MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-21 23:37:25+00:00
> Wouldn’t measuring dynamics of home ownership using a unit “households” cause all sorts of problems?

I had the same impression at first as well. But a household is a household is a household. That massive increase in people living alone follows the same 60/40 split on ownership that more "traditional" married couples would.

The affordability of housing has changed since the 60's, 70's and 80's. And it's what your intuition is picking up on. And it does relate to what is a household, but not because it's a poor measure but because the housing stock we have no longer matches how we use housing.

If you go back to 1985, the boomers were in their prime years and housing was much more affordable than today. The greatest generation was dying off, and in their golden years they lived together (The literal plot of golden girls), in homes or moved in with kids.

The boomers are NOT doing that. They are occupying multi bedroom housing stock, as couples or alone. This has created much of their wealth and lots of price pressure on younger generations. The millennials will tell you "housing was worse for them" and it was: the two large cohorts competing for the limited supply, and one was deeply entrenched already.

Do note that boomers aren't the only ones "living alone more" its a fairly equal distribution but they have the first mover advantage, historic pricing advantage, and tend to be the ones occupying multi bedroom housing alone creating the utilization pressure.

And the Golden Girls type living situations are unviable today for legal reasons. Overly broad tenants rights have killed the concept of co-habitation (roomates/housemates) turning 2,3, and 4 bedroom houses into single family homes, and zoning + tenants rights have finished off the boarding house (there might be hand full left in the US, this was the plot of another 80's tv series).

Telling The boomers to move in with the millennials is going to be massively unpopular with both groups. Telling renters that "you get less rights" is going to be politically impossible (even if it is only for 'housemates' situations). Death or a major change to Americans political will are the only fixes that we are going to see.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-07-21 23:38:01+00:00
> you probably don't need to move.

When I was a kid in the late 60s through the 70s, we moved every 2 or 3 years. And this was generally not because we needed to move. It was because my parents decided they wanted to move somewhere different. From Seattle to the gulf coast of TX when I was 1 because my dad wanted to live somewhere sunny & warm. From TX to the Oregon Coast when I was 12 because my parents missed the PNW. Of the several moves in between I can only think of maybe 3 that were for jobs - but even then, it was generally by choice more than necessity.
Ask HN: I am looking for MCP server beta testers
by willahmad | 2025-07-21 23:38:27+00:00
Hey folks,

I'm currently looking for beta testers for a macOS-only MCP server. If you are interested in MCP ecosystem, I would love to hear your feedback.

The app runs entirely locally—your credentials are securely encrypted using your Keychain password, and nothing leaves your machine. It's still early in development, but your input could help shape its direction.

If you'd like to try it out, please reach out to me at: kzphefll8@mozmail.com

Thanks!
by no_circuit | 2025-07-21 23:38:43+00:00
I'm assuming that the PaaS/IaaS providers already have solutions for secrets. So a new centralized system may help with just dev and DIY bare metal?

But the centralized method, as in secretspec, not everyone will accept reading secrets in environment variables, as is also done with the 1password cli run command [1]. They also may need to be injected as files or less secure command line parameters. In the Kubernetes world one solution the is External Secrets Operator [2]. Secrets may also be pulled from an API as well from the cloud host. I won't comment on how that works in k8s.

To note, the reason for reading from file handles is so that the app can watch for changes and reload, e.g., key/token rotations without restarting the server.

But what could be useful to some developers is a secretspec inject subcommand (the universal version of the op inject command). I use op inject / dotenvy with Rust apps -- pretty easy to manage and share credentials. Previously I had something similiar written in Rust that also handled things like base64 / percent-encoding transforms.

If you aren't tied to Rust, probably could just fork external-secrets and get all the provider code for free.

[1] https://developer.1password.com/docs/cli/reference/commands/...

[2] https://external-secrets.io
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-21 23:39:11+00:00
It's a machine. I or no I, we knew for decades what they can excel at and what they fall far short of. Llms only amplify those steneghrs and weaknesses.

My definition of intelligence logical intelligence involves the following factors:

- able to recognize patterns in data, even complex ones (machines have always excelled in this, with aid of a human) - an ability to break down complex concepts into fundamentals. I.e seductive reasoning (LLMs as of now don't really do this) - conversely, the ability to learn new concepts and apply them to more complex situations (LLMs especially cannot do this without human assistance) - the ability to synthesize a set of data and come to a conclusion given an environmental context. I.e. Critical reasoning (Ai as of now is poor at this. Partially by design, as critique is avoided in their behavior).

As a few criteria. Artificial "intelligence" as of now is simply leveraging its superior pattern matching to give the illusion of reasoning, and it's mimicry is close enough for non-subject matter experts to choose to believe its output.
by tacker2000 | 2025-07-21 23:39:42+00:00
To be fair exchange works quite well for mail and calendar, it syncs very fast, is easy to set up and the cloud version is easy to administer (i never had to admin an on-prem exchange but ive heard its not fun).

