MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-10 18:13:48+00:00
I haven't been to every country in Europe, it is true.

A few years ago I shut down a website in Poland for someone because people didn't want to pay with cards, they wanted COD. My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only. Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget). Another colleague in rural Spain found that the price they were charged was lower if they paid cash by the exact amount of VAT. In Germany I ran a website that had to allow bank transfer as a payment method because 'companies generally don't have credit cards' according to the locals. Up until Covid travellers from our office to France and Germany always needed to use a few Euros. Up until Covid it was an absolute taboo to buy drinks with a card in the UK and Ireland, unless it was with a meal. My local chip shop is cash only today, but none of them had a machine before Covid. My local Chinese restaurant tells everyone the card machine is dodgy to see if they will pay cash. They only installed it during Covid.

I think we will manage without Visa just fine.

> and anybody who works in the tourism sector is happy to receive them.

Of course they are! That is literally their job. It is everyone else that has a problem with them.
by thisisit | 2026-02-10 18:13:51+00:00
I liked their comic panels example and tried it using their chat at: https://chat.qwen.ai/

When I used the exact prompt the post - the chat works. It gives me the exact output from the blog post.

Then I used Google Translate to understand the prompt format. The prompt is:
A 4x6 panel comic, four lines, six panels per line. Each panel is separated by a white dividing line.

The first row, from left to right:
Panel 1:
Panel 2:
.....

and when I try to change the inputs the comic example fails miserably. It keeps creating random grids - sometimes 4x5 other times 4x6 but then by third row the model will get confused and the output has only 3 panels. Other times English dialogue is replaced with Chinese dialogue. so, not very reliable in my books.
by awkwardleon | 2026-02-10 18:13:54+00:00
I believe the point was these companies benefited greatly and specifically from basic research funded by the government: they should therefore "give back" in kind (vs simply contributing to the tax base and relying on a government to figure out what to fund). The reality is these companies care only about shareholder value, and the current US administration has been terminating grants and cutting funding in basic research. I think it's fair to question, in this environment, what these companies' ethical responsibilities really should be.
by dvngnt_ | 2026-02-10 18:14:01+00:00
Stoat isn't working well for me. It's taken over 24 hours to try to register a new account. First I couldn't register after doing several captchas. Then I had to wait for a verification email which took over 12 hours. I signed in to one client, but attempting to reset a password results in the same waiting game and error when selecting a new password.

I wish for the best, but they're probably putting out fires from the increased load
by shipman05 | 2026-02-10 18:14:16+00:00
I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.

- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates.
- "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.

"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.

Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
by zzzeek | 2026-02-10 18:14:20+00:00
giant private companies like Google are not ever going to be involved with defying court orders, especially ones that do lots of business with the federal government (which will be just about any company even half of google's size). You can say it's wrong or whatever but it's like asking a brick wall to do an Irish jig.

The only solution to this problem is for the US to have a vastly more active anti-monopoly regime so that companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. are simply not allowed to exist at such scales where consumers are locked into them.
by dang | 2026-02-10 18:14:28+00:00
Ideological battle is against the intended purpose of this site, and crossing into personal attack as part of it is particularly bad. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously lately. I'm not going to ban you right now because (unlike the other account, which I did just ban) it doesn't look like you have a long history of doing this, and also because we haven't warned you before. But please don't use the site primarily for ideological battle, and please follow the rules regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. Comments like these are particularly against the rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867569

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866597
by mh2266 | 2026-02-10 18:14:54+00:00
how does this square with very senior people putting in a lot of effort to bolt fairly good type systems onto Python and JavaScript?

> business logic will move faster than whatever code you can write and fix, and exposing it as just "types" breaks the process for future programmers to extend your program.

I just don't understand how this is the case. Fields or methods or whatever are either there, or they are not. Type systems just expose that information. If you need to change the types later on, then change the types.

Example: Kotlin allows you to say "this field will never be null", and it also allows you to say "this field will either be null or not null". Java only allows the latter. If you want the latter in Kotlin, you can still just do that, and now you're able to communicate that (or the other option) to all of your callers.

