MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pkos98 | 2026-03-09 16:15:37+00:00
As a German, I genuinely cannot comprehend this short-sightedness and ignorance:

Our current Chancellor (Merz) publicly boasts that Germans work too few hours and calls on them to work more [0] implying this would generate more tax revenue.
Yet working has arguably never been less rewarding for workers: Germany currently has the 2nd highest tax wedge among all OECD nations (≈48% for a single worker, nearly 13 percentage points above the OECD average) [2][3]. This is compounded by demand-side welfare measures for low earners such as Wohngeld (housing benefit) and pension supplements like Mütterrente ("Mothers' pension"), creating a massive redistribution from working people to non-working people.

Meanwhile, the German government has spent years failing to fully prosecute the CumEx/CumCum tax fraud scandal, a scheme through which banks and investors systematically robbed the German state of an estimated €36 billion in tax revenues [4][5].
The contrast could not be more glaring: squeeze workers harder while letting financial fraudsters off easy.

I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here.

- [0] Merz urges Germans to work more CGTN (Feb 2026): https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must...

- [1] EUFactCheck Merz's claim rated "Mostly False": https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-wor...

- [2] OECD Taxing Wages 2025 Germany: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

- [3] Tax Foundation Tax Burden on Labor, OECD 2024: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo...

- [4] CumEx-Files Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files

- [5] Stanford GSB CumEx and CumCum Scandals: https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-fin...
by atmosx | 2026-03-09 16:15:41+00:00
So let me get this straight: you have exactly one data point, and the second data point using is a German chancellor widely regarded as one of the worst by many measures. Right?

This is FUD. They said the same about the Greeks in 2008, it is complete BS. In any given org, passed a certain size you'll find ppl who slack a lot and people who work for three. Unfortunately that seems to the nature of large orgs, nothing special about Germans...

ps. I'm having a DejaVu. This is the exact same narrative Greek politicians used against the Greek population to justify them become poor overnight.
by guerython | 2026-03-09 16:15:56+00:00
love the thesis. we built something similar that emits ingest events with request_id/tool_label/timestamp metadata, writes the stream to parquet, and lets the agent run a short summary query before choosing whether to surface an anomaly. keeping the rows small and tagged lets the agent reason about drift without a dashboard, and if someone wants to double-check you can replay the same query result into a human-focused view.
by zozbot234 | 2026-03-09 16:16:00+00:00
> If in 2012 you read a similar article explaining borrow checking in academic terms you would have thought Rust would be unusably hard, which is not.

Ironically, Rust was unusably hard prior to the late-2018 edition. So now your academic article has to explain both the baseline borrow checker and non-lexical lifetimes, a vast increase in complexity.
by oytis | 2026-03-09 16:16:02+00:00
> it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles

Lots of real problems listed, but such a non-sequitur conclusion. US is built on these principles, China seems to be more individualistic and consumerist than Germany too. If anything, a big problem in Germany is low ambition as the societal norm. A bit of consumerism could actually help with that, as to consume you need to earn, and to earn, you need some ambition.
by nyxtom | 2026-03-09 16:16:12+00:00
Single greatest thing I did to fix my circadian rhythm was get a sunset/sunrise lighting alarm. I have some hue lights and a "Hatch" alarm clock that both do sunrise lighting and some light morning noise that gradually increases lighting early in the morning. Even when its dark outside, my body has accustomed to it so much that I didn't even notice day light savings at all. Best investment for myself and my daughter I've ever done.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-03-09 16:16:14+00:00
Standards and regulations are simply one tool, and not even the most common one. In the US auto market for example, standards besides FMVSS (and IHS testing practically speaking) are purely optional. You can read FMVSS for free and compliance is self-certified. Emissions regs are slightly tighter, but not a hurdle for EVs.

And outside automotive there's plenty of leaders that don't dominate based on regulations. Google search doesn't dominate based on regulations. Spotify doesn't dominate because they enshrined themselves in copyright law.
by 9rx | 2026-03-09 16:16:31+00:00
> I can tell you do

I like nice things. You've identified a clear pain point that I agree with. If something can be better, why not make it better? "I am not able to think beyond the end of my nose, therefore we have to stop there" is a silly response.

> Empirically, people don't seem to think they have better options, or else they'd be using them.

I have read many Go codebases that do a great job with errors, without all the frustration you speak of. I've also read codebases where the authors crated great messes and I know exactly what you're talking about. That isn't saying Go couldn't improve in any way, but it does say that design matters. If your design sucks, fix it. Don't design your code as if you are writing in some other language.

