HN user
There is no legal maximum for the percentage real estate agents can take, in the US. Rates are also not fixed, by law, and are required to be negotiable. There's a general standard for rates (typically 5-6%, split between agents/brokers), but there's nothing stopping them from setting it to 99%, other than the fact that people won't pay it.
Source: was a licensed real estate agent for a long time.
We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
no longer need to worry about heating due to climate change
I'm nearly positive that was sarcasm.
Deaths from all natural disasters have dramatically decreased over the last century.
Because of our ability to predict them, and due to advances in scientific knowledge that allows us to more safely handle them. It's not because they've become less deadly. They're also becoming more frequent, and deaths alone isn't their only problem. They also drive loss of shelter, migrations, economic damage, etc.
you claim my comment is propaganda when I cite a scientific source
Yes, plenty of science is propaganda. The study you cited wasn't propaganda, but the way in which you used it was, because it's not applicable to the way you're using it.
Direct exposure to ambient heat is only one of the many issues related to climate change, and one of the least deadly. As I pointed out, the study didn't include wet bulb events, so even direct heat exposure wasn't properly covered in the study in terms of climate change.
This study doesn't factor in droughts, floods, crop death (and starvation), and other non-direct effects. It also doesn't consider wet-bulb events, because it's looking at average ambient temperatures.
I don't think this is climate change propaganda, but your application of this study by evoking it in a discussion about climate change feels like it.
I think it's the parent that's confusing this:
I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
They're saying that main stream media sources are what can be used to define something is notable or not. The question isn't "Is the Daily Stormer" notable (it is), it's should the daily stormer be usable as a source to determine if something is notable or not (it shouldn't be, obviously).
Are you seriously asking if a Nazi website is a bad reference?
I don't think you understand the scale of "running Wikipedia". I do. I worked there for years when there were 100 engineers and they were severely understaffed.
Wikipedia is: mediawiki (and its development), wikimedia cloud services (which I built) that runs tools and provides services for developers (including volunteers and tool authors), server/network infrastructure, wikidata, search, etc.
Mediawiki itself is extremely complicated to build and run, and it's running for numerous languages across multiple projects (wikipedia, commons, wikidata, wiktionary, etc etc).
I'm leaving out a lot of the other things handled by the engineering teams, but it's considerably more complex than you think it is.
300 employees is an extremely low number of employees for a project of this scope.
I think some of yall need to think about how this would be run if it was a company. There would be thousands of employees, realistically.
The alternative is that the Daily Stormer is usable as a source.
There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.
You generally need to wire libraries in to your service, and you may be using the library in a slightly different way than normal. AIs are perfectly capable of doing this.
Back to the original point, though: most software engineering work isn't novel. Most people are working on slightly different iterations of the same thing, but with the aim of different products. You can have completely different products that use nearly the same patterns as most other services.
To put it bluntly: we don't need AI to generate novel code for the vast majority of the software being built.
Gutting organizations _leads to_ these kinds of problems.
Sadly in Tokyo, most businesses post their info to twitter or instagram, but in both cases you're able to read without an account (not well, but it's possible).
If your friends won't use something other than messenger to talk to you, they aren't your friends.
How can you fight when your power has been taken away from you? The reason I'm saying you're part of the problem is because you're blaming victims for the situation they're in without realizing that you're up next, and others like you are going to scream "why aren't you doing MORE TO HELP?" while you're screaming "Why isn't anyone helping ME?".
Southern states have been stripping people's rights away for decades.
New Orleans is extremely blue. They're the ones having their rights stripped away by the rest of the state.
You're part of the problem here.
This both sides thing is stupid. Though there's always some form of military actions under either Democrats or Republicans, Republicans consistently start unilateral (and illegal) wars that leave us in massive quagmires, leave power imbalances in the middle east, and destabilize things considerably.
AI models will simply build the ads into the responses, seamlessly. How do you filter out ads when you search for suggestions for products, and the AI companies suggest paid products in the responses?
Based on current laws, does this even have to be disclosed? Will laws be passed to require disclosure?