Typed Python allows you to say "yeah this function returns Any, good luck!" and at least your callers know that. It also allows you to say "this function always returns a str".
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-10 18:15:14+00:00
These kind of condescending comments are a bit much, especially when not everyone has the luxury or know-how to deFAANG their lives. For instance, whether or not (I) personally want to avoid it, I use some of this for actual work, and there is no alternative. Comments like this seem to imply then I have no right to complain about it, which is frankly ridiculous - there is a world where FAANGs can exist without being far reaching apparatuses of an authoritarian regime. They do so because it is convenient and the existing power structure incentivizes it.

Like what am I gonna do in a job interview - "Oh, you guys use gsuite? Sorry, I deFAANGed."

Come on.
by brynnbee | 2026-02-10 18:15:29+00:00
I would guess it's a lot more to do with globalism and the increasing ability for work to be done remotely (offshore). The US actively encourages American companies using foreign labor, which I have no moral qualms with, but it does make the value of American labor plummet when we're competing with groups of people that will do similar work for 1/10th the price or less.
by Anonbrit | 2026-02-10 18:15:36+00:00
Several companies have resisted these court orders successfully. Google can afford a lawyer to go over the order with a fine tooth comb if they wanted to - it's just easier to roll over and let the government rub their belly.

Trump has also repeatedly used government apparatus to illegally retaliate against companies and individuals for not going hos way, with no consequence, so it is hard to entirely blame corporations for behaving that way
by rubinlinux | 2026-02-10 18:15:37+00:00
Wonder if the author is aware that in the 1970's during the gas shortages, GE developed an electric lawn tractor called Elec-Trak. See https://myelec-traks.com/E20.html It used DC attachments for everything, lawn mower blades (they sounded like an electric razor), chain saws, snow throwers, tillers, AC inverters etc etc. All powered by 6 golf cart batteries.

This build in the article reminds me of the one I owned for a while, was a lot of fun. Hope the kid has as much fun with theirs as I had with mine.
by varispeed | 2026-02-10 18:15:39+00:00
10-20 years ago running a social network platform was viable for individuals. Today, in the era of information warfare, SEO, trolling and in general magnitudes more bad actors, it's almost impossible.

Friend has encountered things like people uploading illegal content and then reporting to hosting provider or various terrorist or political organisations publishing their manifestos and vile content then making death threats for taking it down and so on.

Also no ads, means how the platform is going to survive once provider runs out of money or figures out it is not as easy as it looks like?
by QuercusMax | 2026-02-10 18:15:45+00:00
I like writing new, interesting code, but learning framework #400 with all its own idiosyncrasies has gotten really old.

I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent - I mostly used Claude Sonnet 4.5. I've been dreading this rebuild mostly because it's so boring; this is an app I built originally when I was 17, and I'm 43 now. I treated Claude basically like I'd treat my 17-year-old self, and I've added a bunch of features that I could never be assed to do before.
by legitster | 2026-02-10 18:15:45+00:00
So I don't think I actually have a problem with businesses handing over their customer data if there is a valid warrant or subpoena. That's the system working as intended.

The main crux of the problem here is that the DHS has been granted a wide berth by congress to issue administrative subpoenas - i.e. not reviewed by a real judge and not directed at criminals. In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. But the reality now is that ICE is doing wide dragnets to make arrests without any judicial oversight and often hostile to habeas corpus.

(Also, my understanding is that when banking is involved, it may also fall under the Banking Secrecy Act and Know Your Customer Rules - a whole other privacy nightmare.)

I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem, but the real problem we need congress to act on is abolishing these "shadow" justice systems that agencies have been able to set up.
by segmenta | 2026-02-10 18:15:47+00:00
Graphiti is primarily focused on extracting and organizing structured facts into a knowledge graph. Rowboat is more focused on day-to-day work. We organize the graph around people, projects, organizations, and topics.

One design choice we made was to make each node human-readable and editable. For example, a project note contains a clear summary of its current state derived from conversations and tasks across tools like Gmail or Granola. It’s stored as plain Markdown with Obsidian-style backlinks so the user can read, understand, and edit it directly.
by goldenshale | 2026-02-10 18:16:03+00:00
Restaurants try to make food you will remember and want again. Authors try to write books you can't stop reading. It's silly to imagine that any type of media would do anything other than seek to gain your interest and attention. It's our job to have personal hygiene and to control our information diet. This postmodern social construction perspective that tries to blame everyone for our problems is a lame approach to the problem.
by quietsegfault | 2026-02-10 18:16:10+00:00
I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do on my Apple ][+.
by jghn | 2026-02-10 18:16:14+00:00
A lot of posts in this thread are conflating two separate but related topics. Statically typing a string as EmailAddress does not imply validating that the string in question is a valid email address. Both operations have their merits and downsides, but they don't need to be tied together.

