MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scott_w | 2025-09-04 15:29:54+00:00
> No, it's not just that—even if the company's policies said so, they still might have been found to have unlawfully dismissed her...

The sections you quoted don't support this statement. The quoted statements highlight contractual clauses which include "excessive" foul language which one instance of calling someone a dickhead does not approach. The only point a single instance of swearing could be grounds for dismissal were against a customer, which is specifically highlighted in the contract.

Were the contract to include a clause of "you will not swear at other employees," then that would have been sufficient. Now, whether that falls foul of the Equality Act (due to discriminatory treatment) is a different question. You can't extrapolate any result of that from this case, however.
by metalman | 2025-09-04 15:30:34+00:00
in Canada you can tell even the police to fuck off, but not fuck you, which generaly seems a good place to put the line, so actualy calling someone a dickhead would not be ok, comenting on the situation as bieng dicked or fucked, screwed, etc the exception would be if there was no seperation and the boss was also a sole descision maker or business owner, but in a large company a "boss" is just an employee who cant be held directly and completly resonsible for dickery.
by crowcroft | 2025-09-04 15:30:56+00:00
The strategic insight behind Arc was perfect – your browser IS the Operating System, and so we should build a browser that can function as that platform.

Arc had pretty good market validation with early adopters, they say that growth was flattened out but IMO that's normal for most products, and it's up to the company to find out WHY growth flattened and then solve that problem. Not kill the product and chase some entirely new idea about AI.

I wouldn't be surprised if the investors were fed up with the business and wanted out, pretty good exit all things considered.
by michaelsbradley | 2025-09-04 15:31:06+00:00
It’s just asking a well-formed question, which has been a thing for a while in human history. Lol!

Seriously, the Hledger software looks great, more appealing to me than GNU Cash for various reasons and something I’d be more likely to recommend to others. And I’d like to have a book recommendation/s to go along with it. Learning personal finance through the school of hard knocks can be painful, and even if you learned it that way it may be difficult to communicate what you’ve learned effectively. I imagine someone somewhere sometime has written a nice book that would pair well with Hledger.

Thanks for the link. I have AI accounts and sling prompts all day long some days. In this case I’m looking for recommendations from fellow humans who participate on HN.
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-04 15:31:35+00:00
>Batteries are both a source and use when thinking about fuel mix

That doesnt make them a generator. Other grids are sources of energy as well. Are they generators?

Again, I see absolutely nothing published anywhere classifying batteries as generators. It's a source. It's an input into the grid. But how can you argue all grid inputs are considered a generator, therefor batteries are generators? You seem quite alone in that.
by simne | 2025-09-04 15:32:04+00:00
As I could see, classic methods (used in children teaching) could create at least magnitude more data than we have now, just paraphrasing text (classic NLP), but depends on language (I'll try explain).

Text really have lot of degrees of freedom, but depends on language, and even more on type of alphabet - modern English with phonetic alphabet is worst choice, because it is simplest, nearly nobody use second-third hidden meaning (I hear about 2-3 to 5-6 meanings depending on source); hieroglyphic languages are much more information rich (10-22 meanings); and what is interest, phonetic languages in totalitarian countries (like Russian) are also much more rich (8-12 meanings), because they used to hide few meanings from government to avoid punishment.

Language difference (more dimensions) could be explanation of current achievements of China, superior to Western, and it could also be hint, on how to boost Western achievements - I mean, use more scientists from Eastern Europe and give more attention to Eastern European languages.

For 3D robots, I see only one way - computational simulated environment.
by rpdillon | 2025-09-04 15:32:35+00:00
You'd be correct if all of these contracts weren't essentially contracts of adhesion. The fact that the user has no agency to change the terms of the contract or really any say at all in what the terms of the agreement are waters down your argument significantly. In fact, the contracts are so asymmetrical that only one party has control over them and can change them at any time. The other party has no agency whatsoever.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-04 15:33:13+00:00
Is your claim that Musk, who cofounded OpenAI and started buying GPUs by the tens of thousands almost immediately after buying Twitter, and whose stated purposes in buying Twitter included AI, and who has been trying to build X since the 1990s, and who uses AI in SpaceX and Tesla, did not foresee that he would use AI on Twitter when he conducted the layoffs?

Can you walk me through your thought process here?
by nightdal | 2025-09-04 15:33:19+00:00
Location: Madrid, Spain

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Depends

Technologies: Kubernetes, Go/C#, AWS, Postgres/MSSQL, Argo, Github Actions, Datadog

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pBhn_sa9s6fvwed7IHcfeIiWgiA...

Email: andredoescare@gmail.com

Developer with 5+ years of experience, including 3+ years as a Platform Engineer/SRE, with strong expertise in FinOps.
by ForHackernews | 2025-09-04 15:34:17+00:00
I feel like astronomy probably wins, the magnitudes are literally astronomical.

