skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$100/g? You can buy it for less than 1/10 of that in Europe at least
Show HN: I built a tool to rank cities based on purchasing power for SWEs
Show HN: I built a tool to calculate real tech salaries across cities (after tax & COL)

As a software engineer obsessed with data-driven decisions, I wanted to quantify how much better/worse other cities would be compared to my current home in Berlin. While sites like Glassdoor and levels.fyi tell you how much you can earn, they don't show what you actually keep after taxes and living costs.

So I built Tech City Index - a tool that compares cities based on actual purchasing power for software engineers, combining:

* Real-time salary data from levels.fyi

* Cost of living data from Numbeo

* Local tax calculations at median tech income (thanks, GPT-4o)

* Weather data (naturally)

Some surprising findings:

1. Seattle and Austin top the list (ahead of SF) due to:

* Similar tech salaries to SF

* No state income tax (vs California's 13.3%)

* Significantly lower housing costs

2. The top rankings are unsurprisingly dominated by the US, which is still by far the best place for a SWE to be. Even an engineer working in the middle of nowhere (no disrespect, Kansas City) has 42% more purchasing power than their London counterpart, thanks to:

* Access to US-only remote jobs

* 32% lower cost of living

* Lower tax rates

3. Western Europe significantly underperforms both US and Middle East markets. A Milan-based SWE:

* Earns 54% less than in Abu Dhabi

* Pays 38% in taxes (vs 0% in UAE)

* Faces 11% higher living costs

The tool includes a "salary converter" - input your current compensation and family size (e.g., number of kids needing childcare), and it calculates the equivalent salary needed in any target city to maintain your standard of living.

Try it out: https://www.techcities.app

Built with Cursor and Next.js

Feedback welcome!
Does that imply that if we invent brain upload technology, that my weights have every conflicting license and patent for everything I can quote or create? I don't like that precedent. I have complete rights over my noggin's contents. If I do quote a NYT article in it's entirely, that vould be infringement, but not copying my brain itself.
"The cost-effective nature of AI makes it highly plausible we're moving towards an agent vs agent future."

Sounds right. I assume we will all have AI agents triaging our emails trying to protect us.

Maybe we will need AI to help us discern what is really true when we search for or consume information as well. The amount and quality of plausible but fake information is only going to increase.

"However, the possibilities of jailbreaks and prompt injections pose a significant challenge to using language models to prevent phishing."

Gives a hint at the arms race between attack and defense.
We don’t. But if we keep throwing companies into the grinder like this where all their IP is stolen and they are just replicated in China on an unfair playing field, we end up losing anyways regardless of intent.
If I generally know what my levels are on a daily basis as both my diet and my routine is constant, then I don’t need a device. But I guess some people do.

It’s also a little presumptuous to believe that someone would want to wear a bulky medical device for an easily manageable and non-life threatening condition all the time. If not wearing a medical device doesn’t kill you, then why do you need to wear it? Form factor and comfort is important.
To what extent do people in this line of work feel fear as they do it? Is it mainly suitable for those rare people who either don’t feel fear, or the less-rare people who are looking for a rush, or does it just become mundane after sufficient experience, so that really anyone can do it?
True, but next time it comes up we have a pretty good argument.
You've got to say more about what you mean by that, especially how you know what everyone else finds valuable on the internet.
> It also makes it impossible for a single (or multiple parties) to change the license in ways in line with the community's desire, including moving to more permissive licenses.

You contribute under the existing license because you approve of that license. Not allowing change is not allowing change... there is no way to make it to allow only change you like. So it is a compromise and, IMO, a good one. .. And, while not specifically relevant to my point, moving to a more permissive license isn't necessarily a good thing.

> If a company doesn't think a project is worth maintaining without a more monetizable license having multiple code owners isn't going to force them to keep maintaining the software.

My thought is that it would be better if companies didn't have this option. That releasing software under a free software license but then reserving the rights to change it later for business reasons is bad behavior. It is using free software as a marketing tool while you keep on hand on to yank it out from under your users at a whim. I think free software is better (best?) when developed to scratch an itch and released to reduce the long term maintenance and development burden (and hopefully some altruistic leanings).
Email and web browsing relies on “deny lists” rather than “allow lists”. So anything goes but you block bad addresses, rather than nothing until you get permissions/trust/credibility. This helped growth of all the networks but means indefinite whack a mole.

I think (but am not sure) that something using trust networks from the ground up would be better in the long term. Consider anything dodgy until it has built trust relationships.

