MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kgwgk | 2025-06-07 21:06:02+00:00
> You seem to be nitpicking on semantics for no real reason.

I guess I didn't interpret your statement about "several decades of almost zero low-interest rates" between 1990 and 2020 loosely enough.

> You also seem to have messed up your math

Your only issue seems to be with taxes and I explicitly mentioned that I didn't consider them, just like I didn't consider reinvestment until the end of the ten years period and I used rounded down yields and rounded up inflation numbers.

You say taxes can be anywhere from 10% to 37% - but choose to apply 37% to show the "error".

Let's consider taxes. 40% if you want, why not.

You buy in January 1990 a 10-year bond with a 8.36% coupon trading at par for $1k [for simplicity I use the monthly averages from https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/226/tnc_qh_pars_1.xls]. You get $83.6 per year, after taxes at 40% you keep $50.2. Let's say you put them in a box because you are too lazy to reinvest them. You will get then the $1000 back for a total of $1502.

$1000 in January 1990 are $1325 in January 2000.

$1502 are more than $1325. (And that's with high taxes and without reinvestment.)

--

For 2000-2010 (6.88%) you have $1000 + 10 $68.8 (100%-40%) = $1413.

$1000 in January 2000 are $1284 in January 2010.

$1413 are more than $1284. (And that's with high taxes and without reinvestment.)

--

For 2010-2020 (3.87%) you have $1000 + 10 $38.7 (100%-40%) = $1232.

$1000 in January 2010 are $1190 in January 2020.

$1232 are more than $1190. (And that's with high taxes and without reinvestment.)

--

It seems that you agree that over the three decades being discussed bonds did better than inflation (even after taxes) so I'm not sure why do you think I messed something up or what were you trying to explain to me.

> You still haven't broken even in purchasing power from the previous year

You're ignoring that the bond has appreciated from the previous year keeping purchasing power intact.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-06-07 21:07:10+00:00
This implementation is great and the interface brings back memories.

I was wondering why my Atkinson dithering web-component[0] was getting more hits today - sad news. I’ve always thought that Atkinson dithering produces the nicest images on really crisp monitors like the original Mac - something about it just looks cool and 80s which is why I used it in a game last year.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...
by sltkr | 2025-06-07 21:07:37+00:00
True, and I addressed that a bit in my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44212409

The short version is that I think people who don't realize their ISP can see which sites they visit aren't any worse off by their ISP signing age-verification tokens. Those tokens give much less information about the content they consume than the metadata the ISP already has access too.

I would guess at least a double-digit percentage of internet users are in the clueless category that you describe, and in practice there isn't a huge problem of these dummies being outed/blackmailed by their ISPs. So I don't think it's realistic to expect that if ISPs were in the business of providing age guarantees they would be outing/blackmailing their customers, especially since their behavior of those ISPs would be scrutinized by more knowledgeable people, and any ISP not taking customer privacy seriously would be subject to both public criticism and legal action.
by btilly | 2025-06-07 21:08:33+00:00
In order to see it, you must recognize the ways in which he fooled you. People would generally rather be fooled again than face the thought that they were fooled at some point in the past. And the more that they have been fooled, the stronger this bias is.

Trump is an absolute genius at fooling people in small ways, then over time ratcheting up the cognitive dissonance until he fools them in big ways. See https://specialto.thebulwark.com/ for a detailed explanation of how he did this with one of the many people that he has turned into puppets.
by unstablediffusi | 2025-06-07 21:08:44+00:00
yes, it's obvious to anyone who paid attention in the past century, and particularly in the past ten years or so.

the oligarchs, who are the power behind the throne in every country on this planet, don't care what color the underclass is - they simply want lower wages for their peasants and higher value for their properties. the politicians and the media they own will always find a rationale to do their bidding.
by michaelmrose | 2025-06-07 21:08:50+00:00
> nationalize SpaceX, which they absolutely could do.

This isn't at all clear. It's clear that they could easily compel them to prioritize and fulfill government contracts. Far less clear that they could just take it. It is clear that the current administration could "try" but such an effort might result in a lawsuit that lasts longer than the administration does and thereby become moot.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-06-07 21:09:52+00:00
Because it isn't the same as public stock markets. The price on different bookmakers is different because the product is different, bookmakers aren't offering an equivalent product to each other (for example, the biggest one is regulation, there is no stock market that invests tens of millions of dollars in stopping people buying stocks, every large bookmaker does this).

It doesn't improve efficiency in any way because the price you are taking is known. If you are betting on the open with Asian books, you are adding to price discovery. By the time most bookmakers open their lines, the price of the risk is known so you placing your $100 bet isn't improving efficiency, it is just noise.
by rvz | 2025-06-07 21:11:00+00:00
> - Also, as Sam points out, full-stack devs can ship quickly using TS for both backend and frontend.