Using this infra for teams makes sense since it already works well. As one poster said, its probably via some hidden folder.

I wonder what they did with skype, did they actually integrate any of it into teams or just dump it entirely?
by pitpatagain | 2025-07-21 23:40:22+00:00
SignWriting is closer in purpose to the International Phonetic Alphabet for spoken languages. It attempts to allow detailed recording of the actual signing as it is signed for any sign language.

It has a lot of the disdvantages of IPA as a practical writing system as well.

Sign languages are not the same as spoken languages used in the same countries, as is very apparent if you look at transliterations of ASL using latin glyphs, there are some standardized ways to do this but they drop a lot of information and don't have the same sentence/word structure.

There is also a long history of attempts to create notation that can record this type of language, the first for ASL being Stokoe notation, which represents hand shapes for example, but can't represent for example facial elements, and is specific to ASL, can't represent things in other sign languages.
by kristianp | 2025-07-21 23:40:30+00:00
I suppose having the small DRAM footprint is required to meet extremely low power requirements. How low power is it? The CPU has a 18.6 μA/MHz Run mode at 3.3 V [1], so 61μW! I wanted to know more about the power harvesting applications though.

[1] https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32u5f7vj.pdf
by levocardia | 2025-07-21 23:41:37+00:00
>Small thing, but I'd definitely prefer that when it generates code it places it in a script for me to read and run line by line, rather than showing the code in the chat pane and expecting the user to select between Run (all of it!) or Cancel.

I agree, I am one of many R users whose workflow for science is still, I'm sheepish to admit, "select some code and run it, then use the variable explorer."

On the whole though I'm very excited to see agentic abilities coming to R.
by bboygravity | 2025-07-21 23:41:44+00:00
I don't get how it's possible that nobody (other than Tesla) can manufacture batteries in the West?

It a glance this feels insane. Batteries are in everything and such a basic need.

How is it possible that buying through known scammers with tons of QA is still cheaper than manufacturing in the West?

Obviously for Tesla it isn't cheaper to buy from China, so why is it thought to be cheaper for the rest of the West? Is it purely scale?
by stillsut | 2025-07-21 23:42:14+00:00
Overall strong piece of writing. This part resonated with me as aptly described:

> more/better in the same time used in the past — which is what I do), when left alone with nontrivial goals they tend to produce fragile code bases that are larger than needed, complex, full of local minima choices, suboptimal in many ways.

And this part felt like a "bitter lesson" anti-pattern:

> Avoid any RAG that will show only part of the code / context to the LLM. This destroys LLMs performance. You must be in control of what the LLM can see when providing a reply.

Ultimately I think cli agents like claude-code and gemini-cli and aider will be controlling the context dynamically, and the human should not be spending premature optimization time on this activity.

If anyone's interested I've got some very exact stats on prompts and accepted solution linked in my LLM proof of concept repo: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 23:43:18+00:00
Adding up all of the wealth in a small region and then calculating wealth inequality against a small number of households makes for some triggering headlines, but it’s not a very useful metric for anything in the real world.

A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.

A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
by leephillips | 2025-07-21 23:43:34+00:00
Gmail is a toy, not a real email user agent.¹ You might be happier with Mutt, which is powerful, flexible, and fast. But probably the most efficient way to accomplish what you want is to use a tool like grepmail (assuming Google provides a way to export your mail into an mbox file or something).

[1]https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
by tyzoid | 2025-07-21 23:43:41+00:00
Upper-end estimates for typical web traffic CPC/CPM rates are around 10¢ per click and 0.5¢ per impression. I never click on ads, but let's hypothesize that with very-well targeted ads 5% of people click through. That ends up at around an estimated 1¢ per page view. Even at 5x that rate, I'd be able to read 1000 articles ($5 USD) before even approaching the $6 USD/mo rate I think is reasonable.

That's over 30 articles per day, again at a 5x rate than advertising will return. Will there users that read vastly more than that? Sure. But there's also many readers that will under-utilize the service too.

Just take a look at how YouTube Premium is doing, many creators report that their premium revenue vastly outpaces ad-supported viewers on a per-view basis.

