MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why are Italian cities riddled with graffiti?
by robomartin | 2025-12-22 17:51:43+00:00
Just got back from spending a couple of weeks in Rome, Florence, Milan, Monza, Pisa, Napoli and a few other places.

It absolutely broke my heart to see the extent of the defacing seen almost everywhere. Watching local news, I never heard anyone say anything about it. Is anything being done to restore the beauty of these cities? It's really sad.
by skywhopper | 2025-12-22 17:51:46+00:00
Those 50 million visits are the sum of daily visits across four parks, so it’s probably at most 30 million people. Even if they were all American (they aren’t), that’s like 9% of the population.

The average cell phone bill you cite is for more than one person.

I think it’s entirely fair to say that “most” Americans would find it too expensive to visit Disneyworld.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-22 17:51:56+00:00
Used to be written in C++, and usually trace back to the 1990's when C++ GUI frameworks used to rule.

Nowadays most are written in managed languages, and only hot paths are written in C++.

There is hardly anyone still writing new GUI applications on macOS, Windows in pure C++, even Qt nowadays pushes for a mix of QML, Python and C++.
by thenoblesunfish | 2025-12-22 17:51:59+00:00
Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
by underlipton | 2025-12-22 17:52:24+00:00
I wouldn't even say medicine. Neither Baby Boomers nor the current American healthcare system have 30 years left in them; that means that, unless you're already in your 40s or 50s, you're going to see the bottom fall out of that sector mid-career.

This is a political failure. It has nothing to do with individual decision-making and everything to do with poorly-managed incentives for appropriate 21st-century investments.
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-22 17:52:26+00:00
Yeah. I get this is all kind of silly. I think what trips me up is that a watt doesn’t represent a timeless amount of something the way a meter does. A watt involves a unit amount of time.

Imagine if the distance between you and I was 438 kiloflerp-hours. And to get to you in one hour I have to drive at a speed of 438 kiloflerps. It works, it kinda makes sense. It just feels inconsistent with all the other units I work with.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-22 17:52:28+00:00
> I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more!

I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when:

- people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly,

- Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things,

- Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing

I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it.

But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc.

Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point.

It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-22 17:52:32+00:00
Your style of commenting is pretty full of LLM tells fyi. Normally don’t comment on it but this is the second such comment of yours I have read in a few minutes.

e: I would be curious of the thoughts of those downvoting as personally I don’t think mostly LLM written comments are a direction we want to move towards on HN.
by floxy | 2025-12-22 17:52:36+00:00
>either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make.

Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always be at least a few people that complain about something for the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm" phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-22 17:52:37+00:00
It's not about ideology, ffs get a grip.

The US is bleeding out because its government spends so much more than its society can generate via taxes. Its has a debt of 38 trillion dollars. The subsidies were adding to that.

People who say "we'd like to give you free money but can't afford it" aren't motivated by ideology, they're motivated by the money not being there. Borrowing just delays the inevitable and makes it worse - it's literally stealing from children and it doesn't fix anything.

There are ways to fix US healthcare but adding ever more debt won't do it.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-22 17:53:17+00:00
Every single major tech company that I am aware of (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require you to submit a promo doc showing you “operating at the level you want to get promoted to”. You only can show that by getting those plum opportunities and that only happens through building the right relationships with the right people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.
by jltsiren | 2025-12-22 17:53:17+00:00
There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.

Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.

I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-22 17:53:18+00:00
It's always so wild to see the denial of what is almost certainly going on. "Article critical of tech company X or tech celebrity Y gets quickly buried in flags" is a tale as old as time here. It is not a huge leap of faith to suppose that the flagging activity often comes from employees or fans who have an interest in burying criticism. But if you mention it, people act as though you are talking crazy. That Meta employees, with a strong incentive to see Meta succeed, would NEVER stoop to flagging an article critical of Meta or demonstrating Meta's wrongdoing. My goodness! How could one even imagine that could happen??

Technically, no we don't know this is going on. Only HN's admins can know this. But come on...
by TheRealPomax | 2025-12-22 17:53:27+00:00
Counterpoint: whoever let this past the QC phase got paid very generously, and everyone involved is ignoring the laws that already exist to combat this, because law enforcement, too, gets paid generously. And the laws that forbid that aren't getting enforced because the police doesn't police the police, and dad has made it perfectly clear that flagrantly ignoring the law is fine if you're in power.
by jandrese | 2025-12-22 17:53:33+00:00
It probably makes close to no difference in development or production, but it does significantly cut down on the number of tech support calls from people who can't figure out how to set the password, or immediately forget the password they set. If it has no password then you can just plug it in an have it work. Sure it's totally insecure, but its also trivial to install.
by biophysboy | 2025-12-22 17:53:38+00:00
How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?

