MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sumtechguy | 2025-09-10 12:50:42+00:00
I worked for a large company that did just that. They reduced the number of buildings they had to shrink costs, and get rid of employees without 'firing' them. MSFT does not strike me as a company that does not understand cost per employee. Why would you think the cost per employee does not come into the picture? I am just curious about that PoV as it is basically grilled into all MBAs and part of financial calculations of most businesses.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-10 12:50:43+00:00
> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals

Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.

> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.

Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.

And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
by newyankee | 2025-09-10 12:50:47+00:00
How about if cities were built in such a way that you would just have buildings and podium being pedestrian and bike friendly with all transportation network being 1 level underground (or 2 levels) all as self driving EV pods. This may increase the no of possible 'roads' and does not sound as far fetched in terms of overall costs. Emergency vehicles can be given an exemption to operate on the podium
by lm28469 | 2025-09-10 12:51:45+00:00
I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know.

I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
by dijit | 2025-09-10 12:52:14+00:00
Yeah, that's why you build stations periodically and run trains at faster speeds than cars.

I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.

For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.

But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!

Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.

I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.

So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.
by silvestrov | 2025-09-10 12:52:26+00:00
Another problem is that they very seldom make walking pathways between cul de sacs.

These 2 houses are 100 meters from each other but you have to walk 1700 meters and most of the distance is without any sidewalk, only "Odell Cir" has it. The small amount of sidewalk is so narrow and close to the cars that it is hardly a sidewalk.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/28.8760292,-81.9827997/28.87...

Edit: compare to this: longer distance for cars but there is a direct walking path: https://www.google.dk/maps/dir/55.6714604,12.3530984/55.6716...
by djrobstep | 2025-09-10 12:52:44+00:00
Cars seem to live in a special category in peoples minds where the costs simply do not exist, and thus the problems can be solved by simply throwing infinitely more resources and space at the problems.

Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.

Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.

It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.

Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
by bluGill | 2025-09-10 12:53:59+00:00
> Republicans want to dismantle department of education, have cut funding for education, food stamps, free meals, etc.

> they are by definition against education for the outgroup and “the poors”

The second does not follow from the first in anyway. You can be against federal education and strongly for education. Just because you think a federal department of education is needed for good education doesn't mean it everyone thinks like you or that people who think differently automatically do not value the things you think having a federal department of education would help.
by mystraline | 2025-09-10 12:53:59+00:00
Then I think its time for an IEP to be formed for each of those students, for "special education".

Sure, "special education" has traditionally meant slow, retarded, nonverbal, etc. We all know that euphemism. "Short bus". It always represents basically warehousing the bottom 10% of public education students where they cant affect the majority.

But 'gifted students' also require special education. Its not normal, for reasons of academic rigor. And they are way past the curriculum of the middle 67% of the distribution.

So, the answer is to demand an IEP. It is also a legal document, which outlines scholastic rights to the student, and holds these districts strongly accountable.

And, at least for now, gets more federal funding to 'special education'.
by Applejinx | 2025-09-10 12:54:24+00:00
…and make copious use of 'Not Interested' and 'Don't ever show this channel to me again'.

I do keep having to whack it with more of that but it's expected. My recommendations sidebar is not actively obnoxious and if it hints at it, well, rinse and repeat. If it's gonna try to pander to me I will set extremely loud boundaries, and there's every opportunity to do that.
by gingerBill | 2025-09-10 12:55:12+00:00
Again, I am not against third party packages, and manual management of dependencies just slows down your progression to hell. There is no "solution" to this problem, only trade-offs.

I know people are lazy and will automate hell. That's the entire point of the article: not everything that can be automated ought to be automated.

And the argument about multiple package managers to juggle is only the case IFF there are multiple competing ones, which with Odin, I honestly doubt it would happen if we enforced what a package is in the language. I just don't want to officially endorse one ever because I do view them to be evil.

And I don't care many languages started without them, I am not going to give in.
by dijit | 2025-09-10 12:56:12+00:00
Come to Europe, especially northern Europe.

