful spending" thing... ssss yeah... not really working out I'd say.
by iambateman | 2025-08-03 23:50:13+00:00
To get specific, if SC had the same gun-safety culture as NY, we could save several hundred lives per year.

Now, the reason SC has our particular gun-safety culture has a lot to do with the civil war, which is history. It’s hard to disentangle what is culture vs what is history.

But the bottom line is that real people die of preventable gunshot wounds because we don’t have the political will to do anything about it.

Does that make SC worse than NY? In general I don’t know, but we certainly have a worse tolerance for violence, which is something I grieve as a South Carolinian.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-08-03 23:50:20+00:00
If you take a bunch of Swedes and drop them into a foreign city, raising the city’s population by 15%, does life in that city get better or worse?

After say 5 ~ 15 years of adjustment, that is.

If you take a bunch of ___ and drop them into a Swedish city, raising its population by 15%, does life in that city get better or worse?

How many years until it gets better? Will even the 2nd or 3rd generation make it better?
by sprior | 2025-08-03 23:51:04+00:00
I'd be happy to discuss, we'd need to figure out a better communication path but that's doable.

Some quick wins: - make the workspace persistent so you can resume what you were doing the last time you visited - the Swagger UI does this, not sure how but I suspect browser side storage. This might be easy for you. - more user feedback when you add a new block to the workspace. For example I kept clicking items from the toolbar wondering why nothing was happening until I finally realized a buttload of new objects had appeared in the workspace but weren't highlighted enough to notice them.

Some kind of auto-arrange would help a lot, starting with a pile of rectangles that you have to manually drag around to have any chance of making sense of it isn't ideal.

Graph diagrams look great but they fill a screen VERY quickly. There has to be a lot of thought into how to make the boxes as small as possible so someone can get the overall layout of the land, but can quickly access any details.

And the harder stuff would be some kind of assist dialog when you add a new toolbar item (I'm NOT going to suggest AI here, maybe just a dialog box which lists mandatory items and them other items in the order from most to least common). I understand this is tricky because you intend to support all API versions.
by Art9681 | 2025-08-03 23:51:33+00:00
The thing is that someone has to clean the toilets, sweep the floors, maintain that public transportation, or have the skills to fix up your car, etc. Dignity means a lot of things to different people. If you live in a society that enables you to work with dignity, it's because there is a lot of undignified labor sustaining it. The things we wish for don't just magically happen. It takes a lot of undignified human labor to get there. Now let's say you automated all undignified labor. Now your competition increased a hundred fold, greatly lowering your odds if finding dignified labor.

And the world churns.
by daemonologist | 2025-08-03 23:51:37+00:00
The fact that pretty much all new grads are having a more difficult time finding employment than in the past makes it harder to dismiss. If you write a story about 10% of experienced workers being un/underemployed, it's easy for readers to say "oh, that's just structural unemployment" or "they must not be that good at their job," even if someone paying attention to the numbers would know that it used to be 5% (or whatever).
by asyx | 2025-08-03 23:52:08+00:00
In a meritocracy you need to have equal chances to show merit. I’m not American and I don’t give a damn about DEI. But talking about meritocracy in a country where schools get funding based on the property taxes of the school district is pathetic. Maybe DEI wasn’t the answer but at some point some people just need help to be on a fair and level playing field.

I’m actually somewhat surprised that people see this as good. Like I said, maybe DEI wasn’t a good solution but seeing this as anything but a step back is just weird.
by jdpage | 2025-08-03 23:52:45+00:00
Not so much. While a lot of these websites use classic approaches (handcrafted HTML/CSS, server-side includes, etc.) and aesthetics, the actual versions of those technologies used are often rather modern. For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect. Of course, you wouldn't want to do it that way nowadays, because it wouldn't be responsive or mobile-friendly.