> My point is that there's a decent number of people who aren't satisfied with this

Including the Go team. Hence why Ian Lance Taylor (who isn't on the core team anymore, granted, but was at the time) went as far as to create a build of Go that exhibited the change he wanted to see. But, once it was tried, we learned it wasn't right.

Nobody has been able to find a design that actually works yet. Which is the same problem we had with generics. Everyone and their brother had half-assed proposals, but all of them fell down to actual use. So, again, who is going to be the person who is able to think about the bigger picture and get it right?

Philip Wadler may be that person. There is unlikely anyone else in the world with a more relevant background. But, if he has no interest in doing it, you can't exactly force him — can you? It is clearly not you, else you'd have done it already. It isn't me either. I am much too stupid for that kind of thing.
by hangonhn | 2026-03-09 16:16:46+00:00
> A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.

This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
by Insanity | 2026-03-09 16:16:55+00:00
> Farmed animals could live happy, healthy lives and then be culled in a humane way.

Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
by lagrange77 | 2026-03-09 16:17:11+00:00
I'm not saying there are no good products. Hetzner Cloud come into my mind for example. It's executed really well.

I'm saying that the number of good software offerings is too low, to have a significant impact on the country's economy.

One of the advantages Germany had though, was a somewhat good and accessible higher education system in regards of computer science.

Now, with software development becoming a commodity, this advantage vanishes.
by alephnerd | 2026-03-09 16:17:22+00:00
You could have invested in nuclear instead of adopting a broadly popular anti-nuclear policy.

The EU could have also enforced the JCPOA as one of it's guaranteers but decided to be inward facing instead of treating the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as the wake up call that it should have been.

We have been saying for almost 20 years that we in the US are shifting East, but Western and Northern European states like Germany did nothing to prepare for such a world.

At least the French establish military bases, conduct coups and attempt to project hard power abroad in order to protect their interests.
by ffsm8 | 2026-03-09 16:17:33+00:00
Blaming Merkel of all politicians for that is seriously retarded. Sorry but no other way to phrase it.

That's entirely on the green party. They ran on it and Merkel publicly stated she's against it, but will do it for the coalition. Because it was more important to get the coalition done then keep the plants running for another few years (by which they'd be decommissioned anyway)

It's typical woke behavior, causing issues and blaming others for the shit they cause. (Not you, but the green partys politicians which occasionally blame her for that,too)
by snowwrestler | 2026-03-09 16:17:55+00:00
A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work.

You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.

There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
by diacritical | 2026-03-09 16:18:35+00:00
I think what GP meant is that when it involves money, suffering is nearly impossible to prevent. That's why you have puppy mills, for example. Most people don't know how the puppies are raised, they just see the cute puppy in the shop. The same way people see a pretty piece of meat in the supermarket and don't know its history.

Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
by jebarker | 2026-03-09 16:18:56+00:00
I have a background in mathematics, I believe in mathematics, but I don't believe in blind faith. Physics gave us statistical mechanics precisely because it's impossible to measure, model and predict the behavior of every individual particle in real-world systems. My gut feeling is that a mathematical theory of LLMs is more likely to look like statistical mechanics than something that tames chaos. That certainly doesn't mean that theory wont't open new doors though that we haven't currently thought of.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-09 16:19:01+00:00
While it's difficult to eschew all government money, given the current political climate it would be interesting to turn the tables so to speak: updating their ToS to disallow any use by the federal government

This would hand the federal govt to OpenAI and Google but would certainly be head-turning. Hard to say if it would pay off positively for them though.
by hkonte | 2026-03-09 16:19:27+00:00
The roast angle is clever — brutal feedback early is actually the most efficient path to a good idea. Most people spend months validating what a 10-second honest take could surface.

It's interesting that even the roasting process is a prompt problem: the quality of the critique depends entirely on how well-structured the "what is your agent idea" input is. Vague input → vague roast.

I built flompt (https://flompt.dev) for exactly this kind of structure problem — a visual prompt builder that decomposes inputs into semantic blocks (role, objective, constraints, examples) and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. The difference between a useful AI output and a useless one is almost always upstream in the prompt.

https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt if you want to poke around.
by marojejian | 2026-03-09 16:19:38+00:00
"successful people set up their lives so they didn't need to use willpower frequently. They exposed themselves to fewer temptations."

