MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cwyers | 2025-10-08 18:35:27+00:00
```When Uber entered the taxi market without securing taxi licenses or extending the workforce protections required under law, it said the move didn’t count because it did it with an app.```

It's so weird to see the first half of this article written as an ode to the virtues of competition and then see the sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions. Say what you will about Uber, but no Uber driver has ever tried to lie and harass a passenger over whether or not the credit card machine is broken in an effort to cheat on their taxes. It's not even like the anti-consumer hostility of the taxi experience translated into better rights for workers, the high price of a medallion meant in practice your typical cab driver was in a situation damned close to indentured servitude to a medallion company.

And to top it all off, taxis demonstrate the fallacy of thinking that hundreds of market participants provides meaningful benefits from competition. In a market with a suitably large number of cab drivers and passengers, the odds of repeat business between any pair of driver and passenger is low enough that neither party is incentivized to treat each other well. It's not like anyone was pulling out a Yelp-like site or review book to pick the best-reviewed cab drivers, or like you went out of your way to stick with a cab driver you'd had a good experience with. Meaningful competition requires that people can make _informed_ choices, and without repeat business you don't get participants informed enough to make meaningful choices between market participants. It also requires leverage. It doesn't matter if you threaten to take your business elsewhere next time if you and they both know _you were going to anyway_.

I'm not saying that Uber is perfect, or even that Uber couldn't be productively regulated better by the government. I'm saying that taxis were a terrible experience, and I don't trust Doctorow to have a good lay of the land when he focuses more on his ideology than the evidence. If subscribing to Doctorow's beliefs requires services to look more like taxis than Ubers, you can count me out.
by sureglymop | 2025-10-08 18:35:27+00:00
To surveil... myself?

It's interesting to read such a comment here. I see comments from people on this site frequently who work for Google, Facebook, OpenAI and other such companies where everyday software that doesn't respect users or their privacy is being worked on.

However, if I suggest doing similar data collection and analysis that they already do but in a way that is self hostable/governable and respects my privacy and threat model, it is bad?
by mholt | 2025-10-08 18:35:32+00:00
Bookmarks are bookmarked at a specific time.

Contacts are already handled as first-class concepts in Timelinize, known as "entities". Entities don't have timestamps, but they have a name and attributes that can be anything, and the relationship between the entity and its attributes can be bounded by time.

Notes are also created and updated/changed at specific times.

> Are my IMDB-ratings valid data for this? My Ebook-collection? My Steam-account? Those are usually things I would not manage in a timeline or a map, but with different interfaces and features.

Could be, if you wanted to timeline those! (Like, when you rated a certain movie. Or when you got or read a certain book. Or when you got a new Steam game.)
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-08 18:35:54+00:00
I can find many Republican representatives, Trump, and media personalities insulting New York with sweeping generalizations and hateful rhetoric.

The only negative comments from Democrat representatives and the media on the left I see is are critical of specific laws, for example abortion, but they don't insult the entire state or generalize.

If you need specific quotes let me know.
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-10-08 18:36:02+00:00
> McDonalds is a real estate business.

In the same way that American Airlines is a credit card company. How much rent will they receive if they stopped selling burgers?

> The Founder"

Good movie but McDonalds is a long long way away from scrappy, morally-bankrupt Ray Kroc's time. I imagine using pink slime to make the nuggets he sold to kids would be right in his wheelhouse though.
by timerol | 2025-10-08 18:36:07+00:00
I did not interpret the article as you did, and thought it was clear throughout that the author was talking about an individual read from memory, not reading all of a given amount of memory. "Memory access, both in theory and in practice, takes O(N^⅓) time: if your memory is 8x bigger, it will take 2x longer to do a read or write to it." Emphasis on "a read or write".

I read "in 2x time you can access 8x as much memory" as "in 2x time you can access any byte in 8x as much memory", not "in 2x time you can access the entirety of 8x as much memory". Though I agree that the wording of that line is bad.

In normal big-O notation, accessing N bytes of memory is already O(N), and I think it's clear from context that the author is not claiming that you can access N bytes of memory in less time than O(N).
by balamatom | 2025-10-08 18:36:45+00:00
>Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?"

Because that's the first step to getting your needs ignored. And in conversations where "empathy" is brought up you're usually exactly one step from getting your needs ignored.

If you're doing something wrong, and I decide to do something about it, minimum decency dictates I make sure you understand what it is. Bringing into it some vague abstract notion that everyone with half a critical mind turns out to have a whole personal exegesis about, but I only know about it from everyone else? Now there's a clear signal that nobody in the room actually cares how people are treated.
by tempestn | 2025-10-08 18:36:47+00:00
Sure, but whichever shareholders control the company, they ultimately want to profit from that ownership, right? So if the stock price isn't reflecting the true value of the underlying company, they're going to do something about it.

