MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smeej | 2025-11-24 03:32:47+00:00
I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:

> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.

We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.

You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.

There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.

It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?

It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.

I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.
by notpushkin | 2025-11-24 03:33:34+00:00
> The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures each September. The first, called the official poverty measure, is based on cash resources. The second, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). The official poverty measure has remained mostly unchanged since it was introduced in the mid-1960s. In contrast, the SPM was designed to improve as new data and methods become available.

– https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2025/...

I’m not sure how to treat this, but if the official poverty measure is used for practical purposes and not the SPM, the core premise is still entirely valid. I have no idea if that’s the case, and why the “official” one is still measured at all.
by byko3y | 2025-11-24 03:33:44+00:00
>Compile speed. Why do people care so much? Use debug for correctness and iterating your code. You're hardly going to change much between runs, and you'll get an incremental compile.

What's the largest Rust-based public codebase so far? Rustc with like 1 million lines of code including all the dependencies in all the languages? Zed IDE has 800k lines. Incremental compilation seems to work fine at this scale, but things become messy above it. Most people prefer to not exceed the limit.

>Mutable shared state: make bad designs hard to write. Mutable shared state is another one of these eternal bug sources. Use channels and pass messages.

People think BEAM (Erlang/Elixir) does not have shared mutable state because the programming model says so, but it actually has some mutable shared state transparently under the hood i.e. implementation details and runtime. BEAM processes all run in a single OS address space, they are not even separate threads but async tasks spread out across OS threads — and still per programming model of the language those are "shared nothing". So in the end BEAM is a very good abstraction on the partially shared mutable state.

And no, in BEAM remote messaging is not nearly the same as local messaging. For example, you don't have built-in supervision trees on remote, and ETS is also local-node-only.

I do agree that hardware model of shared mutable state is inherently problematic, but we don't have other commodity CPU-s yet — you have to handle the shared mutable if you wanna be close to hardware.

>It reads like a lot of critiques of Rust: people haven't spent enough time with it, and are not over the learning curve yet. Of course everything is cumbersome before you're used to it.

Well, at least you confirm that the complexity is real. Don't get my criticism to close to the heart though — I did exaggerated the problems a bit, because someone needs to counteract the fanboys.
by jemmyw | 2025-11-24 03:34:24+00:00
They aren't choosing a side, they're choosing a person. Being bisexual surely just opens the field to more potential mates, but once you're with someone the same rules apply as to folks in any other relationship. And I don't want to sound too conservative - if you choose to be with someone and both agree to have an open relationship of some kind, or any other mutually agreed kind of thing, that's no-ones business but yourselves.

In this case though, they're saying their partner is pansexual - open to many kinds of sexual activities. And they're saying that they'd be accepting if their partner needed to go and do sexy stuff with someone else even though it'd cause them a lot of pain (that's my reading of it, not having a platonic friendship with someone else as you mentioned). I'm asking why? Having a different to hetrosexual appetite before going into a relationship shouldn't give you special rules once you're in one - it's absolutely no different than if a hetrosexual person wanted to sleep around. OK if your relationship allows for that, really not OK if it's going to cause your partner/spouse/love pain, as they said.
by hastily3114 | 2025-11-24 03:35:46+00:00
We do this too sometimes and I love it. When I work on my own projects I always stop and refactor/fix problems before adding any new features. I wish companies would see the value in doing this

Also love the humble brag. "I've just closed my 12th bug" and later "12 was maximum number of bugs closed by one person"
by the_af | 2025-11-24 03:36:47+00:00
Your answer seems in bad faith because it ignores parts of the answer like this:

> "Instead, I will respond to the former, which is the original point, and say that there are plenty of mom-and-pop (or larger) businesses, as well as cooperatives, whose goals are not actually to exploit the worker to maximize the amount of money they make, but is primarily to give the owners a good work/life balance, or to help their community, or to be owned collectively by all workers"

Those are not hobbies and will not be categorized as such.