The Perseus Cluster of galaxies is estimated[0] at something like 816,592 light years in diameter, so that's 10^21 meters, and on the other end 2008 TC3[1] is an asteroid 4.1m across.

[0] https://www.universeguide.com/galaxy/perseuscluster

[1] https://thesolarsystem.fandom.com/wiki/2008_TC3
by scott_w | 2025-09-04 15:34:22+00:00
> HR and legal across the UK are probably updating their company procedures right now to include every imaginable reason they might want to fire someone.

No, they aren't because that's not how contracts or the law work in the UK. The court found that the contract enumerated a long list of breaches of contract, of which "swearing at colleagues" was not in that list. This means the court read the list as exhaustive, because it appeared to be exhaustive.

If the contract was worded differently, the court may not have used this interpretive rule. If the wording was a little more broad, the court may have worked to determine whether "swearing at your boss" could reasonably fit into the terms.
by kocheez75 | 2025-09-04 15:34:25+00:00
If your data is already in GeoJSON, you can use tippecanoe to produce a tileset in either MBTiles or PMTiles format: https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe.

Or if your data is more dynamic, you can also use the ST_AsMVT extension to query PostGIS, which will generate tiles on-the-fly: https://postgis.net/docs/ST_AsMVT.html
by simonmic | 2025-09-04 15:34:50+00:00
You said book, but I wouldn't rule out the docs on hledger.org (and perhaps plaintextaccounting.org); of which https://hledger.org/hledger-by-example.html is book-ish, and https://hledger.org/accounting.html leads to some good general accounting resources.

Also, again not what you asked for exactly, but the hledger chat room can be a very useful extra resource, to keep things moving along.

And here's one I found useful, though with more of a business flavour: "Accounting Savvy for Business Owners: A Guide to the Bare Essentials" by Philip B. Goodman CPA.
by bri3d | 2025-09-04 15:34:57+00:00
> The statistics agree

Citation? It’s hard to find independent studies on LASIK since it’s big business, which is indeed a good cause for suspicion, but every follow-up survey I can find indicates net satisfaction in the 80-90+% range after 20 years, and the technology has massively improved so I’d expect the rate to go up even more over time.

If we’re doing anecdotes, my father got very early LASIK and is extremely happy he did, over 20 years later his vision is just starting to degrade again and he had only extremely minor halo issues (which are also less prevalent today due to the use of lasers instead of a knife to cut the eye open, leading to less scarring).

I’ve been considering laser eye surgery soon and it seems that all available technologies are decent. Based on my survey, SMILE>PRK>LASIK in terms of outcomes and risk, but SMILE works on a much more limited range of eye issues and PRK requires a somewhat lengthy and uncomfortable recovery period requiring time off work and caretaker support, so LASIK is still a good fallback option.
by duxup | 2025-09-04 15:36:24+00:00
First Trump tenure, word has it that folks from the Pentagon would visit the White House and be horrified after receiving what seemed to be a series of often conflicting orders / demands from Trump that day to day he would seem to forget he ever said. White House staff and advisors not wanting any ire from Trump were of no help to Pentagon officials to clarify things. In response they established a rule that they wanted a signed order before taking any serious action, otherwise they ignored stream of consciousness type demands, in a few cases these included talk of assassinating foreign leaders.

There is something about the combo of "oh he just says things sometimes" non seriousness along with autocratic tendencies that seems very dangerous.
by teiferer | 2025-09-04 15:37:00+00:00
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.

Why is that? I may feel that somebody is wrong, and that may be correct, but it could also be incorrect. A priori, they are not less correct than you are. Then why do you need to go to them and tell them that what they think is wrong and what you think is right?

I'm glad that people don't do that all the time. I'm sure I meet lots of people every day that think I'm wrong on something. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. If every time they would feel that I "need to be corrected", that would be terrible.
by taeric | 2025-09-04 15:37:11+00:00
My understanding, the last time rising electric costs came up, is that a large part of the cost increase was finally paying for the infrastructure maintenance that companies put off for a time. Is that no longer the case?

That is, it is specifically the transmission and distribution network that is driving costs increases. Per the crappy AI answer "Electricity distribution costs now often exceed the cost of electricity generation for U.S. utilities, with transmission and distribution (T&D) costs potentially comprising over half of a customer's energy bill, up from about one-third previously."

I should say, I have no problem thinking data centers may need to pay more. If only because they are probably able to. My assertion is just that it is misleading to pin them as THE reason costs have gone up. It is far more complicated than that.
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-04 15:37:25+00:00
When reading on my iPad or Kindle (back when I had one of those), I would regularly encounter a word used in a context slightly different from my understanding of the word - so I'd quickly skim the definition to fill in the gap in my knowledge that this made apparent.

