MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Being a freelancer and never dealing with unpaid invoices again – possible?
by cesargstn | 2025-10-16 20:41:32+00:00
As a freelancer myself, one of the main issues I used to face was unpaid work — and spending hours every month chasing payments just to get what I was owed.

I found it so unfair that I decided to start building a tool that puts an end to unpaid invoices and guarantees you get paid.

Here’s how it works 1⃣ You upload your work (photos, documents, PDFs, Excel files, etc.) 2⃣ You set your price 3⃣ Your work is locked, and a secure link is generated 4⃣ You simply share that link with your client (by email) — they have to pay to access your work.

Think of it as a “paid WeTransfer”!

No more unpaid work — you’re guaranteed to get your money if your client wants your deliverable.

The service will be offered as a subscription for less than $4/month.

I’m here to get your honest feedback — my goal is to reach 300 people on the waitlist to validate interest, as more and more freelancers are asking for this.

The product will be available soon — so if you find the idea interesting, sign up here:

https://unzipme.xyz/
by dang | 2025-10-16 20:42:07+00:00
You started an entire flamewar with a gratuitous and offtopic provocation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589157, and then perpetuated it.

Please don't do that on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by 12_throw_away | 2025-10-16 20:43:06+00:00
I clicked, getting ready to roll my eyes at the open source drama but ... yeah, this checks all the boxes on the "time for new project management" checklist, when the lead dev:

[x] pushes directly to master, [x] pushes *untested vibe-code that fails CI* directly to master, [x] won't admit that there's any problem with doing that, and then [x] makes it worse by *force-pushing* to master to hide the commits and associated discussion

I mean, open source project management is hard, thankless work, I get it, but surely you can't expect anyone else to want to work on your project with you if you do this?
by unleaded | 2025-10-16 20:43:16+00:00
agreed*. You often hear this assumption today that Netscape was always the better browser and that people using IE were simply making a mistake. If anything they were just shit in different ways. For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology which no-one did.

* Kind of, I was born in the 2000s
by bnjmn | 2025-10-16 20:43:21+00:00
Here's a use case that seems more science fictional to me (as the parent of a 2yo) than warp drive: a robot that can gently restrain an uncooperative human baby while changing its diaper, with everything that entails: identifying and eliminating all traces of waste from all crevices, applying diaper cream as necessary, unfolding and positioning the new diaper correctly and quickly, always using enough but never too much force... not to mention the nightmare of providing any guarantees about safety at mass-market scale. Even one maimed baby, or even just a baby some robot neglects to prevent from falling off the changing table, is game over for that line of robots.

Is there any research program that could claim to tackle this? It's so far beyond folding laundry and doing dishes, which are already quite difficult.

I wouldn't bet my life on this tech _never_ materializing, but I would mistrust anyone who claimed it was feasible with today's tech. It calls for an entirely different kind of robotic perception, feedback, and control.
by cs702 | 2025-10-16 20:43:46+00:00
This is basically a Pytorch library for executing computations over dynamic ranges that exceed Float64's limits, including on GPUs.

I can see how it could be useful when you really need it. Thank you for sharing it on HN.

I tried the sample code for estimating Lyapunov exponents in parallel. It worked on the first try, and it was much faster than existing methods, as advertised. It's nice to come across something that works as advertised on the first try!

The high-dynamic-range RNN stuff may be interesting to others, but it's not for me. In my book, Transformers have won. Nowadays it's so easy to whip-up a small Transformer with a few lines of Python, and it will work well on anything you throw at it.
by dang | 2025-10-16 20:43:54+00:00
Personal attacks will get you banned here, and you did it more than once. No more of this, please, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been posting tons of flamewar comments to HN and clearly using the site primarily for this, so I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
by saaaaaam | 2025-10-16 20:45:15+00:00
This is such a weird story. The “bottles” are half litre bottles. So that’s 13.5m litres a year, or 37,000 litres a day.

Average water use per person is around 140 litres per day in the UK.

So the big shouty shock stat quoted is about the same amount of water that around 265 people would use.

By contrast Glasgow Caledonian University (I couldn’t find Glasgow University stats - which is itself notable) uses just shy of 27 million litres a year.

Weird AI scare mongering.