The point is that the goal of making money is not necessarily meant at the cost of crushing employees or considering them disposable. The person you're replying to is saying that's a very US-centric way of looking at businesses (e.g. maximize shareholder value even if it costs happiness) but that's not necessarily the only way of making money. It's very cynical to think it's the only way, because it reinforces the status quo (what are you going to do if you don't like it? That's business, join a commune instead!).
by phantasmish | 2025-11-24 03:37:09+00:00
The phone point was terrible but he’s not wrong that next to housing, childcare, and healthcare, basically all other expenses hardly matter at all for a family these days, including food.

If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.

[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.

[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.
by fallat | 2025-11-24 03:37:30+00:00
Zoo has said it's open to local hosting of the kernel for years. I believe it's a matter of time because it's mostly about legal tape.

ucad is based on Manifold, so unfortunately, not really comparable, since it's all meshes vs brep, like OpenSCAD.

Note KCL could be completely augmented with another kernel. There are people who've already tried :)
by sfink | 2025-11-24 03:37:31+00:00
I know of no business that does not involve making money.

I know of many businesses for which making money is not the primary reason to exist. And the majority of businesses do not try to maximize profit at all costs, even when their primary reason for existence is to make money.

Random example: I know someone who teaches singing. She no longer employs other people, but has done so in the past. The IRS agrees that it is a business. She makes money from it and depends on the money from it. She has other skills that would earn her more money elsewhere. If her business made moderately more money but no longer taught anyone to sing better, she would stop running the business and do something else.

If you're going to say that the business's existence depends on the function of making money, as in if that purpose were removed then it would be called a hobby and not a business, then that's a No True Scotsman argument and it's pointless to discuss.

(Basically, I'm with stavros on this.)
by josephcsible | 2025-11-24 03:37:32+00:00
> Registration is like $100 a year for "unlimited" access to roads. Quite a bit cheaper than a yearly unlimited transit pass.

But that's still "some of it".

> And electric cars don't pay a gas tax.

Electric cars' registration fees are much higher to make up for that, e.g., in New Jersey, you owe an extra $260 per year for an EV (which automatically goes up by $10 every year) vs. a gas car.
by fallingfrog | 2025-11-24 03:39:10+00:00
140k is significantly more money than I've ever made in my life.

Where I live, really the line where life becomes a real struggle is about 80k I would say. Below that, you're putting off maintenance, not saving money, the car is accumulating wear that you can't fix, and a medical bill is fatal.

People living way below 80k can only be doing so with significant government assistance.
by burkaman | 2025-11-24 03:39:54+00:00
The premise is that food is a smaller share of the average budget today, so multiplying a food budget by three is too low. But they don't recalculate a new food budget every year, they literally just take the number from 1963 and add inflation.

> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.

They don't do that, nobody does that.

I agree that the poverty line is too low, and I agree that the original idea was not supposed to mean "more than this is ok", but the argument still doesn't really make sense even if the conclusion is correct.
by jlev1 | 2025-11-24 03:39:56+00:00
I have moderate-to-profound hearing loss and have worn hearing aids since I was 4. I currently have Oticon Opn1’s and have had Oticons since 2017 (and got new ones in 2022) and they are fabulous. I find the sound quality in noisy environments much better than any other aid I’ve had - much better perception of voices in restaurants, for example. I rarely have to fiddle with the volume control and in fact do not even use any other settings than the main program - I find that whatever the core program is doing tends to be basically what I want.

I also very much appreciate that they can natively connect to iPhones (this is also essentially the main reason I have an iPhone). This makes phone calls and music and podcasts very easy. (Whereas up until 2017, I used to dread phone calls.)

I actually tried Phonaks briefly in 2022 and hated them. Lots of controls to fiddle with (some with oddly unintuitive names), but that meant I was constantly trying to adjust it and was rarely able to just exist in the moment. I found them markedly worse in noisy environments - I basically couldn’t have a conversation in a restaurant.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-24 03:39:57+00:00
> does “disarming” here mean “not engaging in illegal authoritarian action”?

Nothing discussed is black-and-white illegal. SCOTUS has made that clear.