I _do_ miss that functionality on the reMarkable devices. It seems odd to me that it's not included; a dictionary isn't a huge file, and the devices have more than ample storage for their intended purpose. I used my daily for a couple of years, and I don't think I've ever deleted anything from them.
by Waraqa | 2025-09-04 15:38:02+00:00
"Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++."

https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...
by troyvit | 2025-09-04 15:38:24+00:00
Taking the morality of a company on its own isn't how I look at it, it's also the context. You might be right that if Mistral was born in the U.S. instead of France it would do the same shady stuff Anthropic and OpenAI are doing, but it wasn't and therefore it isn't. As a result it's a company I personally can work with for now.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-09-04 15:39:03+00:00
> ~€60K for an European car instead of paying ~€30K for the same set of features?

Fear and uncertainty mostly. We don't know how these cars will be in 5-10 years. Maybe they have some hidden faults that will come up en masse after certain time? And what about spare parts? These are the questions many buyers ask themselves.

And after some thinking, no matter how you look at it, the 60k option is not beating the 30k one.
Show HN: Startup Calculators for Founders
by neebelthan | 2025-09-04 15:39:35+00:00
Founders spend too much time piecing together spreadsheets to answer basic questions about equity, dilution, valuation, and fundraising. I kept seeing the same problems pop up: •How much will an option pool dilute me? •What happens to my stake on exit? •How do I model a SAFE or a convertible note? •What’s my burn runway actually look like?

So I built a set of calculators for founders: •Exit Outcome •Option Pool Impact •Co-Founder Equity •Pro-Rata Rights •Find me Investors •Valuation Calculator •Vesting Schedule •SAFE Calculator •Burn Rate & Runway •409A Valuation •Convertible Note & SAFE •Equity Modeling

All in one place, no messy spreadsheets.

It’s live now: icanpitch.com. Would love feedback from the HN community what’s missing that would actually save you time as a founder?
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-09-04 15:39:36+00:00
> answer> Temporal.Instant.fromEpochSeconds(timestamp).toPlainDate()

The answer ends in `toPlainDate()` which returns an object with year, month and day properties. ie it does not output the requested format.

This is in addition to the issue that `fromEpochSeconds(timestamp)` really should probably be `fromEpochMilliseconds(timestamp * 1000)`
by queueco | 2025-09-04 15:39:37+00:00
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by Aurornis | 2025-09-04 15:39:39+00:00
> No, they aren't because that's not how contracts or the law work in the UK. The court found that the contract enumerated a long list of breaches of contract, of which "swearing at colleagues" was not in that list. This means the court read the list as exhaustive, because it appeared to be exhaustive.

Yes, and that's why I said HR and Legal are updating their boilerplate to be more exhaustive.
by crote | 2025-09-04 15:39:52+00:00
> You might even be able to have something generic like "verbal abuse"

That's just going to lead to a lawsuit on the definition of "verbal abuse".

> A quick update to the procedures that calling someone a dickhead is a fireable offense is all that is needed.

Even specifically stating that might not work. It is not uncommon for such clauses to be struck through in court if they are deemed unfair and disproportionally punitive to the employee.

For a regular office drone otherwise in good standing, given the UK's cultural context, getting fired for calling your boss a "dickhead" is an extremely harsh punishment. An official warning, improvement plan, or some kind of training would be more appropriate.
by Ancapistani | 2025-09-04 15:39:56+00:00
reMarkable is adamant that their devices are "digital notebooks" - no more, no less. They intentionally do not implement features that aren't in support of this use case.

FWIW, I think that makes sense from their perspective. There are a ton of eReaders out there, but reMarkable is the only company that I'm aware of that focuses specifically on this use case, to the detriment of others. They don't _want_ them to be world-class eReaders, because then they would have to support the features that market wants. They want to support a smaller market niche.

They're clear about that, too. If anything, I wish more companies would focus on a specific use case and stick to their guns when it comes to scope creep.
by mrbombastic | 2025-09-04 15:40:01+00:00
“It’s the story stupid.” seems like a good mantra from hollywood execs to internalize. Toy Story, Shrek and their ilk were partially successful because of the new fresh medium but mostly successful because they told stories that resonated with people with well thought out and relatable characters. Of course not to say esthetics don’t play a part, but all secondary to story.
by profdumpster | 2025-09-04 15:41:09+00:00
what we've done at nc/acc is build a lot of the solo founder psych needs into the AI - both accountability and just plain solo lonliness - solos aren't loners but they can get lonely. not saying it's there completely yet, but it will be at some point - we're not at 'her' level yet - but hopefully past the whole just go jump off a bridge when your runway is down to a few weeks point lol
by squigz | 2025-09-04 15:41:15+00:00
You and the other commenters who are saying this know that... devices can do multiple things, right? That's why phones don't just call people anymore.

