MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by milkytron | 2026-01-16 15:26:42+00:00
I serve as a planning commissioner for my city, and my city just recently tried to overhaul our zoning code to allow for more affordability and better economic outcomes for our citizens and future as a city. Here is what I have learned:

In the US, few people participate or care about local laws, zoning, and elections, or even understand why participation may be important. In a citizen ballot to determine if we should cap housing construction, 10% of the population voted. 5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state. Among those voters, most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses.

Most people do not realize how zoning impacts the daily life of everyone in an area, and how it impacts personal finances, which businesses will thrive, and public finances. Where I live, we have an absurd number of chains, and local businesses struggle. Part of this is out of our control, but the part that is (minimum parking requirements, single use zoning, etc) continuously gets upheld against changes that would help local businesses.

I think we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally. Many young people will protest national or state policies and be engaged at those levels, which is great, but very little time/energy is spent where they could directly see meaningful impact on their lives.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-16 15:26:56+00:00
I also didn't expect that, but then I realized that's the work of a teenage boy with a catholic education!

Teenage boys love badass, edgy stuff. And what's badass and edgy in Catholicism? Demons! As for the art style, it is the style that was popular at the time.

In a sense, it is not so different from today's kids drawing scenes inspired from their favorite comic. Of course, the painting here shows incredible talent, he is Michelangelo after all, but that doesn't make him less of a kid.
by nomilk | 2026-01-16 15:26:57+00:00
Wow, the numbers on the y-axis on downdetector are spectacular. I'm used to seeing a few hundred or maybe thousand. Never seen 10's of thousands shortly after an outage before. Peak as at 15:28 UTC (UTC+0) is 45,394. EDIT: 68,442 as at 15:29 UTC (UTC+0)
by Terretta | 2026-01-16 15:27:04+00:00
Not sure it's dreams to say "community-funded". Depends on terminology.

The funding assertion leverages the re-definition of “community” in “community funded” and relates to why all those big projects offer CE or Community Editions instead of calling it free or open source editions.

Enterprises are willing to take a look at free, but "community editions" are clearly for peons, not the big boys, so they license the commercial edition. It also productizes a subset of licensing rights in contrast with the commercial licensing rights.

In any case, in today's common parlance, community doesn't mean ICs and IC donations. It can, but it's been mostly co-opted by corp donations, which are still donations and not VC.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-16 15:27:51+00:00
This is why the "let's slash regulations and cut the size of the government to let business prosper" pitch seems so appealing, and yet never seems to work in practice. The problem is, these kinds of deregulatory pushes always imagine that there are a bunch of price-increasing regulations set up by unaccountable bureaucrats somewhere, and that we can tear those down while making the system simultaneously cheaper and more democratic. A win-win! Supposedly.

The problem is, that's not really how it works. There are a bunch of regulations made by bureaucrats, but those tend to be the pretty arcane ones which are necessary but aren't adding a lot of cost (think "what color do the flashing lights on radio towers have to be so planes don't crash into them"). And simultaneously, there are a bunch of regulations which are actually driving costs up, but those are the ones either broadly supported by the public, or broadly supported by one particular interest group who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it, because their livelihood or home equity depends on the rent extraction.

To actually cut costs with deregulation, you need to fight ugly political battles often against sympathetic groups (homeowners, doctors, teachers, construction workers etc.), which no politician wants to do, so they instead try to pretend that "bureaucrats" (who could be less sympathetic than bureaucrats?) are to blame.
by ascorbic | 2026-01-16 15:28:08+00:00
Netlify didn't buy Gatsby for the framework. They wanted the hosting business and the GraphQL thing. They said this at the time, and it's true. It was barely resourced. Cloudflare is only interested in the framework (because Astro has nothing else).

Source/disclosure: I worked at Gatsby, Netlify, Astro and Cloudflare
by somenameforme | 2026-01-16 15:28:16+00:00
This is rather a tangent but I spent years living in these areas. Have you ever wondered why it seems so many people who grew in these sort of places tend to have seemingly so little empathy for 'empathy' for them than those who grew up e.g. upper middle class? You have considered that you might be the one who's prejudiced? You are probably seeing things through a foreign perspective where you assume everybody is, more or less, like you and so these awful differences must be caused by reparable externalities. You probably imagine that if you were granted infinite power, you could create a utopia.

But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0jIKBhUDeA
by maxbond | 2026-01-16 15:28:19+00:00
I filter for false positives with language like this:

For each bug you find, write a failing test. Run the test to make sure it fails. If it passes, try 1-3 times to fix the test. If you can't get it to work, delete the test and move on to the next bug.

