MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TuringNYC | 2026-01-29 10:10:10+00:00
>> Surprised London holds this position given the cost of living. Housing alone eats such a massive chunk of salary that I'd expect talent to gravitate toward cities where their equity/salary goes further. How do early-stage startups compete for engineers when rent is £2k+ for a one-bedroom?

thinking about comparisons, in SF the average 1B is $3300
https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...

In NYC it is similar.

SF's challenge is that the business distract is split across 2 areas (SF, SV) 50mi apart, with extremely sparse public transit in SV. Everything is doable, just be prepared for $100 Uber bills as you go between meetings.

In NY the business district is thankfully mostly centralized. However, poor commuter train service outside of Manhattan makes everything more expensive as there is insatiable appetite in central areas to avoid the commuter trains.
by yxhuvud | 2026-01-29 10:11:33+00:00
It is easy to see why the system package managers in that are in use are not sufficient. The distro packages are too bureaucratic and too opinionated about all the wrong things.

I don't disagree that it would be nice if there was more interoperability, but so far I havn't seen anyone even try to tackle the different needs that exist for different users. Heck, we really havn't seen anyone trying to build a cross-language package system yet, and that should be a lot easier than trying to bridge the development-distro chasm.
by sd9 | 2026-01-29 10:11:41+00:00
Let's do some maths.

There are 35,000,000 taxpayers [1], 70,000,000 citizens [2]. Say there are 5,000 people responsible for gov.uk and that each are paid £80k/year.

Total budget: 5000 * £80k = £400M
Cost per taxpayer per year: £400M / 35M = £11.43
Cost per citizen per year: £400M / 70M = £5.71

This source [3] cites projected GDS budget for 2026 as £420M. Previous years have been £273M (2025), and £256M (2024). So the fag packet calculations are not far off.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/income-tax-liabilit...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
[3] https://www.publictechnology.net/2025/07/14/government-and-p...
by verdverm | 2026-01-29 10:12:42+00:00
The people launching a SaaS in 40 hours are not concerned with the state of vibe coding, the quality of code, or the testing.

They care about the business. If you want to be like them, start by caring far less about the actual code or how it gets made. They will bring in people later who do, who will clean up the vibed mess

*I'm generally not a fan of this, but you asked
by foldr | 2026-01-29 10:13:16+00:00
The great thing about London is that it has diversity without segregation. So no, you won’t find a huge area of town where almost everyone is of the same ethnicity, but the diversity is still there. Race isn’t the only index. A higher percentage of London’s population is foreign-born than LA’s.

Food depends a lot on what you go for. You won’t find much good Mexican food in London, but on the other hand, you can by a better croissant in a supermarket here than you can find in most of the US.
by nabla9 | 2026-01-29 10:13:39+00:00
Apple’s App Store profits on commissions from digital sales

Revenue $32 B
Operating Costs $7 B [1]
Estimated Profit $25 B
Operating Margin ~78%

[1] R&D, security, hosting, human review, and including building and maintaining developer tools Xcode, APIs, and SDKs.

Apple could take just 7% cut and still make 20% profits.

Fun Fact: During the Epic trial, it was revealed that Apple's profit margins on the App Store were so high that even Apple's own executives were sometimes surprised by the internal financial reports.

---

edit: There is no ideological argument for voluntary action here. The entire goal is to force regulators to step in. The debate over 'good vs. bad companies' is just online noise and rhetorical trik, no one on either side of the political spectrum wants these systems to be fixed voluntarily with corporate altruism.
by Lucasoato | 2026-01-29 10:15:16+00:00
I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:

A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.

A friend of mine used:

A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.

From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.

A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-01-29 10:16:19+00:00
I don't get how/why the Dutch government doesn't own and have full control over DigiD. It's just a database and a bunch of certificates.

Okay, you need expertise to design and develop the software, infrastructure to host it and a bunch of sysadmins to keep it running. You need hands.