If the revenue doesn't make sense, then you could supplement the revenue with ads for users who exceed a soft cap, or have tiered subscriptions. Something like a basic (1k articles per month)ad-supported subscription for $4, basic ad-free for $6, and unlimited ad-free for $10.
by sterlind | 2025-07-21 23:43:48+00:00
I still don't get billionaire populism. like just fundamentally, I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people.

there are weak spots, though. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for murdering a CEO, with a lot of support across the political spectrum. likewise, the Epstein files getting suppressed seemed to agitate just about everyone. those fault lines weren't on the woke/anti-woke axis, they were on an elite/common axis. they were also harder to safely polarize the public on.
by dgunay | 2025-07-21 23:45:34+00:00
I saw an AI generated video the other day of security camera footage of a group of people attempting to rob a store, then running away after the owner shoots at them with a gun. The graininess and low framerate of the video made it a lot harder to tell that it was AI generated than the usual shiny, high res, oddly smooth AI look. There were only very subtle tells - non-reaction of bystanders in the background, and a physics mistake that was easy to miss in the commotion.

We're very close to nearly every video on the internet being worthless as a form of proof. This bothers me a lot more than text generation because typically video is admissible as evidence in the court of law, and especially in the court of public opinion.
by a_bonobo | 2025-07-21 23:45:45+00:00
Three massive differences between DNA and any other 'private data'.

Once DNA has flown the coop, you won't get a new set of SNPs. That's it, it's a 'complete' picture of your SNPs (not your genome, yes, but SNPs are enough for many use-cases like ancestry estimation). Your private browsing data, however, is messy, ever-changing, has huge holes, changes over devices, and you can take active steps against leaking it (including even fuzzing it - you can't fuzz your SNPs!). Your SNPs are written in stone.

Second, you don't have to leak your DNA for the data to be out there, a distant cousin is enough to implicate you. You can do nothing at all and still get scooped up. (see the arrest of the Golden State Killer) My cousin's browsing history, on the other hand, says very little about me.

Third, your DNA implies you as part of minorities. Your browsing profile does not. China uses DNA to track minorities [1] and that may come to a government near you, soon. Again, data that may not even be shared by you may send you off to a camp.

[1] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/genomic-surveillance/

P.S.: And no, 'private mode' doesn't help you.
by altairprime | 2025-07-21 23:45:46+00:00
> Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year

Thank you for pointing out this correction and article! TIL.

> from $17.55 an hour to $17.95 come Jan. 1

> In the San Jose metropolitan area, as of earlier this year, [Living Wage Calculator estimates] about $32.87 for a single adult with no children

> Last year, the calculator estimated single adults needed to make $26.20

Elsewhere:

> The [CPI] inflation rate for the United States was 2.7% for the 12 months ending June

So, assuming the article’s figures are valid, it looks like San Jose’s minimum wage increased this year by around -1.5% (inflation-adjusted) or by around -20% (Living Wage adjusted), depending on which basis you use. If only San Jose had misread the inflation chart and mistakenly issued a one-month inflation increase rather than a one-year. Sigh.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-21 23:46:06+00:00
> Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.

It’s almost certainly, in the case of Amazon, data centers and fulfillment centers and trucks and planes and heavy equipment.

Unfortunately, you are probably viewed as a liquid asset by your management.
by JohnMakin | 2025-07-21 23:46:12+00:00
I think the comment you are replying to is pointing out the terrible ramifications of just taking a random sysadmin team and expecting them to work in a full blown devops role. I too have seen similar situations play out, and in slight reverse - in their scenario the devops guys were calling all of the shots, ive also seen (and have lived) the opposite where devs call any and every shot on devops stuff and the devops team is treated as little more than glorified IT tech support but for devs (understandable how a business could come to a conclusion about why that makes sense, given how they perceive the sys admin -> devops progression). This sounds like it’s what you may want but it has its own sorts of problems - devs dont always know the right thing or what to ask for or what not to ask for. Really good devops guys are experts at guiding these conversations collaboratively.

I have known and worked with some really great former sys admins gone devops. I am working on mentoring one right now, but I have to be kind of insulting about it and be like “forget everything you knew before it probably won’t help now” which sucks because sys admins do form pretty decent understanding of OS’s, databases, networking, etc. however, when it comes to the code part and more importantly taking all of these concepts and applying them to reasoning about infrastructure code and complex systems is very hard for most people and you have to take a “im a total newb” mentality a lot of people dont seem easily capable of doing.
by smackeyacky | 2025-07-21 23:47:19+00:00
Valid assessment. The CIO in question did not have a technical background as was far more interested in fostering cliques than good engineering practices. The culture of the place was toxic as a result, it rewarded surveillance and not performance. It promoted fantasy land project managers who ignored reality.

Still, it made me very wary of the idea that devops is separate to development.
by kyrra | 2025-07-21 23:48:01+00:00
Many of the cloud providers give free certs via acme.

https://cloud.google.com/certificate-manager/docs/public-ca-... (EDIT: Google is their own CA, with https://pki.goog/ )

The browsers and security people have been pushing towards shorter certs, not longer ones. Knowing how to rotate a cert every year, if not shorter, helps when your certificate or any of your parent certs are compromised and require an emergency rotation.
by XorNot | 2025-07-21 23:48:13+00:00
You've always been able to do this. Whether its useful to your clients has always been the problem.