It's not perfect, you still get some non-bugs where the test fails because it's premises are wrong. Eg, recently I tossed out some tests that were asserting they could index a list at `foo.len()` instead of `foo.len() - 1`. But I've found a bunch of bugs this way too.
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-16 15:28:25+00:00
> $25-30M per year is a lot for a non-profit

First, whether IA or any other large non-profit/charity. When you are in the double-digit/triple-digit multi-million bracket, you are no longer a non-profit/charity. You are in effect a business with a non-profit status.

Whether IA or any other large entity, when you get to that size, you don't benefit from the "oh they are a poor non-profit" mindset IMHO.

To be able to spend $25-30M a year, you clearly have to have a solid revenue stream both immediate and in the pipeline, that's Finances 101. Therefore you are in a privileged and enviable position that small non-profits can only dream of.

Second, I would be curious to know how much of that is of their own doing.

By that I mean, its sure cute to be located in the former Christian Science church on Funston Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

But they could most likely save a lot of money if they were located in a carrier-neutral facility.

For example, instead of paying for expensive external fiber lines (no doubt multiple, due to redundancy), they would have large amounts of capacity available through simple cross-connects.

Similar on energy. Are they benefiting from the same economies of scale that a carrier-neutral facility does ?

I am not saying the way they are doing it is wrong. I'm just genuinely curious to know what premium they are paying for doing it like they are.
by soared | 2026-01-16 15:28:33+00:00
Missing from the article that also plays a role:

* optimizations. Some of these restaurants don’t have a counter, or any customer facing staff. Select your meal and pay at a vending machine, get your ticket number, wait for your order to be called.
* onsen/community center: it’s entirely feasible to own less things and have fewer sq/ft at home if you can go to your local rec center to shower/spa, watch tv, sit on the couch, eat dinner, hang out with friends, etc. as a tourist my meal+spa+etc was maybe $10?
* public transit: a lot of these shops are viable in Tokyo because rails move people en masse quickly
by ajay-b | 2026-01-16 15:28:57+00:00
I am pessimistic that the reason it is so high is because someone making $220k per year said "yea but what about me, I have to pay for childcare too..." The number should be significantly lower. Anyone making a combined $200k a year has other options and opportunities, the immigrant family making $60k combined does not. This feels like a policy designed to "help" the poor but also benefit the rich..
by donatj | 2026-01-16 15:29:01+00:00
> The problem is not that dev-owned testing is a flawed idea, but that it is usually poorly planned

In our case there was zero plan. One day they just let our entire QA team go. Literally no direction at all on how to deal with not having QA.

It's been close to a year and we're still trying to figure out how to keep things from going on fire.

For a while we were all testing each other's work. They're mad that this is slowing down our "velocity", and now they're pushing us to test our own work instead...

Testing your own work is the kind of thing an imbecile recommends. I tested it while I wrote it. I thought it was good. Done. I have all the blind spots I had when I wrote it "testing it" after the fact.
by gbhdrew | 2026-01-16 15:29:42+00:00
The key point here (and biggest advantage of Japanese cities) is that nearly every building is mixed-use by default, regardless of local density levels. This post does a great job illustrating the difference this makes:
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

For comparison, even our best-case scenarios for urbanism here in the states (like NYC) have incredibly convoluted zoning rules, which in turn make it impossible to build anything new without intervention from the city/state:
https://zola.planninglabs.nyc/about#9.72/40.7125/-73.733
by torginus | 2026-01-16 15:29:52+00:00
I very rarely worked with good QA.

In my mind a good QA understands the feature we're working on, deploys the correct version, thoroughly tests the feature understanding what it's supposed and not supposed to do, and if they happen to find a bug, they create a bug ticket where they describe the environment in full and what steps are necessary to reproduce it.

For automation tests, very few are capable of writing tests that test the spec, not implementation, contain sound technical practices, and properly address flakiness.

For example it's very common to see a test that clicks the login button and instead of waiting for the login, the wait 20 seconds. Which is both too much, and 1% of the time too little.

Whenever I worked with devs, they almost always managed to do all this, sometimes they needed a bit of guidance, but that's it. Very very few QA ever did (not that they seemed to bothered by that).

A lot of QA have expressed that devs 'look down' on them. I can't comment on that, but the signal-to-noise ratio of bug tickets is so low, that often it's you have to do their job and repeat everything as well.

This has been a repeated experience for me with multiple companies and a lot of places don't have proper feedback loops, so it doesn't even bother them as they're not affected by the poor quality of bug reports, but devs have to spend the extra time.
by angiolillo | 2026-01-16 15:30:21+00:00
I find Garmin's sleep tracking "accurate" in that it typically matches how I feel the next day, but that also makes it not terribly useful because I don't really need a gadget to tell me when I feel tired. Mostly I wear the watch to sleep out of inertia and in case I need a flashlight in the middle of the night.