Anyway, I don't really see why reading a PDF means one wouldn't need a dictionary. A lot of PDFs - that I read anyway - tend to be more technical stuff; looking stuff up is helpful there too.
by hunglee2 | 2025-09-04 15:41:15+00:00
Probably the main issue with vaccine mandates is a lack of understanding how they are meant to work at different scales. None of the Covid-19 vaccines claimed to immunise against infection at individual level - only to reduce virulence of the infection. This would also reduce spread, as 'less infected' individuals would be less effective as factories for the reproduction of the virus, so that the outcome on society scale would be quicker end to the pandemic.
by bradly | 2025-09-04 15:42:06+00:00
Very anecdotal, but a friend of mine works for a fuel cell company that basically converts natural gas and/or propane to grid electricity a huge part of their work right now is powering new datacenters for AI growth. I don't really know the technology, so I may have the details wrong, but the fact companies willing to take on cost and complexity does hint towards real limits on energy supply.

> Taking this into account, blaming AI companies for jacking up electricity prices in this context makes as much sense as blaming airlines for jacking up oil prices.

I'm not sure if "blame" and "jacking up" are the right words here. AI technology is demanding power quicker than it is being added to the grid and add so there is going to be tension. Now if tech companies start buying the grid operators and power, I'm more inclined to start blaming the tech companies themselves, but for now I still place broad energy failures squarely with the government.
by stefie10 | 2025-09-04 15:42:39+00:00
There is a facet of intelligence that is missing from ChatGPT: embodiment. Crows, elephants, and chimpanzees have behaviors associated with this facet of intelligence, without having spoken natural language at all. From a capabilities perspective, we mean processing high-dimensional, high-framerate sensor input and producing high-dimensional, high-frequency actuator output to produce long-horizon goal-directed behavior in the physical world. We make two claims: 1) embodiment is an important facet of intelligent behavior, and 2) LLMs like ChatGPT lack embodiment. More precisely, embodiment is a spectrum, and LLMs are far on one side of the spectrum, compared to humans, dogs, and crows, and because of this, they fail at a number of behaviors today.
by spiffytech | 2025-09-04 15:42:40+00:00
To offer another option for a graphical FOSS budgeting app, I switched to https://actualbudget.org a few months back and it's great.

It's like YNAB, but with less magic. Plus sophisticated features like a rules engine for automatically filling envelopes and cleaning up spare funds at the end of the month.

I host it on Pikapods for cheap, and connect to my bank accounts with SimpleFINs.

I've tried a lot of budget apps, and this is the happiest I've been with one in a long time.
by em-bee | 2025-09-04 15:43:24+00:00
that's way to simplified. illegal means, you break the law and must necessarily be punished. but insults are only prosecuted by request of the insulted, and even if that happens, they are not necessarily grounds to be fired. the person making the insult may be punished in some other way.

it depends on the courts though, and it also depends on the relationship between the two people. the more close they are the less likely the accusation of insult is going to stand. stories about such cases go both ways.
by modeless | 2025-09-04 15:43:56+00:00
Hmm, but how likely are clicks on random squares to reveal more safe clicks? Seems likely that even if you hit a safe square you might still not have any safe moves. The goal ought to be to create more safe moves for the next turn, to reduce your chance of dying over the whole game, not just in the current turn. I wonder what that analysis would look like.
by Cloudef | 2025-09-04 15:44:40+00:00
I took mine at age of 19, been 13 years now and so far fine. I feel like eyesight during dark is worse than it was during younger age, but during day sight's still good as ever. Operation itself was pretty scary.

Before LASIK i was wearing some pretty heavy glasses, so i think the sight had already hit the worst part.
by robertlagrant | 2025-09-04 15:45:11+00:00
> If you just charged equivalent access (if industrial users had to pay to-the-penny exactly the same prices as a residential user, identical transmission fees, identical per-kwh prices, identical time-of-day usage surcharges, etc), it would go a long way to making the data center setup more fair for everyone.

Why? An industrial feed to a data centre is the company dealing with a single customer contact, to a single location, probably bulk-buying up front. That's very different to serving 500 houses with very variable demand.
by troyvit | 2025-09-04 15:45:11+00:00
> If we pretend history begins at 1991...ignore the colonialism, world wars, fascism, communism, genocide, and body counts collectively in the hundred millions...

Uhhh it isn't Europe taking all its bad news out of its museums, friend. That's the good ol' U.S.A. attempting to hide from its own history.

> Europe is a 24-year old trust fund kid working in a vegan commune while living in a $2M Brooklyn apartment paid for by her dad who is an executive at Exxon.

What a very ... American analogy.