MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smcin | 2025-06-20 09:41:52+00:00
Can you cite us a few specific examples (URLs) of each of what you're suggesting? I see your other post [0], but I can't find Startanator.

Otherwise "Most Are Missing This One Thing" instead of just saying "not solving real problems, only adding convenience" feels clickbaity; you haven't shown concrete examples.

"Gold rush... hype cycle... not solving a real problem" are (legit) criticisms that are made in every boom cycle. Remember all the previous waves of laundry startups, or mealkit startups, or food-ordering?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320908
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-20 09:41:58+00:00
The point being made is that rationalism is a framework. Having a framework does not imply competent execution. At lower levels of competence other strategies win out. At higher levels of competence we expect rationalism to win out.

Even then that might not always be the case. Sometimes there are severe time or bandwidth or energy or other constraints that preclude carefully collecting data and thinking things through. In those cases a heuristic that is very obviously not derived from any sort of critical thought process might well be the winning strategy.

There will also be cases where the answer provided by the rational approach will be to conform to some other framework. For example where cult type ingroup dynamics are involved across a large portion of the population.
by gpt5 | 2025-06-20 09:42:07+00:00
Economies of scale are essentially a form of network effect (which is defined as a phenomenon where product gains value as more people use it).

In addition, every example you had benefits from traditional network effects: Amazon is a two sided marketplace with sellers and buyers.

Google connect searchers to websites, who in return allow Googlebot to scrape them freely (unlike your IP) - and also rank results by the way other users clicked.
by bmacho | 2025-06-20 09:43:11+00:00
It's not even about the quote, or Asimov.

"Less wrong" is a concept that has a lot of connotations that just automatically appear in your mind and help you. What you wrote "It's very telling that some of them went full "false modesty" by naming sites like "LessWrong", when you just know they actually mean "MoreRight"." isn't bad because of Asimov said so, or because you were unaware of a reference, but because it's just bad.
by nrvn | 2025-06-20 09:43:14+00:00
In my org I have enforced linear history, squashing all commits into one in PRs and roughly following the rule from [1]:

> If the request is accepted, all commits will be squashed, and the final commit description will be composed by concatenating the pull request's title and description.

One less thing to think about.

Less is more, not vice versa.

[1]: https://go.dev/doc/contribute#review
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-20 09:43:16+00:00
Here in Norway they've tried to curb this somewhat by eliminating the wealth tax value discount you get on secondary homes. Your primary gets a 75% discount up to $1mill, then 30% on anything above $1mill, while secondaries count in full. So it's much less favorable to own multiple homes now as an investment.

Of course, most of those who did own extra homes as an investment rented them out as well, so rental prices here has gone through the roof as landlords and common folk with an extra apartment or two has sold the homes.
by oersted | 2025-06-20 09:43:27+00:00
It's surprising how we ended up with such a robust open-source OS ecosystem (pretty much every server running Linux) with such emotional people at the helm.

He is clearly not being rational there, but I could see how his aesthetic tastes might correlate pretty well with robust software. I suppose that saying no to new features is a good default heuristic, these additions could have easily added more problems than they solve, and then you have more surface area to maintain.

That being said, this old-school ideology of maintainers dumping the full responsibility on the user for applying the API "properly" is rather unreasonable. It often sounds like they enjoy having all these footguns they refuse to fix, so they can feel superior and differentiate their club of greybeards who have memorised all the esoteric pitfalls, simply because they were along for the journey, from the masses.
by rvnx | 2025-06-20 09:43:34+00:00
Default on U.S. debt.

A U.S. default would spike interest rates, crash bond markets, trigger a credit freeze, and destroy consumer confidence. Mortgages would become unaffordable. Mass foreclosures and job losses would crush demand. Asset fire sales would follow. Housing prices would collapse.

This would also reshuffle assets, so speculators and highly leveraged people would be punished instead of being rewarded.

It will also cleanup the situation for future generations so kids won't have to be under extreme debt to pay back in some way to government, because the older people lived above their means.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-06-20 09:43:52+00:00
That there is a optimal fluidity to a person's self-concept that is worth thinking about, in the unacknowledged gap between the performative extremes of preferred vs genotypic gender.

(DNA isn't as alterable as pics of your private bits, or even your actual private bíts..

Or we would have cured cancer by now. Without either resorting to surgery or diluting the term "biohacking")
by karel-3d | 2025-06-20 09:43:58+00:00
Now I remember, a lot of the Mac apps back then had this weird "side panel" thing where side panel went "out" of the window. I don't know the precise name of the pattern, but that would be probably the most confusing thing.