I suppose there are edge cases where they will instead attempt to profit by convincing the board to pay the CEO a trillion dollars, but even that kind of thing probably only flies if the stock price is also going up. (I wouldn't have thought to include that exception at all some years ago, but at least one salient example has proven this possible, if not likely.) So I could see a case for not trusting the valuation of companies that behave in that particular manner. Where the CEO is effectively the controlling shareholder, especially if they have shown a willingness and ability to inflate their own compensation.
Ask HN: What's the best live translation app for voice?
by transitivebs | 2025-10-08 18:37:21+00:00
eg:

- can use from my phone - easy to use - set 2 languages, one person speaks and when they're done, the app speaks the translation, then switch

i don't need it to be real-time, just good quality, and i don't want to use custom hardware / models
by palmotea | 2025-10-08 18:37:38+00:00
>>> You do, but usually it's better to be more on the charitable side by default and only be uncharitable when someone has behaved in a way that proves that to be necessary.

>> its usually too late by then. you always need to be one step ahead.

> No. That's just paranoia. That makes you the snake.

Yeah.

Also "and only be uncharitable when someone has behaved in a way that proves that to be necessary," does not mean that behavior has to have been directed towards you. If you're charitable by default to people, you can make friends and hear about things that happened to others. Also your friends can help you avoid working at places that are just dens of snakes. To put it in gamer software engineer terms: having friends can be like having a wallhack (among many other better and more important things).
by Aachen | 2025-10-08 18:38:00+00:00
I've read up on this in the context of potentially backdoored CPUs and there is fundamentally no way. You don't need to trust the router (as you say: a device that just relays data can have all the backdoors you want, thanks to asymmetric cryptography enabling E2EE), but the scenario is that your own device has software from law enforcement on it

In which case, the best you can do is use an obscure method that the attacker is unprepared for. If they've hijacked the AES CPU operation to store the key and include it in the output for a later syscall like when writing the output file, but you unexpectedly use some funky experimental cipher, you'd be lucky until they push an update. The device has a mandatory backdoor after all, so govt can also decide what new code it needs to run now, perhaps under the guise of detecting more situations of terroristic content or whatnot. There's no winning that game except through obscurity, and I presume everyone has heard about how reliable security through obscurity is
by captainbland | 2025-10-08 18:38:37+00:00
The Pareto principle gets "interesting" when you involve hierarchical categories. For instance, the category of "researchers" is arguably arbitrary. Why not research labs? Why not research universities? If we write off 80% of universities, 80% of labs in that top 20% of universities and 80% of researchers within that top 20% of labs then actually the number of impactful researchers would in fact be .2 * .2 *.2 or 0.8% of researchers which seems extreme.

That said if we took 20% of all working people are doing useful work, then can you guarantee not all research scientists are within that category?

And indeed there are different fields and the distributions of effectiveness may be incomparable.

I think the nature of scientific and mathematical research is interesting in that often "useless" findings can find surprising applications. Boolean algebra is an interesting example of this in that until computing came about, it seemed purely theoretical in nature and impactless almost by definition. Yet the implications of that work underpinned the design of computer processors and the information age as such.

This creates a quandary: we can say perhaps only 20% of work is relevant, but we don't necessarily know which 20% in advance.
by Alejandro9R | 2025-10-08 18:39:11+00:00
https://github.com/chunqiuyiyu/xie/tree/gh-pages

in the gh-pages branch you have the final index.html. You can also literally download/save the page as well, should be the same.

It does not use any other deps than the final index.html

Now, speaking about the project itself, maybe it would be good if the notes get also saved into localStorage in some way. One browser refresh or reboot and it all goes away if it wasn't saved.
by strongpigeon | 2025-10-08 18:39:14+00:00
I guess you're right in a purely geometric sense. It's just that it seems almost silly to consider that given that (AIUI) the 3D geometric constraints don't impact the memory access latency at all for now (and likely for any reasonable period of time).

Like you said, thermal and cost constraints dwarf the geometrical one. But I guess my point is that they make it a non-issue and therefore isn't a sound theoretical explanation as to why memory access is O(N^[1/3]).
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-08 18:39:45+00:00
If you're worried the hard drives won't spin back up, I'd say you should instead spin them down regularly so you know that risk is basically zero. If you're worried the power supply will explode and surge into the drives when you turn it on, you should not be using that power supply at all. Any other risks to powering it down?

And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.
by gowld | 2025-10-08 18:39:52+00:00
> "in 2x time you can access 8x as much memory"

is NOT what the article says.

The article says (in three ways!):

> if your memory is 8x bigger, it will take 2x longer to do a read or write to it.

> In a three-dimensional world, you can fit 8x as much memory within 2x the distance from you.

> Double the distance, eight times the memory.

the key worda there are a, which is a single access, and distance, which is a measure of time.