In a practical sense you likely wouldn't like the alternatives, because for most people's usage of the internet there's exactly one authority which matters: the local government, and it's legal system - i.e. most of my necessary use of TLS is for ecommerce. Which means the ultimate authority is "are you a trusted business entity in the local jurisdiction?"

Very few people would have any reason to ever expand the definition beyond this, and less would have the knowledge to do so safely even if we provided the interfaces - i.e. no one knows what safety numbers in Signal mean, if I can even get them to use Signal.
by gopalv | 2025-07-21 23:48:18+00:00
This is my absolute favourite uv features and the reason I switched to uv.

I have a bunch of scripts in my git-hooks which have dependencies which I don't want in my main venv.

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script --python 3.13

This single feature meant that I could use the dependencies without making its own venv, but just include "brew install uv" as instructions to the devs.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-21 23:48:56+00:00
Mostly this should be a non-event due to renewal long before expiration? Although huge deal I suppose for services that require issuing new certifications constantly; Let's Encrypt would be major failure mode for them.

As they move to shorter-lifetime certs (6 days now https://letsencrypt.org/2025/01/16/6-day-and-ip-certs/?utm_s...) this puts it in the realm of possibility that an incident could impact long-running services.
by agarsev | 2025-07-21 23:49:09+00:00
Interestingly, one advantage SignWriting may have over IPA is that while you cannot easily represent sounds in a visual medium (thus letters are mostly arbitrary) movement and hand depictions in SW are highly iconic.

Also, just as you can drop many IPA symbols and just get the basic set needed to represent a particular language, I guess you could use "simplified" SW ignoring the fine differences.
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-21 23:49:11+00:00
> I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people.

They say the quiet part out loud and make enemies out of the people their followers already don't like.

One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades, with literal Iron Man cameos, and the other promises to hurt people with blue hair a lot.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-21 23:50:28+00:00
There's a flurry of battery holders that accept 21700 cells, but the power delivery is just too weak IMHO.

From memory, the max output was about 20~30W for the bigger models [0]. For 2 cell types it gives 10W, so barely good enough to slowly charge a smartphone.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/PLCPDM/dp/B0DFPKXQZ1
by tedsanders | 2025-07-21 23:50:43+00:00
Sounds like no one requested that OpenAI wait a week:

>We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did.

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1947024171860476264?s=46

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1947398531259523481?s=46

(I work at OpenAI, but was not part of this work)
by waldopat | 2025-07-21 23:51:08+00:00
This is a great article, but sadly there's just too much cognitive dissonance in the ecosystem for critical thinking and worse it's not rewarded by the algorithms, so articles like this end up making far smaller splashes than the hype cycles.

Almost exactly a year ago, Goldman Sachs produced a report showing the investment in AI is untenable. They showed up with the receipts. It was quite good. They also gave a fare shake to what's working and not working in the space, but most people didn't read it.

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/top-of-mind/gen-ai-too...
by kenshaw | 2025-07-21 23:51:33+00:00
I encountered this while trying to issue a new certificate for a service. As a temporary fix, started using ZeroSSL which conveniently also supports the ACME protocol. While not a big problem, if you have something like `cert-manager` being used on Kubernetes, then it requires quite a bit of reconfiguration, and you may spend a couple hours trying to figure out why a certificate hasn't been issued yet.

That said, I'm unbelievably grateful for the great product (and work!) LetsEncrypt has provided for free. Hope they're able to get their infrastructure back up soon.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-21 23:51:43+00:00
> if correct does mean overall fit-to-purpose the way you are suggesting here, then by gosh my points stands and no code generated by AI is correct

This is patently false per my experience generating code with LLMs. It was not a lot; it changed one line to update a global variable to a new value per my request. It was exactly the “correct” change per the stated instructions. (Okay, not exactly because it added an extra new line that wasn’t there and which I didn’t want.)

It is certainly a fallacy to say that “no code generated by an AI is correct”. Unless you are making a point about the semantics of what is making the code “correct” (as in, is it the human reviewer or AI generator?), my point is that, in theory, the human reviews the code and submits changes for further review. The code was still generated by an AI and it can still be precisely “correct” for a given intended change.

It is understandable that you misunderstood my meaning because I was rather unclear about it (though “correct” is still the closest word I can think of to mean what I mean). However, it’s a bit wild that you say you do understand that meaning before turning around to say that it actually supports your point with a vague claim of a “variety of factors”. I actually get the feeling, based on this response, that your argument is effectively refuted by the point I raised. I’m willing to keep an open mind if you’d like to show me that I’m wrong; maybe I’m just missing something.