skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I doubt they would even fix dangerous shit like bad circuit panels

A retired NFL player was purchasing this house and multiple inspectors indicated that the entire main panel would require replacement [note: NOT in contract to update any branch circuits; panel only]. Any pre-existing branch circuits unable to be update "to code" were to be de-activated.

Previous homeowner had made all sorts of "specials" [i.e. crappy work] within this home, and many of the branch circuits were just hots with neutrals tapped off other shared circuits [not multibranch; it was hack-work]. One such disabled circuit —per our contract— was for a TV above the kitchen sink, which had its own 15A hot — but jaked off another neutral [melt/burn/fire hazard; not "to code"].

----

What does one do on a multiple thousand $$$ contract for a multimillion dollar property, when your lifeblood brokerage is telling YOU [the EXPERT] that "no permits are required, just make that TV work!!!" ?

Or other such new-homeowner surprises as: "please disable the garage door safety sensors even though I have over ten young children that could be crushed by one of the most dangerous items in a typical home [garage door]" —okay, I added that latter half.

----

Firms don't often care if your house fetches slightly less, because to them it isn't really reflected much differently in their [already bloated] commissions. Any future land purchases I make will be lawyer only, up-front flat-fee [where possible].
A few people have asked for recommendations, and I just spent months researching ebikes to buy.

Cheap and cheerful: Priority Current. Mid hub, internally-geared rear hub, upright position, cheap. Can get from Costco on fat discount for $2,600. Not a cargo bike, but amazing to go to the shops.

Longer-term: Specialized Globe Haul. I feel the same way about it as I do my pickup truck - it can go anywhere, do anything, and seems incredibly happy to either cruise around town or eat shit for hours. I absolutely adore it and cannot recommend it enough. It also has a big dealer network, something you don't get with the DTC boys. A steal at $3,500, but you can almost certainly get it for less at your LBS
Taiwan doesn't own any IP behind the semiconductor manufacturing pipeline. China was going down the same path until it was interrupted by US's chip war. Now it's forced to develop its own lithography machines and software. It's a massive own goal by US politicians.
Well this was useful in so much as it provides a link to someone else offering advice after actually living a life...

The hubris of the tech bro knows no bounds! lol
Even from the "underserved people" standpoint, most of the people who have shit-tier internet are people living in very rural areas (read: overwhelmingly white).

There is no valid reason to turn this into yet another performative piece of race-bait.
William Burns, the current Director of the CIA and former ambassador to Russia, would disagree with you.

"In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” "

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-w...
thank you, this is great information; an informed recommendation in fields like this, where bad reference books abound, is good as gold

however, on casual inspection, the page doesn't seem to have the book available for download; possibly it is not open access
Correction: you can usually run 10Gbit/s over CAT5e if the cables are not too long, so you probably won't need to replace your cables. But the hardware is indeed expensive.
Yes but from the perspective of the seller, the buyer's agent fee feels like you're subsidizing the realtor market to make it viable. Now, don't get me wrong, when I _bought_, I was very happy my agent made money, because she deserved it. I can just understand the attitude to sellers over agent commission (not saying I agree with it)
Just as Olaf the snowman sings in Frozen II, "This will all make sense when I am older ... 'Cause when you're older absolutely everything makes sense"
Looks like the multi room streaming is back? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/google-wins-sonos-pa...
The thing about proportional pricing is that it doesn't scale up or down. Assuming your sale was near the median US home price, the seller's agent would net around $12k for their work. You believe that was worthwhile, let's assume that was money well spent.

Suppose the market was hotter when you sold and your property was worth 2x the median. Is the same work worth $24k? What if you sold in a hot market in a hot neighborhood, which should make it somewhat easier to move the property? Does it make sense that this would increase the amount the agent gets paid?

For similar reasons, proportional pricing doesn't work well at the lower end of the market, where listings are often under $100k.
Uhh, 10 kilometers is a LOT. I would not walk 6.2 miles for groceries. Or to work. Or to most things frankly
A related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/

For a sufficiently popular project there are often cases where users (other projects) rely on existing observed behavior even if it not guaranteed by documentation/specification.
If a company puts itself in a position as gatekeeper between people and essential services, it behooves them to put in the effort to equalize access. Intention doesn't have much if anything to do with it, it's a plainly obvious outcome that focusing purely on market economics will disadvantage people in systematic ways, especially if those disadvantages are correlated with other features of their experience and identity.