N is the amount of memory, and O() is the time to access an element of memory.
by redhed | 2025-10-08 18:39:54+00:00
There's a lot of companies with IP that can be extracted or systems that can be sabotaged by a bitter employee. There's also the extreme cases of someone who knows they are being fired who can do a shooting/arson/some other extreme scenario.

I'm not saying I agree with the shock approach but there are definitely some generic risks that I don't think paint a bad picture of the company by their existence.
by mort96 | 2025-10-08 18:40:22+00:00
If I am a company that builds technical solutions, and I sell it to someone. Then, that someone loses money because the solution did something it wasn't supposed to: who's responsible?

Me as the person who sold it? The vendor of a core library I use? AWS who hosts it? Is my customer responsible themselves?

These are questions that classic contracts typically cover and the legal system is used to dealing with, because technical solutions have always had bugs and do unexpected things from time to time.

If your technical solution is inherently unreliable due to the nature of the problem it's solving (because it's an antivirus or firewall which tries its best to detect and stop malicious behavior but can't stop everything, because it's a DDoS protection service which can stop DDoS attacks up to a certain magnitude, because it's providing satellite Internet connectivity and your satellite network doesn't have perfect coverage, or because it uses a language model which by its nature can behave in unintended ways), then there will be language in the contract which clearly defines what you guarantee and what you do not guarantee.
by rodolphoarruda | 2025-10-08 18:40:46+00:00
The last time I was let go I was given two days to phase my projects out to a colleague. But I also took the time to email/call all the customers I had contact with and asked them to send me an email to my personal account so that we could keep in touch, especially for future referrals. I've got 63 messages. It was such a relief and a joy to get all those messages coming in bitter days like the ones following a lay off.
by JohnMakin | 2025-10-08 18:41:25+00:00
This sounds similar to an infuriating issue I've been dealing with AWS Client VPN for at least a year - it does not support ipv6, but depending on your setup, requests may try to resolve a ipv6 address first, not find one, and then stall/fail. Only solution seems to be trying to guarantee ipv6 resolution is disabled.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-10-08 18:42:10+00:00
Yeah, not really the same. I had a really really complete Vectrex setup, every game (even the stupid ones :-)) AND their overlays, I'm pretty sure every accessory. Which I ended up selling to a guy doing a museum?[1] Anyway it was quite the game for me. I knew eventually it would stop working and then just be a memory but still.

The screen was what really made it, and I get that having a vector scope manufactured would be expensive (it isn't true that nobody makes CRTs any more, but it is true that they don't come cheaply). Its also the reason I never really went all the way and bought one of my all time favorite arcade games which was the cockpit version of 'Star Wars' with its color vector display. (even harder to store!)

In a related effort, I looked at replicating a CRT "look" for some older test equipment that came with CRTs using a high dpi IPS display. I probably could have succeeded if I had an FPGA for doing the phosphor simulation (I developed a lot of respect for Tektronix's DPO technology and their patent portfolio on same :-). Very much a diminishing returns kind of thing.

[1] If you're that guy and reading this say "hi" :-)
by vntok | 2025-10-08 18:42:13+00:00
As a company, we entrust our employees with a lot of agency and access to our systems, networks and data. We do not spy on our employees nor have intrusive systems to prevent them from seeing/copying internal IP.

Therefore, while these operating procedures foster an agreeable environment for our collaborators to thrive and do actual things without too much segmentation, it makes it painful when a hard decision results in people getting suddenly both very angry against the company, and very capable to inflict damage upon it.
by lazide | 2025-10-08 18:42:21+00:00
If you ask a random Chinese middle aged man or woman, do you think they will agree with you or not?

In my experience, they think there are practical reasons why things are the way they are in China, and what you’re describing is a poisonous fantasy spread by idiots. (As one said to me quite clearly once in Singapore!)

Either way, I prefer freedom of movement, self determination, etc. but it’s pretty obvious that many cultures actively think it’s a bad idea and go out of their way to squash it in very real ways, especially against certain portions of the population. And I bet if we did a spreadsheet with various examples, you’d also consider some of them too much.

Like consensual vore. Personal freedom, or mental illness?

Ignoring that you’ll get a fight from any given culture on these and many more topics and we can all just ‘get along’ due to fundamental human awesomeness is just not how it has ever worked - ever - near as I can tell.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-08 18:42:39+00:00
That really depends on the company. Comcast would tell me to reboot my computer even after it was clear their modem wasn't getting a signal. Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example. But if your phone only fails on one charger made by somebody else, and works otherwise, they're not going to help you fix the charger.
by _verandaguy | 2025-10-08 18:43:15+00:00
Are Ortega and Newton mutually exclusive? Isn't the case much more likely that both:

- Significant advances by individuals or small groups (the Newtons, Einsteins, or Gausses of the world), enable narrowly-specialized, incremental work by "average" scientists, which elaborate upon the Great Advancement...

