MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dismalaf | 2025-07-21 15:39:05+00:00
Prices going down doesn't automatically mean building stops, and prices going up doesn't mean building automatically happens...

Whether or not a homebuilder builds homes depends on whether or not there's enough demand at a price point that's profitable. And markets aren't entirely localized, people will move for affordable housing if there's also enough jobs.

So lots of things affect whether or not homes get built: cost of building supplies, cost of land, cost of labour, growth rate of the municipality, demand for the specific unit type, zoning laws (which affect a bunch of the above), etc...

Remember, a house can cost as little as $100k to build, but nowadays costs $500k-$1M+. Price of land is a huge determining factor, cost to hook up utilities (if a new neighborhood, the builder often pays for it), interest rates (the homebuilder incurs a bunch of expenses before homes are sold and whole projects are financed, then it also affects the price buyers will pay), insurance, regulatory costs (the whole permitting process is $$$) etc...
by bredren | 2025-07-21 15:39:06+00:00
Out of curiosity, ~how many lines of C in all is the C you're refactoring?

Reason I ask is I have gotten outstanding results from gemini pro 2.5, which has a very large context.

It already accepts very large individual messages, however if the code base is still too big for a single message, it is possible to send it all in multiple messages and still have the model keep it all in context.

For large, system wide refactors, this can provide planning that claude code can't or won't do efficiently.

Sometimes, I'll have claude code come up with a plan, feed all the related code to gemini, and then provide claude code gemeni's improved plan.

Then after the work is done, have gemeni validate the implementation.

I've looked a bit into automation around this but haven't picked something yet.

If anyone has a solid workflow for this already, I'm all ears.
by bluGill | 2025-07-21 15:39:15+00:00
We need to allow smaller houses such that people can afford to buy them then. Or we need to build apartments of all sizes so people can afford to rent them. The above is not an exclusive or - buying a house is a great choice for some and a terrible choice for others.

Affordable housing used to include a room where you share a bathroom and kitchen with the entire hallway. Affordable housing used to include tiny shacks. Air conditioning used to be something not even the rich had.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-21 15:39:18+00:00
From the article.

> The basic idea behind tokenization: Use blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies to create digital tokens as stand-ins for things like bonds, real estate or even fractional ownership of a piece of art and that can be traded like crypto by virtually anyone, anywhere at any time.

> However, the SEC has struck a cautionary tone when it comes to tokens. Shortly after Robinhood’s announcement, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has been an outspoken crypto supporter, issued a statement saying companies issuing tokenized stock should consider “their disclosure obligations” under federal law.

> “As powerful as blockchain technology is, it does not have magical abilities to transform the nature of the underlying asset,” Peirce said.

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/peirce-stat...

> The SEC’s 2025 rules say crypto tokens are likely securities if they act like investment contracts. This means tokens sold with promises of profits, driven by a central team’s efforts, will be categorized as securities. The SEC’s 2025 guidance outlines specific scenarios in which crypto tokens will likely be classified as securities. These typically involve projects that are still centrally controlled, promote profit expectations, or offer limited utility at the time of sale.

https://cointelegraph.com/explained/secs-2025-guidance-what-...

Schrödinger's tokens?
by stetrain | 2025-07-21 15:39:24+00:00
That is an incentive for some shippers for sure, and it gets pushed down onto the (often overworked) delivery drivers. They have metrics on how many things they should deliver or attempt delivery each day and are sometimes judged harshly on those metrics.

I have multiple times seen an "Out for Delivery" package switch to "Delivered" or "Delivery Attempted" at 10pm, presumably when the driver ended their shift and didn't want to be penalized for the undelivered packages. They usually showed up the following day.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-07-21 15:39:52+00:00
It's actually somewhat the same in cattle. There are beef breeds of cattle for meat and dairy breeds for milk. Dairy breeds tend to be skinnier and don't grow as efficiently, so the bulls don't make good beef steers. There's kind of a specialty market in them for people who think a dairy steer raised and fed over a longer time for meat is better than the beef breeds that have been focused on efficient growth. But some dairy bull calves are just killed. The heifer calves are far more valuable.
by ch4s3 | 2025-07-21 15:40:08+00:00
> On the other hand, if prices come down then the broader economic engine will grow ornery and stagnate

A rather small part of the economy relies on high long term returns on housing. You can build homes and sell them for rather small margins and that's good business. Many types of businesses happily run on profit margins that are single digit percentages.