Having a type wrapper of EmailAddress around a string with no business logic validation still allows me to take a string I believe to be an email address and be sure that I'm only passing it into function parameters that expect an email address. If I misorder my parameters and accidentally pass it to a parameter expecting a type wrapper of UserName, the compiler will flag it.
by macromagnon | 2026-02-10 18:16:34+00:00
School calculus is hated because it's typically taught with epsilon delta proofs which is a formalism that happened later in the history of calculus. It's not that intuitive for beginners, especially students who haven't learn any logic to grok existential/universal quantifiers. Historically, mathematics is usually developed by people with little care for complete rigor, then they erase their tracks to make it look pristine. It's no wonder students are like "who the hell came up with all this". Mathematics definitely has an education problem.
by sottol | 2026-02-10 18:16:40+00:00
If I'm mistaken, then the article states that the investment is $1T annualized when taking software development costs into account [1] if the labs don't all suddenly decide to stop development.

That would mean earnings of ~ $1.1T would be required on that investment annually, so maybe on $2T of revenue, capturing 2% of the global GDP - so I'd estimate that GDP would need to go up more like 5-10% to justify this.

[1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gf2t!,f_auto,q_auto:...
by hbcondo714 | 2026-02-10 18:16:40+00:00
Thanks for sharing this! I had done a PWA that displays some revenue forecasting[1] based on Stripe Subscriptions but I found their APIs can be slow[2]. Having that data synced up in a db sounds like a good enhancement so will definitely look into this more.

[1] https://github.com/hbcondo/revenut-app

[2] https://github.com/stripe/stripe-dotnet/issues/2284#issuecom...
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-10 18:16:43+00:00
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild did not require tens of billions of dollars. Sherman Fairchild invested 1.3 million and the treacherous eight each put in $500. Fairchild did have the right to purchase the firm for $3 million, which of course he exercised. Similarly, Shockley's lab was funded by a $1 million grant in the 50s.

There is a lot of handwaving going on here to justify the incredibly cheap, mostly privately funded investments that launched the computer generation with the massively expensive, extremely gradual gains we are making now with particle accelerators. Part of it is that people just can't imagine how little was invested in R&D to get these stunning results, given how much we have to invest today to get much less impressive results, so they just assume that semiconductors could not have been invented without tens of billion dollars of research.

There is diminishing returns, just as a 90nm process is really all you need to get 90% of the benefits of computerization -- you can drive industrial automation just fine, all the military applications are fine, etc. But to go from a 90nm process to a 3nm process is an exponential increase in costs. In a lot of fields we are at that tail end where costs are incredibly high and gains are very low, and new fields will need to be discovered where there is low hanging fruit, and those fields will not require "tens of billions" of dollars to get that low hanging fruit.

Even with particle accelerators, SLAC cost $100 million to build and generated a massive bounty of discoveries, dwarfing the discoveries made at CERN.

To pretend that there is no such thing as a curve of diminishing returns, and to say that things have always been this way is to not paint an accurate picture of how science works. New fields are discovered, discoveries come quickly and cheaply, the field matures and discoveries become incremental and exponentially more expensive. That's how it works. For someone who is in a field on the tail end of that process, it's not good history to say "things have always been this way and have always cost this much".
by jmyeet | 2026-02-10 18:16:47+00:00
According to the ACLU, they are not [1]. So Google voluntarily handed over user information. It requires a court order to enforce it and that requires a judge to sign off on it.

This is somewhat analogous to ICE's use of administrative warrants, which really have no legal standing. They certainly don't allow ICE to enter a private abode. You need a judicial warrant for that. That too requires a judge to sign off on it.

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/documents/know-your-rights-ice-administ...
by xyzelement | 2026-02-10 18:16:52+00:00
I used to think similarly but I disagree.

Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.

In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.