Phone and internet access should be a public good.
Maybe all the back-stabbing and nepotism was data-driven[1]?

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you...
It’s probably more accurate to say that what your brain is doing when writing code is more like emulating an LLM than an LLM is emulating your brain.

Converting human language to code is an ideal task for LLMs, which is part of why they are such an exciting development.
Red-lining is based on the inherently-racist premise that Black people moving into an area were likely to result in decrease of property value.

What we're talking about here is much simpler, basic economic stuff like "poor people can't afford expensive stuff" which doesn't demand any racial assumptions.

EDIT: I don't usually ask about down-votes, but for the people who are down-voting this comment, please explain why I'm wrong. The whole basis of the discussion here is that the 'disparate impact' standard is being used to criticize business decisions that are not based on racial inputs.
Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum called. They want their argument back!
> Anecdotally, I also found the music selection accuracy went down considerably once Google Play Music was merged into Youtube Music.

Going from the search corpus containing only the actual song/artist name to an uploader-provided title aimed at gaming the recommendation algorithm made this a foregone conclusion. It's incredibly frustrating.

Some other things I've noticed-

- the "nearest device" feature almost never works now. I'll quietly speak in one room only to have a device at the other end of the house activate either instead of or in addition to.

- "play white noise" has a 50% chance of playing death metal

- there is still a huge amount of functionality that's only available to free google accounts and not gsuite users. Generally this is discovered by trying to do something like add a reminder and having the device crash/restart.
None of that is true. But thinking makes it so.
I don't who that is, but looking around there is an obvious bias that also is not based in reality.
> The focus on race seems to be mostly coming from commenters here.

The linked article starts by drawing comparisons to redlining in the very first paragraph.
Any claim that Chrome's decision is not entirely profit-focused needs to take into account that Firefox managed to adopt Manifest V3 without gutting the ability for adblockers to do their job.

Google needs to be very specific on this: what precise user-privacy-threatening functionality can an extension have in Firefox's implementation of MV3, that is not also possible in Chrome's? Because if there is actually none, then we have our answer right there.
There was a video from Twitter shared on HN a while back of Windows 95 or 98 (I don't remember which) running on a modern computer, and all programs and menus loaded instantly when clicked, not like now where there's often a small delay. It would be great if better hardeware meant the same thing but snappier, rather than the same thing but more inefficient.

However, that speed came at the cost of laborious optimization for the low-end computers of the time and millions of dollars spent by Microsoft debugging defective C and assembly code within Windows.

The only way to force software to be more efficient would be some sort of cap on how inefficient software were allowed to be, which doesn't seem possible. At most, you can have a carbon tax, or increase taxes on electricity use, indirectly incentivizing the use of energy-efficient software.
Anyone alive today would be born between 1900 and 2023, right?

And their mothers, assuming they were between 13 and 50 when they gave birth, would therefore have been born between 1850 and 2010.

So that's 161 out of 9999 available last-4's (0000 is not used) that could possibly be someone's mother's birth year.

And then, of course, it has to be the right year within that space.

I am guessing this was something that happened to a few folks by chance and then was blown up by people who don't understand how many coincidences can occur across a population of millions.
For one, it would return us to the status-quo where the user decides what to install on the hardware they own. That seems pretty important to me, even if you hate Europe or Apple.
My argument is that AI-assistance makes it easier and faster to learn to code.
> a 4000 lb vehicle

Amateur numbers.

The F-150 Lightning is 6,500 lb (2,950 kg) and the Rivian trucks (R1T, R1S) are 7,000 lb (3,175 kg). The electric F-150 is 35% heavier than the ICE model.

Meanwhile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37726539
A very tiny number of people in the US live a 5 min walk from a grocery store.

Many people live within 5 miles of one, but usually in denser areas where 5 miles could easily take 30-60 min of travel.
You’re probably in US. Meanwhile in Switzerland people are enjoying 25gbps internet: https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/
Former Alexa Skill developer here.

I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned).

I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each.

My notes:

- VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device.

- The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong.

- The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations.

- The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress.

- Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use.

- Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc.