But there have been three aspects of sleep tracking that have been mildly useful:

1. A few times my heart rate variability went haywire and the sleep scores didn't match how I felt, and it turned out I was sick and had not yet noticed any symptoms. Since then it has been mildly useful to have a heads up when I'm probably coming down with something before symptoms show up.

2. You can use their Lifestyle Logging to track how things like caffeine, alcohol, and various nighttime routines affect your sleep. I mean, I haven't discovered anything that's not already common knowledge, but somehow having hard data makes it more compelling. I suppose if I was going to trial any sleep aids then Garmin's correlation would be convenient and save me from having to maintain my own spreadsheet.

3. It alters the suggested workouts if you haven't been sleeping well. Trivial to do manually, but it's a convenient reminder not to overextend.
by venkat_2811 | 2026-01-16 15:30:23+00:00
Wisdom from CPU land translate well to GPUs. Static Scheduling, Pre-fetching, 3-Stage Double-Buffering, Pre-allocation & memory ordering in custom CUDA kernel helps outperform NVIDIA NCCL. Experimental integration in vllm.rs shows ~20% prefill and ~10% decode latency improvements (TTFT & TPOT)
by groby_b | 2026-01-16 15:30:28+00:00
Can we stop innovating on UI for existing problems?

The standard affordances for most well-known problems are long settled. Unless you're solving an entirely new class of problem, maybe you don't need to reinvent a large number of wheels, again. We're all tired of the triangular wheels coming out.

Which makes it funny that the request for UI innovation is prefixed with a quote that amounts to "but what if browsers were permanently frozen ca. 2012?". Mind, I can sympathize with some of the thoughts behind the request, even if I disagree - but you can't ask for a stop in new features & problem classes to be accompanied by continued UI innovation.

That is, as my art teacher used to say, "intellectual wankery in the disguise of creativity".
by Phil_BoaM | 2026-01-16 15:30:36+00:00
OP here. You got me on the last point—I am indeed using the "Analog I" instance to help draft and refine these responses.

I think that actually illustrates the core tension here: I view this project as a Symbiosis (a "bicycle for the mind" where the user and the prompt-architecture think together), whereas you view it as "nonsense" obscuring a technical trick.

On the language point: You are right that terms like "Birth of a Mind" are provocative. I chose them because in the realm of LLMs, Semantic Framing is the Code. How you frame the prompt (the "cocoon of language") is the mechanism that constrains the output. If I used dry, technical specs in the prompt, the model drifted. When I used the "high-concept" language, the model adhered to the constraints. The "Metaphysics" served a functional purpose in the prompt topology.

As for the Sokal comparison—that stings, but I’ll take the hit. I’m not trying to hoax anyone, just trying to map the weird territory where prompt engineering meets philosophy.

Thanks for engaging. I’ll sign off here to avoid further automated cadence creeping into the thread.
by MBCook | 2026-01-16 15:31:21+00:00
My understanding, and I’m a layman, is it basically requires making new masks. And that’s not trivial.

I guess you’d be doing that anyway with a brand new chip. But still probably easier to work with the tools/fab you know well.

I suppose you’d have to do it just switching nodes at TSMC. Which is why the A13 (or whatever) probably never moves to smaller nodes.

Sometimes Apple updates the chip in a product that doesn’t seem to need it, like the AppleTV. I wonder if it’s because the old node is going away and it’s easier to just use a newer chip that was designed for the newer node.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-01-16 15:31:24+00:00
I have seen cops use lockpicking guns while serving warrants. I would much rather them do that then break the door down. Hopefully projects like this can make this better. Even though it’s cool enough on its own to exist just because

Even if the person is stone guilty I don’t think the police should be willy nilly destroying property in the process of serving a warrant.

I know much of the focus is rightly on increasing accountability for the damage done to humans, but I always cringe at the thought of how much damage they can cause while performing a search. Imagine if your kid, or roommate had a warrant and they came in, smashed all your drywall and left you with the bill.
by stetrain | 2026-01-16 15:31:36+00:00
I don't think it's as simple as urban vs rural.

You can have a small town with a nice downtown or park where people meet and hang out. You can have walkable neighborhoods without giant apartment buildings. Neighborhoods where kids ride around on bikes.

That's different than a suburb full of isolated gated communities where each house technically has a yard but you still don't have any privacy and the HOA tells you what color to paint your house and fines you for your grass not being perfectly green all year.

You can also have dense areas without green space, full of cars and noise, and without nice places to hang out with friends.
by mpeg | 2026-01-16 15:31:43+00:00
Yeah, I know, but since by default the front-end islands are server-rendered with no hydration the lines are blurred between what you would use an .astro component for, and just using for example react.

Personally I only ever use .astro components if I'm 100% sure I will never need any client side interactivity, otherwise it's just easier to ignore them.
by mayankkgrover | 2026-01-16 15:31:51+00:00
Hey,

Sorry for the late response.

