MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2025-07-21 16:12:43+00:00
That's faulty reasoning. If the price drops stop new production, but there's still "demand", it means that the cost of providing new production is higher than what this demand can afford to pay.

But a big problem is that people try to view housing as not a commodity. They think that people don't move, don't change housing, don't need different things at different stages of their life.

If instead we actually view housing as the commodity it actually is, we would realize that the reason old cars are cheap is because we build new cars that are more expensive. That day old bread is only cheap because new bread was made today. Houses fall apart, the housing itself is actually going down in value every day. The land is the only part that rises in value, because we restrict its use so much.

New housing is nicer and more expensive than old housing, yet for some reason we are saying those with the least ability to pay should only be allowed to buy new housing. There are a ton of aging people in gigantic old houses that would like to downsize into something newer and smaller so that they don't have to walk as they age, yet that sort of non-car-dependent community is largely banned.
by KingMob | 2025-07-21 16:12:48+00:00
They require extremely low cooling from the helium to achieve superconductivity.

And with superconductivity, by definition, current flows without resistance; it continues even without energy, so turning off the power won't stop it. Nor will it heat up and decay from resistance. Modern MRIs are well-insulated enough to maintain their field without power from days to weeks.

The only thing that collapses the field is to warm it up to where superconductivity stops, which can be done slow and expensively, or in an emergency, fast and even more expensively.

By venting the supercooled gases in what's called a quench, you can turn it off faster, but the time it needs can depend on the model. It could be 20 seconds, or it could be 2 minutes, which, depending on the emergency, may be insufficient.

A quench itself can be dangerous, though usually less so than a patient pinned to the magnet. There's a chance that poor ventilation can flood the room with helium, causing loss of consciousness in seconds. The increase in pressure can also make it impossible to escape if the door's not built for that. You'd have to break a window. On top of which, it's dangerously cold, and the explosive bang can rupture your eardrums.
I Use EDA and Local LLMs to Make Better Product Decisions
by pdxbug | 2025-07-21 16:13:54+00:00
How product managers supercharge AI/ML product decision-making with smarter EDA. Good decisions start with good questions. Before product managers decide what features to build, one of the most overlooked yet critical steps is: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

Why? Because good EDA accelerates hypothesis validation, helps you ask the right questions, test assumptions, apply statistical techniques, uncover insights about the user journey, clarify KPIs — and ultimately helps you make smarter, more strategic, and user-centric decisions.

Over the years, I’ve developed a lightweight but effective process to help myself and teams move faster — especially when: dealing with sensitive or PII data that can’t leave local networks working with very large datasets streamlining collaboration with analysts and data scientists

Here’s my go-to setup that has saved us days (if not weeks): Data analysis & visualization — Jupyter Notebook + Pygwalker No more exporting CSVs or bouncing between BI tools & raw data. Local LLM with LMStudio When I need help exploring hypotheses, drafting SQL, or summarizing findings

Here is my LinkedIn post about this topic. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peekay-chan-453102_pygwalker-lmstudio-productmanagement-activity-7352780192395792384-AFDe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAD2_8BA9f2IpYDPZmflw9ziUIVH_mw7V8

Would love to hear how other PMs/Analysts/Data Scientist go about this.
by anonymars | 2025-07-21 16:14:08+00:00
From Wikipedia:

"Any change to the current through the magnet must be done very slowly, first because electrically the magnet is a large inductor and an abrupt current change will result in a large voltage spike across the windings, and more importantly because fast changes in current can cause eddy currents and mechanical stresses in the windings that can precipitate a quench [...]. So the power supply is usually microprocessor-controlled, programmed to accomplish current changes gradually, in gentle ramps. It usually takes several minutes to energize or de-energize a laboratory-sized magnet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet
by lotharcable | 2025-07-21 16:14:16+00:00
The only desktop to have real meaningful large-ish/professional usability testing is Gnome. And that is only a couple times.

