MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jtsummers | 2026-02-09 21:19:33+00:00
> This calculator does not include retirement savings, emergency saving, etc. It just assumes you'll comfortably live paycheck to paycheck until you die and never save a dime. In our country, you will not be getting $60k/yr post tax from social security. So, this is a stupid calculator unless you plan to never retire or never experience job loss (max payout is $450/week for unemployment in CA), etc.

It doesn't include those things because those aren't the things that are covered by a "living wage". Living wage sounds like something good, but it's literally just enough to cover what's needed. Can you afford housing, childcare, medical care, transportation for work, etc. It's a low bar, not a good target, for a society to try to hit. It means people at that wage shouldn't be going hungry or without shelter, but they won't necessarily be thriving.
by nomel | 2026-02-09 21:19:36+00:00
> The top post is about property damage not flying over.

No, it was specifically about property damage from a failure during flight, while attempting to traverse a property, with that temporary traversal being legal.

> Please share a source on your “current legal definition” either in North Texas municipality

This is the domain of the FAA. Municipalities have very little power in what they can regulate, because aviation and airspace is federally regulated by the FAA, as made clear, with many examples, in this FAA fact sheet [1]. Restrictions like minimum altitude, for the sake of reasonable privacy, would be ok. Extending that to 400 ft, which is the ceiling that drones can operate, would not.

But, none of this is related to a drone having a failure mid flight, which may caused the drone to dip belowsome local operating altitude restrictions. But, losing altitude from catastrophic failure is not "operating". And, anything related to safety, which is the domain of failure, is entirely regulated by the FAA, which municipalities have zero say in [1]. It was only a scratch because the FAA limited the speed and weight with that in mind.

> I’d contest the idea that you don’t even own an inch or a foot or several feet above your property

They regulate airspace for the purpose of flight. If you extend your house up, then it's no longer airspace that can be flown in. They don't own the space in the air, clearly.

And, this isn't a just a commercial thing. The drone you buy from the hobby store falls under similar regulations. For slightly relaxed regulations, that these Amazon drones operate under, you get a Part 107 license. Operating altitude limitations don't even change, with the exception that you can exceed the 400ft ceiling while traversing over a 400ft tall building (or 300ft building if local privacy minimum is 100ft).

[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/State-Local-Regulati...
by rwmj | 2026-02-09 21:19:57+00:00
Private Equity has been buying up vets in the UK and jacking up prices massively, causing all sorts of knock-on negative consequences. Vets in the UK were not failing before.

Unfortunately our competition authorities are toothless. Their proposed remedy is that vets will have to publish prices on their websites from now on. Woohoo.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8j3020kl04o

https://archive.ph/ikhpP (link to FT.com)
by pyrale | 2026-02-09 21:20:00+00:00
> Urban workers in China do 3,744 hours per year

For reference, that's 10:15 per day, 365 days a year.
Or 996 without vacations, if you intend to have one day off.

996 has never been a standard work duration for urban workers in China, aside from some tech companies that promoted performative work ethics. And even there, people do take vacations.
by burkaman | 2026-02-09 21:20:01+00:00
The easiest answer is yes, since many Americans currently earn minimum wage with no paid vacation, minimum wage with mandatory vacation would be an increase in total compensation. I don't know how paid leave regulations impact wage growth in general, I'm sure there is research on this but I didn't immediately find anything.

Another way to think about it: why do we have building codes? We don't want to incentivize builders to cut corners that would risk an electrical fire or falling down in an earthquake or something in order to offer a cheaper price, so we make it illegal. If unsafe buildings are allowed, it makes it difficult for safe builders to stay in the market. Similarly, we don't want to incentivize workers to sell their labor with zero leave in order to offer a cheaper price, because that risks unhealthy and insular communities (literally unhealthy if people can't take sick leave), poor mental health, unhealthy childcare practices, an unhealthy civic environment if people can't take time off to vote or volunteer, etc. The labor market is competitive and people will sacrifice paid leave if they have to, because they need money to live, so we should make it illegal to remove the incentive.
by cyberax | 2026-02-09 21:20:35+00:00
> 1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe.