The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-22 17:54:15+00:00
That still feels a bit off, as you are "having fun" because it ultimately is the road to success.

There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.

Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.
by robtherobber | 2025-12-22 17:55:03+00:00
Not discounting the suggestions and implications there, for all we know all of that could be true, but that's still a tremendous amount of speculation. And the fact itself that the US gov and US institutions have invested in cryptography or anything at all doesn't automatically make those investments "tainted" (for lack of a more inspired word).

I'd be interested in reading that blog post eventually.
by qcnguy | 2025-12-22 17:55:13+00:00
No, health insurers are motivated to keep their premium payers healthy and have a long track record of funding programmes to improve the health of the population. Think about how insurance works. Where I live they paid for the creation of outdoor gyms.

> Individual doctors and nurses etc may very well want people to get good treatment, especially children

It's individual doctors and nurses who are most incentivized to over-treat. They make more money the more healthcare is consumed. It's insurers who have an incentive to keep healthcare costs under control. A big part of the reason US health insurance is so expensive compared to the rest of the world is that Americans stage a massive freakout every time insurers try to control costs. It's a cultural thing and done by both Democrats and Republicans, look at how they call the UK's NICE committee a "death panel".
by zahlman | 2025-12-22 17:55:19+00:00
Recognizing that sort of opportunity is why we have optimizing compilers and intrinsics.

Funny thing: in Python code I've had a few occasions where I needed both quotient and remainder of an integer division, so naturally I used `divmod` which under the hood can exploit the exact sort of overlap you describe. I get the impression that relatively few Python programmers are familiar with `divmod` despite it being a builtin. But also it really doesn't end up mattering anyway once you have to slog through all the object-indirection and bytecode-interpretation overhead. (It seems that it's actually slower given the overhead of looking up and calling a function. But I actually feel like invoking `divmod` is more intention-revealing.)
by SamInTheShell | 2025-12-22 17:55:30+00:00
If I was 10 years younger, I might agree that they aren't justifying it, but I have enough experience with passive speech to just not let it pass anymore.

Regarding remedy, we really need laws on this stuff yesterday. The problem is that we have to gut first amendment freedoms for some of this stuff, which wont go anywhere because there will always be too much overreach with today's representatives.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-22 17:55:47+00:00
My experience of the central line couldn't have been more different - commuting between Bethnal Green and Holborn, often having to wait 20-25 mins on the platform, letting a dozen trains go by before finally managing to squeeze on, followed by 9 minutes crouching under someone's armpit.

No chance of reading my phone or Kindle, let alone using a laptop!
by godzillafarts | 2025-12-22 17:56:31+00:00
This is effectively what I'm doing, inspired by HumanLayer's Advanced Context Engineering guidelines: https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...

We've taken those prompts, tweaked them to be more relevant to us and our stack, and have pulled them in as custom commands that can be executed in Claude Code, i.e. `/research_codebase`, `/create_plan`, and `/implement_plan`.

It's working exceptionally well for me, it helps that I'm very meticulous about reviewing the output and correcting it during the research and planning phase. Aside from a few use cases with mixed results, it hasn't really taken off throughout our team unfortunately.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-22 17:56:40+00:00
Some of the prevalence of gift cards in corporate culture is loopholes and silliness in tax codes and anti-bribery laws. Giving any cash to an employee counts as bonus income and needs tax withholding. Giving gift cards under certain values to an employee is a gift to the employee that doesn't count as income (and, worse, in some cases can be expense reported for a tax advantage as a cost of doing business, especially gift cards to restaurants where it may be assumed it is for a "business meal").

In a different direction, giving cash to a partner/vendor/competitor is pretty obvious to many laws as a bribe. Giving gift cards more resembles gifting swag or paying for a meal and is sometimes considered "allowed". Different companies have different views on that loophole, but some companies do take advantage of it. Enough companies at least did at one point that the "CEO is in a high-powered meeting and needs gift cards immediately" came from somewhere and it was probably that, wining and dining partners/vendors/competitors in "legally distinct from but quite resembling bribes".
by enragedcacti | 2025-12-22 17:56:44+00:00
It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.

FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-22 17:57:15+00:00
This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.

I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.

When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.

Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-22 17:57:23+00:00
> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.

