MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ufmace | 2025-11-05 03:38:07+00:00
I don't particularly like this article, mostly because he seems to have spent the great majority of it ranting about people on the internet supposedly yelling at him about not being "on the cloud" and semantics about exactly what constitutes "the cloud". I'd be much more interested in reading exactly what he was spending that money on at AWS and how he moved it all onto one or a few bare-metal boxes.

I don't think AWS is particularly expensive at all. In fact, it's rather cheap at quite a few things if you know what you're doing and use the right services. I've got all my server backups going to S3, for which I pay a whopping penny a month. I also host a handful of Docker images on ECR for 7 cents a month - way cheaper than any other private hosting service I know of.

Now RDS, and the equivalent at every other hosting provider I know of, gets quite pricey indeed. IMO, you shouldn't bother unless you have pretty serious needs for reliability and speed. Apt install your DB server of choice on bare metal goes quite far. Or possibly pull a container of it into whatever you're using to manage containers.
by bpodgursky | 2025-11-05 03:40:32+00:00
The use of paywalled scientific articles to train AI is one place where I think we have to just draw the line and say, this has to be allowed or US AI is simply going to get gutted and replaced by international competitors who have no respect for copyright law.

Sorry but this is just a competitive reality and the content matters A LOT. Sucks that Elsevier gambled badly on the scientific community putting up with overpriced subscriptions forever, but their concerns can't dictate national policy on this.
by mrandish | 2025-11-05 03:41:06+00:00
Some US washers don't but many do. However, US washers tend to not heat water as quickly or to as high of a temp. The video cites two reasons: 1. US power being 110V vs 220v. 2. US dishwasher heating elements being limited to 800 or 1000 watts because many are designed to potentially share one 20A residential circuit with an oven and/or fridge due to possibly being retrofitted into a kitchen built before built-in dishwashers were standard and manufacturers not wanting to create different models for retrofit vs new installs.
by kazinator | 2025-11-05 03:41:12+00:00
People with absolutely no technical clue who only know "ISO 9001" equate "ISO" with quality initiatives and certifications.

What people with a better clue sometimes wrongly equate ISO with is interoperability.

ISO standards can help somewhat. If you have ISO RISC V, then you can analyze a piece of code and know, is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions.

If an architecture is controlled by a vendor, or a consortium, we still know analogous things: like does the program conform to some version of the ISA document from the vendor/consortium.

That vendor has a lot of power to take it in new directions though without getting anyone else to sign off.
by ameliaquining | 2025-11-05 03:41:15+00:00
In general, Ruby does allow mutable values in hash tables, with basically those semantics: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/3.4/Hash.html#class-Hash-label...

The copy-and-freeze behavior is a special case that applies only to strings, presumably because the alternative was too much of a footgun since programmers usually think of strings in terms of value semantics.

I don't think anyone likes the explicit .freeze calls everywhere; I think the case for frozen strings in Ruby is primarily based on performance rather than correctness (which is why it wasn't obvious earlier in the language's history that it was the right call), and the reason it's hard to make the default is because of compatibility.
by js2 | 2025-11-05 03:41:28+00:00
And 15 years before that was Hillarycare (1993):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...

(Fuck you Bill Kristol.)

There's a long, sad, littered history of attempts at universal care in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_...
by ikidd | 2025-11-05 03:43:23+00:00
I had to do exactly this with Oracle. They couldn't fix my account to be able to change my billing, but I still had access to my resources. But I couldn't change anything and I figured it was just a sign that breaking my rule of never dealing with Oracle was a bad idea so I shut it down. Then had to cancel the card to get the billing stopped because multiple long calls and chats with CS couldn't get that fixed.
by spijdar | 2025-11-05 03:43:51+00:00
I actually think about this a lot, and I could argue both sides of this. On the one hand, you could look at your list of examples as obvious examples of modern innovation/improvement that enrich our lives. On the other, you could take it as a fascetious list that proves the point of GP, as one other commenter apparently already has.

I often think how stupid video call meetings are. Teams video calls are one of the few things that make every computer I own, including my M1 MPB, run the fans at full tilt. I've had my phone give me overheat warnings from showing the tile board of bored faces staring blankly at me. And yeah, honestly, it feels like a solution looking for a problem. I understand that it's not, and that some people are obsessed for various reasons (some more legitimate than others) with recreating the conference room vibe, but still.