But it boggles my mind that all of this ended up as some commercial service in the hands of Solvinity. And that the company can be purchased by Kyndryl.
by akadruid1 | 2026-01-29 10:16:22+00:00
You're right, and the article is wrong. 3 pane layouts similar to desktop mail readers and Usenet clients appeared well before 2002. For example, if you look at the history of feedreader.com, there is a screenshot of a 3 pane layout on the front page archived in 2001: https://archive.ph/U9ZAo
by kkfx | 2026-01-29 10:16:53+00:00
Well... We read text. We need UIs to manage the text flow/visible parts. Many websites could be read much better with Firefox Reader for similar reasons. Gnus (Emacs) concentrate news, feeds and mail in a single UI because of this, I concentrate most of my information in org-mode notes for similar reasons.

The real issue is explain to the masses that what we know is there for a mix of rational and legacy stuff mimicking we should slice. And that's a very hard issue.
by petesergeant | 2026-01-29 10:17:07+00:00
> London has a special microclimate and pleasant weather

It is hard to reconcile this with having actually lived there. The only benefit to the weather in London is it rarely gets very cold. Other than that, it gets very dark winters, it’s rarely sunny, when it gets too hot it’s unbearable because nowhere has aircon, and it’s usually drizzling.

The weather is appalling.
by ljf | 2026-01-29 10:17:12+00:00
Someone posted a similar story on one of the other times the 500 mile email was posted - where a car would fail to start if the owner bought strawberry ice-cream from the store, but would work if they have vanilla. I love the processes that go into finding the actual issue (regardless of if the ice cream story is true!): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
by azornathogron | 2026-01-29 10:17:30+00:00
I don't doubt you're correct about the incentives, but one point seems amiss...

> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.

You don't think that spending £4.1 million on this garbage might reflect badly on someone?
by oliwarner | 2026-01-29 10:17:43+00:00
What problems did "Woke" (I'm not sure it's a thing, but whatever) have with the truth?

Are we talking about opinionated gender vs biological sex? Or how others shouldn't offend? Trans women sports?

If it is, I think these are firmly opinions about inclusion. Asking people to ignore biological sex isn't the same thing as saying he said Greenland when he said Iceland. It's weird that you even think them comparable.
by Ray20 | 2026-01-29 10:18:55+00:00
> How come the US has a higher rate of struggling with groceries (12.2% US vs 8.5% EU), healthcare (44% US vs. 18.6% for costs) EU, education costs, etc.?

Reliability of statistical data. The more totalitarian a state is, the more out of touch with reality it can be in its statistics. If we look at the statistics provided by North Korea, they have zero on all the points mentioned. Europe isn't there yet, but it's moving at full speed. Their cars even safer and cheaper to own and run than European ones.
by Slartie | 2026-01-29 10:19:00+00:00
I think he meant "keeping TSLA where it is".

Tesla's sales have suffered, yes, and Elon's image is a significant contributor to that, besides all the reasons directly related to the cars themselves.

But Tesla's stock price is still stuck in irrational heights, not even remotely justifiable by the company's performance.

It just seems that people reconsider purchasing a physical object way quicker than they reconsider a stock investment. Maybe because the stock investment, especially in TSLA, is considered more like a gamble - "as long as others also think that this stock will skyrocket, even just because they think that others like me think it will skyrocket - as long as that's the case, I'm good with buying shares".
by imtringued | 2026-01-29 10:19:06+00:00
I didn't read the full blog post but back when I was still using RSS I tried a bunch of RSS readers and they all had the same problem. They were "algorithmic" in the style of Youtube or Twitter instead of the email client UI that this blog post is complaining about.

I used RSS for exactly one thing: to follow releases of content that I didn't want to miss out on. For anything else HN, Youtube, or even just googling is good enough.
by ogandreakiro | 2026-01-29 10:19:23+00:00
We're YC S25, launched in summer. Demonstrate Mode is a new feature we recently added to our platform and thought it would be worth sharing here.

Re differentiation: The space is crowded and feature sets converge. But like LLM providers, we feel there's room for multiple players with different positioning long term (enterprise, developers, etc.) Right now, we're now focused on making the product that feels most exciting to build with - hope people can tell that :)
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-29 10:19:27+00:00
Ukraine has some of the same problems with corruption that Russia does, although they've made more of an effort to fight it than Russia. However what this means in practice is that the claimed figure aren't necessarily the actual figures. So maybe the headline should be read as "Ukraine pays for 7 million drones" or "Ukraine certainly plans to build 7 million drones".
by stanko | 2026-01-29 10:19:36+00:00
Lovely!

Of course, I added mine as well, which got better feedback on “What are you working on” thread than I expected.

