MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pksebben | 2025-11-22 04:55:15+00:00
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for.

The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.

For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.

I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-22 04:55:18+00:00
> Construction, food service, sanitation and so on are _cheaper_ to do in suburban areas. Why? Because of the planning overhead. Materials cost less than planning.

> They work _better_ in suburban areas. That food truck owner in Manhattan can't afford to live there, so they likely spend hours every day to commute. In a suburban area, they can afford to buy/rent a house nearby.

> This is not a theory, btw

You're right, it's not a theory, it's literally just wrong. Like, obviously so.

The idea that people in the suburbs commute less is patently insane. It's just so obviously not true that I legitimately cannot believe someone could think this. Have you lived anywhere, ever, for any period of time?

The more rural the area you are in, the longer your commute will be, because where you live has no economic activity. So you have to drive somewhere that does.

Consider sanitation: why don't we have this in the suburbs? Because turning 1 sanitation facility into 100 distributed sanitation facilities across 100x more land, all while servicing the SAME AMOUNT OF PEOPLE, is insane. So we don't do that. So then you drive.

It is indisputable that density brings efficiency. From computer chips, to transit, to cities.

> If you want to change a sewer main in Manhattan, you'll spend several years getting all the permits, creating temporary infrastructure to pump the sewage while you're working, then spending several months carefully digging through the streets to avoid severing unmarked pipes carrying who-knows-what.

Okay, this is a perfect demonstration.

If you change 1 mile of sewer in Manhattan, you've serviced 100,000 people. If you change 1 mile of sewer in the suburbs, you've serviced 100 people. Are you seeing the problem?

Yes, there is obviously more friction to getting stuff done, but the amount of stuff you need to get done to impact the same people is orders of magnitude less. The cost ends up being much, much, much lower. This only works if you're comparing like and like though.

A lot of people will compare dense areas to the suburbs and they won't compare the same amount of people. Yeah, that's cheating. NYC has about as many people as north Texas. When you put it that way, then it seems clear that the efficiency of NYC is orders of magnitude higher than your average suburban hellscape.
by OutOfHere | 2025-11-22 04:57:17+00:00
It's not odd; it's the burden of being aware and not ignorant. Of course I take pleasure in several things that won't give me cancer. I also realize that true pleasure comes only after labor and pain. In contrast, alcohol is the kind of pleasure that is followed by pain.

I have a relative who drank regularly. He now has a bad case of gout because of his drinking.

Two others got diabetes from all the unhealthy food they ate while drinking, and died from it.

A coworker who drank regularly got brain cancer and died from it.

An ex-friend long ago basically killed someone drinking and driving.

Most humans don't learn from the dead but they should.
by mmcclure | 2025-11-22 04:59:27+00:00
Yes, it was extremely clear that your position is that it’s overfunded.

OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?

No, we don’t, I just wasn’t trying to make that point. There’s absolutely debates to be had about SFUSD, including how they spend their budget (personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools), but the thought that $28k/kid is too much in SF just isn’t grounded in reality.

two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.

This type of broad statement is true, but also obscures the realities of the student population SFUSD is mandated to serve. That high level number includes special education, non-English speakers, etc. Generally speaking, the data for kids with a similar socioeconomic background to the one I suspect your kids have are doing fine in SFUSD, particularly in K-8.

For example, a low key popular school with “bad scores,” Flynn[1]. ~30% of the student population met or exceeded the standard for math. That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school. Race is an unfortunate proxy here, but it’s 70.8% for white students.

Not trying to convince you to send your kid to public school, of course, just calling out that there’s nuance required when comparing outcomes and what can work for families.

[1] https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true...
by pedalpete | 2025-11-22 04:59:43+00:00
I've found that I don't have trouble making friends, but I've put myself in situations where friendships come and go.

I went from moving around a bunch, and making new friends at each place, to living in Whistler, BC, where you've got an annual turnover of new people, then I settled down in Bondi Beach, Australia, which doesn't have the turnover of Whistler, but not far off.
by 0xCMP | 2025-11-22 05:00:10+00:00
Unfortunately it simply is true. The "same car" in another country is made cheaper. There are a variety of ways to do it and often it's justified as better than the alternative. For instance in India the goal is getting people off of motorcycles as that is a huge cause of driving deaths. To do that they remove various airbag systems, auto braking systems, and etc. which are not required in India... but are required in America or the EU.

Even between the EU and America there are differences in regulation with the EU often getting the stronger regulation first.

This video is my source for all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI-vFq39-I

I've done my best to remember most of it.
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-22 05:00:33+00:00
I'm sure it is a conflation, but it is directionally correct. We are burning money and making zero progress.