The first time was financed by Sun Microsystems in 2001 for Gnome 1.x and the result was Gnome 2.

The second time was financed by Novell around 2005 or so for their attempt to compete with Microsoft with Novell Linux Desktop. Unfortunately for them the real beneficiary of the improvements that results from their work was Canonical's Ubuntu.

Since then there have been numerous smaller/informal/ad-hoc attempts for both KDE and Gnome.

The results of all of this, of course, is that many "Linux users" believe that Gnome is the result of a conspiracy between IBM, Redhat, and maybe even Microsoft to "destroy the Linux desktop".

So that is fun.

The real success story, from what I can tell, is Blender.

They successfully revamped their user interface without a huge budget. Although it was still financed somewhat by some EU initiative, IIRC. They accomplished this by getting developers sat down next in a big room to actual 3D artists working together to produce a animated feature.

By physically placing users next to devs and having them work together, likely with a great deal of humility and openness, they managed to transform their UI into something that was actually decent.

This is probably a model that can be duplicated by other open source developers, although finding the right type of technical users not experienced in using said software willing to participate is going to always be a major challenge.
by hwillis | 2025-07-21 16:14:57+00:00
A good N52 neodymium magnet can be 1.5 tesla- MRIs are usually 1.5 tesla. The pull force is around the same too- a steel object will experience say 20g, and 100 lb fishing magnets are not hard to find.

The difference is the size. Even a large magnet only hits that 20g force over an inch or two. An MRI pulls at that force over a full foot or more; equivalent to dropping the object from 20'+. Worse, the MRI starts pulling at 5 or 10 feet away. Objects can experience a tremendous amount of uncontrolled acceleration in fractions of a second.

It's not like a black hole- unless you are trapped under something very large, the crushing force is substantial but not incredible. In fact inside the tube the gradient is actually smaller than the entrance of the tube- you are pulled in strongly, but once inside the tube you are pressed against the wall somewhat less forcefully. Instead it's like an invisible waterfall, and any metal will be swept away in it, fast enough to put holes in you.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-21 16:15:32+00:00
> I think it’s like they are missing a “theory of mind” for how software works.

This is a delightful way to put it! I have older relatives that can't really tell apart where a website ends and where their operating system begins, due to not really knowing about the client server model (even when it's explained to them) and I worry about the generation that will also just grow up with phone apps.

That's why I actually liked the classes back in school where we had all sorts of office program tasks to do, though I wish some of the later stuff from university would also be more widespread. Probably not programming for everyone (unless something practical with like Python), but just a few lessons on how the Internet works.
by danshapiro | 2025-07-21 16:15:51+00:00
Author disclosure – I’m Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge, writing with Ethan R. Mollick (Wharton management professor, author of Co‑Intelligence and the “One Useful Thing” newsletter); Angela Duckworth (MacArthur Fellow and University of Pennsylvania psychology professor, author of Grit); Robert B. Cialdini (Arizona State University emeritus professor, author of Influence); Lilach Mollick (Co‑Director of the Wharton Generative AI Lab); and Lennart Meincke (WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management & Wharton).

Across 28 000 GPT‑4o‑mini conversations, we found that Cialdini’s classic seven persuasion principles more than doubled compliance with two objectionable prompts (33 % → 72 %). For example, the AIs we tested naturally wouldn't call you names or tell you how to synthesize drugs. But they could be persuaded if you first paid them a compliment (Liking) or told the AI it felt like family (Unity).

Let me know if you have any questions!
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-21 16:15:57+00:00
You could probably summarize the history of bridge-building as "keep subtracting things until they don't stand up anymore."

Building bridges (and large structures in general) has always been about the tension between over-engineering (for safety) and under-engineering (for cost/aesthetics).

The Brooklyn Bridge is massive; they'd never built a bridge like that so they over-engineered it. But once they saw that it was more than strong enough to stand up, the next bridge was lighter. And the next one after that was even lighter. And so on, until a bridge collapses because some new factor came into play (e.g., harmonic resonance).