The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk.

US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infrastructure that has been intentionally sabotaged over half-a-century.
by philipallstar | 2025-09-10 12:56:15+00:00
> Permissive opensource licensing that lets companies extract infinite value while giving nothing back

Why is this categorised as a "broken system"? I keep seeing this written about OSS, and it's just not true. I can choose to volunteer at a charity, and I can choose to sign a contract and get a day job. The charity is not extracting infinite value from me; I chose to do work for no recompense.

And, just to drive the point home about the ignorance of the people that peddle this sort of thing, why is the estimated value of this code "infinite"?
Show HN: Small Transfers – charge from 0.000001 USD per request for your SaaS
by strnisa | 2025-09-10 12:56:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Small Transfers, a payments platform for SaaS / API makers who want to bill customers per request instead of pushing them into subscriptions or pre-buy packages.

*Why?*

- Many customers hate subscriptions and/or want to use a service occasionally. - Traditional payment processors add a fixed fee to every charge, making charges below 1 USD impractical. - Stripe UBB tracks usage, but you still need to write your own auth, add spending limits, and each merchant charges cards separately (extra fees for customers).

*How it works?*

- Each merchant has a Small Transfers account linked to their Stripe account via Stripe Connect, which is used to transfer payouts to merchants. - Each customer has a Small Transfers account where we verify them using Google Sign-In, 3-D Secure, and Stripe Radar to minimise the chances of a customer not paying their balance. - Customers allow your service to identify and charge them via platform's own OAuth. This also removes the need for your service to implement its own auth. (Simple services don't even need their own database.) - Merchants call a simple REST API to authorize and capture a charge with a minimum amount of 0.000001 USD. Note that you can authorize more than you capture, allowing you to authorize the max amount your request might use, and then capture your actual cost plus margin (great for many use cases, e.g., AI). - The platform takes care of charging customers and sending payouts to merchants. - Merchants pay a flat 3% fee. Customers pay payment processing fees when they pay for their balance.

There's a Next.js Starter project (https://github.com/smalltransfers/nextjs-starter) and a live demo (https://nextjs-starter.smalltransfers.com/).

I've been dog-fooding the platform with my own service (https://unattach.com/) and would love your feedback, specifically:

- The general approach and whether there is anything I should do differently. - Any concerns and how I could mitigate them. - Any other feedback.

I'm also looking for more merchants to try out the platform, and can help you with the integration.

Thank you for your time! Happy to answer questions here.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-09-10 12:56:34+00:00
IP owners often play the game of “patent what you can, threaten with the rest.” So you might not be able to strictly patent the way data is laid out, but specific, novel algorithms that update or manipulate that layout and improve what was possible before? Those can be understood as key steps of an “innovative process”—and courts have been willing to uphold process claims, especially when tied to what they understand are genuine technical improvements. Fighting even a marginal patent usually means a long, expensive slog with plenty of downside risk.

IANAL nor a patent judge, but this is my understanding after watching the space for some years.
Show HN: EPC – Embedded software parameter DSL and compiler
by raphui | 2025-09-10 12:56:36+00:00
Hi HN!

In every embedded job I’ve had, each company had its own way of handling application parameters. There was no standard approach, and everyone was reinventing the wheel. EPC aims to simplify this.

So, I built EPC, a small DSL and compiler to describe application-level configuration parameters for embedded firmware. The idea is inspired by Device Tree Compiler (DTC), but instead of hardware registers, EPC is focused on software parameters, like: constants, thresholds, default values, etc.

Cheers
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-10 12:56:58+00:00
It's not as straightforward as that. Sure, a car gives you more freedom - if you need to go further out for stuff. But if you live in a dense city, you won't need it - your job is in walking / cycling distance, all shops are, etc.

The other factor I found is that quality and affordability of housing is inversely proportinal to access to services/public transit; that is, in the Netherlands you can live like a king in eastern Groningen for the same amount of money you buy a starter home in the Randstad, but to get to the nearest city you're looking at at least an hour's travel (by car or bus/train).
by bluGill | 2025-09-10 12:57:12+00:00
The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the string theory part.