- ... And then those small achievements form the body of work upon which the next Great Advancement can be built?

Our potential to contribute -- even if you're Gauss or Feynman or whomever -- is limited by our time on Earth. We have tools to cheat death a bit when it comes to knowledge, chief among which are writing systems, libraries of knowledge, and the compounding effects of decades or centuries of study.

A good example here might be Fermat's last theorem. Everyone who's dipped their toes in math even at an undergraduate level will have at least heard about it, and about Fermat. People interested in the problem might well know that it was proven by Andrew Wiles, who -- almost no matter what else he does in life -- will probably be remembered mainly as "that guy who proved Fermat's last theorem." He'll go down in history (though likely not as well-known as Fermat himself).

But who's going to remember all the people along the way who failed to prove Fermat? There have been hundreds of serious attempts over the four-odd centuries that the theorem had been around, and I'm certain Wiles had referred to their work while working on his own proof, if only to figure out what doesn't work.

---

There's another part to this, and that's that as our understanding of the world grows, Great Advancements will be ever more specialized, and likely further and further removed from common knowledge.

We've gone from a great advancement being something as fundamental as positing a definition of pi, or the Pythagorean theorem in Classical Greece; to identifying the slightly more abstract, but still intuitive idea that white light is a combination of all other colours on the visible spectrum and that the right piece of glass can refract it back into its "components" during the Renaissance; to the fundamentally less intuitive but no less groundbreaking idea of atomic orbitals in the early 20th century.

The Great Advancements we're making now, I struggle to understand the implications of even as a technical person. What would a memristor really do? What do we do with the knowledge that gravity travels in waves? It's great to have solved n-higher-dimensional sphere packing for some two-digit n... but I'll have to take you at your word that it helps optimize cellular data network topology.

The amount of context it takes to understand these things requires a lifetime of dedicated, focused research, and that's to say nothing of what it takes to find applications for this knowledge. And when those discoveries are made and their applications are found, they're just so abstract, so far removed from the day-to-day life of most people outside of that specialization, that it's difficult to even explain why it matters, no matter what a quantum leap that represents in a given field.
by cyanydeez | 2025-10-08 18:43:15+00:00
There are definitely right wing talking points being shrouded as centrist or other fascism.

Like one thing that I see often are the "they deserve this right-wing grift". Like, there's a lot of people who quickly love to do victim blaming when there's now like one near left mainstream media (NBC) and the remainder are all some right wing grooming station.

There's definitely a center that needs to be reminded that they're currently surrounded by right wing propaganda and they're all trying to move the overton window.

You're right the far right is far gone, but the rest of civil society is still drifting, from apathy or misdirection or serious grift or be grifted realities.
by mfdupuis | 2025-10-08 18:43:24+00:00
This is a really great comparison to draw. This actually made me think that this feeling of going from mastering a craft to working on large scale systems is probably how someone who was passionate about cars felt when they went from building cars one by one, knowing how the whole machine works to then having to take a job on an assembly line.

Fortunately I think anything pertaining to vibe coding/engineering/analytics is still more enjoyable and less grim than working on an assembly line, but the human feelings remain nonetheless.
by flexagoon | 2025-10-08 18:43:38+00:00
Not if you consider that the linked repo requires you to use asPipe on all functions first. So it's this:

const greeting = thrush( 'hello', s => s.toUpperCase(), s => s + '!!!' );

Vs this:

const upper = asPipe(s => s.toUpperCase()) const ex = asPipe((s) => s + '!!!') const greeting = pipe('hello') | upper | ex await greeting.run()

(And that doesn't work in reality, as the top comment here notes)
by 7373737373 | 2025-10-08 18:43:45+00:00
The answer to the ice cream question (for places where ice cream can be bought) appears to be Buenos Aires! https://overpass-turbo.eu/?Q=%5Bout%3Ajson%5D%3B%0Anode%28%7... (for any circular area centered around such a shop with 10km radius)

For ice cream shops specifically, Kraków? https://overpass-turbo.eu/?Q=%5Bout%3Ajson%5D%3B%0Anode%28%7...
by oneplane | 2025-10-08 18:44:40+00:00
This is just a Windows VM with extra tooling. Makes it look slick, doesn't make it "Windows apps on Linux".

Similar projects exist for gaming for example Looking Glass, which also uses a Windows VM on KVM (the "Windows in Docker" thing is a bit of a lie, Windows doesn't run in the container, Windows runs on KVM on the host kernel).

UX wise, this is similar to RAIL.

That's not to say that this isn't neat, but it's also not something new (we still have two flavours: API simulation/re-implementation and running the OS [windows]). If this was a new, third flavour, that would be quite the news (in-place ABI translation?).