- The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon!

- Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not.

- Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills.

- Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary.

There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.
> That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built before 1995 you'd be looking at CAT4 and under 20 Mb/s.

I've been dealing with twisted pair cable since the mid-90s and I've never seen Cat 4 cable anywhere, commercial or residential.

Cat 5/5e both support GigE. The primary difference between FE and GE with respect to cabling is that GE uses all 4 pairs where FE used only 2 pairs. The difference between 5 and 5e cable is pretty negligible, and the GigE standard only requires Cat 5, not 5e

With respect to Cat 4, you're confusing the signal bandwidth and data rate. Cat 4 supports up to 20 Mhz signal bandwidth. It can be utilized by either 10BASE-T (10 Mbit/s) or 100BASE-T4 (100 Mbit/s).

If there's twisted pair data cabling in the home at all, it's probably suitable for GigE. Otherwise it's likely RJ11 phone cabling that's not typically going to be in a home run topology.

That said, the standards are pretty forgiving over shorter distances. Here's someone claiming they got GigE speeds over Cat 3 cabling in an older home:

https://superuser.com/a/1281656
Its weird to hear " future american shenzhen". that already exists and is called silicone valley.

Guangzhou is the manufacture powerhouse of china. Which is, a stone throw from its silicon Valley, shenzhen.

But I believe shenzhen as a tech hub was selected for proximity to Hong Kong not because of Guangzhou.

Source: lived in China
I am not sure what you are saying here.

Is this is a general critique of capitalist exploitation of the "software" field? Like, as in software should be a utility like fresh water or electricity?

If not, and you are relatively literal in what you write, the following question seems unavoidable:

What about coaches for youth sports? What about beach cleanup? What about a thousand other worthwhile and societally useful activities that people volunteer to do, but for which there is no sustainable career path? What makes OSS contributing any different from them?
AI: The Coming Revolution
No, the stuff that directly comes out of the 3D printer is not foodsafe. Some of it is biocompatible, though, which means you can safely lick it for a while. But you can use 3D printing to create foodsafe molds and then use them to cast foodsafe plastic copies of your 3D-printed master.
30-40m each way to work and usually get to drop off my kids at school on the way ... love my Xtracycle Stoker!
I hear lots of people saying this, but I’m not sure why we assume that Apple is the best positioned to take advantage of this.

They have had powerful devices with best-in-class integration for many years now, and Siri is still a frustrating experience and lags significantly behind competing voice assistants.

Competitors also have access to LLMs, and competing ecosystems are maturing (e.g. Samsung, Google). I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple makes waves with AI, but I also wouldn’t say they’re particularly more likely to do it than anybody else.
- "For another, it was absolutely clear to everyone that Virgil didn't actually say the things Dante put in his mouth;"

It was far worse than that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil#Legends

The whole thing's a mess. It'd be hard to draw a bright line between the crazy bullshit medievals* literally believed about Virgil, and the poetic, metaphorical bullshit Dante wrote about him.

(*I actually had a Latin professor in the 21st century sincerely advocate that Eclogues interpretation. There's a mode of thinking behind this stuff that, to put it tactfully, confounds people about what's the difference between fiction and reality).
Aka, a search engine enables GPT4 to act as a search engine…

At least until they get blocked.
I have bike, e-bike and EUC (monowheel / electric unicycle). My only car (minivan) is only for far travels or bringing heavy items.

Out of all 3 EUC is the most fun.
It’s a hard problem for sure. I guess You fine tune to their preferences. Everyone gets the “Giant bus headed straight towards you!!!!” Alert. But let’s say you’re at the grocery store, maybe it’s clever enough to read the aisle descriptions for example.
Maybe Alexa would have made money if
the product wasn't so broken at understanding basic logic commands.

How can you expect to sell this device knowing how bad and limited it is?
The 2021 China Census news release says:

> There were 901.99 million persons living in urban areas, accounting for 63.89 percent; 509.79 million persons living in rural areas, accounting for 36.11 percent.