Of course we should be skeptical of this result, as with all research, especially in psychology. after all, the previous theory had lots of apparent research support.

But that said, this is the strategy that works for me. If I want to eat less junk, I need to not have junk in the house, so close that it's in my mouth before my prefrontal cortex can call for a review.
by kaashif | 2026-03-09 16:20:02+00:00
> you just can’t play StarCraft that much better than the best humans

I could not disagree with this more.

Just the perfect micro part means that computers have a far higher ceiling than humans.

No, it is not possible in theory for humans to have perfect micro with thousands of APM!

We're talking about hundred unit zergling swarms perfectly dodging tank shells. Hundreds of APM at multiple locations on the map. Perfect timing and placement for every order.

This is like saying an aimbot wouldn't make a top CS pro much better.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-03-09 16:20:02+00:00
A stackfull coroutine is brittle and doesn't compose as cleanly as stackless coroutines. As a default language primitive, the latter is almost always the robust choice. Most devs should be using stackless coroutines for async unless they can articulate a technical justification for introducing the issues that stackfull coroutines bring with them.

I've implemented several stackfull and stackless async engines from scratch. When I started out I had a naive bias toward stackfull but over time have come to appreciate that stackless is the correct model even if it seems more complicated to use.

That said, I don't know why everyone uses runtimes like tokio for async. If performance is your objective then not designing and writing your own scheduler misses the point.
by tsss | 2026-03-09 16:20:08+00:00
Germany is a country that never moved past 1918, both in technology and society. All the successful industry is from that time and the mindset is too. They may have gotten rid of the Emperor but the top-down government and Prussian subservience are strong as ever. It's no coincidence that the GDR was even more controlling than the Soviet Union and crashed even harder. The German federal republic, too, is turning more and more into a paralyzed command economy. The entire public sector, health care, and all large corporation certainly work that way and it is the reason for their unfathomable inefficiency.

Ignoring EVs is a symptom and not a cause of the problems. It is impossible for these corporations to pivot or innovate, no matter in which direction.
by hkonte | 2026-03-09 16:20:19+00:00
Sandboxing local agents is the right instinct — the blast radius of an unconstrained agent on a dev machine is real.

One thing I'd add: sandboxing the execution environment only solves half the problem. The other half is the prompt itself — if the agent's instructions are ambiguous or poorly scoped, sandboxing just contains the damage from a confused agent rather than preventing it.

I built flompt (https://flompt.dev) to address the instruction side — a visual prompt builder that decomposes agent prompts into 12 semantic blocks (role, constraints, objective, output format, etc.) and compiles them to Claude-optimized XML. Tight instructions + sandboxed execution = actually safe agents.

https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt
by hkonte | 2026-03-09 16:20:31+00:00
The "one line in" UX is a smart entry point — lowering the activation energy to start is often the whole product for early adoption.

The interesting constraint is what happens when that one line is underspecified. The AI team you get is only as good as the instructions it infers from your input. Garbage in, garbage team.

I built flompt (https://flompt.dev) to work on that layer — a visual prompt builder that forces structure by decomposing prompts into 12 semantic blocks (role, objective, constraints, output format, etc.) and compiling to Claude-optimized XML. The "paste one line" approach and flompt are almost complementary: one for speed, one for precision.

https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-09 16:20:41+00:00
Usually the answer is embassy for me.

And embedded systems vastly outnumber classical computers. Every classical computer includes several microcontrollers, every car, modern appliance, camera, toy, etc does too. Safe languages for embedded and OSes is very important. Rust just happens to be pretty good for other use cases too, which is a nice bonus. But that means the language can't be tied to a single prescribed runtime. And that it can't have a GC, etc.
by tialaramex | 2026-03-09 16:20:44+00:00
The calendar adjustments are because the planet's constant orbital period isn't a whole number of days.

The leap seconds were an attempt to have wall clock time map to the planet's rotational angle consistently despite the problem that the planet's spin varies unpredictably.

Yes the "leap hour" is a legal fiction of course. In reality in the event anybody cares about this in the distant future they will make the kind of "drastic" changes you've probably experienced twice a year for your whole life and barely noticed... More likely because the drift is so incredibly slow they won't change anything.
by abedaarabi | 2026-03-09 16:20:55+00:00
GeoArk AI is a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform that helps brands track and improve their presence in AI answers—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok.

Problem: When people ask these models for recommendations, most brands are invisible or poorly represented. We built GeoArk to measure that visibility and then improve it—content suggestions, citations, schema, A/B tests—instead of only reporting numbers.