Eg email servers can’t just go for it. You need time to warm up your IP address, use DKIM etc. People can’t just friend you on FB without your acceptance so it’s a lot safer than email, if still not perfect. A few layers of trust would slow bad actors down significantly.

A trust network wouldn’t be binary. Having eg a bunch of spam accounts all trust each other wouldn’t help getting into your social or business network.

Thoughts from experts?
The little town I grew up in (Weaverville, NC) housed the factory that made all the patches for NASA missions (AB Emblem). Most of the manufacturing plants there have since closed down, but it always made me happy that my little part of Appalachia made something cool.
I wish I understood why someone would make a brand new account, and then post this.
In the UK, most letting fees charged to tenants were banned a few years ago, because it was felt that letting agents were acting abusively. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tenant-fees-act

If I had to pay a fee to apply for a job, I’d assume that it was a scam and that there was no job on offer.
> restrictions on businesses are not related at all to democracy.

I guess we've dropped the whole "Global fair trade leads to a more free, peaceful and democratic world" argument that used to be so popular?
Yeah no.

An example for legal reference might be convolution reverb. Basically it's a way to record what a fancy reverb machines does (using copyrighted complex math algorithms) and cheaply recreate the reverb on my computer. It seems like companies can do this as long as they distribute protected reverbs separately from the commercial application. So Liquidsonics (https://www.liquidsonics.com/software/) sells reverb software but puts for free download the 'protected' convolution reverbs specifically the Bricasti ones in dispute (https://www.liquidsonics.com/fusion-ir/reverberate-3/)

Also, while a SQL server can be copyright protected, a SQL database is not given copyright protection/ownership to the SQL server software creators by extension of that.
The internet as I know it is the value I get out of interacting with other people.

I've never had a moment where I've said "Oh, I'm glad that ad was there!"

If a service can't be run unless it's through ads?

Then perish.
> The vertical integration is why the $110 phone exists in the first place…

There is no evidence of that. If anything more vertically integrated devices (e.g. iPhone, Samsung flagships) cost more, because a vertically integrated market increases barriers to entry and impairs competition.

A Samsung phone might very well have a Samsung CPU with Samsung RAM and Samsung flash made in Samsung fabs with a Samsung battery and a Samsung screen. Galaxy S24 Ultra, ~$1000.

Meanwhile, the $110 phone was the Moto G Play. That's a Qualcomm CPU with Samsung RAM, a "Motorola"-branded battery which is probably Sanyo or Panasonic, and a third party screen and flash because Motorola doesn't make those either. It's $110 because it's full of fungible commodity parts.

The issue is, some of them -- especially that CPU -- are poorly documented and full of tightly integrated but closed source firmware/drivers. Which has nothing to do with the manufacturing cost of the hardware. A fully-documented open-source RISC-V CPU is not going to cost more.
Debatable.

> whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also (Jesus)

> I do not like the word tolerance, but could not think of a better one. Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one (Gandhi)
> Would that be a net positive or negative for employees?

In what world would this be a net positive for employees?
Oh well... At least, in 1980 we got Xenix.
Unless you are making an argument for personhood, one is a machine, the other is a human. Different standards apply, end of discussion.
Well, naively, then, what you might be describing is a new language; because if the software itself can't capture the details of the expertise, then that may imply that something simply isn't being expressed.

Languages evolve with expertise, specialties are tailored to and can be permanently and effectively captured; and not just captured, but reused as in the case of libraries.

Perhaps there's some core capability missing from the MATLAB ecosystem that isn't so obvious on the surface. What I know about MATLAB is it is primarily focused on simplifying and making performant DAQ / processing cycles, but not necessarily associating concepts to use-cases and correctness/effectiveness (and probably optimality, as an important thought) -- say with how Objects and Types compartmentalize data transformation effectively for user-facing software applications with understandable UIs.
Ok. I'm fine agreeing to disagree.
I thought he asked the court to pause the ban until he was in office. In the interest of trying to be neutral, perhaps he either:

* Thinks he can help negotiate some sort of deal that keeps TikTok here fairly, or

* Sees an opportunity to do a grift/accept some bribes from ByteDance/get some control over an effective propaganda engine.
There is a feast. You get a crumb. The problem isn't that part of that the internet needs part of that crumb to function. The problem is that you get only a crumb. Let's not pretend otherwise.
> with tech CEO Elon Musk even suggesting that he would be capable of getting the construction started for a fraction of estimated costs.

Name one construction project the man has completed under budget.
This has nothing to do with democracy, it's about trying to keep a level playing field. The US has been trying to open trade with China since the 70s, and until China stops doing this the US has to adjust trade policy to keep things fair. Free and open trade is a two way street, otherwise it's just charity to the bad faith actor.
Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertising.

Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see.

Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.
To me there's something more than just entertainment in the idea of sport, of finding the limits of the human body and will. It's almost like art—it's evidence of human flourishing and it should appear as one of the final products of a successful society.
I think any university press release should be not be posted
Not really sure how you come to the conclusion those are all valuable things.
On top of that they kindly share all your data with 383 "partners", and you have to click "no" one by one to opt-out
Well isn’t part of the issue that people are using automation to mass apply? If so, they’ll just redirect their money from compute cycles toward application fees and we’ll be in the same situation.
An 80W CO2 LASER is plenty of power. I regularly engrave the living shit out of stone with mine, and that goes a few millimeters deep.

Get a couple kW in the same wavelength (10640nm) with a proper adjustable focus (movable diopter) and a galvo and a vacuum assist and you can just start raster-scanning your way through the rock.
True, but Australia and China have extremely close economic relations due to proximity and an FTA.
That would be against the whole idea of 'net neutrality.'

Which is why I agree. The user is paying for those ads, and the infrastructure is being upgraded to serve those ads. Why do ads get subsidies?
"What is miniKanren?" it's NOT a title of that page.

It's a first line that happen to be there, of quite a lot. The one only short explanation what it is that was there, I've cited in the parent.

The title of a submission shall not be edited - right ? - but here, it's obviously hallucinated (there is no title). And I seem to be downvoted by bots with context buffer size of 1 line and a submitter ? who did read no more - but who exploited me and others instead - all paid in reverse.

Dang: title of this submission breaks HN guidelines (and I'm dovnvoted for being exploited and saying it, there shall be a warning - but it's up side down, not for me only - coltea .., - or leave: * suck karma exploiting others, my no thanks, sorry).
Internet and CDNs has unique restrictions and requirements in China.

Not everyone will want to play ball.
I’m not American so that’s irrelevant to me anyway, I just think it’s a moral good
I don't disagree with some of the points are making here, but the main point of my own comment is your last sentence from above was mean-spirited and unnecessary.

You want to have a conversation about quality and ethics in computing and how this post can be pushing a narrative that is not in line with your views on this, I think that is worthwhile to have. But personal denigration of someone else isn't necessary in doing that.
>But that measure has been rolled back over the years, and now only applies in particular industries.

I would like to know where you saw this. Not to be a jerk but I've never heard this and I'm more informed than most.

>Tesla 100% owns its operations in China, as do more and more foreign companies.

Tesla is the first one to have that arrangement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Shanghai What about this? https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Supply-Chain/Tesla-cars-fa... Keep in mind, producing Teslas in China is not the same as selling them in China. They can mandate Tesla to export 100% of the cars at any time if they feel it threatens the local industry.

>Many people in the US and Europe are operating with a mental picture of China that is decades out of date, or which is even just wrong.

Many people are also operating with an overly optimistic and romanticized picture of China that was never true to begin with.
Your Platform Is a Trap
One person's/entity's freedom and rights end where anothers start. :)

Beginning with choice.
I don’t even know what this means, but it sounds either stupid, or a theory that only works in a clean room laboratory.
This will be a much bigger issue when it’s female swimmers and gymnasts
OP you only took this half way. We already know LLMs can say smart sounding things while also being wrong and irrelevant. You need to manually validate how many N / 100 LLM outputs are both correct and significant - and how much did it miss! Otherwise you might fall into a trap of dealing with too much noise for only a little bit of signal. The next step from there is comparing it with human level signal to noise ratio.
> I guess we've dropped the whole "Global fair trade leads to a more free, peaceful and democratic world" argument that used to be so popular?

Global Free Trade is based on the Stag Hunt Principle - all players need to be aligned to cooperate in order to "hunt the stag".

If players decide they wish to undermine the principle of fair trade, then they should be isolated.

For example, if China has banned FB or Google from operating without Chinese government oversight, then we should do the same with TikTok and WeChat.
Every problem you just listed is 100% in your control and able to be configured, so the issue isn't long polling, it's your setup/configs. If your client (libcurl) times out a request, set the timeout higher. If apache is your web server and it disconnects idle clients, increase the timeout, tell it not to buffer the request and to pass it straight back to the app server. If there's a cloud lb somewhere (sounds like it because alb defaults to a 10s idle timeout), increase the timeouts...

Every timeout in every hop of the chain is within your control to configure. Setup a subdomain and send long polling requests through that so the timeouts can be set higher and not impact regular http requests or open yourself up to slow client ddos.