Since then I released two updates but Show HN thread didn’t catch on. I’m still actively working on it. Atm I’m tweaking level difficulty to make it easier to start and then ramp up the difficulty.

I have a todo list defined, and I’m having so much fun going through it.

edit: typo

https://muffinman-io.itch.io/spacedeck-x
by impure-aqua | 2026-01-29 10:20:16+00:00
That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together.

Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)

But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.

Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.

Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.

It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.
LongAsia: Technical Analysis of an Exit Scam in Progress
by awjykudguj | 2026-01-29 10:20:34+00:00
When I see a platform like LongAsia (longasiagroups.com) popping up with "institutional" claims in 2026, my old IT sysadmin gut starts to churn.

I’ve been digging into their backend logic, and this isn't innovation—it's regulatory theater. Here’s why this looks like a textbook wrapper company designed for a terminal trap:

The License Facade: They used to cite FSCA (South Africa) and FSPR (New Zealand) registrations, but a quick audit shows these have been revoked or deregistered as of late 2025. In 2026, they are operating under "unverified" status while still flashing fake credentials to lure in new capital.

The Withdrawal Ransom: This is the smoking gun. Multiple reports from January 2026 show users being hit with "tax fees" and "verification charges" just to access their own principal. As a veteran, I can tell you: legit brokers don't ask for a fresh USDT deposit to "unlock" your money—they net their fees from the balance.

Operational Inconsistency: While the MT4 frontend looks slick, the order execution is increasingly inconsistent, and customer support has gone dark for users trying to exit. It reminds me of the FxCapLtd circus—a beautiful UI masking a black hole of liquidity.

I’ve seen this movie before, and the retail guy always dies first when he ignores the "maintenance" excuses. LongAsia has a dismal 2.0/10 safety score for a reason. It’s a fraud suspect in a tuxedo. Stay far away.
by xerox13ster | 2026-01-29 10:21:27+00:00
That’s correct: it was stated to be about ablation.

That’s what I took from GP saying “I can recommend BPS Space video about ablation” followed by their opinion of the video.

I’m curious, what did you take from them saying “video about ablation” that made you think the video was about ‘wood in satellites’? How does one get from A to B here?

I want to be perfectly clear that I understand the thread we’re in right now is about wood and satellites. I want to TRY to understand how you read their comment so I can understand the confusion.
by joshjob42 | 2026-01-29 10:21:40+00:00
Most wouldn't because it's expensive. But at scale automated vehicles should be dramatically less expensive, in the range of 50-60¢/mi conservatively, and at that level it is going to be quite compelling to a lot of people since it's a private vehicle (no taxi driver) and it's reasonably affordable, a 1 seat ride, etc.

It's possible they'll be even cheaper but that range is the cost according to the IRS of operating a typical vehicle all in, and that seems like a reasonable guess of the cost of an autonomous electric vehicle with far lower probability of crash than a human (all the savings basically going to profit margin).

At ~60¢/mi, there'd be a lot of people who would save money on balance using autonomous taxis to get everywhere vs owning a private vehicle (10k mi/yr would cost only ~$6k/yr, a pretty low cost of ownership/use for a private vehicle).
by MrBuddyCasino | 2026-01-29 10:22:02+00:00
Another data point:

"Spent half a decade at Amazon, and all the folk I see being cut today are strong, performant Amazonians. Not fifo, but cutting the high performers that made Amazon successful, the doers, the expensive ones, the L6+ folk that define the culture. This is what we used to call frupidity (iykyk)"

https://x.com/BaldSkeptical/status/2016680049886249098
by akomtu | 2026-01-29 10:23:13+00:00
This might become technocracy at some point, if the corporations become stronger than the state govs. In that case, the entire NOAM region will become a so-called technate, ruled by a form of ToS. I'd say, technocracy is way worse than even autocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
by sjhuda | 2026-01-29 10:23:37+00:00
Thin air? It was delivered 3 years late and cost £5bn more than it should have. While projects like HS2 to the North are scaled back. The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects.

I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through with it. Manchester only recently got devolved powers meaning the region did not have to get approval from Westminster on how they use their money and the bus and tram system has completely improved in the sapce of a couple of years (unified tickets, tap and go) with the suburban rail to come into that this year.