> Only a small subset of prepared buyers will be able to take advantage of these lower prices before investors snatch most of them up and raise prices again anyway.

In 2024 87% of homes in the US were bought by people who intended to live in them or use them as a second home. If you only want to count primary homes the number is still close to 80%.

> but a symptom of a larger dysfunctional economic engine that simply does not work for the majority.

Factually the majority of US families live in homes they own, about [65% of US families own their homes])https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S) that is not only a majority but nearly 2/3.
by etra0 | 2025-07-21 15:40:11+00:00
I think this comment should be on the top lol.

I mean, I love ffmpeg, I use it a lot and it's fantastic for my needs, but I've found their public persona often misleading and well, this just confirms my bias.

> We made a 100x improvement over incredibly unoptimized C by writing heavily specific cpu instructions that the compiler cannot use because we don't allow it!

2x is still an improvement, but way less outstanding as they want it to publicize it because they used assembly.
by righthand | 2025-07-21 15:40:28+00:00
Nobody agreeing on this stuff is freedom and beauty. If you want a managed OS there are already many options.

You look at Linux as an issue because someone you know can’t do system administration, something Debian almost requires none of. I look at Linux as an opportunity to rip people off their safe OS and introduce them to something that works but allows deep customization when they’re ready.

You’re operating out of fear, I’m operating out of faith. I really don’t care if the user “gets it”. They barely get their mobile device.
by stmw | 2025-07-21 15:40:48+00:00
To use XSLT effectively, you need an intuitive understanding of functional programming, a good grip on low-level HTML5/CSS details, and an engine that can run it quickly and correctly. The first of these is very rare, especially among business programmers. It is about as far away from the "Visual Basic-inspired" design goals of XMLUI as possible. Yes, both involve XML but that's where the similar ends.
by greenhearth | 2025-07-21 15:40:55+00:00
Laws are many things and one of those things is a concern for justice. As far as self-perpetuation of the state, yes this is how a state operates, this is the nature of it. As for "the government," what is it? It's not a monolithic thing that you can just point your finger to. It depends on the nature and character of the citizens and the established customs of the nation, of which laws are a part. If we're talking about ancient Mesopotamia, then this is probably a tyrannical aspect. But there are many types of governments and constitutions. This dismissive attitude for "the government" is really not a practical, and even kind of a juvenile mentality.
by yesfitz | 2025-07-21 15:40:59+00:00
From the article that you're commenting on:

"There are multiple approaches to in-ovo sexing. One of the most prominent approaches uses advanced imaging to detect subtle optical differences between male and female embryos."

"Another widely adopted technique involves taking a small fluid sample from inside the egg to test for sex-specific hormones or genetic markers. Kipster’s eggs, launching later this year, will use a technology of this class employing PCR analysis to detect the sex chromosome, developed by the company Respeggt."
by BoumTAC | 2025-07-21 15:41:42+00:00
you should not ask indie hackers for advice and you should not hang out with them.

If you build a product for marketers, you should hang out with them and ask them for advices, not indie hackers who know nothing about marketing.

If you build a product for bakers, you should hang out with them to understand what they need, not with indie hackers who have never baked anything in their lives.

That sounds logical, but for certain types of products, it is not.

There is no point in talking with indie hackers. It's only useful if you need knowledge about coding skills, which is rarely the case (especially now with AI).
by bredren | 2025-07-21 15:41:47+00:00
FWIW, this has been the way of working with AI products since the beginning. For example, chatgpt has waxed and waned even without model updates due to how the context gearing behind the web interface.

You can see in various subreddits the spikes in complaints--and there is definitely one in week(s) on Claude Code.