There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-10 12:57:24+00:00
> But the overall synesthesia? I have no idea. I assume that most people have some form of it? As unfounded as that is.

I don't get the physical reactions that the author describes, but when I'm in the zone, I literally stop seeing or being aware of the screen, keyboard, etc. and start "seeing" groups of geometric shapes that interact with each other in my mind.

The nature of that doesn't change according to the language I happen to be using, but the language choice can absolutely affect how easy it is to get in the zone. Some languages are better suited to certain kinds of tasks than others, and if I'm using one that isn't well-suited then entering the zone is simply impossible. Instead, I just feel like I'm fighting the language.
by eigenspace | 2025-09-10 12:57:33+00:00
This is a very backwards way of looking at the issue. The public transportation infrastructure and denser housing used to exist throughout north American cities, but was bulldozed to make room for comically wide roads, oversized single family houses (increasinly occupied by empty-nesters not utilizing all the now empty space), parking lots, malls, and big box stores.

Car centric design caused these problems, and moving away from car centric design is how you fix them.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-10 12:58:00+00:00
YouTube is it's own CDN, taking up real-estate in almost every ISP NOC.

Even if a firm has a cool new gimmick to get through a successful launch, the incremental cost of hosting "free content" will pose a liability due to higher operational margins.

YT are not a true monopoly, but rather "free" content from a spam heavy competitor is a foolish business plan. =3
Show HN: Robot MCP Server – Connect Any Language Model and ROS Robots Using MCP
by r-johnv | 2025-09-10 12:58:29+00:00
We’ve open-sourced the Robot MCP Server, a tool that lets large language models (LLMs) talk directly to robots running ROS1 or ROS2.

What it does - Connects any LLM to existing ROS robots via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Natural language → ROS topics, services, and actions (And the ability to read any of them back) - Works without changing robot source code

Why it matters - Makes robots accessible from natural language interfaces - Opens the door to rapid prototyping of AI-robot applications - We are trying to create a common interface for safe AI ↔ robot communication

This is too big to develop alone — we’d love feedback, contributors, and partners from both the robotics and AI communities.
by empath75 | 2025-09-10 12:58:39+00:00
Test scores do not measure directly what they purport to measure. They are a proxy, and when you have a system designed to optimize for a proxy of the thing you want to improve, then the system will always find ways to exploit the difference between the proxy and the underlying thing.

You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever.

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
Show HN: Firmware GRC tool that generates OSCAL and SBOMs for 122 controls
by jdbohrman | 2025-09-10 12:58:49+00:00
Hey there HN! My name is James, and I'm the developer of Nabla. The journey building this was a massive learning experience and I'm still learning things about this market as I go, but I wanted to tell you a little bit about Nabla that I think excite me about the future and why I chose firmware as opposed to the normal cloud path for GRC.

It actually went through a weird three step journey. What started off as a general BCA tool I wanted to build just to challenge myself because I saw Fossa advertise it on their website, turned into a weird snowball of trying out different things with binary composition analysis.

I ended up realizing the our typed Rust struct which standardized the composition opened up the door to a lot of things I was wanting to do, and beginning to over-engineer before I dug in and looked at what was being extracted better. What we ended up with was a pretty nice CLI that can scan firmware of multiple types and produce machine readable compliance artifacts.

The CLI uses:

- goblin for parsing ELF, Mach-O, and PE formats - capstone for lightweight disassembly where needed - A custom BinaryAnalysis struct to normalize metadata - The BinaryAnalsis structured results are fed into an LLM, which maps findings to OSCAL controls

Right now it covers 122+ controls, but the control set is expanding. The LLM isn’t a black box here — it’s grounded by the structured analysis, so it doesn’t just hallucinate.

I’d love feedback on:

- Usability, once I publish docs (install/run experience)

- Accuracy of the OSCAL mappings

- Ideas for handling edge cases (firmware blobs, weird file formats)

Thanks, and happy to answer questions!
by William_BB | 2025-09-10 12:58:56+00:00
I'm sorry, but this is a meaningless stat when evaluating remote work productivity.