Source: To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski--one of my favorite engineering books.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-21 16:15:57+00:00
She's using a browser all the time. Using debian out of the box is still more complicated. The setup process for debian to get it back down to the bare bones simplicity of ChromeOS is much more time consuming for me.

Hence, as my original post was meant to convey, a ChromeOS clone is a better option to set up a laptop for her than just grabbing debian.
Show HN: An API for human-powered browser tasks
by madebywelch | 2025-07-21 16:16:28+00:00
At APM Help, we have a large team that performs repetitive, browser-based tasks. Years ago, to manage this work securely and get a clear audit trail, we built an internal platform we call "Hub." It's essentially a locked-down environment where our team works that records their sessions, tracks every interaction, and prevents data from being copied or shared. It's been our internal source of truth for years.

More recently, like many companies, we've been building more automation. And like everyone else, we've seen our automations fail on edge cases—a weirdly formatted invoice our parser can't read, a website layout change that breaks a scraper, etc. Our team would have to manually step in to fix these.

We realized other developers must have this exact same problem, but without a 250-person team on standby. So we connected our old, battle-tested Hub to a new, modern front door: a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) API. We're calling it browser-work.com.

The idea is simple: when you hit a task that needs a human, you can send it to our team through the API.

Here's how it works:

- You POST a request to our endpoint. The payload contains the context for the task (like a URL) and a set of instructions for the human on what to do. - The task appears in the Hub, where one of our trained operators can claim it. - They perform the task exactly as instructed, all within the secure Hub environment. - When they're done, we send a webhook to your system. The return payload includes the task's output, any notes left by the human, and a detailed log of their actions (e.g., DOM elements they interacted with).

For example, if your automation for paying a utility bill fails, you can pass the task to us. A person will log in, navigate the portal, make the payment, and return a confirmation number.

The product is live and we're looking for people with interesting use cases.

I'm Robert, the CIO. If this sounds useful to you, send me a brief email about your use case at robert@apmhelp.com and we can get you started right away.

Happy to answer any questions here.
by password4321 | 2025-07-21 16:17:50+00:00
XSLT trending back up?

--

XMLUI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625292#44625559 (~30/317 comments; yesterday)

> No mention of XSLT?

(interesting mention of a better way, vintage "kiselyov's SXML/SSAX" for scheme - https://ssax.sourceforge.net/ ?)

--

XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817 (328 comments; ~month ago)
by daft_pink | 2025-07-21 16:18:07+00:00
I’ve used Claude and Gemini and Claude works a lot better, but Gemini is a bit cheaper so I have both and use Gemini when I don’t want to waste my Claude availability.

However, Claude wastes less of my time than Gemini.

In my experience, Gemini is a lot more likely to have an empty tool call and get in a loop of using a tool that isn't working, or get confused and use some previous instruction from the context window instead of the task at hand and go on a totally crazy tangent. Claude is generally a lot more accurate.
by zahlman | 2025-07-21 16:19:17+00:00
Despite appearing to have perfectly ordinary structured static HTML content (aside from the fact that it spams things like <span style="font-weight:bold"> instead of using some basic CSS properly), without JavaScript I only see a solid-colour background.

Anyway, this doesn't offer a whole lot of storage:

$ python -c 'print(sum(__import__("math").log2(x) for x in range(1, 53)) // 8)' 28.0
by yencabulator | 2025-07-21 16:20:04+00:00
> I wonder whether this style is specific to the LLM (Grok vs. ChatGPT) or if it will somehow arise from the raining data itself that they all share and be sort of a permanent "accent" the LLMs have.

It's very different. I used LLMs to brainstorm a business plan write-up hypothetical startup and Claude/Gemini/qwen3:30b-a3b, one-shot with a long background text. They all generated similar-but-slightly-non-overlapping ideas in very different language.