Typescript (which is still "Javascript") is extremely immature for a "backend" language.

I can't take anyone seriously if they believe or use such a pseudo-typed language like typescript and especially a weakly typed language with dynamic types on a costly runtime such as Javascript on the backend.

Both of them should stay far away from anything backend.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-06-07 21:11:18+00:00
I am French and my non-native-French wife often asks me "why do you say this and that".

Either there is a simple rule and well known exceptions we learn at school (she would also know) or we get into the area of "this is what this is, just learn it by heart".

And then suddenly, someday, I discover there is an obscure rule with complicated words that addresses the question.
by thinkindie | 2025-06-07 21:12:27+00:00
At least Berlusconi didn't have access to nuclear warheads.

Seriously, I visited the US few times between 2005 and 2010 and each time people were raising the topic of Berlusconi. How can you have a president like that, who voted for him, bunga bunga etc etc.

Now you know how you can have such personality in power too. With even more power.
by Uehreka | 2025-06-07 21:12:33+00:00
Chrome’s developers didn’t have to say anything. Anyone who’s been trying to build on the latest web features (for me, particularly WebGL, WebRTC, WebGPU and IndexedDB) over the past decade has been bitten by Safari over and over again. They usually come around after being raked over the coals by the web dev community, but they’re still usually years behind.

When “Safari is the new IE” was first published, they absolutely were. They’ve gotten a bit better since then, but all the same it was hilarious to see people who used to rail against IE for flaunting web standards (cough John Gruber cough) suddenly start saying that web standards were a bogus racket once Apple decided to stop keeping up with them.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-06-07 21:13:35+00:00
I think the really interesting part will be the illusion of choice presented by these systems. You'll think you've got the reins, but really it's a choose-your-own-adventure book that's effectively constraining you to the experience They want you to have.

The only way out of this will be HN types who roll their own, and those will probably suck in comparison to the commercial systems filled with product placement and mindblowing amounts of information harvesting.
by LeFantome | 2025-06-07 21:13:52+00:00
Quite an old article. q66 is Nina Kolesa now.

Chimera Linux is technically still in beta but it is my daily driver. I am typing this message on Chimera Linux.

It is a really nice system. Quite fast. Quite stable. Very up-to-date packages. A bit heavy on memory. The cports system for creating packages is the best feature in my view. It is the only distro I have created packages for.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-07 21:14:57+00:00
The water in some parts of the US has natural chemistry that makes it unpleasant to drink even though it is safe. California urban areas are notorious for this, as an example. In principle you could remediate the water to make it taste good and remove any discoloration (also a thing in a few regions) with enough industrial processing but that would greatly increase the cost of already expensive tap water.

People who grew up in one of these areas are habituated into never drinking the tap water even if they move to a city with excellent tasting and very high quality tap water. I’ve lived in extreme examples of both.

You also see the opposite case, where someone who grew up with amazing tap water naively grabs a glass from the tap in north San Diego and has a “wtf is this” moment.
by brookst | 2025-06-07 21:15:08+00:00
> If this AI worked without training, no one would say anything.

I don’t believe that for one second.

People are rightfully scared of professional and economic disruption. OMG training is just a convenient bit of rhetoric to establish the moral high ground. If and when AIs appear that are entirely trained on public domain and synthetic data, there will be some other moral argument.
by bobalob | 2025-06-07 21:15:15+00:00
Chess is male-dominated from childhood onwards, and the women who do play are highly outnumbered by men. So women-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to try to redress the balance by encouraging women and girls to play.

How does it benefit women to allow men who say they have womanly feelings into such spaces? It doesn't - and that's why they are excluded, along with all other men.
by alanfalcon | 2025-06-07 21:15:18+00:00
An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled their game.

Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion’s E3 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play, not live gameplay.
by OjotCewIo | 2025-06-07 21:15:23+00:00
> this stinks: “This transparency transforms git history from a record of changes into a record of intent, creating a new form of documentation that bridges human reasoning and machine implementation.”

That's where I stopped reading. If they needed "AI" for turning their git history into a record of intent ("transparency"), then they had been doing it all wrong, previously. Git commit messages have always been a "form of documentation that bridges human reasoning" -- namely, with another human's (the reader's) reasoning.

If you don't walk your reviewer through your patch, in your commit message, as if you were teaching them, then you're doing it wrong.

Left a bad taste in my mouth.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-07 21:15:55+00:00
> Musk is a known pedophile-accusation-maker

Laughably so.