Why would you try to do long polling and not configure your request chain to be able to handle them without killing idle connections? The problems you have only exist because you're allowing them to exist. Set your idle timeouts higher. Send keepalives more often. Tell your web servers to not do request buffering, etc.

All of that is extremely easy to test and verify functioanlity. Does the request live longer than your polling interval? Yes? Great you're done! No? Tune some more timeouts and log the request chain everywhere you can until you know where the problems lie. Knock them out one by one going back to the origin until you get what you want.

Long polling is easy to get right from an operations perspective.
Another way to go is not to participate in the hype cycle of pitching investors instead of pitching customers (marketing and sales) and giving away ideas and opportunities that end up being made elsewhere and not supported where the founders currently are.

Doing the market research and opportunity and presenting it on a stage can be very helpful sometimes, other times it can seem a little head scratching.

It's fine to be open, start with the ICP.
> With FreeBSD, you have to deliberately open ports

The issue outlined in the article happened because the author deliberately open their service to the public internet. Replacing Linux with FreeBSD wouldn't have prevented the compromise.
depending on what you see as "relatively modern", you can check out "project sandcastle" which lets you run postmarketOS (and thus linux) on the iPhone. Kinda tethered but it runs
That seems like a really bad idea. Many of America’s innovations were built on the backs of immigrants, in virtually all industries. There are certainly problems with H1B abuse, but that calls for tweaks to the program, not elimination of it.

> India exports it's poverty to the world

This is just misguided and racist. First off, India isn’t exporting poverty. The people who come to the US on this program are almost all middle class and well educated. Second, even if it were exporting its poverty, so what - it has benefit to us by making American companies stronger.

> No birthright citizenship for Indian H1B's.

I think birthright citizenship is a flawed concept in general so I agree, but not in a way that specifically applies to H1B and definitely not in a way that singles out one ethnicity. Doing so would be discriminatory and not in line with America’s values. And obviously, once they become citizens, they should have every right other citizens have, including citizenship for children.

> Let them go back and make India Great Again.

Are you a Native American? If not, why aren’t you extending this logic to yourself?

> American Graduates First

Guess who is teaching those graduates math, science, and engineering in the most prestigious colleges? Often, it is an Indian professor or grad student.

> Until there is full employment for our young people, No H1B's.

Not all American graduates are qualified. Holding a degree means nothing. Their actual talent depends on a number of other factors. If you were to ban H1Bs, you would see a sharp decline in competitiveness for American companies. They would almost certainly just choose to expand their international offices in response. If they weren’t allowed to do that, they’d just lose in the global competition for tech talent, and fall behind.
I just received a corporate IT security training link. From an external address and with a cryptic link. After a previous training which asked us not to trust external emails (spoofable) especially not with unknown links.

IT wasn’t amused when I reported it as phishing attempt.
Even Wikipedia feels like each page has a prominent “Plea from Jimmy Wales” ad at the top of every page (even after donating), even if it isn’t billed as such.
That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains
Newton was public domain by Einstein's time.
Let them be insular. I don't think it should be anyone's mission to "spread democracy". If people want it, they need to fight for it for themselves.
I gave a subjective reason for a preference, the difference is I didn’t pretend it was anything other than an opinion.
Basically: Wanting a level playing field does not mean allowing yourself to be exploited.

If you’re in the Olympics and your competitor is doping, you shouldn’t practice doping yourself, but you can refuse to compete.
It's not a choice of TBM vs cut-and-cover. You also have drill-and-blast. Which method is better depends on a number of factors, including depth and the state of the soil/rock you're going through.

A problem with TBMs is it can be difficult/costly to secure the tunnel sufficiently against water ingress. If you mess up that one the cost of your tunnel can easily double or more.

Here in Norway we recently built a railway tunnel with TBMs (Blixtunnelen) and it's having problems with water ingress. A fairly mild problem relative to how bad these can get, but it's enough that the tunnel constantly has to be closed for repairs to the railway infrastructure due to water drips.
It's not a red herring, I was responding to this specific sentence about the US "finally" acting, as if it's a new phenomenon:

>> The US is finally starting to act in kind, and should continue to do so

> No country is a perfect free market, and has some 'sacred cows' that it attempts to protect

This is a more nuanced take that should be the starting off point for any productive discussion around what counts as "fair" trade.

> Jones Act is actually really bad, for America! It should go away! It especially hurts areas like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but it is generally

Sure, but it's protectionist, and has existed for over a century as proof of American protectionism.
They're on highways