Oh also the + button didn't do full screen as today, but... it did... something. I never understood the point of the + button.
by JimDabell | 2025-06-20 09:44:11+00:00
I’m a big fan of the web. I think a lot of people misunderstand its design and fail to grasp how important various aspects of its architecture contribute to its success. It’s very common for people to see it as nothing more than a delivery system for imperative code to run without installation on clients. That’s where the overuse of JavaScript comes from.

But JavaScript itself isn’t bad. JavaScript was an incredible improvement to the web. It’s when people pass over the web in favour of writing JavaScript apps that the problems arise. I think it would do good for people who spend all day writing React apps to spend some time working with things like HTMX to break out of that mindset and get a bit of perspective on how the web is supposed to work.
by hnthrowaway0315 | 2025-06-20 09:45:13+00:00
How did homeless become homeless though?

1. They never had a home before so they kept living like that

2. They had a home before but then they couldn't afford it (or whatever other reason)

I doubt we have a lot of case 1 (born without a home). For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless. I doubt building more homes are going to solve the issues. For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
by nrclark | 2025-06-20 09:46:00+00:00
Agreed if you're looking at it through the lens of portable software that you plan to distribute. Automake generates portable Makefiles for a reason.

But there's another huge category: people who are automating something that's not open-source. Maybe it stays within the walls of their company, where it's totally fine to say "build machines will always be Ubuntu" or whatever other environment their company prefers.

GNU Make has a ton of powerful features, and it makes sense to take advantage of them if you know that GNU Make will always be the one you use.
by energy123 | 2025-06-20 09:46:07+00:00
It is a big problem in Democratic states like California, where the leftists (Dean Preston and other leftist NIMBYs) have allied themselves with homeowner liberals to make it impossible to build housing.

Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.

There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.
by onion2k | 2025-06-20 09:46:18+00:00
None of that is the fault of Javascript, it's on the people building them.

This is logically correct, but I don't think it's true in the spirit of the argument. Browsers makes it very easy to deploy a broken website. They're incredibly tolerant of faults. Consequently there's no accountability for problems.

If browsers didn't try to display broken apps in a sort-of-working-but-not-really way there'd be a lot fewer broken apps.
by Puts | 2025-06-20 09:47:31+00:00
You hear this over and over again that Europe is over-regulated and this is why tech-companies don't succeed here. I would say this is utter bullshit. If you look at the acquisitions made by the tech-giants it just that anything that is going to be successful is instantly bought up by these companies.

People probably don't know how little Google for example builds in-house with everything from Analytics to Gmail being of European origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
by phendrenad2 | 2025-06-20 09:47:53+00:00
The problem is the web sucks. CSS sucks. HTML sucks. Javascript is perfectly fine, actually. Browser security sucks. CORS sucks. CSP sucks. SVG sucks. Favicons suck. Shadow DOM sucks. Video controls suck. Web audio sucks. WebGPU sucks. W3C sucks. Chromium sucks.

You know what I'd do to be able to build a website using SwiftUI or GTK?

Given the terribleness of the web, naturally people will use bloated UI frameworks and build tools to even slightly avoid using them directly.
by SergeAx | 2025-06-20 09:47:54+00:00
I bought my desktop PC about 20 years ago, and since then, I've never upgraded more than two components at once. It is literally Theseus' ship. But I put some effort into keeping it future proof, like buying memory compatible with the next generation motherboard, better modular PSU with power for future video card etc. It is actually quite fun game, especially when your vendor return policy is generous enough to not worry if something won't fit or won't work together.
by noname120 | 2025-06-20 09:48:29+00:00
EA people gave a total of $817,276,989 to malaria initiatives through GiveWell[1][2].

How much more do they need to give before you will change your mind about whether “EA's actually want to do something about malaria”?

[1] https://www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund

[2] https://airtable.com/appGuFtOIb1eodoBu/shr1EzngorAlEzziP/tbl...
by kalli | 2025-06-20 09:48:55+00:00
No worries, it's also interesting to see different peoples approaches to the best syntax for this. Exporters/importers do make life a bit easier I suppose.

I don't know what the mechanism/incentive for getting a standard would be either. Probably most likely would be if there was one clear "winner" that everyone else felt the need mirror.

In any case, appreciate the reply and the tool. Good luck with it.
by brushfoot | 2025-06-20 09:49:37+00:00
Linux has gotten in the way every time I've tried various distros over the years. And I'm a system administrator turned software engineer. I can't imagine the headaches for less technical users.