What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better.
by elcapitan | 2026-01-29 10:24:32+00:00
I don't really mind the email interface that much, my main issue is that most RSS clients have it exclusively, without any second level of automatic filtering/sorting/triage. For many feeds that I subscribe, I'm only interested in portions of it, or I would want to filter out some topics, etc. So I have to manually go through heaps of stuff that only mildly interest me or often not at all, to find the few things I wanted when I originally encountered the blog.
by b1temy | 2026-01-29 10:24:45+00:00
Well, we'll have to agree to disagree here.

You absolutely can design a non-intrusive anticheat that doesn't hook into the kernel layer, and many games do exactly that. They do checks server-side, without hooking into your system. Or design their game to make it harder, eg if a player is behind a wall and can't be seen, don't even send the packets saying there's a player there.

Even with invasive anticheat, any dedicated actor can (and usually eventually do) find ways around it, and it becomes a game of cat and mouse. I feel a similar way about DRM in general.

Imo the tradeoff and danger is not worth it for consumers, but most are just not aware of the risk. Game developers take advantage of this and also do it because it's easier than actually designing their game in a way to minimise cheating (be it through code, or game mechanics)

On a tangent, even though it's for the wrong reasons (Even if I were a full-time user and a fan of Windows, I would not want to install games with invasive anticheat and pollute my system, out of principle), I'm glad that there is at least some pressure and pushback on invasive anticheat by gamers that usually run Windows, just for the reason so that it can run on something like a Steam Deck.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-29 10:24:54+00:00
> Under the project name of Crossrail, the system was approved in 2007, and construction began in 2009. Originally planned to open in 2018, the project was repeatedly delayed [...] The service is named after Queen Elizabeth II, who officially opened the line on 17 May 2022[...].

I wouldn't say thin air, exactly.
by account42 | 2026-01-29 10:25:03+00:00
There is a big reason: It impedes usability, extensibility and composability. If you sandbox GUI applications then the sandbox needs to add support for any interaction between them or they will just not be possible - and to fully support many advanced interactions like automation you will essentially have to punch huge holes in the sandbox anyway.

Meanwhile the advantages of sandboxing are pretty much moot in an open source distro where individual applications are open and not developed by user hostile actors.
by dns_snek | 2026-01-29 10:25:25+00:00
> My point is that you ask for regulation hoping that it will prevent this type of issue, but the regulation that you actually get will be barely having any effect and it will enforce ID + picture verification, it will enforce downloading specific government sanctioned keylogger app,

This is nonsense. Yes bad regulation is bad regulation, that's not an argument against regulation but an argument against bad regulation. Not all regulation is bad regulation - in fact most of it is good regulation. I enjoy not drinking feces for example but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how regulation against poopy drinking water is going to be turned against me.

> New systems, new complexity, harder for newcomers to start business... Things like this are always added in the fine print.

Good regulation recognizes that small businesses don't have the same ability to comply with complex requirements, so it creates exceptions for small business or relaxes requirements.

By all means, please advocate for good regulation and call out bad regulation, but pretending that regulation is unnecessary or inherently harmful only serves the interest of capital at everyone else's expense.
by podgorniy | 2026-01-29 10:25:46+00:00
Electric cars hype topic is has rotted away. Time to bring new, yet novel for the the public. Now people will belive in the musk stories of the future shaped by the humanoid robots, not shaped by the electric cars. Who cares if in 3 years they will switch to another subject if stock keeps being pupmed (and compoensation keeps flowing in the hands of this guy).

His idea is to keep involving more investors, more people, government is possible in tesla's orbit with nice stories. When other are so invested the failures aren't his problem anymore, he got hist compensation which is tied to the company price.
by frereubu | 2026-01-29 10:25:47+00:00
When my family moved to Somerset from London in the 1970s our elderly next-door neighbour, after hearing we'd moved from London, said "I went to Bristol [25 miles away] once. Didn't like it much." Apart from that he'd stayed in the town we'd moved to. I think about that a lot and sometimes envy his contentment in staying where he was - he had everything he needed.
by agentcoops | 2026-01-29 10:25:54+00:00
Yeah, I've lived in London, New York and San Francisco for work and the first had the lowest cost of living in absolute terms. Local developer salaries are, however, shockingly low outside of finance and consulting to US eyes.

The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.