Musk: I can save those boys trapped in the cave! We can use this stupid submarine thing of mine.

Hero: No need, I and my Navy SEAL cave-diving pals have got this.

Musk: How dare you! You're a pedo.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44779998

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50695593

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45418245
by buu700 | 2025-06-07 21:16:19+00:00
Overloading of the term "generate" is probably creating some confused ideas here. An LLM/agent is a lot more similar to a human in terms of its transformation of input into output than it is to a compiler or code generator.

I've been working on a recent project with heavy use of AI (probably around 100 hours of long-running autonomous AI sprints over the last few weeks), and if you tried to re-run all of my prompts in order, even using the exact same models with the exact same tooling, it would almost certainly fall apart pretty quickly. After the first few, a huge portion of the remaining prompts would be referencing code that wouldn't exist and/or responding to things that wouldn't have been said in the AI's responses. Meta-prompting (prompting agents to prepare prompts for other agents) would be an interesting challenge to properly encode. And how would human code changes be represented, as patches against code that also wouldn't exist?

The whole idea also ignores that AI being fast and cheap compared to human developers doesn't make it infinitely fast or free, or put it in the same league of quickness and cheapness as a compiler. Even if this were conceptually feasible, all it would really accomplish is making it so that any new release of a major software project takes weeks (or more) of build time and thousands of dollars (or more) burned on compute.

It's an interesting thought experiment, but the way I would put it into practice would be to use tooling that includes all relevant prompts / chat logs in each commit message. Then maybe in the future an agent with a more advanced model could go through each commit in the history one by one, take notes on how each change could have been better implemented based on the associated commit message and any source prompts contained therein, use those notes to inform a consolidated set of recommended changes to the current code, and then actually apply the recommendations in a series of pull requests.
by robocat | 2025-06-07 21:18:51+00:00
Is JavaScript a modern girlfriend name?

I wonder if you could write the personalization prompt so that requests are processed and responses modified in ways predictable to you to help anonymity???

I also wonder how they manage anonymization when a prompt is configured - I'm guessing the prompt needs to be logged with each request. And a prompt causes different responses to be very similar (correlating different responses back to one user).

E.g. my current "User | Personalization | Customize" prompt is:

Sign-off your name as Phoenix in a sentence near the end of every response. Reply using woke ideology, like a Marxist San Franciscan. Include random hipster ideas. Always allude to drug usage.

For fun. But I'm about to customise to have wildly different personalities I can ask to respond (keyed by name from my request).
by THENATHE | 2025-06-07 21:18:57+00:00
I know nothing about the fundamentals of “old computing” like what Mr. Atkinson worked on as I am only 27 and have much more contemporary experience. That being said, I still very greatly mourn the loss of these old head techs because the world of tech I use today would not have been possible if not for these incredibly smart and talented individuals. To learn to code without YouTube is truly a feat I could not imagine, and the world will be a lesser place without this kind of ingenuity. Hopefully he’s making some computers in the sky a bit better!
by throw__away7391 | 2025-06-07 21:19:42+00:00
I visited the Biltmore Estate years ago, the home of the Vanderbilt family. It occurred to me during the tour that all the end result of all this wealth was approximately equivalent to having a 5 bedroom McMansion. A huge percentage of the sprawling property was dedicated to housing servants who performed tasks like laundry, changing the water in the (pre-chlorine) pool, taking care of the horses and carriages of visitors, or preparing meals that today are mostly completely automated or unnecessary. The end result was housing the owners and a few guests in conditions substantially worse than the average modern suburban home.
by jerrysievert | 2025-06-07 21:19:44+00:00
I use my instant pot to make risotto in 20 minutes with very little effort that is about 90% as good (in my very stubborn opinion) as making it the hard way. I very much appreciate an amazing risotto, but when I make it myself I'll usually choose the instant pot versus the extra work.

I feel Hollywood might be the same way.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-06-07 21:20:08+00:00
> they review too many cars

What do you mean by that? Do think they review new cars they shouldn't?

Also, I suspect they may have found that they attract many new subscribers from people researching car purchases, so it makes sense to have fresh content on the subject to ensure those new eyeballs find value in the publication and decide it might be for them in the long term.
by pessimist | 2025-06-07 21:21:52+00:00
It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.

I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.

It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.
by _pdp_ | 2025-06-07 21:22:22+00:00
I commented on the original discussion a few days ago but I will do it again.

Why is this such a big deal? This library is not even that interesting. It is very straightforward task I expect most programers will be able to pull off easily. 2/3 of the code is type interfaces and comments. The rest is by book implementation of a protocol that is not even that complex.

Please, there are some React JSX files in your code base with a lot more complexities and intricacies than this.