Examples:

- Screensharing in Teams. There was a gaussian blur over everything. I had this happen during a work call.

- Nvidia. I kept getting screen-tearing. I went through various guides, installed drivers and so on, but it never worked properly.

- Office. LibreOffice slaughters my Office docs. The formatting is wrong, things are broken.

- Media. I had issues watching things that I could just watch on Windows.

Those kinds of issues were fun to me 20 years ago; they were part of the adventure of roughing it and sticking it to the man. Today, I don't have the time or energy. I'd rather use an OS that Just Works. When I need Linux, WSL has worked great.
by throwaway18875 | 2025-06-20 09:49:47+00:00
> Europe can't even build its own tech companies

I'm not sure where this notion comes from. First, Europe does build its own tech companies — Bolt, Bol, SoundCloud, and Spotify, which started in Sweden. Second, do we really consider companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Twitter as pure progress?

I think the case is that the US has been really good at promoting its domestic products. Another reason why the US has more tech companies, and why more companies move to the US, is the lack of legislation for worker protection. However, this is the same argument as to why most products are manufactured in China.

> GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant

First, this is clearly not true [1]. Second, GDP per capita is a poor metric for assessing wealth and quality of life [2].

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?.... [2]: https://time.com/5118026/gdp-metric-success-wealth/
by MASNeo | 2025-06-20 09:49:47+00:00
I appreciate the consideration. Thank you.

For a home cleaning dusting, cooking and tidying up were actually tasks I believe should be possible. I am in conversations with vendors to see task performance for this. That said, I am optimistic but sceptical. I take away that the actual task performance would better be demonstrated and will take videos to evidence to customers.

There are several security and entertainment tasks that I believe are more agreeable to be performed, would you not agree?

I am surprised there are no concerns about security/safety, is that not an aspect that would be of importance?
by AngryData | 2025-06-20 09:50:07+00:00
No human deaths have ever been attributed to LSD overdose. Atleast in one case some people got close and were hospitalized, having snorted a line of powder they though was cocaine but was actually pure crystalline LSD, which probably represented tens of thousands of standard doses at a minimum, and likely significantly more than that. LSD probably has one of if not the highest known spread beyween theuraputic dosage and dangerous over dosage. It was once considered the safest drug anyone could get because there was almost nothing else that it could be adultered with effectively because blotter paper and single liquid drops can hold such little of any other drug.

These days there are other drugs that are effective in such small doses, but are not common to encounter unless you specifically look for them and are usually significantly more expensive than LSD to start with.
by pjerem | 2025-06-20 09:51:26+00:00
Except the US tech is locking any compatibility layer one after the other. Every OS release is now more locked down than the previous one. Every piece of hardware is totally locked down.

What this means is that it's harder and harder to create new hard tech (e.g. OSes, computers, phones ...) that is compatible with what's existing now.

Let's make a thinking experiment : Imagine that somehow an european company is magically releasing the most perfect phone you would ever imagine but it's not running an american OS ?

No app ecosystem, no possibility to bootstrap it. You can't connect to your friends that are using closed IM apps. You can't access this Google doc "file" someone just sent you without using Google suite...

And that's because we lost the war for standards. File standards, protocol standards. This ship has sail a long time ago.

And the issue is not only for this magical theorical european company.

Americans are also deluding themselves if they think this situation is good for them, this issue isn't unique to Europe, it would be the same for any american company trying to compete with Google or Apple. Except it would be even worse because they could be easily bought by existent actors if they managed to succeed.

In fact, everyone would gain form breaking tech giants, europeans, for sure, but especially americans.
by yellow_lead | 2025-06-20 09:51:29+00:00
> For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless.

It's not always all or nothing - sometimes you might be able to afford rent if rent were cheaper.

> For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.

"Build more homes" includes social aka public aka "affordable housing".
by _petronius | 2025-06-20 09:51:42+00:00
Luckily, your personal thoughts from first principles with zero review of the available data is not all we have to go on!

There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.

This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
by ben_w | 2025-06-20 09:52:59+00:00
> Meh, that's a big nothingburger. Noncitizens have never had constitutional rights or at least not for decades. I don't like it but let's not pretend this is some radical change.

That's the first I've heard of it. Everyone else is saying it covers everyone in the USA, including the courts who ruled that kicking people out for blogging was unconstitutional and ordering the release of the people the US government had arrested: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.564...

and: https://time.com/7284578/judge-orders-release-of-rumeysa-ozt...