> hope that if Democrats get back into power they will invest in stabilizing democracy and the rule of law

Me too. The first step in that has to be setting the precedent that if you side with an autocrat, you lose your wealth and freedom.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-11-24 03:40:00+00:00
I've followed DOGE closely and haven't heard anything that would indicate they were even trying to reduce unnecessary medicare spending. Where I have heard that they've tried to touch healthcare spending, they've made a huge mess. For instance, they cancelled a lot of support contracts at the VA, but many of those contracts did necessary things, like maintaining complex machinery. If you read ProPublica's article on DOGE at the VA, it's pretty clear that this was done incredibly quickly by a guy with zero healthcare knowledge using a minimal prompt and wasn't even directing the AI to read the most important parts of the contract. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-veterans-affai...
by pyuser583 | 2025-11-24 03:40:49+00:00
Thank you for this article.

You’ve censored out some names as “redacted” but it’s pretty easy to fill in at least one name by other articles in the site. If you want anonymity, consider doing a broad review.

I’m not trying to dox you - it’s totally up you what to share.

But some of the articles seem to be private, while others seem very public.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-24 03:41:31+00:00
I love the idea, but this line:

> 1) no bug should take over 2 days

Is odd. It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done.

That said, unless fixing a bug requires a significant refactor/rewrite, I can’t imagine spending more than a day on one.

Also, I tend to attack bugs by priority/severity, as opposed to difficulty.

Some of the most serious bugs are often quite easy to find.

Once I find the cause of a bug, the fix is usually just around the corner.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-11-24 03:42:36+00:00
> While it can be super powerful, I wish there was a quicker "in memory" agent solution where each agent keeps in its own RAM the list of files modifications ("patch") it recommends to apply to solve current issue. Then we could apply that patch depending on what we're doing, if we have others patches to apply before etc.

Then the changes can't be tested to even verify that they pass the compiler/linter, much less tested to confirm they actually work. The only way to fix this is to "modify local files", where "local files" is either a separate worktree (that you don't manage or need to know the location of, possibly even on a separate machine); or a hacky, vibe-coded, in-memory VFS; or somewhere in between.
by saithound | 2025-11-24 03:42:58+00:00
> You're cherry-picking your own examples. It worked in Iowa City.

Indeed, it worked in Brisbane (a metro area comparable to Baltimore in the U.S.) and Lanzhou (comparable to Boston-Cambridge-Newton): congestion was reduced, the environment benefited, and usage increased in many cities that dislodged from that equilibrium and switched to a free-of-charge or symbolic-charge model.

I don't think GP's claim stands, for transit cities big or small.
by GianFabien | 2025-11-24 03:42:59+00:00
Using Advance72 (made by Sonova) has BlueTooth which makes using a phone a breeze. The Hearing Remote app allows me to override the audiologist configured settings for volume, listening modes and equalizer.

IMHO rechargeable models are not worth the extra cost. With a typical 5 year replacement cycle the batteries will no longer hold the early levels of charge. 312 batteries are cheap and easy to carry spares.
by rmunn | 2025-11-24 03:43:05+00:00
I remember it being called "Windows FP" where FP stood for Fischer-Price (maker of colorful plastic toys for babies and toddlers) at the time. Lots of people hated the design of XP after using Win98/2000. I got used to it, but much preferred 7 when it came out. There's a reason why Linux Mint's UI is modeled more or less after the style of Windows 7, not XP or 10.
by jchrisa | 2025-11-24 03:43:28+00:00
I just had a majorly fun time addressing tech debt, deleting about 15k lines-of-code from a codebase that now has ~45k lines of implementation, and 50k lines of tests. This was made possible by moving from a homegrown auth system to Clerk, as well as consolidating some Cloudflare workers, and other basic stuff. Not as fun as creating the tech debt in the first place, but much more satisfying. Open source repo if you like to read this sort of thing: https://github.com/VibesDIY/vibes.diy/pull/582
by bgkkdev | 2025-11-24 03:43:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a solo developer. I built Knothing because I was frustrated with existing utility sites (UUID, JSON, Image Compressors) that are:

Full of ads/popups.

Slow.

Uploading data to servers (privacy risk).

Knothing runs 100% in the browser (client-side). No data leaves your device.

Tech stack: Nuxt 3, VueUse, Tailwind CSS, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

It's free and PWA-ready. I'd appreciate any feedback!
by plutonium3345 | 2025-11-24 03:44:04+00:00
I personally have had a frustrating experience with GitButler, and would prefer if things don't become too complicated. For example, when you accidentally break GitButler, it can become really difficult to recover all your unpushed progress. It is also hard to find the exact location of where your code changes are stored across different branches.