So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
by yandie | 2026-02-10 18:17:07+00:00
My childcare cost is $52k/year for two kids. To hire a private nanny for TWO kids, it'll be at least $35/hour with benefits (insurance, paid time off etc) in my area. That'll be around $80k/year for a private nanny. And once the kids are older, the value of a nanny isn't as good IMO since they don't provide the variety of social challenges that a daycare can provide (group working, relationship building, conflict resolution etc...). We have friends with kids of the same age that don't go to day care and have nannies instead, and the differences in social interaction are significant - maybe we just get lucky but I think our kids build a lot of skills being in a bigger group.
by lmkg | 2026-02-10 18:17:23+00:00
The Gaussian integers usually aren't considered interesting enough to have disagreements about. They're in a weird spot because the integer restriction is almost contradictory with considering complex numbers: complex numbers are usually considered as how to express solutions to more types of polynomials, which is the opposite direction of excluding fractions from consideration. They're things that can solve (a restricted subset of) square-roots but not division.

This is really a disagreement about how to construct the complex numbers from more-fundamental objects. And the question is whether those constructions are equivalent. The author argues that two of those constructions are equivalent to each other, but others are not. A big crux of the issue, which is approachable to non-mathematicians, is whether it i and -i are fundamentally different, because arithmetically you can swap i with -i in all your equations and get the same result.
Ask HN: AI to Replace Compiled Languages?
by exodys | 2026-02-10 18:17:28+00:00
Consider the following scenario: Bob is making some compiled software that will be run on a host machine. Bob knows what operating systems Bob wants to support, and knows the ISAs those operating systems supports. Bob is also a huge vibe coder, and Bob learned that 'assembly is the best language you can write in, as you have the most control' (this is debatable, but gives Bob modus operandi).

So Bob builds his project, moving subroutine and subroutine so that his project is built. Bob then realizes something; he didn't have to compile a single piece of code. He just had to assemble it.

Is this as far as AI can go? Assumedly, it could spit out correct binaries if it was trained well enough.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-10 18:17:33+00:00
The closest realistic option is probably XMPP and Mumble. I just think both need a modern UI that supports everything that Discord offers OOTB. I am working on a client for XMPP on the side, nothing special yet, but I can login and chat with myself on a prosody instance, so there is that. Would love to work on open source full time, but it never seems to pay the bills. I do intend on eventually open sourcing my client.
by mh2266 | 2026-02-10 18:17:47+00:00
This is all pretty language-specific and I think people may end up talking past each other.

Like, my preferred alternative is not "return an invalid Email object" but "return a sum type representing either an Email or an Error", because I like languages with sum types and pattern matching and all the cultural aspects those tend to imply.

But if you are writing Python or Java, that might look like "throw an exception in the constructor". And that is still better than "return an Email that isn't actually an email".
by boelboel | 2026-02-10 18:17:48+00:00
I find it a much more conscious choice for high paid immigrants. They can either live closely with their family, with the added bonus they basically live like a 'king' or they can move countries to live relatively wealthy lives in a new country.

Living in the US has many advantages but I feel like a lot of them matter more for offspring. More safety besides wealthy pockets in their home country and a more 'average' life experience compared to the rest of your country are things some people care about. Difference in air quality, traffic congestion and easier access to nature are things that make the US a more attractive choice.

But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain. Lots more things to think about as a (potential) immigrant.
by gumarn_y | 2026-02-10 18:17:51+00:00
Imho because to put both into a certificate just by convention (or what was the reason to still do it?) is for a CA that has the webpki in scope is not best practice.
From experience people are often misleading the client authentication part as a substitute for user authentication what you simply don't get and than they are surprised that anyone with the certificate can login...
Yeah people with knowledge should know the difference but I have seen this way too many times...The thing I really see LE is problematic is the topic of revocation. Yes revocation is broken but the only working mechanism with ocsp stapling was brought to the graveyard (aka made optional by the cab) with the argument of data privacy issues under the normal ocsp umbrella...Yeah back to CRLs/proprietary browser revocation mechanisms such as CRLsets (https://www.grc.com/revocation/crlsets.htm#:~:text=What%20is...) combined with CTlogs as a reactive measure that simply don't work in practice/are too slow (e.g. remember the Fina CA/Cloudflare incident and the time it went unnoticed).
I have the feeling the driver for LE were rather the costs than the data privacy arguments brought up.