I generally take this as a sign of needing to get more skilled at context control and validation. And that by doing so, you'll be in only a better place once the product you're relying returns to baseline or leaps ahead again.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-21 15:42:02+00:00
XSLT is part of the strange story of why production rules, the basis of many "expert systems" and once thought to have a bright future, never became a mainstream technique in computing.

If somebody were really interested in bring XSLT into the 2020 the best bet may be to drop the XML bit and ask questions like: how do I use production rules to transform a POJO (plain ordinary Java object) into another object, how do I use production rules to transform JSON documents, transform XML/JSON/HTML bidirectionally to and from platform objects, etc. Based on XML it is just too easy to get into the weeds like "should this be represented as an attribute or an child element", namespaces, entities and so many details that get in the way of seeing XSLT for what it is.
by buzer | 2025-07-21 15:42:11+00:00
I recently logged into one of my email addresses that I hadn't used in years and discovered quite a few people had used it as their address for multiple things (of course they didn't have access to it so everything was unread). Lots of services do not really bother to validate the email address (there were e.g. Facebook, Instagram & TikTok emails).

One bigger item was that people were sending details regarding an estate & inheritance. This included an attorney office in Finland (to be clear, I'm also originally from Finland). After finding out I sent email to their DPO as this likely qualifies as GDPR security incident as the emails contained things like names, SSNs, addresses & of course details regarding how inheritance was split. I never got an answer so I reported it to Finnish DPA. I got reply from them pretty quickly that they contacted the DPO and that DPO will be in contact with me soon & the case is closed from DPA side. This was 4 months ago, I'm yet to be contacted by them.
by jcastro | 2025-07-21 15:42:25+00:00
Interesting, I don't think I've seen this in the wild (~30 million pulls across ublue) - but I think I've seen this issue mentioned before.

I'll bring it up during the next bootc meeting[1], which are public btw! Thanks for using bazzite!

1: https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc?tab=readme-ov-file#commun...
by spankalee | 2025-07-21 15:42:48+00:00
I think the idea pairing would be with with a very open cloud-app based solution. Something like Sandstorm where you can install your own cloud apps and have them available via the web on all your devices.

I really with Mozilla would get in this game. For most apps for most people, hosted PWAs make the most sense. But right now we're either stuck with local native software or only web apps from closed providers.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-07-21 15:43:04+00:00
I've been touting the chromeOS banner for years. It makes a huge amount of sense to have an OS optimized for the place most people are going to be spending 90% of their time - the browser - without any extra bloat. Then if you need more, just add those features. Gone are the days when you couldn't do certain things on a chromebook as well - assuming you have the hardware to support it, you can do almost anything you can do on a "proper" linux distro that you can on a chromebook, because you can run a full containerized distro and all the apps that come from it. I've got VSCode in my dock and can do web development easier than on a Windows desktop.
by psunavy03 | 2025-07-21 15:43:10+00:00
It's amazing the difference between different areas. I grew up in a single-family home in Ohio. Parents moved to New York when I went to college. I ended up in Puget Sound.

They bought their NY house by selling the Ohio one. Price was roughly equal, maybe a little higher. Now the NY one is double what the OH one is worth, and I couldn't afford to buy my own house today. Conversely, I could pay cash to buy the house I grew up in, despite the lot being 4 times the size of mine.