And with monitors? This is a far more "spicy" take, but I think 1280x1024 is actually fine. Even 1024x768. Now, I have a 4K monitor at home, so don't get me wrong: I like my high DPI monitor.

But I think past 1024x768, the actual productivity gains from higher resolutions begins to rapidly dwindle. 1920x1080, especially in "small" displays (under 20 inches) can look pretty visually stunning. 4K is definitely nicer, but do we really need it?

I'm not trying to get existential with this, because what do we really "need"? But I think that, objectively, computing is divided into two very broad eras. The first era, ending around the mid 2000s, was marked by year-after-year innovation where 2-4 years brought new features that solved _real problems_, as in, features that gave users new qualitative capabilities. Think 24-bit color vs 8-bit color, or 64-bit vs 32-bit (or even 32-bit vs 16-bit). Having a webcam. Having 5+ hours of battery life on a laptop, with a real backlit AMLCD display. Having more than a few gigabytes of internal storage. Having a generic peripheral bus (USB/firewire). Having PCM audio. Having 3D hardware acceleration...

I'm not prepared to vigorously defend this thesis ;-) but it seems at about 2005-ish, the PC space had reached most of these "core qualitative features". After that, everything became better and faster, quantitatively superior versions of the same thing.

And sometimes yeah, it can feel both like it's all gone to waste on ludicrously inefficient software (Teams...), and sometimes, like modern computing did become a solution in search of a problem, in order to keep selling new hardware and software.
by bhu1st | 2025-11-05 03:44:52+00:00
If you don't have an old device lying around to make use of, here's an X thread I found a while ago supporting similar habit for kids: https://x.com/ValKatayev/status/1926734004314624481

I have set up a similar Google sheet for my 12 yo, which is shared with him on view-only mode. He loves the idea that he's earning $$ every day out of his savings. He's on fire to grow his investment to the point that he earns $5 every day, "while sleeping". He's currently making ~$2/day.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-05 03:45:05+00:00
> Nobody’s health insurance is better or cheaper than before.

It’s far better than before. You can’t be denied for pre existing conditions, there is no benefit limit, and a lot of preventative care is included.

>(before someone argues this, be aware that your state (taxes) heavily subsidizes this)

No, state taxes have nothing to do with ACA. The biggest subsidy is from young people due to the age rating factor capping highest premiums at 3x the lowest premiums. The second biggest subsidy is healthy to sick people, since pre existing conditions aren’t a factor in premium. And the federal government is what subsidized the premium tax credits for people with lower income.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-11-05 03:45:28+00:00
I used my VP extensively recently when working remotely. It's not glamorous, but I used Screen Sharing with a Macbook that grants you a virtual ultrawide monitor.

Once you're already in VR, it's nice to not have to break out for a meeting, and that's where Personas fit in.

It's not a killer app carrying the product, it's a necessary feature making sure there's not a gap in workflow.
by testfoobar | 2025-11-05 03:45:55+00:00
Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?

https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform

Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).

"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."

https://archive.ph/k4h7J#selection-475.0-475.1011
by kj4211cash | 2025-11-05 03:46:31+00:00
we have used it at my last 2 companies for most geospatial data analyses. defining and visualizing catchment areas. making maps dividing up service areas. picking out high demand density areas. etc. before h3, both companies were using zipcodes and more ad-hoc data transformations. i'm not saying h3 is perfect. i wouldn't know. but it definitely beats zipcodes.
by timr | 2025-11-05 03:47:16+00:00
It's an article about a single corrupt individual. Instead of just reporting the facts of the case (as was done by the Stat piece, which they're ripping off) they spend multiple paragraphs making ad hominem attacks about the CDC, Prasad, etc. Almost unbelievably, they put those things first.

I don't care what your opinions are of the administration. This is crappy journalism. I'm even willing to entertain the notion that this is representative of a systematic staffing problem -- but not when the reporting is so obviously, viciously partisan.
by rangestransform | 2025-11-05 03:47:18+00:00
The federal government hasn't even lifted a finger to control undergrad education costs. In British Columbia, Canada where I'm from, the government sets limits on student loan coverage (seems to be CA$520/week right now) and universities don't get anything more from student loans. When my student loan disbursement occured, the form explicitly had $5000 of "unmet need" that I would need to scrounge up somehow.