The ethical dilemma is deep. Is forcing someone into an asylum—where they can be sheltered, monitored, and treated—more ethical than giving someone the self-determination to self-destruct on the street?

I don't have the answer, I'm not Kant. But it's a question we have been unwilling to face because it is deeply unsettling. It goes against our liberal instinct.
by Animats | 2025-11-22 05:01:00+00:00
Here's the paper.[1] No paywall this way; U.S. Government funded research. The paper claims an associated Github repository but there is no obvious link. There's no imagery in the paper, just the development of the math. So this may or may not help much.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/3001752
by econ | 2025-11-22 05:01:09+00:00
People (nowadays?) have no pride in what they do. Greed is praised not frowned upon. Money hungry maniacs without an ounce of even the most basic decency are idolized. It's pretty wild that people are also surprised by the outcome.

People use to believe they would burn in hell for all eternity, now even their prayers are selfish.

LOL
by array_key_first | 2025-11-22 05:02:29+00:00
Uh, no, I was responding to the notion of 'both sides ism' which I called centrism or moderatism, which is, in fact, a fallacy.

That DOES NOT mean that both sides can't do X or Y, or that moderates are wrong. What it means is there is a particular kind of person who will hide behind middle-road nothing burger perspectives, because they intuitively believe middle of the road must be reasonable.

It's not guaranteed to be reasonable. That's the fallacy. I didn't say YOU did the fallacy, I'm just explaining what 'both sides ism' is.

Now, on to you, specifically:

> Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.

This is a nothing burger perspective. It's not interesting, or thoughtful, or intellectual, and it's barely worth the bits it's encoded in.

Yes, politicians lie. And? So what? That doesn't tell anyone anything about, well, anything.

Also, when certain politicians are lying about certain things and you say 'well everyone lies!' - you are making it worse.

You can bet your fucking ass that the reason people like Trump are able to railroad your constitutional rights is because there's droves of useful idiots who will say 'well democrats do the same thing!'

Okay? But they're not doing it right now, right? And that little tidbit doesn't magically make everything okay, right? So what have we achieved? In our quest to find the right answer, we've just justified and defended behavior that we know is bad for us. That's just self destruction.
by phatskat | 2025-11-22 05:02:33+00:00
You seem to have a pretty narrow view of the world, especially about “privilege education.” FWIW I’ve never once heard anything about “white people bad” from my kiddo, about 10.

It’s also impossible to to talk about idk Columbus, slavery, Great Britain, or the founding of America (and like ya know, the treatment of native Americans) without ascribing some blame to the people responsible…who were by and large “white”. We also talk about how any judgement based on skin, appearance, gender, ethnicity, or religion, is flat out wrong.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-11-22 05:03:05+00:00
Most of the small high speed drones are that size to fit under professional licencing requirements, often so that one racing spec can be viable across a wider area. Leading to significant competition in that size pushing down prices.

Rather than some inherent sized for safety idea.

Jamming might be interesting, I suspect that it's easy enough (and a much bigger crime) to follow a very loud jamming signal though.

Every practical metric a drone surpasses a helicopter; they are so much simpler to operate that you can easily offset any perceived downside with more drones. And you don't get a tested solution without trying it out.
by valzevul | 2025-11-22 05:03:21+00:00
Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:

> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.

I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.

But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.
Show HN: Skedular, a Smart Booking and Workspace Management Platform
by mortezaalizadeh | 2025-11-22 05:04:16+00:00
Hi HN

I have been working on Skedular a platform that helps organizations councils co working spaces and local businesses manage bookings shared spaces and multi location operations in a simple modern way

What Skedular does

- Manage rooms desks studios sports facilities meeting spaces and any kind of bookable asset - Handle multi location multi team scenarios - Provide public booking pages for venues - Offer a clean dashboard for operators to manage availability payments customers and schedules - API first design for easy integration with existing systems - Built with modern tooling including Nextjs NET backend PostGIS and Kafka events

Why I built it

Most booking platforms are either too simple or too enterprise heavy Skedular is meant to sit in the middle powerful enough for councils or large organisations but simple enough for a local venue owner to use without training.

I am currently onboarding early users and would love feedback from this community especially around UX data modelling and scaling patterns.