Interesting that the percentages for urban and rural sum exactly to 100%. Is there no concept of "suburban" in China? No in-between city and countryside? Honest question from someone who has never been to China.
Show HN: Lucia-Auth,Authentication, simple and clean
I do worry about this some, but I also have my bikes insured including an e-cargo bike. Cheaper than most car insurance. Still would be a pain in the ass if my bike got stolen though.
I have a Rad Wagon 4, and I love it. It is my only mode of transportation, other than my two feet. It's big and heavy, but I don't care. I've also picked up a couple of their attachments like the basket on the front, and the rack and insulated pack on the back. Even with that rack, I still have room for an old school 2x milk crate in the back. Parking/securing it can be a bit of a challenge as most places around me don't have a bike rike, and the bike itself is a bit larger than most racks are designed. That just means I have to get creative, and it's not really an issue. The amount of stuff I can carry is amazing, and its large motor makes carrying it all a breeze.

Edit: also, if you do anything at night, I highly recommend the upgraded headlight. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with the front rack, but I have an idea how to hack something together to be able to have both at the same time.
Afaik public primary schools and middle schools don't charge tuitions. They do charge other fees though such as food, dormitory and uniform.
The bike in question has a front basket with a bag designed to fit it:

https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/large-basket

https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/large-basket-roll-top...

So I don't have panniers. I might get some in the future to have a bit of extra capacity.
Completely agree. The only licenses that make any sort of sense are AGPLv3 and proprietary all rights reserved. Permissive can easily end up being just free labor for trillion dollar corporations.
> So say you're an ISP deciding whether to invest the same money into building fiber out to one of two areas, one where you'll make 1 million dollars a year and one where you'll take 2 million a year, and you make the rational decision to build out to the more profitable area.

Maybe those two areas should be served by two different ISPs. If an ISP is operating in such a large area that they can't afford to keep all of them reasonably up to date then maybe that's a sign that the ISP is too big.
Well that's the point I think. In practically all of the US you can't even take a sidewalk where you want to go. It gets even worse if you want things like walk signals or to avoid huge intersections, or even mass transit at all.
> The buyer's agent fee is basically subsidizing the hard work of buyer's agents (which is taking their clients to multiple properties, discussions about what they want, using time browsing MLS to find houses that meet criteria and arranging tours of them)

Since Zillow and Redfin have existed for quite some time how, that service seems a lot less valuable. I'm sure it can be worth it in the right circumstances, though.
that depends on local laws. depending on where you live, it may be illegal to ride high speed ebikes in the first place.
When users start to answer other users questions, either in issue or discussion boards.
Did you follow the link in the footnote? [0] I thought it made the case for doing extra quite convincingly.

The gist of the argument is that it's worth spending some small proportion of your work time on exploratory work that might or might not pay off, as opposed to doing more "normal" work (another sprint task or whatever).

For me it described pretty well what I'd already been doing subconsciously for some time. I thought it was interesting to see it framed that way.

[0] https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2021/always-do-extra.php
Top used Chrome extensions – AdBlock is only #5
I have been analyzing Chrome extension stats for a while. Previously, Chrome Web Store would put a cap on the weekly user count to 10M. There are now 37 extensions in the 10M user club, and it was not clear which extension has the most users.

With the new Chrome Web Store, Google has removed the 10M cap. With that, we can finally get more insights into the top extensions. Here are the top 5:

#1) Google Docs Offline - 1.37B users
#2) Adobe Acrobat - 205M
#3) McAfee WebAdvisor - 83M
#4) Application Launcher for Drive (by Google) - 83M
#5) AdBlock - 69M

(See https://chrome-stats.com/top for the rest of the ranking)

I used to assume that AdBlock would claim the top 3 spots, since it has overwhelmingly more reviews than the other top extensions, but it is only ranked at #5. The top 4 extensions seem to be more like something that people did not even realize that they have installed (especially Google Docs Offline, which is shipped with Chrome).
I think the problem is that the headline claims they are "Energy Independent", but when you drill down, it's only electricity that is being affected. Energy independence usually refers to other kinds of energy as well, including petroleum powered vehicles.

Well and of course people love to hate on renewables.

Will this be 12 months in a year? Or are they returning to power generation via petroleum?
> Technically coal is also a closed loop of carbon because the CO2 once came from the atmosphere.

As you say, the loop has to close on a timeline shorter than the greenhouse gas effect's impact on climate. That can be true of wood but not coal.
This has to include some thoughts on how to get vehicles to drastically lower their weights...