If a universal healthcare system really wanted to, it could keep costs under control in a similar manner by telling hospitals to accept X amount for Y procedure or get bent. That the government doesn't swing its big dick on colleges in the US is entirely the fault of the government and a populace that always votes for "candy for dinner" vs. "eating vegetables".
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-05 03:47:23+00:00
He’ll have a hard time getting most of his stuff through. Rent regulation and busses are controlled by authorities that work for the governor, and she is facing an election against Sara Huckabee Part 2 - Elise Stefanik. The MAGAs will dump lots of cash into that race, and there’s plenty of dudes who will vote for her.

You’re mostly wrong on healthcare. The increased state costs are people who didn’t know they were Medicaid eligible who are now enrolled. The biggest failure imo of Obamacare is that it encouraged consolidation and creation of regional health networks, which have increased prices.
by saghm | 2025-11-05 03:47:37+00:00
There's even precedent for the current president's agencies compiling some pretty sketchy "comments" in the past due to not doing basic sanity checks on pretty obvious fake comments that happened to support their agenda, like when supposedly seeking input from the public about repealing net neutrality[1]. There were so many duplicates that only thirty 30 unique comments made up 57% of the overall total, and the second most common "name" among the authors was literally "The Internet".

No one in the current administration cares about what random members of the public think about their policies, and that's by design. Even the government positions that are intended to be permanent across administrations aren't a safe bet at this point with was things have been going

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/11/29/public-comme...
by hansvm | 2025-11-05 03:50:07+00:00
Something I've had a lot of success with (in cases where you're automating the same task with the same lighting) is having a human operator manually choose a variety of in-sample and out-of-sample regions, ideally with some of those being near real boundaries. Then train a (very simple -- details matter, but not a ton) local model to operate on small image patches and output probabilities for each pixel.

One fun thing is that with a simple model it's not much slower than techniques like otsu (you're still doing a roughly constant amount of vectorized, fast math for each pixel), but you can grab an alpha channel for free even when working in colored spaces, allowing you to near-perfectly segment the background out from an image.

The UX is also dead-simple. If a human operator doesn't like the results, they just click around the image to refine the segmentation. They can then apply directly to a batch of images, or if each image might need some refinement then there are straightforward solutions for allowing most of the learned information to transfer from one image to the next, requiring much less operator input for the rest of the batch.

As an added plus, it also works well even for gridlines and other stranger backgrounds, still without needing any fancy algorithms.
by budududuroiu | 2025-11-05 03:50:33+00:00
Do those case studies include the case for expropriating landlords that don’t keep their buildings to code?

Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.

If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
by voidhorse | 2025-11-05 03:51:06+00:00
The literal alternative, which is actually happening right now and not some textbook hypothetical is supply not keeping up anyway and landlords charging however much they want pretty much unbridled, not to mention major companies snapping up real estate and leveraging it as investment collateral rather than treating them and managing them as, you know, housing.

We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.

Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-05 03:51:29+00:00
Bringing down costs while expanding the number of people getting healthcare was never in the cards unless someone had a magic machine to mint thousands of new doctors and not have to pay for patented medicine. Not to mention enormous tort reform.

However, the increase in costs did slow after ACA:

https://cepr.net/publications/health-care-cost-growth-slowed...
by ecshafer | 2025-11-05 03:52:02+00:00
I hope this turns out well for New York, but I am doubtful. Rent control is such a colossally bad idea, a rent freeze is going to be a disaster. This is going to further increase the lottery nature of New York City real estate, and reduce investment. His plans are set to drive finance and businesses out of the city in his goal to give away money to everyone, which will bankrupt the city. Socialism has a bad track record for a reason, there has never been an issue of people trying to escape market economies for socialist ones. The city already has a crime problem, defunding police and making the job unbearable wont help that. Grocery stores already run on razor thin margins, even with the logistics expertise and brutal capitalism of the likes of walmart or aldis, how does the famoisly expensive and incompetent nyc government plan on running a grocery store for cheaper (itll be at a massive loss). This isnt even getting into hos antisemitism “the boot of the nypd on your neck was laced by the idf” should have disqualified him, that kind of antisemetic talk was only on /pol/ like 2 years ago.
by nozzlegear | 2025-11-05 03:52:35+00:00
I don't have one, but even if I did that's only a 2D photo right? I guess when I think biometrics I think of the full on 3D depth maps, vocal signatures, iris recognition, etc. that a phone is doing to tell who's trying to unlock it. Not that I want them to have a plain photo of me either, but that ship has sailed unfortunately.
by octaane | 2025-11-05 03:52:57+00:00
You guys have it all wrong. There was only one candidate for the dem party, Here's the list:

1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.