Who it's for: Marketers, growth teams, agencies who want to treat AI search as a real channel.

Free AI visibility report (no credit card): https://geoark.ai

Happy to answer questions or hear feedback.
by big_toast | 2026-03-09 16:21:32+00:00
For anyone reading this later.

I read a little from sandvault and they suggest sandbox-exec doesn't allow recursive sandboxing, so you need to set flags on xcodebuild and swift to not sandbox in addition to the correct SBPL policy.

(I don't think sandvault has a swift/xcode specific policy because they're dumping everything into a sandvault userspace. And it doesn't really concern itself with networking afaict either.)
by yurunzi | 2026-03-09 16:21:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building an open-source RAW photo editor called Pu-erh Lab as a personal project before graduating from college.

I started it just because I’m an amateur photographer and know something about programming, and I kept feeling that today’s photo workflows and video workflows are still oddly disconnected. Many parts of the imaging pipeline remain black boxes, and most of the choices available to users are constrained by whatever a given piece of software decides to expose. I wanted to explore whether a RAW editor could offer stronger performance, a more transparent pipeline, and more meaningful control over the image itself.

So far, I’ve focused on a few areas:

- a CUDA-based processing pipeline for responsive high-resolution preview
- a 32-bit float imaging pipeline with ACES 2.0/OpenDRT display rendering transform
- LUT support and non-destructive editing
- a Git-like edit history/branching model
- a custom asset-management backend using DuckDB

One result I’m reasonably happy with is that the editor can preview large RAW images in real time, and library browsing stays fairly memory-efficient even with hundreds of high-resolution files.

It’s still early, still rough in many places, and currently Windows-CUDA-only. I’m not trying to out-market Lightroom or replace existing open-source tools outright. This project started more as an attempt to test my software engineering skills and understanding of image processing.
by wisemang | 2026-03-09 16:21:59+00:00
So the tree data itself mainly comes from municipal open data, just like yours does. Street Trees datasets are pretty common across cities. I just added SF yesterday after replying here :)

Otherwise the map tiles are coming from OpenFreeMap [1] which are indeed based on OSM.

Next steps I'm interested in are including economic + ecological benefits of the trees, highlighting potential pests / invasive species, maybe some other basic info about the species sourced from Wikipedia.

I like how you've got different icons for different types of trees; I've been thinking about how to encode DBH data as well but haven't settled on anything yet.

[1] https://openfreemap.org
by hkonte | 2026-03-09 16:22:00+00:00
Interesting angle — measuring tool survival by AI agent preference reveals something about signal clarity. Agents pick tools that are well-documented and have consistent, predictable interfaces.

The same principle applies to prompts: agents that receive structured, semantically organized instructions consistently outperform those given wall-of-text inputs. The "tool survival" problem is partly a prompt structure problem in disguise.

I built flompt (https://flompt.dev) to address this — a visual prompt builder that decomposes prompts into 12 typed blocks (role, objective, constraints, output format, etc.) and compiles to Claude-optimized XML. The tools that survive in agent workflows are the ones built on clear contracts; flompt tries to do the same for instructions.

https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt
by atmosx | 2026-03-09 16:22:04+00:00
Broadly speaking they're not _as far away_ from Chinese EVs as we all make it here to be. However, the problem is that the stockholders of all these companies expect 500% YoY growth which isn't sustainable. Not to mention the cost of a car has grown significantly while all German cars have degraded substantially in quality. For example, you can expect Porsche to sell FOREVER the number of cars they manage to sell in the 00s and 10s:

2000: ~54,600 (happy)
2007: ~98,600 (happy)
2019: ~280,800
2025: 280,000 (CRISIS!!!)

I mean... It's a freaking sports car! Why on earth would you expect to sell more units than these?
by abighamb | 2026-03-09 16:22:18+00:00
Often I see a popup to accept TOS after the update, which was run without me agreeing to anything.

At which time the company has unilaterally denied my access to something I already paid for without seeking my affirmative consent.

In theory I could stop whatever I'm doing, go email the company a brief to the point letter indicating they've broken their ToS and are unacceptably impairing my ability to use my property under the contract that I did agree to, and giving them an opportunity to amend their problem and give me a rollback path.

Realistically the outcome of this is a brushoff and needing to file a consumer protection complaint or get a lawyer.

If the feature is something like "my car" I can't afford that opportunity cost and am coerced into accepting their contract by the way they presented the amended terms.