skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TurboTax has 4.8 stars on the App Store?
Is Apple allowing fake reviews on the App Store? I find it very unlikely that TurboTax is beloved enough to merit 4.8 stars.

I know this isn’t scientific, but take a scroll through the most recent reviews. They are made up of 1-3 star reviews with complaints of the customer experience.

I may be jumping the gun here, but can we trust no one? Fraudulent reviews are rampant on the internet, but I assumed Apples App Store would be somewhat walled off through the requirement for an Apple ID.

Please share any information HN may have on how reviews work on the App Store and if anyone knows of ways they are being manipulated (like Yelp, Amazon, and Google Maps do).
I think this is a very entitled approach, I bet you need very little to live in a small rural area, but the crazy thing is that not everyone can do that since by definition if would get more expensive for everyone to do that. We can't all live off the grid away from people, modern infrastructure just cannot support that.

I think if the approach was, be happy with less, then sure we can get on board. There is a massive difference in being able to afford more and choosing less, than being forced to have less.
Mm. If you want to save on expenses, just considering living in squalor or dying. Being homeless costs $0! How's that for a deal?
This is actually less unreasonable than it seems at first.

The Vo WiFi spec only defines handover procedures for networks that implement VoLTE, but VoLTE roaming was historically almost nonexistent, although the situation is improving somewhat.

This means that if you go out of range of your WiFi router, your cell phone has no idea how to request a handover from the network, and the call drops.
Thanks for doing this Peter. I have two questions, advice on either/both would be much appreciated!

1) Partner moved to the US in L1B status, after 2-3 years successfully adjusted to L1A status, based on having been promoted and perhaps been initially misclassified. Would they be eligible for the EB1C green card?

2) How can an individual on the STEM OPT extension best work on their own entrepreneurial ventures? Would it be sufficient to incorporate as a C-Corp and have 1-2 Americans on the Board, with the authority to fire me, serving as my supervisors? They have relevant work experience and could easily be my manager in a corporate environment. Or do they have to own >50% of the company too?
That would require a short discussion - give and take - and I'd be happy to prepare you when you get to that point.
comparative advantage is disproven at this point, because economists are failed math majors who don't account for the innovation flywheel effect and general network effects. Silicon Valley software industry happened because of the proximity to the existing hardware industry there. Same thing for other forms of manufacturing and the US gave it away in the name of short term profits
Vernal equinox is a pretty well-known expression
For the first point, some mono repo orchestrators (I'm thinking of at least pnpm) have a way to do : run all the (for example) tests for all the packages that had change from master branch + all packages that depend transitively from those packages.

It's very convenient and avoid having to mess with the CI limitations on the matter
The point OP is making (and it
‘s one that I agree with) is that Graham’s particular usage of the word “woke” as written in his essay functions as a shibboleth for a collection of reactionary beliefs and impulses — not merely that he uses the word, but that he does so in a poorly-defined and pejorative way that is characteristic of the word’s usage in various right-leaning circles.
sclerosis happens with time
Technically the Apple Music app will play local files, but only MP3, AAC and ALAC. No FLAC, ogg, opus, etc. Plus it advertises at you to subscribe to their music service.
If you read the original post carefully, side loading wouldn’t solve the issue. The issue is app developers on iOS either focus on streaming or fill their apps with ad garbage. There is nothing stopping developers from building an app that focuses on the local library and doesn’t do ads, but nobody is offering any quality ones.
Xi has been publicly touting how China needs to convert to more of a consumer economy for its next phase of development.

https://www.chinabankingnews.com/p/xi-wants-to-create-a-nati...
Collective action is the best freedom-buyer. Stop trying to atomize society. We need to work together to fight for our rights, not try to hoard what meager crumbs we get from multi-billion dollar companies.
...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange.

Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)

% area housing = area_house * population

So...

aus 0.08%
nz 0.42%
us 1.82%
can 0.08%
uk 2.14%

The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned.

When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia.