[0] https://www.gcu.ac.uk/aboutgcu/commongood/sustainability/wat...
by AStrangeMorrow | 2025-10-16 20:45:39+00:00
I think, from my experience, what they mean is tool use is as good as your model capability to stick to a given answer template/grammar. For example if it does tool calling using a JSON format it needs to stick to that format, not hallucinate extra fields and use the existing fields properly. This has worked for a few years and LLMs are getting better and better but the more tools you have, the more parameters your functions to call can have etc the higher the risk of errors. You also have systems that constrain the whole inference itself, for example with the outlines package, by changing the way tokens are sampled (this way you can force a model to stick to a template/grammar, but that can also degrade results in some other ways)
by pirates | 2025-10-16 20:45:53+00:00
Really? I grow blueberries, strawberries, several cultivars of hot/sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, garlic, bush beans, and several different herbs, and without fail ALL of them taste way better than the store bought version. That isn’t to say the store versions are always bad, but you know the home grown ones every single time.
by fingerlocks | 2025-10-16 20:46:09+00:00
Yeah, of course they shouldn’t, but they do. Kick off a bunch of processes doing too much of the wrong thing on any platform and it will bring the whole system down. DDoS for example. It’s not a solved problem.

Wax idealistic all you want, but just imagine the discussion we’d be having if Apple had sigabort-ed all these misbehaving electron apps on day one. “No userland APIs, private or otherwise, should be able to crash your app!!!” Is the argument I would be responding to right now.
by mickeymounds | 2025-10-16 20:46:29+00:00
Here’s a quick SF cut (single renter, bare-bones basket):

Basket (monthly):

1-BR rent ≈ $3,515 (citywide avg)

Utilities (basic) ≈ $233

Groceries (minimum for one) ≈ $585

Transit pass (Muni) $86 — or $104 with BART-within-SF

Total: ≈ $4,350–$4,420/mo.

Hours to cover basics (price ÷ wage):

Using BLS mean gross pay ($48.15/hr for SF-Oakland MSA): ~90–92 hours. Net would be higher. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Using a net pay anchor (Numbeo avg take-home ≈ $7,057/mo ⇒ ~$40.7/hr): ~106–109 hours.

If you rent outside the center (~$2,712), the basket drops to ~$3,616 ⇒ ~75–92 hours (gross vs net). Numbeo

Want to spin a US cities edition? We can replicate this with a fixed basket (1-BR rent, basic utilities, minimum groceries, local monthly transit) and city-level wage anchors (BLS + net adjustments). Start with SF, NYC, LA, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Chicago, Boston, DC, Denver, and expand.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-16 20:47:36+00:00
Even when looking at something as barebones as perceptrons, it's hard to really see "why" they work.

Check out the Karpathy "Zero to Hero" videos, and try to follow along by building an MLP implementation in your own language of choice. He does a good job of building intuition because he doesn't skip much of anything.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-16 20:47:45+00:00
Need: Basic word processing, spreadsheet and email apps to handle mundane, fully non-secure tasks.

Hoops to jump thru to type up the lunch memo: Two layers of enterprise authentication including an OTP requirement - mandated by the software & not wanted by the biz - that ends up forcing an employee to install a company app on their personal device.
by coredog64 | 2025-10-16 20:48:00+00:00
Getting onto my hobby horse:

The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.

Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
by rnd33 | 2025-10-16 20:48:25+00:00
The wage structure is very flat in my country, the average wage is only around 15% higher than the median. The median wage is very livable on. For essential or basic needs I would estimate you would only need ~70% of the median wage.

I appreciate that I could be biased, and my guesses could be off, but we're talking about almost a factor two here. If the numbers would be correct the average person does not even have enough money for the minimum essentials every month, which is extremely far from what I see and hear.
by ben_w | 2025-10-16 20:48:26+00:00
It's OK, but it's not "vastly" superior down here on Earth. Sun's a fusion reactor we don't need to build.

In space… again, there's uses for nuclear, but it's not a slam-dunk for everything. Space is a very good insulator, so there's a limit how hot and for how long you can run your power source — for a lot of scenarios, being closer to the sun than about Mars means that even with PV, too much heat is more of a problem than too little.

(On Mars itself, you probably do want nuclear anyway: global dust storms happen and can last ages, so you can't just geographically distribute solar farms, but on Deimos and Phobos you should just use PV).
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-16 20:48:28+00:00
I've read this story before on a different site. I was near the start of my career in 2009. I honestly think they are overstating the effect of those banners.

The significant shift IMO was when Windows 7 machines replaced the ageing XP machines. That is what I saw in the google analytics on the sites I was supporting at the time.
by oneredoak | 2025-10-16 20:48:43+00:00
I find Gemini Deep Think to be unbelievably underrated. In my testing, it consistently comes out far ahead of any other model or harness (for system architecture debugging, coming up with excellent YouTube title and hook ideas, etc). You can through a ton of context at it, and Deep Think's attention to detail is excellent.

My only exceptions being Sonnet 4.5 / Codex for code implementation, and Deep Research for anything requiring a ton of web searches.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-10-16 20:48:52+00:00
For weapons. There is already AI piloted F16's that win against human pilots. This is already here, now years old.