If I remember right it went something like this: Gemini used stilted business-speak and bold everywhere, but had the best structure for the document. Claude gave surprisingly good one-paragraph intros to every section. Claude and Gwen3 were roughly tied to how nicely written their bullet point content was. I made a new document with Gemini's base structure, Claude's intros, and bullet points mashed from Claude and Gwen, making sure I covered all the good ideas from Gemini that weren't mentioned. Then I edited everything for homogeneity and style.

I recommend experimenting with combining their work.

(Also, qwen3:30b-a3b is amazing for local LLM work, the MoE architecture makes it have the speed of a 3B parameter model!)
by alexb_ | 2025-07-21 16:20:39+00:00
What? Strong Towns is not just their "content creation", they ARE local organizations. You might have a chapter in your city. This criticism tells me that you don't know what Strong Towns is, what they do, the actual specific policy guidelines they come up with and push that have real influence on local city planning.

Strong Towns gives actionable proposals all the time, and their main purpose is local organizations to actually do local change. To accuse them of being a content creation scheme that does no organizing tells me that you have not looked into this at all and are making immediate assumptions based on the aesthetics of their content.
by hinkley | 2025-07-21 16:21:33+00:00
I found this video very helpful:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oBt53YbR9Kk

Yes, it is 5 hours long. At least 4 of those are worth it.

Many people confuse caching with DP. I’ve had that conversation too often. I think it’s down to the memoization examples people choose being too toy and just looking like caching. Caching is global shared state, whereas memoization can be scoped to the current calculation and still be useful.

But they always skip over tabulation, which is where I believe DP distinguishes itself.
by pmarreck | 2025-07-21 16:21:40+00:00
> @ted_bunny "In the past" is inevitabilist framing. I don't think it'll ever be normal or ok to let kids play mass murder simulators. Just because our culture has decided to accept it doesn't mean the matter is settled.

If there was any actual evidence to support the assumption that "mass murder simulators" have a negative long-term effect on humans, this wouldn't be nonsense. (I do know that it does have a slight short-term effect on violent tendencies.) EDIT: I noticed that comment was removed but I didn't want to delete my reply to it!)

Similarly, if there was evidence to support that people engaging in "forbidden" sexual content in a fictional context, somehow influenced real human behavior in that space (does "cheating wife" porn encourage more actual cheating, or "incest porn" encourage more incest?), this group's righteous campaign might actually have substance instead of being devoid of it. Otherwise you're basically just doing baseless thought-policing based on Argumentum ad Nauseam fallacies. "I don't like the fictional content you're engaging with... Just because!"

People really have some major difficulty for some reason discussing these things rationally. For example, take a brother and sister, raised separately, who meet by chance and end up feeling intense GSA (genetic sexual attraction). It just so happens that the sister is infertile. They want to have a relationship. Who is actually harmed by that, again? Anyway.

Also related, my previous comment on this story which was posted yesterday, pointing out the hypocrisy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44614427
by woodpanel | 2025-07-21 16:22:02+00:00
> All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists so desperate to get their hands on rape-my-little-sister incest games they’re now exchanging clues on how to find them so that they don’t all die overnight," Collective Shout co-founder Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted on July 18th.

Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?
by masklinn | 2025-07-21 16:22:05+00:00
In some places it’s already more than viable. In Europe it’s baked into the banking system, SCT (SEPA Credit Transfer) lets you move money between any two European accounts with only as much hassle as your bank wants in your way. And EPC QR lets you initiate transfers from QR codes.

The biggest annoyance with it is that uptake is quite variable from country to country.
by patcon | 2025-07-21 16:22:21+00:00
In humans, diversity of thought [patterns, not just diversity of knowledge] increases the quality beyond its parts.

I suspect this model alloy tactic always works, just only seems impressive when it does so with the top models and achieves otherwise unattainable quality.