You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
if anything, gitlab's ci seems even worse...
BTW, Re: #2: There was a proposal for a Lisp-Like IPL that used s-expressions as list representations (actually, they call it "linear"): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0611841.pdf
Do they? Different cultures have widely different axioms. E.g. compare Islam and Christianity. Not to begin with cultures far away geographically from each other.
Thanks, so many interesting answers.
As an European working for a US tech company - regular visiting but world traveler as my passion. Is there officially a list of countries one should not visit (just tourism) that could harm career prospects while working for a US company for visas?
Thank you.
It's easy to write "just get more money" from a Palo Alto coffee shop making six figures and screwing off on HN all day in between "looks good" PR reviews. The rest of America is a little more angry than that.
What's the reason for these lower prices? Data only 5gb/month for $5 or $6 seems to be the summary of the link, amazing! I think the answer is there is lots of competition and they've driven the price down to this point. That's an incredible price.

Of course this would be immensely useful. For example, can I put this in my vehicle with built in maps (or just have a hotspot in my vehicle to use with a tablet). As a price comparison, in the us there are some EVs that charge $100/year for basically this, most charge a lot more. That's $8.33/month, so only a bit more than $6 or 7. But in the us it's hard or impossible get anything that low for just raw service, I can't find anything like that.
They keep raising the prices, of course, so maybe it's different if it's a new account today? I started at $6/month, then it got to $15 within a few years. Because of the forced Gemini this last week, I downgraded my Workspace account yesterday back to "basic" for $8.
This issue is raised and addressed ad nauseam on HN, but here goes:

It doesn't mean anything when a model tells you it is ChatGPT or Claude or Mickey Mouse. The model doesn't actually "know" anything about its identity. And the fact that most models default to saying ChatGPT is not evidence that they are distilled from ChatGPT: it's evidence that there are a lot of ChatGPT chat logs floating around on the web, which have ended up in pre-training datasets.

In this case, especially, distillation from o1 isn't possible because "Open"AI somewhat laughably hides the model's reasoning trace (even though you pay for it).
I'm sorry the sarcasm was not evident. I learnt to program when men were men, and man was man.
> Spark Innovations

As I understand it, the competitor in this space is Anaplan.
The technology that makes ASML’s machines possible (EUV lasers) was researched by the US government with taxpayer money and ASML bought the San Diego-based US company that was producing the technology.
I met PG once when we went to visit him for some office hours for my YC startup. I was a late cofounder so I hadn't been part of the program. During the conversation I said something, he looked and me and said "I have no idea what you just said", then turned back to my cofounder and kept chatting. o_O
I would really like to see a concrete, legit way to materialize a "100M raise in market cap" into actual ROI ...
For those from China and India, based on the current backlogs, the process would take about 4-5 years; for those from every other country, there is no backlog in this category so the process could take less than 1 year.
Restaurant Software Directory
Hey HN!

I’ve built a free directory that lists and compares restaurant software (POS, inventory management, accounting, etc.). I run a small project on the side and realized how scattered the tools are, so I put them all in one place:

Any feedback is welcome, even if you’re not in the restaurant space—especially around UI, search functionality, or new features I could add.
There is a big difference between models.
My iphone is way worse than my Android phone (gboard offline STT model).

So it's not that there aren't good models, but you need to look around to find a good one. And on iOS it's harder to do that.
Maybe function calling using JSON blobs isn't even the optimal approach... I saw some stuff recently about having LLMs write Python code to execute what they want, and LLMs tend to be a lot better at Python without any additional function-calling training. Some of the functions exposed to the LLM can be calls into your own logic.

Some relevant links:

This shows how python-calling performance is supposedly better for a range of existing models than JSON-calling performance: https://huggingface.co/blog/andthattoo/dpab-a#initial-result...

A little post about the concept: https://huggingface.co/blog/andthattoo/dria-agent-a

Huggingface has their own "smolagents" library that includes "CodeAgent", which operates by the same principle of generating and executing Python code for the purposes of function calling: https://huggingface.co/docs/smolagents/en/guided_tour

smolagents can either use a local LLM or a remote LLM, and it can either run the code locally, or run the code on a remote code execution environment, so it seems fairly flexible.
Oh, I’m not saying old houses are better (although many of them have more generous sized rooms and plots)

I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives

A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in the back garden.

They fit them with smaller windows so they don’t have to add as much insulation… the list of shitty things the major housebuilders do is pretty long
Learning about FNV Hash
A high level walkthrough of FNV Hash.
You did not answer any of my questions.