Links

- Public website https://getskedular.com - App website https://skedular.app

Looking for feedback

I would appreciate thoughts on the overall concept any edge cases I might be missing suggestions for UI and UX improvements and pain points you have experienced in managing bookings or shared resources

Thanks for taking a look Morteza
by ashtakeaway | 2025-11-22 05:04:23+00:00
There has been a change in behavior in the past few years, in fact it used to be that you could only become a HN member that can comment thus vote by posting a select number of threads before being able to comment. This actually kept the community on the more intelligent, factual, and serious side. Now it's not so serious.

This used to be the only place that I could visit to get away from Reddit behavior. It seems like the more obscure a social gathering is, the less Eternal September it suffers.
by ecshafer | 2025-11-22 05:06:03+00:00
The way I look at it if I were to end up homeschooling my kid wouldn't socialize with the ~5 kids in the co-op.

* co-op

* Ballet

* Fencing

* Gymnastics

* Math Circle

* Church / Fellowship

* Neighbors

* Family & Friends

That easily adds up to 50 children their age.

But my thinking isn't really about the numbers of socialization. Public school academics move at a glacial pace. They don't have a sufficient rigor, lack a decent education in mathematics, neglect the classics and philosophy, and have started to neglect the western canon in favor of contemporary literature which is poorly written and offers little value. There are also, even in the best schools, trouble students that disrupt classrooms.
by cyberax | 2025-11-22 05:07:12+00:00
"The pollution in cities goes up because they continue to be more productive, and that's just how money works. I don't know what to tell you, there's just no way around that. Opting to anarchist mode implode the economy so you get slightly cleaner water is insane."

Sounds familiar?

And no, I'm not proposing anything "anarchist". Tax (or cap&trade) the dense office space, provide tax breaks for remote work, provide incentives for jobs in smaller cities.

That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.
by xp84 | 2025-11-22 05:08:30+00:00
OP wisely said for critical vulnerabilities is where the actual exposure needs to be assessed, in order to make an exception from a rule like “install the latest release of things that’s been published for X length of time.”

For instance if you use a package that provides a calendar widget and your app uses only the “western” calendar and there is a critical vulnerability that only manifests in the Islamic calendar, you have zero reason to worry about an exploit.

I see this as a reasonable stance.
by zahlman | 2025-11-22 05:10:30+00:00
In the Python world, people often enough use Rich so that they can put codes like [red] into a string that are translated into the corresponding ANSI. The end user pays several megabytes for this by default, as Rich will also pull in Pygments, which is basically a collection of lexers for various programming languages to enable syntax highlighting. They also pay for a rather large database of emoji names, a Markdown parser, logic for table generation and column formatting etc. all of which might go unused by someone who just doesn't want to remember \e[31m (or re-create the lookup table and substitution code).
by array_key_first | 2025-11-22 05:10:48+00:00
If you don't want to release the Epstein files, then yeah, you're bad.

If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?

Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.

Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
by yunnpp | 2025-11-22 05:12:18+00:00
In the old days you could just call someone a goddamn noob. Suleyman is a goddamn noob. He can't code for shit, so it's no wonder he doesn't understand the programmer's point of view, he can't understand why people are not as enthusiastic as he is. I am a programmer and I take pride in my work; I don't want an AI or anybody to do it for me. Of course, you wouldn't understand that if you're a noob, but that's fine. What's not fine is when you cross the line and you think you're hot shit when, in fact, you're still just a goddamn noob. Nobody wants to hear your shit; your opinion is irrelevant.

I'm surprised Suleyman is the CEO of anything, for that matter. Does he have any interesting opinions on anything?
by xp84 | 2025-11-22 05:16:16+00:00
If it were, they could 20x their margin numbers by raising prices $1 across the board.

It shows how much disdain they have for their customers though, that they won’t at least make it a 25 ¢ line item upgrade for customers who actually care. Instead customers have to pay $20 or whatever for an inferior software decoder.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-22 05:16:35+00:00
Suburbs cause more pollution per capita than cities, and you know that. Because, again, obviously, suburbs are just less efficient. Moving, say, water 100 miles to reach 100 people is worse than moving water 1 mile to reach 100 people.

> That's exactly how we solved the problem of industrial pollution.

It's not, at all. We 'solved' it by just pushing it somewhere else, and then we actually helped it by making more efficient processes.

It's not that by you living in the suburbs you have no pollution. No, the pollution is made in the city, and then we just transport the end result sometimes thousands of miles to your house so you don't have to see it. That process is horribly inefficient - which is why it's fair to say that suburbs are essentially on the welfare of the cities around them.

Everything you have - water, concrete, food, electricity - is coming from denser centers. You don't actually pay enough in taxes to cover that, but it's fine, because that's the cost of typical American culture.