But again, as you've not answered the "Even when it's your own head?" part, I remind you that you earlier wrote:

> I'm an immigrant and a minority myself, not that people like you ever actually care about supporting people like me.

I had assumed you were living in the USA, until checking your github account, so now I assume you're in Japan.

Please, imagine it is your own head that is the target of, in your own words, "the goon squad to crack heads".

What's happening today in the USA can happen anywhere, including where you live. (And where I live, but around here you can trip and fall over Stolperstein to be reminded of that latter part).
by swiftcoder | 2025-06-20 09:54:16+00:00
> US-EU and US-China relation is very different

It certainly was very different - maybe less clear that it will remain so.

The whole tariffs debacle, the threat that the US won't back NATO allies in the event of Russian aggression, wavering US support for Ukraine... The EU is starting to see a need to pivot away from reliance on the US.

Without that relationship, a lot of US tech firm offerings are going to look much worse (i.e. we might quickly see an end to overlooking blatant tax evasion and GDPR violations)
by awongh | 2025-06-20 09:54:46+00:00
You're locked in because everyone else is already on the closed one and the switching costs are too high.

If the big companies were legally required to allow you to migrate your group texts onto another platform with a push of a button then I would say you're not locked in anymore.

Companies would complain that "it's not technically possible"- but of course we all know it's completely doable.
by paulfharrison | 2025-06-20 09:54:59+00:00
What a strange web page. Scrolling is thoroughly broken.

I recently went to a two day workshop on whole cell modelling. I'm still trying to work out how much of the exercise is fantasy. I get that some of the chemistry is well enough understood to simulate from the ground up, but there's so much more to it.

The oddest thing to me is the level of satisfaction in being able to run the model. I would think the model has to be very very fast, because of all the work that needs to be done with it to fit it to data and fully understand its behavior.
by darkwater | 2025-06-20 09:55:34+00:00
> - you don't want developers to worry about details such as DNS and networking and topologies.

Did they need to know this before Kubernetes? I've been in the trade for over 20 years and the typical product developer never cared a bit about it anyway.

> - you don't want to be tied to a specific app framework.

Yes and no. K8s (and docker images) indeed helps you in deploying more consistently different languages/frameworks but the biggest factor against this is in the end still organizational rather than purely technical. (This in an average product company with average developers, not super-duper SV startup with world-class top-notch talent where each dev is fluent in at least 4 different languages and stacks).
by noname120 | 2025-06-20 09:55:35+00:00
> that's not the centre of EA debate or culture....

EAs gave $1,886,513,058 through GiveWell[1], and there is 0 AI stuff in there (you can search in the linked Airtable spreadsheet).

There is also a whole movement for doing a lifetime commitment to give 10% of your earnings to charity. 9,880 people took the pledge so far[2].

[1] https://airtable.com/appGuFtOIb1eodoBu/shr1EzngorAlEzziP/tbl...

[2] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
by dgellow | 2025-06-20 09:55:50+00:00
Startups move to the us because of the ease of access to VCs (or capital in general)

> I'm not sure where this notion comes from.

From the outside the EU sounds like on large unit. Where in facts it is a fragmented group. The EU has plenty of tech companies but it is pretty competitive when you have that many countries to cater to, each with their own culture, language, and laws. So you will target a specific market - like France, with marketing in french, adapted to the French context. Expanding to anew place is expensive and difficult. So you end up with lots of local, small/medium size businesses instead of one unified large business.

Just my personal opinion living here. And not saying it’s bad, it’s just a different dynamic
by keepamovin | 2025-06-20 09:55:57+00:00
This one: https://youtu.be/i1xPujRzWks?si=bmIBjlA-9GYDaOEM

And for the OG: https://youtu.be/C8BC0VuF8Ys?si=E8VRiGht-guW_DUC
by JamesBarney | 2025-06-20 09:55:59+00:00
Rationalism is not about trying to be clever it's very much about trying to be a little less wrong. Most people are not even trying, which includes myself. I don't write down my predictions, I don't keep a list of my errors. I just show up to work like everyone else and don't worry about it.

I really don't understand all the claims that they intellectually smug and overconfident when they are the one group of people trying to do better. It really seems like all the hatred is aimed at the hubris to even try to do better.
by franciscop | 2025-06-20 09:57:20+00:00
I noticed this with the line "Around 2010, something shifted. The iPhone was ascendant. Native apps were sleek, fast, fluid."

When the iPhone was first released, the experience was much worse than today's web experience. Sure apps/native also got much better, so 15 year ago webs were worse than today's apps, but that's not a fair comparison.