I do not think that Europe or the US even could specialize in anything. The population is so large that for every good and service needed there is a group of people who are specializing in it right now.

What single good/service is not at all produced in Europe. Which single good/service is not produced in China?

At the scale of 1B people specialization becomes meaningless. You can't even accomplish it if you wanted to. All you could do is letting one of your industries get out competed by some other power.
Can't wait for the whitepaper written by Melania herself explaining Merkle trees and proof of stake.

I'm hearing rumors of Satoshi coming back from the grave to sort our all those fraudulent "currency" inventors...
Of course you're not a failure. You still put food on the table, provide for your loved ones, and have a roof over your head.

You've got battle scars, and stories that are worth their weight in gold. Your experience is probably extremely useful for the right startup.
I once took some "natural and organic sleeping ingredients" and there was a recall due to it containing a highly potent and dangerous prescription only ingredient.

It seems the only times that all natural medication works it's laced with allopathic medicine.
The math pages on Wikipedia value correctness above lay comprehensibility. It's easy to understand how this happens: a learned mathematician points out that a simplification for the purposes of making an explanation more approachable is not actually correct, so the explanation gets desimplified... and repeat ad absurdum until most math pages on Wikipedia cater primarily to experts and are too advanced for a good fraction of the audience.
This depends on the reason for the 221g. Security-related reasons can take a while but often 221gs these clear quickly. What's the reason?
Gen Z affect? This Substack post has all the staples of a Millenial tumblr blog post, not only the lack of uppercase but also the whimsical drawings of cherished children books to emphasise the “vibe”, and the whole thesis of the post is basically promoting the hipster “”“authenticity “”” (using hipster runoff inspired use of quotes on purpose here)
It's America's 'Manifest Destiny' to Plant a Flag on Mars, Trump Says
> I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here.

In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses.

The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed.

> And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch.

There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity.

The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories.

There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can.

I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
EVM Data for AI Agents
Data delivery for AI agents, real-time pipelines for developers to keep developing
"The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Monday that companies can make their own decisions on operations and acquisitions, a reversal of the government’s previous position that it would block any forced sale of TikTok. It was the ministry’s first comment after Trump said Sunday, a day before his inauguration, that he wanted U.S. and Chinese interests to split control of the app 50-50."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-signals-it-wont-block-a-deal-...
Yes! I had to flash it with beta firmware since the eSim Manager disappears using Airalo.

https://dl.gl-inet.com/release/router/testing/e750/4.3.21

Fixed the problem that esim manage page is lost after installing some esim profiles.
UK Poised to Back Heathrow Airport Expansion in Push for Growth
Why is this flagged? Surely one of the most influential people in the tech space (and the richest man in the world) doing a nazi salute is pertinent to Hacker News?
I agree! Making > $100k is an absolute privilege. I am privileged as all hell finding myself interested in and decent enough at computer programming at a point in time where it was a relatively lucrative field to be in. That's serious luck!

But if you're making < $100k and suggesting you need $200k in passive income to go to a farmer's market, cook pasta for dinner, read library books, grow some plants, and drink the occasional wine? That doesn't inspire confidence that you have a great understanding of the value of a dollar.
I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.

What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.
The Six Codes of Nonverbal Communication (2019)
Protecting text content on the web by poisoning AI scraper responses
> even if you are at FAANG making high six figures you still a slave

I’m sorry, but do you know what a “slave” is?

I can’t imagine the kind of hopelessly ignorant perspective a person must have to say something like this.
Outlook – Starting in February, you will stay signed in unless you sign out
An initial O-1 visa is valid for up to 3 years and can be renewed indefinitely in 1- or 3-year increments.
Haha isn't that how Americans measure happiness? Like how in Eastern Germany the news always talked about increasing grain harvests American news always talks about how many billionaires get invited to Trump's inauguration party.

You can live in a trailer park next with your meth addicted family but Musk is getting richer.
The MI50 may be considered deprecated in newer releases, but it seems to work fine in my experience. I have a Radeon VII in my workstation (which shares the same architecture) and I host the MI60 test machine for Debian AI Team. I haven't had any trouble with them.
git commit --allow-empty -m "bump ci"

unless your pipeline does magic with trying to detect changed files
Not only is there a rust version of synapse, it has been existing for years before Element decided to fork it unilaterally [1]. Just to be clear: the current development on dendrite has mostly not been done by element, but by a volunteer community.