This is a non-answer. Yes, political systems were different. The ARE still different.

But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.

> 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.

It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.

If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
by bccdee | 2026-02-09 21:20:50+00:00
This is a fun post. I think you're mistaken, though.

Your strongest point is that allowlists exclude new contributors. (You're right about blocklists, but this seems to me like a primarily allowlist-based approach.) Thing is, new contributors are already being excluded by a flood of slop PRs within which they are indistinguishable. Whatever strategy they would currently use to distinguish themselves (reaching out through social channels, volunteering in the issue for an important problem, etc) should still work with vouch. But when it does work and they are vouched for, they will get a reputational shortcut to contribute again in this repo and to contribute in other repos sharing the same vouchlist.

Like any good social solution, `vouch` is trying to codify & extend the existing ad-hoc practices that have arisen to cope with slop PRs (i.e. largely ignoring PRs submitted by strangers). Obviously it's not a full solution, but I'm suspicious of solutions that claim to fully solve a difficult problem. It's a step forward.
by malfist | 2026-02-09 21:20:59+00:00
Most of the money in politics isn't direct contribution to candidates, it's PACs.

PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do things like advise congress people on legislation they'd like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or candidates, some advocate for movements.

What they're not supposed to be doing is directly coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a candidate. But that's a line that has been continually fuzzed.

An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-09 21:21:40+00:00
I deliberately tried as hard as possible to phrase the things I said in such a way that either of the groups you proposed would find no objection to my saying those things were true. Perhaps I failed in some way, but I don't think I did. My point is that we can indeed agree upon some facts as to what happened, but that those are not what people argue over. They argue over an interpretation of the facts that tells some story about who is the "good guy" and the "bad guy", but not the facts themselves. And in my experience, that is generally the form of all disputes over "facts": they are very rarely actual disagreements on what events happened, but rather disagreements about why they happened or if it was acceptable for those things to happen.
by npunt | 2026-02-09 21:21:43+00:00
Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.

It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.

If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.

The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.
by Aunche | 2026-02-09 21:21:49+00:00
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades

50 years ago, in high cost of living areas, you could rent an SRO, but now they're either banned or practically banned because they're strongly disincentivized against. Combine this with not building enough new housing is a recipe for rent increases. Even if a minimum wage works as intended, it can only subsidize demand, which would do nothing when the bottleneck is the supply.
by MostlyStable | 2026-02-09 21:21:57+00:00
I'm not sure it's that negligible. Mythbusters found that weaving in and out of traffic could save between 5 and twenty-five percent. Now A) Mythbusters did an experiment with an N of like 4 or something, along a single commute in the Bay Area, so it's basically anecdote and I'd love a better source if one existed, but it is at the very least proof-by-existence that larger impacts on travel time _can_ happen. And their non-weaving person was, if I recall from the video, not constantly decelerating to keep a buffer.

And from personal experience in some places, keeping such a buffer, in some traffic conditions would just literally be impossible. There are sometimes enough aggressive drivers such that they can just consume it faster than one would be able to create it. It is simply not always the case that you have sole power to create and keep the recommended buffer size (although very often it is and you can).

I keep a decent buffer whenever I am able, but at some point, you have to bow to road conditions.
by bradlys | 2026-02-09 21:22:06+00:00
As long as collusion exists, I don't see this changing. Manhattan is more expensive than it was a 100 years ago but less people actually live there now. Not a little less either - 700,000 people less. We've built way more housing at the same time. And yes, people have more square footage per person now but the housing doubled and the population went down dramatically.

Rent is always going to go up there even if they build more. Same in other places. As long as rent setting tools exist to collude - we will see the rent not go down. You're not gonna dump $100m in new buildings and not maximize your return.
by thoughtlede | 2026-02-09 21:22:16+00:00
I think we can simplify the answer to this question for most audience and say "the air is blue".