On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.

It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.

You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.

This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.
by mystraline | 2025-12-22 17:57:27+00:00
Oooh, scary. "Investigations!"

This is a archivalist institution that actively ignores "copyright" to further the art and science of our shared media legacy.

And frankly, public libraries would absolutely be deemed illegal if they were made 10 years ago. (And it was only because rich people like Rockefeller wanted to wash their actual history with a social-happy persona.)
by slibhb | 2025-12-22 17:57:48+00:00
So far you're right but the tide can always turn. China has massively overbuilt housing supply, which is the kind of mistake that a freer economy couldn't make. China's failed birth policies (1 child until 2015!) are another example.

My opinion is still that capitalism (Western style) will win. Not because markets are never wrong but because the scope for fucking up is so much less. Markets can't decide "families can have only one child" or "we need to build 90 million units of housing" (that now sits empty). An accumulation of fuck-ups in this vein is inevitable when you have a small group of people making these kinds of decisions. In the long run, it will be fatal.
by kashyapc | 2025-12-22 17:58:16+00:00
> It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human.

If one treats an LLM like a human, he has a bigger crisis to worry about than punctuation.

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc

No need for confusion. I'm one of those who does aim to write cleanly, whether I'm talking to a man or machine. English is my third language, by the way. Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.

Pay attention to your instant messaging circles (Slack and its ilk): many people can't resist hitting send without even writing a half-decent sentence. They're too eager to submit their stream of thought fragments. Sometimes I feel second-hand embarrassment for them.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-22 17:58:21+00:00
I'm interested to see where we'll land re: organizing larger codebases to accommodate agents.

I've been having a lot of fun taking my larger projects and decomposing them into directed graphs where the nodes are nix flakes. If I launch claude code in a flake devshell it has access to only those tools, and it sees the flake.nix and assumes that the project is bounded by the CWD even though it's actually much larger, so its context is small and it doesn't get overwhelmed.

Inputs/outputs are a nice language agnostic mechanism for coordinating between flakes (just gotta remember to `nix flake update --update-input` when you want updated outputs from an adjacent flake). Then I can have them write feature requests for each other and help each other test fixtures and features. I also like watching them debate over a design, they get lazy and assume the other "team" will do the work, but eventually settle on something reasonable.

I've been running with the idea for a few weeks, maybe it's dumb, but I'd be surprised if this kind of rethinking didn't eventually yield a radical shift in how we organize code, even if the details look nothing like what I've come up with. Somehow we gotta get good at partitioning context so we can avoid the worst parts of the exponential increase in token volume that comes from submitting the entire chat session history just to get the next response.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 17:58:41+00:00
I'm so sorry to hear this. The best thing you can do is help to educate people, maybe create an organization that can work with other organizations to target youth and senior knowledge. Before they passed both my grandmothers had seen many similar scam efforts that targeted them. One of my grandmothers was way too knowledgeable and crafty to fall for it, even pleas like, "Grandma, I'm in jail and need help..." absolutely failed in practice. For better or worse, my other Grandmother had been scammed a couple times and towards the end of her life didn't have the finances to scam any more from, living with my mom and her sisters.

Unfortunately the scams themselves range from amazingly complex to what should be really easy to spot. I make it a rule to NEVER give personal information to someone that calls me unexpectedly, at least nothing that isn't already effectively public information. Annoying when your doctor's office has an automated system that calls and the first thing it does is ask for your social security number... My response is "nope, not doing it" and that's what I told anyone that would listen at that office every visit... it's training people to get scammed.
by asa400 | 2025-12-22 17:58:47+00:00
It's a question of incentives.

For safety regulators, the incentives are all on the side of limiting acute downside (e.g. a plane crashing), not maximizing potential aggregate upside (e.g. millions of tons of fuel saved per year and millions of tons of C02 not in the atmosphere).

Society punishes regulators that approve products that kill people, so regulators adapt to this and as a result tend to be very conservative.

Regulators don't capture any of the upside (reputational or otherwise) when a new product enters the market and cures disease, makes cars more efficient, helps planes land on their own in an emergency, etc.

I don't know what "right" should be here, but you've hit on a good point. It's complicated.
by mapcars | 2025-12-22 17:59:16+00:00
>and you probably considered the sun, moon and five planets as gods.

I find it strange that today knowing much more about sun and moon we don't consider them as gods. Today we know for sure they are the origin of all life on this planet and yet many cultures decided to go for an abstract intangeable entities instead of what is directly in front of us and can't be debated.