The rugpull can be observed here [2] by the playbook so many others have used:

- Create commercial offering

- Add some breakwards compatibility breaking shit to the repo

- Declare the project dead

- Old users are now basically forced into "the new" product

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/06/future-of-synapse-dendrit...

[2] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/issues
LLM x zip bomb
Oops, is that our favorite oligarch doing a nazi salute? Sorry we don't do politics here, flagged.

...

I usually try to avoid politically charged content here but if you think this wont affect you, you are out of touch.
It's funny because this simple excercise shows all the problems that I have using the reasoning models: they give a long reasoning that just takes too much time to verify and still can't be trusted.
Calls can freely be handed over between VoLTE and VoWiFi, depending on signal quality, and that often happens without the user's knowledge or explicit consent.

This means that "no roaming costs over WiFi" is a very dicy proposition, as a carrier either needs to restrict handovers (and I don't even know if that's allowed by the spec, not to mention the implications of dropping calls when going out of WiFi Range), cover the costs themselves, or move them onto the unsuspecting user if a handover happens.
I definitely ran into others on Reddit who had a similar experience with both screen breakage and terrible customer support response. Hopefully your boox will continue to function as advertised and you won't have to deal with boox customer support.
I can agree with you on this point but when someone is standing on the earth they can prove it is flat. Then you zoom out and prove it is not. The flat earth person will just say: "that's not what I meant."

Zoom out to the cosmos and think about the truth available to different observers. This same principle holds across the board. You have to reconcile with each observer, and until you do truth is subjective.

I just have trouble stating that my objective truth is also someone else's objective truth. What if my information is "the Bible." You can split hairs with these people until you die of old age and they can technically be wrong but their truth can work for them.

Just like we have all kinds of wild unintuitive math proofs that are very enlightening once they are communicated to all observers. Newtonian physics are true until they aren't, the same as those Bible "truths."

Given the infinite probabilities of the universe I have trouble declaring a set of objective truths that are immutable and try to give people a pass on what they hold as true. Can anything be known? We settle on some truths that work for us in the little time we have.
now openai has no other choice than shipping a cheaper version of o1 and o3. The alternative is everyone using r1 (self hosted or via openrouter, nebius AI, together AI and co)
Having used Gimp and Photoshop fairly extensively, I'd agree that Gimp works, and it has the features that Photoshop has (for the most part). However, there's quite a bit of user interface issues with Gimp that make somewhat simplistic activities rather irritating.

Gimp kind of has the Open Source issue where it has tons of features, yet there's a large wall of complexity, zillions of little fiddly knobs to tweak on almost every process, and the interface makes you feel like you need to, because they're all exposed immediately.

Photoshop (personal opinion) is better about having an initially functional feature, with relatively "what you expect" defaults, and then layers of fiddly knobs you can tweak if you "really" want to or need to for a project.
see:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42700426

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42699610
Awesome! Let me know if you have any feedback!
Good news- I still have a much lower resting heart rate from running years ago- I haven't run in about 12 years due to compounding injuries- but the benefits are still there. It's finally starting to go up to normal, but it used to freak nurses and doctors when they'd measure it.
Completely off-topic: some years ago, an Excel on steroid was posted on HN. A UI where you could visually organize your column groupings, your multi-cardinality (one cell of one column had several connecting cells on its next column), your drillDowns.
Is there an insightful fellow here who remembers a tool like that, and could remind me the name of it.
It was really food for thought about how the proper UI can properly drive your mental model about data [or kill it, in the case of Excel]
You realize that Trump and his cronies are trying to increase the number of H1B visas don’t you?
I read that the US military wants a modernized version of celestial navigation to reduce dependence on GPS. With modern light amplification technology it might be able to work during the day.
What are good controllers for using together with Mixxx?
GitHub Actions supporting yaml anchors would resolve one of the gripes, which I share.

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182
Anyone who has payed attention to his Twitter feed will not be surprised by this.
Mostly like because of the comments likely to (and already) ensue

Also people just don't want to hear about it on HN when it is all over the media already