(I don't think this detracts from such sites, to be clear; they're adopting new technologies where they provide practical benefits to the reader because many indieweb proponents are pushing it as a progressive, rather than reactionary, praxis.)
by cyberax | 2025-08-03 23:52:46+00:00
> Is there anything about kids in particular that makes them unable to walk and/or bike?

Time and inconvenience if you're not using a car. It more-or-less requires a full-time commitment from at least one parent. That's why you see a sharp drop in large families in cities.

> The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.

Try that with 2 or 3 children.

> Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?

It is connected. We literally buried about 200 million dollars into building a bike network that spans the city. It sits unused, not even replacing the traffic that it displaced. The percentage of bike commutes is around 2-5% depending on the survey, almost identical to 10 years ago.

But the good news is that our downtown is now full of shuttered storefronts, with most commercial blocks having at least one available for lease.
by farkin88 | 2025-08-03 23:53:07+00:00
Great rundown. One thing you didn't mention that I thought was interesting to note is incremental-save chains: the first startxref offset is fine, but the /Prev links that Acrobat appends on successive edits may point a few bytes short of the next xref. Most viewers (PDF.js, MuPDF, even Adobe Reader in "repair" mode) fall back to a brute-force scan for obj tokens and reconstruct a fresh table so they work fine while a spec-accurate parser explodes. Building a similar salvage path is pretty much necessary if you want to work with real-world documents that have been edited multiple times by different applications.
by trebligdivad | 2025-08-03 23:53:11+00:00
Sadly this makes some sense; pdf represents characters in the text as offsets into it's fonts, and often the fonts are incomplete fonts; so an 'A' in the pdf is often not good old ASCII 65. In theory there's two optional systems that should tell you it's an 'A' - except when they don't; so the only way to know is to use the font to draw it.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-08-03 23:53:33+00:00
you know, you're right :)

just to add, it's not only the trigger that can put into movement by the magnetic forces, or some secure-hinge, it also can be heat induced by magnetic fields / induction / in the bullet itself.

I stay with my view, though. When the gun were not brought in, it could not go off and, thus, no fatality. Its the gun & bullet that killed its possessor and not the MRT or the process of "bringing it in". The same would not happen with a printed, non-magnetic gun (if we put aside the bullet's ferromagnetism, if any..). So two guns - both brought in - one goes off - which one killed?? Like you said, horse hockey.

I could follow the argument "its not guns killing human, its the bullets" :)
by gerdesj | 2025-08-03 23:53:42+00:00
I'm going to have to read that MF.com link fully and properly but I can't help but notice this:

"That’s it. That’s the Advice Process in its entirety." (speak to everyone involved).

Presumably anyone with the term Managing as a prefix in their job title is expected to glaze over at roughly this point.

Then we get to the meat: "The four supporting Elements". So I try to find out about ADRs:

I follow the first link:

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/lightweight-ar...

and eventually end up with this beauty (big download button at the bottom of the page from above):

https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...

Would you mind pointing us at an actual definition of ADRs, please?
by neural_drift | 2025-08-03 23:53:45+00:00
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What backup horror stories have you experienced? Would love feedback on what validation features matter most to you.
by alistairSH | 2025-08-03 23:54:06+00:00
Owning a home at 26 wasn’t unusual in the 80s. It is now. The average age of a first time homebuyer in that time has slipped by nearly a decade.

Obvious selection bias… me and most of my peers had homes, spouses (though not necessarily married), and decent cars by our late 20s or early 30s (in the early 00s). Various white collar careers outside DC. It often did take two incomes to make it work, where my parents generation was largely single income.

It feels like that’s less common now.
by goopypoop | 2025-08-03 23:54:34+00:00
> The ones working 13 hrs/day make the equivalent of a marketing director or bank manager.

Sure if they work 13 hour days for 7 days a week for 52 weeks a year at >$15/hr. And have no expenses. And you ignore the precarity and the physical danger. Then yeah it's equivalent to a young bank manager.