There's definitely haves and have nots real-estate wise in different parts of the country.
by aurizon | 2025-07-21 15:43:26+00:00
Any buffer vanishes as prices fall = buyers pull back and wait for the dust to settle = a downwards cascade that can consume all equity= underwater, and buyer does not want to bail out a sunken ship. Lenders have recourse to whatever other assets the buyer has(depends on fine print, LLC etc) and some lenders sell at auction right away, some set a reserve below which they rent the home and the banks usually have management departments to manage that, but each case differs.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-21 15:43:27+00:00
The first few Squigglevision shows were notorious for being cheaply hand drawn in their production so they probably got that effect the original way (using a base template and redrawing it by hand a lot without too much concern for continuity/cleaning between frames). I'd imagine in the age of Bob's Burgers (and 15 seasons of such) they are probably using digital drawing tools and emulating it, maybe with filters, when they feel they need it, but also the "squiggle" is nowhere near as pronounced as it was in the Dr. Katz and/or Home Movies days.
by zippergz | 2025-07-21 15:43:32+00:00
I've definitely gotten the sense that the flip side of that is happening - in many cases, items get marked as "shipped" when the label is printed, but often shippers don't hand the package off to the carrier until days later. I can't prove it but sometimes it very much feels like sellers, especially on platforms like etsy and ebay, make sure to print the label immediately and mark the item as shipped so they can claim fast shipping, but then are in no hurry whatsoever to actually get the package in transit. Maybe this is not nefarious and is just a side effect of the way the systems work together, but as a customer it's pretty annoying. For me it's less about how long it takes to get the item and more about feeling mislead on whether it is actually on its way or not.
by encom | 2025-07-21 15:43:55+00:00
Not a huge fan, except in situations mentioned in "When to use calver" from your link. However... I'm sure we can all agree that anything is better than the Mozilla/Google "major versions are now minor" arms race, that are now up to absurd numbers. Except for projects using code names. Is Wonky Wallaby more recent than Halfbaked Hamster? Fuck knows. Debian has been especially annoying with this, since the last three releases were b-words: buster, bullseye, bookworm. I can never remember. Please stop.
by amlib | 2025-07-21 15:43:58+00:00
Can't you say most of these things about Windows or even any other useful desktop OSes?

If you want a computer that does useful things and isn't just a locked down social media consumption machine, you end up with a lot of that baggage you've mentioned. Sure MacOS and Windows fare better (insert trillion dollar companies backing it spiel here...) but they are no smooth ride if you are doing anything more than consuming stuff or using a web browser.
by balamatom | 2025-07-21 15:44:17+00:00
>I know people who if you tried to explain an $X to them, would become visibly uncomfortable and search for any way to change the topic.

Expected behavior. Explanations of complex topics are to be rejected if explainer does not have sufficient authority to make behaver hold-still-and-listen.

I know such folk, too, and this is among the thing about people which annoys me to no end. If a MRI tech tried to explain the shit to one such acquaintance, they would try to change the subject like you say. OTOH, if the doctor in charge tries the same, the listener will instead have to zone out. But zoning out is a more expensive operation, as any zooner knows. (Which is why they hold doctors, lawyers, and other semi-priests in high reverence, up to pushing kids to take up these rather joyless professions to the exclusion of all sense.)

Peeps here equally well-behaved other way round tho. C-f "mal" = 0. Geez I really needed to witness the absolute by-the-book Freudian slip that can be found at 1:55 of one of the probably infinite interview cuts, then have MRI safety explained to me by hacker noosers on their Monday morning.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-21 15:44:19+00:00
Fear of heights is ingrained, fear of snakes is learned. We can definitely do better to educate people on the fear of magnets, I figure it’s not a priority since we’re not going to encounter many MRI machines in the wild.

How difficult would it be to install metal detectors to give an alarm to people who enter. I have had a few MRIs and they did seem too trusting that I properly remembered to remove anything magnetic.
by smelendez | 2025-07-21 15:44:22+00:00
It's mostly only mildly useful for me. But I recently had a bank send me a new debit card as mine was about to expire, and the card never arrived. The bank was under the impression it was delivered a certain day, and I was able to tell them that I have Informed Delivery and as far as I could tell, the USPS never even attempted to deliver the card (or, as it happened, anything else that particular day).

If you are waiting on a particular piece of mail it sometimes can be handy to know it'll be in your box soon instead of repeatedly checking the tracking or double-checking with the sender. If you don't receive mail every day, and your mailbox is at all exposed to the elements, it can remind you to check the box that day.