Using Lyft, Uber, or Waymo in San Francisco is slow, especially during peak times. To go across town in NYC by train, it would take 5-10 times as long to go that same distance in SF by car. If you have to cross a bridge or tunnel, it's going to be even longer during peak times.
That's the whole problem. Car transportation simply doesn't scale, so there will never be an option to use waymo that's as fast and cheap as the subway. It's worth calling out that an efficient train system is vital to keeping car traffic moving quickly, because once everyone is in a car, it's gridlock.
I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance
Lately I'm not sure that's the case.
"I only speak one language, so models I use should only understand one".
This is satire. Its purpose is to use exaggeration to provide comedy while also drawing attention to issues.
Obviously the intended use and design of AI isn't to scam the elderly, but it's extremely efficient at doing it, and has no guard rails to help prevent it.
Why is anyone allowed to make a digital copy of me, without my permission, and then use that to call my relatives? It should be illegal to use it and it should be illegal to even generate it. Sure, it's already illegal to defaud people, but that's simply not enough at this point. The AI companies producing these models should be held liable for this form of fraud, as they're not providing any form of protection.
You're exactly the person that this article is satirizing.
Scammers are using AI to copy the voice of children and grandchildren, and make calls urgently asking to send money. It's also being used to scam businesses out of money in similar ways (copying the voice of the CEO or CFO, urgently asking for money to be sent).
Sure, the AI isn't directly doing the scamming, but it's supercharging the ability to do so. You're making a "guns don't kill people, people do" argument here.
Red meat also helps people stay at a healthy weight, lower the risk of heart disease (caused by glucose) and some types of cancer (which feed on glucose).
Are you a lobbyist for beef? This is not at all what research says, and research has said mostly the opposite for decades.
in an environment with regulations and high living standards.
Is this a joke? The US has poor living standards for these types of workers. Minimum wage in low minimum wage states. Poor or no healthcare. Most are probably on government assistance programs. Tariffs hit these workers hardest as well, because they're the most likely to be laid off, and also the ones paying the largest percentage of their salaries for products affected by tariffs.
The factories in China cranking these things out also have poor conditions, but the reason they're making stuff so cheaply is because their factories are typically more advanced. You can get small batches made cheaply, which is nearly impossible in the US. This allows them to compete with even somewhat niche products.
Also, let's be a bit real here. Nearly every "American Made" product at some point offloads the production outside of the US, and there's plenty of companies in the US that make dupe products as well.
Currently on the front page, and not flagged:
* California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years * Inside the secret world of Japanese snack bars * Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries * Driver killed and several injured after second train derails near Barcelona * De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
It's common to have things that are covered on TV news on the front page. It's more common for anything negative about Trump to be flagged, though.
Is HN really a place to criticize administration?
Articles critical of economics policies aren't criticizing the administration, but the policies. Yes, economic policies are of interest to technology, and articles related to it are of interest to us.
Even ignoring the fact that an article critical of a policy isn't specifically critical of the administration, yes, HN is really a place to criticize any administration.
I don't want competition with the Chinese either.
You also only want to be able to sell your goods in the US? Because the outcome of tariffs is retaliatory tariffs, which will considerably reduce your available market. No matter what you're going to have competition from China, and tariffs ensure markets outside of the US will be more dominated by them.
If your product can so easily be duplicated, and for cheaper, it's probably not a great product.
no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad
Someone biologically being your parent, doesn't mean you're required to call them your dad.
The claims around whether these things would be true or not are questionable. We don't know whether these things were solely his decision or not, or if others were involved in the process. We don't know that his early involvement lead to the success of the project or not.
I added HTTPS infrastructure to wikimedia foundation sites. Even if I weren't there, that would have eventually happened, though potentially much later. I moved wikimedia from svn to git, for development, and maybe that never would have happened and some other source control system would have been used, but would that have led to failure of the project? Almost certainly not.
You're giving this person far too much credit, especially as they've spent decades trying to destroy something they "created".
Why is this flagged? Why are things critical of this administration usually flagged? Moderation on HN is a joke.