For Analysis. Who knows what the military has access to. I was able to ask plain old GPT about India/Pakistan, and it was able to weed through media reports and come up with something pretty accurate.

Maybe we wont launch nukes based on an LLM feedback.

But it will definitely be used to summarize and analyze data into reports.

Not sure why this seems like it wont be done. Military has many rungs of management that needs to push out reports just like a corporation.
by mickeymounds | 2025-10-16 20:49:16+00:00
TL;DR: The chart is a single-adult, renter affordability ratio (price ÷ typical net wage). It’s not saying “people actually work 11h/day”; it’s saying “if you tried to cover a solo renter basket out of one typical paycheck, you’d need ~X paid hours.” Households adapt (roommates, family pooling, informal housing, employer perks), which lowers real-world hours.

Why the >220h outliers were excluded from the press note: We used a trimmed summary to avoid letting a handful of fragile cases (thin/biased price data, capital-city rent proxies, wage series with poor coverage, currency quirks) dominate the headline. In the full write-up, I’ll show the entire distribution, the eight omitted cases, and winsorized vs. raw comparisons so readers can audit the effect.

Where confounding can creep in (you called several):

Informal economy: Formal price series + formal wages can overstate hours where many transact or earn informally.

Housing formality: If rent stats miss informal dwellings, the “solo renter” basket skews too expensive vs. typical living arrangements.

Basket design: Ours is a minimal, non-tradable basket (modest 1-BR rent, basic utilities, ~2,100–2,400 kcal groceries, local transit). No cars, no tuition, no luxury goods. I’ll add a shared-housing variant and a city vs. national sensitivity.

Household composition: The metric is per worker, not per household. A 3-adult household sharing one rent bill will show fewer hours per person than a single renter.

Net pay & transfers: We use net/typical pay (after taxes, including standard cash benefits where the source does). Publicly funded services (health care, schooling) are intentionally excluded from the out-of-pocket basket—this is a cash-flow lens, not a full welfare measure.

Mexico/“11 hours a day” example: That interpretation mixes hours of pay needed with hours actually worked. If the basket costs more than one typical monthly take-home, the ratio can exceed ~173–184 hours/month—even though people don’t work 11h/day; they share housing, live outside the cost center, buy informally, or pool incomes.

What I’ll add to make this clearer (and falsifiable):

A methods box with the exact basket, wage series, and the full, untrimmed table (including the eight outliers).

Two companion views: Shared-housing hours and Discretionary hours = paid hours – hours to essentials.

A city edition (e.g., SF/NYC/Lagos vs. national) so price-level heterogeneity isn’t hidden.

Happy to be corrected—if you have a better wage or rent series for any of the questionable cases, point me to it and I’ll rerun that row and show the delta.
by robobenjie | 2025-10-16 20:49:22+00:00
This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course, your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that I'd risk an infant in its grippers.
by bauruine | 2025-10-16 20:49:25+00:00
You say the average Israeli has to work 288 hours a month. 288h/30d = 9.6 hours. You say average. If some need to work less others work even more. Sorry I don't buy this at all.

The average working hours is like 1900 hours a year. Thats like 6 months of basic needs according to you. This just doesn't add up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
by johnnienaked | 2025-10-16 20:50:20+00:00
>If you're an ordinary citizen of most countries and work under a company, the company is obliged to track it for you.

So a W-2?

>for example, banks collect the taxes for the interest you have received, not the arcane American system where you're the one responsible for that).

So a 1099?

I gotta be honest it sounds like you don't really understand the American tax system very well.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-10-16 20:51:09+00:00
I find it usually more helpful to look at median wages instead of inflation numbers. Inflation looks at many goods and adjusted in many strange ways.

It looks like a normal salary for a Baker in 1900 was $2/day for a 13 hour day, or $0.15/hour[1]. a $1 meal would be about 6 hours of work in 1900.

Today, the median SF income is 100k, or $50/hr. 6 hours buys you a $300 meal.

Taxes are a whole different story you dont want me to start on. In 1900, state, local, and federal taxes were about 7% of GDP. Today they are >30%.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li1gx2&seq=263

Anecdotally, this is consistent with what I have personally observed in dozens of countries, where the low end cost of eating out is about the same as and hour of work.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-16 20:51:10+00:00
More than that, YouTube pays out per video view, so they were also making non trivial money on their video content.

Fraudsters might not be able to as easily game Facebook since they don't pay per 1000 views or whatever - but they can still drive tons of traffic to websites filled with ads, scams, etc, and they can also be making money to get fake engagement to wannabe influencers, politicians, propaganda, etc

Facebook is WAAAY too big of a business to take on this liability themselves, and try to keep it secret.

They'd face securities fraud from their investors, likely huge government fines, and lawsuits from all of their advertisers.