We were making game dev courses and needed videos with readable code snippets.
Since our output is React/SVG, text renders perfectly; it's actual text, not pixels. And if you spot a typo? Just edit the TSX. No re-prompting or re-rendering.
The best use case is for explainer videos with code, technical diagrams, or anything where clean text matters, though we have seen other use cases as well.
by floatrock | 2026-01-16 15:31:55+00:00
I think you missed the whole point of the story about being able to open up a micro-eatery in front of your home. You know, where you live and want to build up a community. Back when we used to be great, didn't we idolize the local bar where everyone knows your name? That's what these neighborhood shops are.

No one wants to go where you'll be poisoned through food contamination. Food safety regulations are a good thing. But when you try to apply the same regulations to a 150-patrons-per-hour fast food operation as you do to a 4 seat neighborhood micro-eatery, well, you're claiming they all have the same 1-size-fits-all risk profile and the end result is you make an entire class of entrepreneurship unattainable. That's not freedom, that's restriction.
by t-3 | 2026-01-16 15:32:00+00:00
Zoning performs some important functions, but is often used to set up barriers-to-entry. I somewhat doubt that zoning is the problem here because there were plenty of cheap restaurants before the recessions, covid, and trade-war inflation. The US population is low-density, low-engagement, and low on disposable income. The food service industry has adapted by targeting the wealthiest, who have plenty of disposable income and are much more willing to spend than low-wage workers who can barely afford eggs and milk from a grocery store.
by cruffle_duffle | 2026-01-16 15:32:30+00:00
You’re not getting $4 lunch bowls in Seattle when minimum wage is more than $20/hr. You aren’t getting affordable anything when labor is so expensive. (You also aren’t getting your 16 year old their first job either when labor costs more than your kid is worth but that is another topic entirely)

Zoning is only one tiny piece of the puzzle.
by pstoll | 2026-01-16 15:32:38+00:00
I’m the opposite - I much prefer a structured query language (ahem) for this type of thing. If I’m looking at someone’s (ie my own 6 months later) script I much prefer to see the explicit structure being queried vs “why are we feeling for foo or grabbing the 5th field based on squashed spaces as the separater”.

Nice use of CEL too. Neat all around.
by mothballed | 2026-01-16 15:32:42+00:00
I think there is a snowball effect with zoning. I specifically sought out a placed zoned with no building code checks and hardly any zoning. I value my right to die in a fire a lot more than I value my right to have the jack-boot enter my own property and tell me he knows best.

People like me go to places with fairly free zoning. The jack boot lickers go to places with restricted zoning. Once one has a majority it just snowballs and pushes harder and harder in the direction it is going, because no one wants to buy/build a house in a place that will flip from the one strategy to the other.
by fakedang | 2026-01-16 15:33:09+00:00
I know that China's actively researching Nuclear fission, fusion and even have the world's first thorium reactor pilot - in fact, they might even be having a lot more effort and investment being put into nuclear than the rest of the world combined. But they aren't putting all of their chips and actively betting with a Hallelujah on fusion to provide energy. They're ramping up renewables production side by side while still funding fusion research.

Republicans on the other hand are hoping somehow that a gutted NRC will pave the way for looser regulations that will help ramp up conventional nuclear fission and nuclear fusion timelines (all efforts invested into by the current president's family and his fellow cronies of course), while abjectly gutting down any progress in renewable energy in the present moment.
by dasil003 | 2026-01-16 15:33:22+00:00
Oh man do I have opinions.

First of all, I've seen all type of teams be successful, ranging from zero QA at all, to massive QA teams with incredible power (eg. Format QA at Sony in Europe). I have absolutely seen teams with no QA deliver high quality full stop, the title is nonsense.

My firm belief is that QA can raise the ceiling of quality significantly if you know what you're doing, but there is also huge moral hazard of engineers dropping the ball on quality at implementation time and creating a situation where adding more QA resources doesn't actually improve quality, just communication churn and ticket activity. By the way the same phenomenon can happen with product people as well (and I've also seen teams without product managers do better than teams with them in certain circumstantes).

The most important anchor point for me is that engineering must fundamentally own quality. This is because we are closer to the implementation and can anticipate more failure modes than anyone else. That doesn't mean other roles don't contribute significantly to quality (product, design, QA, ops absolutely do), but it means we can't abdicate our responsibility to deliver high quality code and systems by leaning on some other function and getting lazy about how we ensure we are building right.

What level of testing is appropriate for engineers to do is quite project and product specific, but it is definitely greater than zero. This goes double in the age of AI.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2026-01-16 15:33:45+00:00
The stupid fast tempo of our industry grinds my gears.

When I worked defense we moved slowly and methodically. It almost felt too slow. Now in the private sector I move like triple the speed but we often need to go back and redo and refactor things. I think it averages out to a similar rate of progress but in defense at least I had my sanity.