If they say, the air appears to be clear when I stare at something other than sky, the answer is you need more of air to be able to see its blue-ness, in much the same way that a small amount of murky water in your palm appears clear, but a lot of it does not.

If they ask, why don't I see that blue-ness at dawn or dusk, the answer is that the light source is at a different angle. The color of most objects changes when the light source is at a flat angle. And sun lights hits at a flat angle at dawn and dusk.

If they ask, what exactly is the inside phenomenon to see the sky color to be blue, then explanations like this blog are relevant.

If they ask, what exactly is a color, the answer is that it is a fiction made up by our brain.
by jopsen | 2026-02-09 21:22:20+00:00
There's an argument to be made that replicating existing software is extremely useful.

Most of the time when you're writing a compiler for a new language, you'll be doing things that have been done before.

Because most of the concepts in your language are brought along from somewhere else.

That said: I'd always want a compiler and language designs to be well considered. Ideally, the authors have some proofs of soundness in their heads.

Perhaps LLM will make formal verification more feasible (from a cost perspective) and then our mind about what reliable software is might change.
by themafia | 2026-02-09 21:22:28+00:00
> 40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.

The government generated most of those too. As technology became more capable they utilized it more but that doesn't mean they were standing around with their hands in their pockets prior to that.

> Nowadays, our societies are old on average

Do they have an unfair access to technology? If not then does this actually have any impact?

> Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

In your experience perhaps. I doubt the reliability of this logic.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-09 21:22:37+00:00
Mumble already exists. IRC exists. Matrix exists. Discord is a surveillance tool by design. Jason Citron pulled the same hijinx with Aurora Feint, but I assume he has been betraying users to CIA-and-Friends from the start so he gets a pass for breaking the same laws.

Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark money support from feds or worse.
by Melonai | 2026-02-09 21:22:47+00:00
Which is the reason why it's better to actually cryptographically sign the packages, and put a key in some trusted keystore, where it can actually be verified to belong to the real distributor, as well as proving that the key hasn't been changed in X amount of days/months/years.

Still doesn't address the fact that keys can be stolen, people can be tricked, and the gigantic all-consuming issue of people just being too lazy to go through with verifying anything in the first place. (Which is sadly not really a thing you can blame people for, it takes up time for no easily directly discernable reason other than the vague feeling of security, and I myself have done it many more times than I would like to admit...)
by digiown | 2026-02-09 21:22:57+00:00
It's rent seeking, the antithesis of capitalism. It's always been. Enabled by abuse of government power. And no, it's not a partisan issue.

You see this pattern across the American economy. The boomers locked in their house values by passing all the zoning regulations to artificially restrict the supply of housing. AMA artificially restricts the supply of doctors to increase their wages. Accreditation pushed ever higher costs on universities which increased costs, and the availability of loans basically cut off the brake cable. And who do you think is really benefitting from all the companies enshittifying everything and pushing up costs? The billionaires and retirees of course. And the young/working people are paying for it.

The solution for individuals is arbitrage. Remote work, get healthcare abroad, and avoid college tuitions. The fact that these things make sense at all shows how broken the markets are.
by reddozen | 2026-02-09 21:23:12+00:00
The problem in America is that more than half the country does not live in a shared factual reality. Like:

* Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)

* World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but Burisma was worse!

* The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred) attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's interests but how's that the big deal?

* Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6 seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-09 21:23:27+00:00
I've been using Deno a LOT for general shell scripting... it's been pretty nice in general. FWIW, Node, Bun and Deno have FS interfaces in the box, so yes, you can do it without npm modules. Though Deno allows you to directly reference the modules/repos from the script without needing a separate install step, package.json or node_modules directory.

It's also a single, self-updating executable and includes a lot in the box. Including SQLite3.
by kevinyang222 | 2026-02-09 21:23:28+00:00
9-9-6 is also not full productivity for 9-9-6.