Idly sitting by and letting the numbers pump a little higher is less of a problem.
by stickfigure | 2025-10-16 20:51:39+00:00
I like the rainbow parens, but I feel like many of these are done already by IntelliJ. And not with just fonts and colors, but with little inline annotations, bubbles, and squiggly lines.

One thing I am still asking for: I want to be able to clearly and obviously distinguish mutable state from immutable state. IntelliJ can't do it yet.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-16 20:51:47+00:00
> yet even Valve was forced to translate Win32 APIs to actually have games for the Steam Deck

Yeh, and it works great. Your point?

The Steam Deck hardware itself can run the original 32-bit libraries if your distro supports it, Valve wasn't "forced" to do anything. They chose WoW64 because it's the mature and functional solution.
by Perenti | 2025-10-16 20:52:09+00:00
How is this different from a CA with dynamic neighbourhoods? Other than the visualisation of course. It appears at first read to be isomorphic to what's shown, unless I'm overlooking something (quite possible I am). CA with neighbourhoods dependent on cell states and/or agents were what made later versions of SimCity etc work.

I was working on GACA with dynamic neighbourhoods in 1997.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-16 20:52:13+00:00
> 10 years ago I was in a meeting with them where they said they couldn't implement something because they wouldn't be able to use it for 5 years... They still haven't implemented it.

I call that trailer park logic:

They say: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

Then four years later, while still in a dead end job: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"
by mickeymounds | 2025-10-16 20:52:15+00:00
Quick clarification (re Sweden/Nordics): The 200+ hours isn’t “hours you actually work”; it’s hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease to cover a minimal basket (1-BR rent, basic utilities, staple groceries, local transit). It’s a price ÷ (typical net hourly pay) ratio.

Why it can look high in Sweden/Finland:

New-lease market rent vs. your rent. Many Swedes have regulated/legacy rents or own; our basket uses current market 1-BR (costlier), so it’s an upper-bound for a solo entrant. Households commonly share or pool incomes, which cuts hours per person a lot.

Paid vacation/leave. If the wage source is hourly, paid leave is already priced in. If a dataset forced us to derive hourly from monthly pay ÷ 160–168h, that would overstate hours for Sweden’s effective ~140h months. That alone trims the ratio ~15%.

Not a welfare map. It ignores public services/quality; it’s a cash-flow affordability snapshot for a specific living setup, not “where life is good.”
by amiga386 | 2025-10-16 20:52:23+00:00
> But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good?

Yes, it's good. The US seems to have either massively spaced out single family housing, or high density skyscrapers. That's not good.

Most other part of the world, and even older US cities before the urban sprawl started, have reasonable densities where you share a wall or a ceiling/floor with only one other family, or not that many. It's sociable, especially if the housing offers a third space (such as a shared green or a courtyard), and the density is such that amenities are no more than a few minutes walk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
by renewiltord | 2025-10-16 20:52:24+00:00
In general, that won't pass environmental review. So at least in most of California that's a non-starter. If you want these things you can't have environmental review, and you can't have community planning, and so on. And we (as a society) would much rather have design-by-committee than what you want.

In San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores or not. If you don't want these people to have a voice you can have what you want, but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people then you have to accept that others have different tastes from you.
by robotresearcher | 2025-10-16 20:52:35+00:00
> It would require an entirely different kind of robotics.

I was 100% with you until suddenly this technical claim pops out. You might feel this way, and might be right, but why? Changing a diaper is crazy hard, I absolutely agree, but you seem to be just declaring from vibes that we 'require an entirely different kind of robotics'. Can you put your finger on why this is true?

Not nitpicking for the fun of it - I'm genuinely interested. Robot person.
by Amezarak | 2025-10-16 20:52:59+00:00
I think it’s misleading to suggest a substance is okay because it’s “just” an extract. Normal foods contain lots of substances that when extracted, are obviously bad if concentrated and consumed in larger quantities than would be had during normal consumption of whatever the source is.

Additionally, even if that substance is perfectly safe, the extraction process may effectively increase (as a %) the amount of byproducts. For example - and this is totally made up - suppose ice cream normally contained 1ppm microplastics, but adding carrageenan increased that to 10ppm because of the microplastics in seawater and the failure of the extraction process to remove them. Or even things that are “good” in their normal dosages might be “bad” at higher doses found in extracts.

In general, I would suggest it’s a good heuristic to avoid foods containing ingredients added for stability, preservation, or color. Maybe it’s fine but the benefit vs just eating fresh food that doesn’t need it is basically nil even in that case. Carrageenan would fall into this category. (It seems like there is some research suggesting carrageenan is not great for you but I’m not an expert: I’d not heard that and avoid it simply because it’s not anything I would add to a food I made.)