And if your mail is delivered where other people have access to it—a spouse, kids, roommates, etc.—it can let you know to check in with them if you don't see something that they may have put in an unusual place.
by perihelions | 2025-07-21 15:44:50+00:00
> "This was first reported by Waypoint, which has since pulled its two articles on the subject without explanation. The articles' author, Ana Valens, has alleged that Vice's parent company, Savage Ventures, removed the articles due to concerns over their controversial content rather than any error in the reporting."

"Vice" shut down last year[0]; its brand was recently purchased and is now run by a hedge fund based in Nashville. I think this incident very clearly sums up the difference between what's news journalism, and what's a vapid content farm operated by financebros.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39476074 ("Vice website is shutting down (writing.exchange)"—459 comments)
by klodolph | 2025-07-21 15:45:05+00:00
If you have a Linux system, try this:

find / -name 'perl*' -prune -o -name '*.pl' -print 2>/dev/null

You will probably find a bunch of random scripts in various places. A lot of random system admin stuff got written in Perl, and those stick around for a long time. There is also a ton of miscellaneous software tooling that got written in Perl, like scripts to generate some C code that you compile.

Perl sometimes still gets used because it’s available on systems that don’t have Python.
by mcv | 2025-07-21 15:45:07+00:00
I did a lot of XSLT 20 years ago. I worked for a company making an open source CMS that did everything in XML. Content was XML, obviously, pipelines (using Apache Cocoon) were defined in XML, and used XSLT to transform XML into different XML. We got quite proficient in it. We even used XSLT to generate XSLT. A Coworker figured out how to calculate a square root in XSLT (not for production obviously).

It's fun to work in such a declarative way, although all the XML gets tiring. I learned a ton there, though. XSLT is great for its intended purpose, but maybe the fact that you can also use it for other things is a risk.

XPath is probably the most useful part of it.
by kjellsbells | 2025-07-21 15:45:12+00:00
Curious that after 30 years the idea of a CPAN-like bash repository hasnt taken root. How many personal reimplementations of logging in bash are there by now?

I suppose what is really tripping people up is that bash can show up on all kinds of runtimes, some of which have the external tools one might need (jq, logger, etc) and some of which don't. So then you go searching for a minimum standard that can be expected to be present. Maybe POSIX or gnu coreutils. Reminds me of the shell horrors of the late 1990s where every script had to figure out if sh was really ksh and what variant of UNIX it was running on, and therefore what commands and options were available. I swear this was one of the great things about Perl when it came along, it just worked.

In 2025, I kind of see the attraction of single binaries like Go does. Ship the binary and be done. It is very un-UNIX I suppose (not so much golfing as having the beer cart drive you to the hole) but then again its not 1985 any more.
by chiffre01 | 2025-07-21 15:45:24+00:00
According to the USGS:

Water use per well can be anywhere from about 1.5 million gallons to about 16 million gallons.

I think a Golf course might use a bit more per year, but this is per well and the state of Texas has 279,615 active oil and gas wells. Not sure of all of them are fracking wells or not.
by epistasis | 2025-07-21 15:45:27+00:00
> where the analogous thing would be to create more "nice places to live" with all the desirable attributes like walkability, jobs, public transport, etc. It's a tall order since land and climate are the ultimate scarce resources

We actually ban nice places to live with walkability in the vast majority of the country. Our urban planning in the US been entirely focused on keeping out mixed uses, keeping out dense housing, the things that enable public transport to function at all.

Land and climate are much easier to manage if we were to simple legalize density and mixed uses. We are reaping decades of bad planning for car-centric lives, without planning ahead for future generations and their ability to find a home.
by liveoneggs | 2025-07-21 15:45:55+00:00
{ "timestamp": "2025-07-21 11:31:52", "event": "user-login", ... }, { "event": 7521, "event-type": "error-code-2025" }, { "message": Traceback (most recent call last): File "<python-input-1>", line 6, in lumberjack bright_side_of_life() ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^ File "<python-input-1>", line 10, in bright_side_of_life return t[5] ~^^^ IndexError: tuple index out of range }, { "timestamp": "1753112562", "event": "user-click", ... },