And, speaking of American culture - what you're advocating is very much the status quo. The US is extremely distributed compared to the rest of the developed world, and we pay a high price for it. We use absurd amounts of water, energy, and money to maintain our suburban lifestyle.
by healsdata | 2025-11-22 05:16:35+00:00
How would you want to see this further clarified?

> Military Use: Use by or for any military organization or for any military purpose, including but not limited to projects sponsored or paid for by military organizations, or use by the U.S. Department of Defense (except for DARPA), U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. intelligence agencies, or any foreign counterparts of the foregoing.
by drivebyhooting | 2025-11-22 05:16:49+00:00
In my neighborhood:

* there is no co-op. Meeting another homeschooler is a whole day affair due to traffic

* ballet and other extracurricular are fine, but always after school hours when traffic is terrible

* math circle is so oversubscribed you have to test to get into it

* neighbors’ kids are locked in school all day and then doing their custom extracurricular. We never see them.

* family & friends, we have none.

Nonetheless we homeschool. We can cover 2 years of math and reading in 6 months.
by ordu | 2025-11-22 05:17:07+00:00
So... Now we have a way to commit an act of biological terrorism on the whole Milky Way? Just get a hundred of tons of moss spores to space and accelerate them in all direction to spread them all over Milky Way. It is somehow a very satisfying thought. Maybe I'm a born terrorist deep down, and just didn't get the chance to become one?
by nuuuwan | 2025-11-22 05:17:37+00:00
THE DATA DRIVEN ORGANIZATION - A CRICKET METAPHOR

Why do organisations collect so much #data yet use so little of it?

Why do so many leaders think "data" means a few bar charts and pie charts slapped on the annual report?

When data shows what is really happening, why is it so often ignored?

MEDIUM: https://medium.com/on-business-etc/the-data-driven-organisat...

SUBSTACK: https://open.substack.com/pub/nuuuwan/p/the-data-driven-orga...
by zahlman | 2025-11-22 05:18:44+00:00
> A sane "cooldown" is just for automated version updates relying on semantic versioning rules, which is a pretty questionable practice in the first place, but is indeed made a lot more safe this way.

I'm reminded of how new Setuptools versions are able to cause problems for so many people, basically because install tools default to setting up isolated build environments using the latest version of whatever compatible build backend is specified (which in turn defaults to "any version of Setuptools"). qv. my LWN article https://lwn.net/Articles/1020576/ .
by r721 | 2025-11-22 05:19:16+00:00
^ This account frequently comments in OP account's posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45992902

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963351

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953724

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943338

UPD Archived comment: https://archive.is/tW6SZ
by array_key_first | 2025-11-22 05:23:48+00:00
The state, as like a concept, doesn't 'inherently' want anything, because there's infinite ways to form a state. The organization of human being in which every person has a voice or say, does tend to operate in a certain way.

The main difference between the public sector and the private sector is that the public sector is somewhat of a democracy, and the private sector is much closer to a monarchy. Obviously our democracy is not perfect, but it's a lot better than "the dictator (board and CEO) makes the decisions, you are cog, please comply".

There's market forces to mitigate that, just like we can say there's foreign affairs to mitigate dictatorships in nations, but that doesn't work if you have a lot of power. Exhibit A: Russia. Russia was supposed to be discouraged from invading the Ukraine, but ultimately, there's nothing stopping the King from doing that.

Let's look at Tesla. Elon Musk is supposed to be discouraged from doing a Nazi Salute because free market, but ultimately there's nothing stopping the king from doing that.

For our government, it makes decisions with the coordination of thousands of people, many of them poor and will experience the direct consequences of those decisions. The further we stray away from that core principle, the worse it gets. Just in general, when we talk about human organization.
by dmpayton | 2025-11-22 05:26:36+00:00
Oh my god, that was me! I can't believe I just read this on HN. Whenever I'm at a conference (usually PyCon or DjangoCon) and meet someone whose work has benefited me, I try to make a point to thank them.

I ended up getting involved with Qtile for a few years and contributed to the docs, website, and various widgets.

So, thanks again!
by array_key_first | 2025-11-22 05:27:05+00:00
> You are making it like they are doing human crime level hitler or some shit

I mean, yeah, Facebook directly caused a genocide because of their pursuit of ads. Do with that what you will.

But either way, it's like you're pulling every fallacy you can think of out of your ass!

Even if it's not a big deal, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. That's stupid.

And the idea that 'oh well we don't need to think of solutions, because the magical solution fairy would've already done it' is also stupid.

How do you think stuff gets done? Who's doing it? Us! The conversation we're having is that! It's the "born already" you're talking about!