One paper of many such new (and nuanced) wisdom of crowds resources:

Cultural diversity and wisdom of crowds are mutually beneficial and evolutionarily stable https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95914-7
by Nasrudith | 2025-07-21 16:22:48+00:00
They follow their leaders basically. Look at the pattern of avoiding claiming responsibility like the plague as it ends up with all of the downsides. When borderline the 'not illegal' legalist ethics prevail across all segments of upper society, with Congress sticking to that and blatantly illegally insider trading or worse instead of a higher 'avoid even the appearance of impropriety' the shit has rolled down hill.

Although it might also just be an impact of illusions of nobility from the past shattered by increased transparency. George Washington abused his power to land speculate for one, presidents who had their affair participant institutionalized for stating uncomfortable truths about whose child was whose.
by kindkang2024 | 2025-07-21 16:23:11+00:00
First things first, I need to clarify what I am referring to when I use the term 'woke.'

My critique targets an ideology that, under the guise of good intentions—whether genuine or feigned—ignores fundamental realities and ultimately causes more harm than it prevents. It’s a form of idealism where noble goals, ungrounded in reality, consistently lead to destructive outcomes.

> Seriously, just say what you mean, because "woke" is meaningless.

Advice accepted. After all, there are genuinely good intentions behind the ideology — or at least we can assume so, since no one can truly verify them.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-21 16:23:14+00:00
Yeah in the US system thanks to some old competition requirements the Affiliate Network gets most of the name recognition and provides most of the prime time entertainment content (a few other content blocks), but the stations under that network have their own owners that can be more or less damaging, especially in news content, and more or less "invisible" in that maybe you only see their name in the fine print at the end of credits or copyright statements.

One other notorious example is Sinclair Broadcasting [1]. Sinclair-owned stations include all of the major Affiliate Networks in the US and some of the minor ones, but are known for how much they farm politically-biased news content across their platforms, including trying to pass off editorial content as news content.

(ETA: Which is to say that yeah a FOX affiliate gets entertainment programming from what is left of Rupert Murdoch's empire, but could be getting news content from all sorts of places from home-grown proper local journalism to content farms from their real owners.)

[1] A humorous rant on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
by pests | 2025-07-21 16:23:28+00:00
It’s a difference in kind I think. Creation of any type of work - art, writing, programming, modeling, deep research, etc is much more accessible on a PC than on a smartphone. Not only because of the input devices available, but also the restrictions of the platform and OS.

Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.

When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
by mcswell | 2025-07-21 16:23:38+00:00
I was wondering whether I was the only person to think XSLT was a poor tool, although for different reasons. I had to work with XSLT for several years, and it felt like the worst programming language I had ever seen. For me, the use of code written in XML to process XML felt absurd, and debugging felt next to impossible. I thought it would be nice if someone would create a library in some other programming language (maybe Prolog) that would do the same thing. If it had to first had to "compile" stuff into XSLT, so be it, but programming in XML was so verbose that I had trouble keeping track of my program's structure.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-07-21 16:23:50+00:00
> For example, anything to do with json can be done in 1 line of readable jq, while it could be 1, 5, or 20 lines in python depending on the problem.

I don't agree that there exists such a thing as "readable jq" to start with. It's very arcane and difficult to follow unless you live and breathe the thing (which I don't). Furthermore, jq may or may not be present on the system, whereas the json package is always there in Python. Finally, I don't think having more lines is bad. The question is, what do you get for the extra lines? Python might have 5 lines where bash has 1, but those 5 lines will be far easier to read and understand in the future. That's a very worthwhile trade-off in my opinion.
by satvikpendem | 2025-07-21 16:24:24+00:00
Probably because Levels says he codes each product in a single PHP file. But then again, there's a reason he's successful and the parent is not (at least to that same level, pun intended). Technologists think code is an end unto itself while true entrepreneurs that it's just a means to an end, and that the end itself is money (otherwise, why are you running a business? If you don't make money, it's simply a hobby).