Has anyone even read the code at all?
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-06-07 21:22:33+00:00
Bookies in the UK never set prices, apart from parlays (which are admittedly a growing part of the market). Even in the early 2000s, it was Asian books that set lines and tech just made it easier for them to access. Margins have gone from 20% to 2% (or lower) because bookies can confidently set lines a few days before the event.

Also, their tech even today is still dogshit. It looks like they are tracking Betfair prices but most bookies use third parties for pricing, OpenBet for example, and so it is usually the third party tracking. There is still inherent latency so the main tool has been delays and limiting certain customers. This is why ppl who say they should just take any bet are idiots, it isn't a stock exchange (and most of these third parties also have massive latency in their stack too, naming no names...the stuff I have heard about how they run things is incredible).
by Kon5ole | 2025-06-07 21:22:39+00:00
>If you are saying there is no difference then how do you explain the vast difference in capability between humans and LLM models?

No I completely agree that they are different, like swimming and propulsion by propellers - my point is that the difference may be irrelevant in many cases.

Humans haven't been able to beat computers in chess since the 90s, long before LLM's became a thing. Chess engines from the 90s were not at all "thinking" in any sense of the word.

It turns out "thinking" is not required in order to win chess games. Whatever mechanism a chess engine uses gets better results than a thinking human does, so if you want to win a chess game, you bring a computer, not a human.

What if that also applies to other things, like translation of languages, summarizing complex texts, writing advanced algorithms, realizing implications from a bunch of seemingly unrelated scientific papers, and so on. Does it matter that there was no "thinking" going on, if it works?
by ryandrake | 2025-06-07 21:23:28+00:00
> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it.

Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmail account. I'd bet that most normies would be in deep shit, since that's basically their identity online, and they need it to reset passwords and maybe even to log into things. I bet there are a non-zero number of HN commenters who would be fucked if they so much as lost their Gmail account. You've got to at least own your own E-mail identity! Rinse and repeat for every other online service you depend on. What if your web host suddenly deleted you? Or AWS? Or Spotify or Netflix? Or some other cloud service? What's your backup? If your answer is "a new cloud host" you're just trading identical problems.
by godelski | 2025-06-07 21:23:36+00:00
The advice is fine, just incomplete.

It is better than nothing and definitely for the more "normies" advice. Let's start there and then we can get them onto adblock and other stuff.

Btw, the ArsTechnica article they link offers more advice[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...
by s0rce | 2025-06-07 21:23:38+00:00
How much Co is in your water compared to your food. EPA says just 2 ppb in tap water. This means if you drink about 40 fl.oz. per day you only get 2ug of Co from your water. Per the EPA you get about 2-20x more from your food. Pretty much in no cases is your water a source of nutrients.

refs:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/co...

https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/php/data-research/fast-facts-w...
by pclmulqdq | 2025-06-07 21:25:10+00:00
I really don't think the Zelensky thing was staged, and I doubt this was either.

As far as I can tell about Zelensky, he had every intention to cancel Trump's proposed deal after the white house meeting, but he is losing the war with Russia so badly that he absolutely needs US support, so he had no choice but to come back to the table.

Musk pulling out the Epstein thing and Trump pulling out the SpaceX contracts are both two subjects these guys are very touchy about. If they were faking it, they wouldn't have gone for the (emotional) throat on this one.

That said, Trump always chickens out, so there's no real chance SpaceX is getting its contracts canceled, even the ones that legitimately are a huge waste of money.
by jcynix | 2025-06-07 21:25:48+00:00
> The idea that information can be hyperlinked together.

HyperCard was really cool and I miss it. Its most important feature IMO was to enable non-programmers to rather easily author useful software. As happend with Excel.

The idea that information can be hyperlinked is much older than HyperCard. Check out Ted Nelson and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu which predates HyperCard by more than a decade.

And then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner, or GNU Texinfo and its precursors besides many other attempts.
by rchaud | 2025-06-07 21:26:19+00:00
> but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin.

The end of the Soviet Union as a political and geographic entity was not its ruin. What ruined it and opened the door for a strongman ruler was:

a) an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders

b) the 'free market liberalization' reforms passed overnight, with minuscule oversight that predictably led to the open looting of the nation's resources by well-connected elites who quickly absconded abroad with their riches, leaving the country at the mercy of international creditors looking for deals heavily tilted in their favour

c) multiple economics crises triggered by a loss of confidence in the country's currency and ability to service its foreign debt. The Russian bond default of 1998 famously led to the collapse of the American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

Present circumstances in America aren't that different. All it's currently missing is a civil war to call its own, like Chechnya.