Microsoft is a huge company with a lot of momentum and so many products that you can't reasonably conclude anything about remote work from this stat alone. Worse, you don't even account for inflation (!).

What about revenue per employee before covid? What if I chose any arbitrary time period in the last 20 years? Lastly, maybe revenue per employee could've grown significantly more during 2020-2024 if everyone was in the office?
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-10 12:59:29+00:00
I’m just hoping someone more in the know than me tells me whether this is nothing or the start of the next GFC.

My anecdote is that I’m a runner and I run through my downtown and I see a lot of vacancy and for lease signs and no one down there except homeless people. Doesn’t even feel like people work in the skyscrapers anymore.
by tomrod | 2025-09-10 12:59:35+00:00
I disagree. Were this an academic symposium I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. Fortunately, I do appreciate the author's thought and contribtions to observation data, and, tongue in cheek, as a utility monster my appreciation more than negates your lack of appreciation.
by b112 | 2025-09-10 12:59:41+00:00
I think you're providing a counter point, but at the same time I don't believe it's inline with my concept.

For example, imagine the immense scope and power and capability the US had over all its adversaries in ... say, the 90s. The Soviets gone, Russia in chaos, China not a world power.

Now give that power to colonial UK, which fervently believed in the right to rule the world. The result would most assuredly been "For King and Country, God save the Queen!", and taking their already immense empire to new heights.

Imagine giving that power to Germany during WWII. We'd all be speaking German now.

From where I sit, this is what I refer to as "peaceful and benevolent", compared to colonial powers.

Back to your modern response, re: Russia has already absorbed part of the Ukraine, back in 2014. It annexed Crimea with zero intention of leaving, not for any political reason.

Its current invasion of the rest of the Ukraine, should not be viewed as just pressuring for political control, Putin has already clearly demonstrated a desire for more than that, in taking Crimea. Regardless, Crimea alone proves my point.

--

When I search text on your provided link, I find no match for UN, United Nations, peace or peace keeping. The US has interceded under the UN in endless operations. How many of the 251 were just that? The link does not say.

Again, yes, the US does project its power. Yes, maybe it should not be as much as it does.

However, compared to Germany circa WWII, colonial powers, and modern aggressors such as Russia, it is indeed 'peaceful and benevolent'.

Especially considering the power it has, and most especially has had.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-10 12:59:58+00:00
If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.)

What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.

The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
by tialaramex | 2025-09-10 13:00:14+00:00
The unions want negotiations towards better pay and conditions, sometimes these demands are pretty transparent grift or make things unsafe, but usually they're just "Give us more money" and like, yeah, give them more money.

An example of making things unsafe: One of the railway unions took strike action to preserve 12 hour shifts for signallers. That might seem counter-intuitive, who wants 12 hour shifts? Well, you work 3 x 12 hour shifts, that's your week = 4 days per week off. Whereas if the safety reform demands max hour 8 shifts that's only 2-3 days off, so of course affected signallers hated that.

Why was it unsafe? Well humans can't really work 12 hours. We get bored & our minds wander, if it's dark and warm we fall asleep or stumble around dazed. And a signaller's job is normally pretty calm, you could do it half asleep and it'd be OK. "Ding ding" that's the last city express, pull 18, wait a beat, press buzzer, pull 19 and 25. But, sometimes it gets very exciting very fast, and that's why it's a job for a skilled human. "Ding ding" - the express, pull 18, it sticks, uh, what? Pull harder, still sticks. Er... now you should be wide awake, that express at 100mph is about to reach a Danger signal, is it because there's really danger? What should you do? But you are tired, it's been a long day, release 16 and that'll fix it right? Now 18 moves. But wait there's a loud noise and this needle is deflected, what did I do? And now the phone is ringing. We've just de-railed the back half of the slow coal train that was still crossing right in front of the express we've just given a green light. Hope nobody dies.

But this is the exception not the rule.