2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.

3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.

Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
by obviouslynotme | 2025-11-05 03:53:09+00:00
Cameras and other means of tracking cannot remove me from commerce. The problem isn't just the tracking. Cash requires no oversight to transact. If I am required to use a payment network, there are many third parties who get a say in what I can do. That's the biggest issue.

On the plus side, once cash is de facto outlawed, the US Supreme Court will be forced to finally step in on the subject. The removal of cash will force banks to authorize bank cards and accounts, no matter who. A bit later after that, they will be forced to give access everyone access to payment terminals and gateways.
by donohoe | 2025-11-05 03:53:31+00:00
Or any of these:

- Vienna, Austria: About 60% of residents live in city-subsidized or cooperatively owned housing

- Berlin, Germany: Rent control has been mixed, varies by neighborhood, but seen as working

- Singapore: Not rent control in the classic sense, but government-built housing

- Montreal, Canada: Rent control applies mainly to existing tenant

Not all perfect. There are others. It can work.
by hyperrail | 2025-11-05 03:53:54+00:00
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file <- Direct File's web app source code is public-domain and published on GitHub!

Obviously the 2025 version will be out of date for the 2026 filing season, though public code means it can always be revived by anyone else.

(previous HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131901 )
by nostrebored | 2025-11-05 03:54:34+00:00
Yes, the mechanism of this is a wealth transfer from people who likely don’t have health conditions to people who do. This hurts young people. With the added benefit of having for profit institutions as a middleman.

The distortions caused by ACA will be papers in 20 years. It is so much worse than single payer or the previous corporatist insurance oligopoly.
by koolba | 2025-11-05 03:54:36+00:00
> … unless someone had a magic machine to mint thousands of new doctors.

That exists. Just buy them from overseas.

Grant special visas to doctors who commit to working at clinics for X years. Pay them some guaranteed wage that’s higher than they make in their homeland and they’ll take the deal.

That would increase the supply of providers, which shifts costs down due to basic economics.

Sure it’s not “fair” to the rest of the world, but that’s not our problem to solve. Too bad the AMA hates this idea.
by eru | 2025-11-05 03:54:36+00:00
That was a pretty long blink?

The personal computer arguably begins with VisiCalc in 1979.

> Through the 1970s, personal computers had proven popular with electronics enthusiasts and hobbyists, however it was unclear why the general public might want to own one. This perception changed in 1979 with the release of VisiCalc from VisiCorp (originally Personal Software), which was the first spreadsheet application.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers#...

Mainstream use of the web really took off in the second half of the 1990s. Arbitrarily, let's say with the release of Windows 95. That's a quarter of a century you'd be blinking for.
by FabHK | 2025-11-05 03:54:54+00:00
> Do runways have some sort of barrier between them and the next "important" thing. It seems like that would be prudent both for cases like this

Ha, Jeju Air Flight 2216 smashed into a barrier on the second landing attempt in Muan last year [0], and people commented "How could there be a barrier at the end of the runway, so obviously stupid, irresponsible", etc.

Now a plane does not smash into a barrier at the end of the runway and people suggest putting barriers at the end of the runway.

Don't mean to attack parent post, but may I suggest that

a) hordes of experts have thought long and hard about these issues, and it is unlikely that you can encounter this for the first time as a lay person and come up with a solution that has eluded the best engineers for decades ("why don't they attach a parachute to the plane?"), and

b) we are very close to an optimum in commercial aviation, and there are few if any unambiguous ("Pareto") improvements, but rather just tradeoffs. For example: You leave cockpit doors open, terrorists come in and commandeer the plane to turn it into a weapon. You lock the cockpit doors closed, and suicidal pilots lock out the rest of the crew and commandeer the plane to turn it into a weapon of mass-murder-suicide.

There are no easy answers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Air_Flight_2216

ETA: In 2007 an A320 overran a runway in Brazil and crashed into a gas station, killing 187 pax & crew + 12 on the ground. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAM_Airlines_Flight_3054
by CPLX | 2025-11-05 03:54:57+00:00
I would say it does not, in fact, look like a compressor stall. It looks very much like an uncontained disassembly, presumably from fan blades that suffered a catastrophic failure and broke up in a way that exceeded the limits of the engine's containment.

Obviously impossible to tell from some cell phone type videos. Being struck by something is also possible. But it sure does look like an uncontained engine failure.