My suggestion would be to keep things simple, pragmatic, and save development time. While git worktrees are not perfect, and they require extra space, it is easier for people to understand and easily locate this kind of structure while also being able to execute commands in a somewhat isolated environment. I would be happy if the app simply automates this for me and creates a new worktree, branch, and agent at that location as soon as I click 'Add agent'.

Then the only issues become merge conflicts between different branches... this is where extra dev time could be allocated, and implement agents that automatically merge branches.
by nuuuwan | 2025-11-24 03:44:31+00:00
Picture the old joke about the pits in hell.

Every country has guards. The Sri Lankan pit has none, because if one of us climbs up, the rest pull that person down.

We laugh, but there is a sting in this tale. Why does the joke feel so familiar?

MEDIUM: https://medium.com/on-politics/crab-mentality-d97d78bef857

SUBSTACK: https://open.substack.com/pub/nuuuwan/p/crab-mentality
by rjdj377dhabsn | 2025-11-24 03:45:54+00:00
Governments respond to populist pressure. I think most people just aren't aware of how bad air pollution can be or that it even exists.

I was recently in a small Asian village where the pollution gets very bad for a couple months when farmers burn the sugar cane and rice fields. I mentioned it to some locals, and they thought the thick haze was just harmless "mist" from the winter weather patterns.
by kykat | 2025-11-24 03:45:57+00:00
Sometimes, a "bug" can be caused by nasty architecture with intertwined hacks. Particularly on games, where you can easily have event A that triggers B unless C is in X state...

What I want to say is that I've seen what happens in a team with a history of quick fixes and inadequate architecture design to support the complex features. In that case, a proper bugfix could create significant rework and QA.
by smileysteve | 2025-11-24 03:46:06+00:00
Minor: Given the examples depend on healthcare and childcare, people aged 65 and older (Medicare, outside average child raising age) fall outside this analysis, and currently a significant part of us population.

(And Medicare, even without additional supplements would have significantly better health outcomes than 1960s)

And if you take the average social security benefit being $48k per household/year, subtract those 2 expenses, either the $31k poverty line is way off or social security is way off
by sfink | 2025-11-24 03:48:19+00:00
> Software has something, which no engineering discipline has. Encapsulation. If you are building a car, a plane or a train everything affects everything.

In other engineering disciplines, a lot of work goes into preventing everything from affecting everything. You overbuild a bridge so that you don't have to consider oscillation magnitudes (other than to conservatively figure out the maximum you need to support, and that maximum will be a worst case specifically so you don't need to consider the interaction of everything else.) Any time you're adding a safety margin, you're removing from consideration all of the things that could go wrong but not wrong enough to exceed the margin.
by ericmay | 2025-11-24 03:48:57+00:00
Thanks. Yea also not accounting for other social costs - obesity, teen deaths, first responders and police spending time rescuing people who are maimed in car crashes.

There are benefits too and all, just saying we don’t really have a full cost readily available for comparison because it’s hard to measure, never mind the literal dollars and cents that go into funding.
by vintagedave | 2025-11-24 03:49:10+00:00
It’s a ‘minimal’ allocator. Reading the blog it seems to be going in depth into allocator principles, in practice, things like coalescing blocks.

I haven’t read in full so not sure if it discusses using blocks vs other structures (eg stack-based allocators, stack being the data structure not the program stack.) Ie, it’s a set of implementation choices. It still seems to reflect common ways of allocating in far more detail than many blogs I’ve read on the topic do.
by lapcat | 2025-11-24 03:49:34+00:00
> It’s virtually impossible for me to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug, until the job is done.

This is explained later in the post. The 2 day hard limit is applied not to the estimate but rather to the actual work: "If something is ballooning, cut your losses. File a proper bug, move it to the backlog, pick something else."
by dangus | 2025-11-24 03:49:35+00:00
This theory ignores the entire Midwest rust belt where the property pricing squeeze often barely exists and senior level engineers barely cross $100k for salary.

By your logic AWS should also be cheap since it was also built under similar timing.

Hetzner is cheap because they don’t provide the same level of abstractions. They also have competitors in the same price range. They aren’t wildly unique.