Office workers will eat lunch, take a 1-2hr nap in the afternoon, and also eat dinner with their coworkers within the common 9-9-6 rhythm. It still takes a significant chunk of time, but the actual working time butt-in-chair is closer to 54 hours
by tabbott | 2026-02-09 21:23:35+00:00
I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with what we see with our internal usability studies with nontechnical users.

Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one:

https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/

> Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years.

I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app.

My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-02-09 21:23:54+00:00
"the bell was rung" illustrates a cause (and introduces a question: who rang the bell?)

"the bell rang" illustrates an effect (the vibration and sound of the bell as it rings).

i think this is more an illustration of the ambiguity of the root word "ring", which can be an action by a subject upon an object, or to describe the behavior of the object itself.
by Veserv | 2026-02-09 21:24:30+00:00
Err, cybersecurity insurance as a business model has not worked. I have seen analyst reports showing that there have been multiple large claims that are each individually larger than all premiums ever collected industry wide. Those same reports indicated that all the large cybersecurity insurance vendors were basically no longer issuing policies with significant coverage, capping out at the few million dollar range. Cybersecurity insurance is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller; you wonder why no one else is picking up this free money on the ground until you get crushed.

Note, that is not to say that cybersecurity insurance if fundamentally impossible, just that the current cost structure and risk mitigation structure is untenable and should not be pointed at as evidence of function.
by elxr | 2026-02-09 21:24:40+00:00
Rivians don't even have a physical vent control (to aim the vents). That alone disqualifies it from anything close to "excellent". And that's before mentioning all the missing physical buttons that should've been there.

Touch screen buttons, especially the ones on the far edge of the center screen, are harder to accurately hit for most people. More physical buttons = better = more premium.
by Atlas667 | 2026-02-09 21:24:44+00:00
The interests of the people who own/control technology, and have the most influence over standards, will make sure you are forced to participate.

And they have always organized society to make sure this is the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just the interests of the people who create and have most influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it necessary for you to participate.

Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have the most influence on its development: those who own it, who are often the same people who determine standards.

The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced by those who produce it.

They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading", etc.

It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.
by legitster | 2026-02-09 21:24:56+00:00
The older I get the more I realize how fraught the idea of a "living wage" is.

Through mid life, your financial health is not as determined by wages, but by your family/connections. Do you have access to a grandmother who can babysit? A decent second-hand car? A good roommate situation? Just look at the expense table - any one of these things could be worth up to 20% of your income!

And you see that literally right here - are any of us actually comfortable with the idea that the value of your labor should be determined by your marriage status and number of children?

It's kind of telling that countries with "successful" minimum wages either don't have one and just institutionalize collective bargaining, or they do some fancy calculations that start with prevailing median wages and welfare eligibility. The idea of trying to get this number from the bottom up by building expenses just doesn't seem very robust.
by dchi04 | 2026-02-09 21:24:57+00:00
If you believe that all parents are intelligent, informed, and put their children's well-being before everything, you are unfortunately wrong about society. Kids don't deserve to suffer just because they have neglectful parents.

Discord, on the other hand, should be at least somewhat responsible for the interactions of children (which they profit off of) on their platform.

And finally, you, a sentient adult with free will, can use another platform. Not your problem unless you want to make it yours, which is the response of choice on this thread.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-09 21:25:13+00:00
I dunno, I think it's clearly different if Spotify is using their platform to inject the ads vs the creators creating the content with ads included.

Like if Netflix let showrunners inject ads into their shows and provided a technical platform for that, and the Stranger Things creators added ads to every episode... nobody would be like "it's not Netflix showing ads, it's the Stranger Things creators".
by ElijahLynn | 2026-02-09 21:25:16+00:00
How should advertising work in an AI product? Asad Awan, one of the ad leads at OpenAI, walks through how the company is approaching this decision and why it’s testing ads in ChatGPT at all. He explains how ads are built to stay separate from the model response, keep conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and give people control over their experience.