MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-15 16:19:27+00:00
Is it that they truly don’t believe it or they don’t want more supply (since that changes their quality of life, neighborhoods, traffic, etc) but still do want lower prices in other ways (like by price caps or other things).

One legitimate reason to not think supply reduces prices is because of big financial companies buying up lots of houses and having effectively free rein to price how they want. It removes the competitive piece. In many areas the new houses are built by a few large home builders doing a few large developments, and the new apartments are owned by a few large corporate owners. That can slow down prices reaching their market value.
by kalleboo | 2025-08-15 16:20:02+00:00
I'm aware of the post-COVID vaccine hesitancy (this is definitely not limited to the US) but the vaccine the CDC is talking about was discontinued "citing insufficient consumer demand" in 2002, over 2 decades ago.

So is GP just vaguely quipping about the cancellation of development of new vaccines? "Oh wait" makes it sound like we already had a vaccine for Lyme disease that is just not being used.

edit: and now this comment I'm replying to has gone gray. I'd love to see some commentary instead of just downvotes
by superkuh | 2025-08-15 16:20:06+00:00
It doesn't have to be text only. An html only webpage has all the same benefits. The real issue everyone has a problem with is javascript applications. The images and even multi-media in a static webpage made of html on HTTP/1.1 are not really the problem. Geocities sites had plenty of images and they were just as accessible as a 'text only' page/
by getnormality | 2025-08-15 16:20:11+00:00
I'm frustrated and anxious about all this stuff too. Sometimes it feels out of control.

I think it is worth noting we tend to assume bigger negative consequences of behavior when that behavior is perceived as a moral violation [1].

A lot of people are frustrated that humanity is doing the "wrong" thing on climate change. I think that leads us to feel like some apocalypse must be imminent, almost like we are due for a karmic punishment from the desecrated and offended Earth.

It's scary that the planet is warming rapidly, especially with the consequences of that remaining largely unknown. But I think there's still plenty of hope that the 21st century will be at least relatively good for humanity.

I don't want to tell anyone how to feel. We are in a tough situation. If you are panicking and feel like the end is nigh, I think it's good to give yourself permission to calm down. We'll need calm to make it through, especially at the unfortunate times when we just have to wait it out because there's no immediate practical way to make things better.

[1] https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/9/1/74793/196122...
by jonahx | 2025-08-15 16:20:42+00:00
You could say that all words are abstractions, and therefore my statement is false because almost all teaching uses words... obviously this is not what I meant. Some interpretive generosity about where to draw the lines between what counts as abstraction or concretion in a particular context is required.

With that said, I actually think you could teach someone (say, who didn't speak your language) how to use a film camera merely by demonstration. It would take longer than if you could use words, but would be doable.

And I would argue that this kind of operational ability (with no explicit theory) is usually where the bulk of the actual learning goes on, and is usually what we mean when we talk about competence. Sometimes it's shocking the theory that really talented people don't have in a domain... I'm thinking of things like poker, competitive programming, even competitive mathematics. Obviously such people have some sort of theory, but it may be largely implicit, learned almost entirely by doing, and different-looking from the accepted or academic theories of that domain.
by fidotron | 2025-08-15 16:20:58+00:00
> Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.

They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.

i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.
by spwa4 | 2025-08-15 16:21:21+00:00
Which means 90% of people who committed extremely serious crimes in service of the Nazis, serious enough to warrant the death penalty, were gradually let out of prison in the years after that. Of the people not convicted to death, 100% were "forgiven". Not really, but read on.

Most people convicted to death (AND Robert Schuman, who was convicted, but later founded the EU) were guilty of helping the Nazis deport and massacre people, and not one or two, hundreds at least. Tens of thousands, some.

And the reason for releasing most of them is even worse, if you disregard that half managed to escape. The reason is that the resistance (and remaining Nazis, by the way, who in some places killed literally everyone they could get their hands on in retreat) carried out their own executions in French towns, villages and cities. Without courts, or judgement. Needless to say, pretty much everyone in government was guilty and more and more were getting executed.

So a "clean slate" was declared, to prevent the country falling apart entirely, and these people were let go. Not just in France. Spain. Italy. Belgium. Luxembourg. The Netherlands. In countries that were Nazi-leaning (like the Netherlands, Austria or Italy) some government departments (think health, youth, justice and education departments) literally have archives of their own cooperation with the holocaust.

Please note that it is now known that quite a few victims of both the courts and the extrajudicial killings were convicted as Nazi collaborators ... BY Nazi collaborators who remained in government and wanted revenge.

Needless to say, there was a wave of murders around the time of every release, with suspiciously little effort going to finding the perpetrators.
by happymellon | 2025-08-15 16:21:31+00:00
Go to shows and buy merch.

Ah wait, that's the other set of streaming services that also don't pass on the profits to creators...

The problem here is that distribution companies have always been a wedge between creators and customers. There have been attempts to provide better ways. I subscribed to eMusic until Sony came along, raised the rates and cut out the indie bands.

YouTube was great for independent creators until Google took it over and slowly squeezed the life out of it. Now it's a janky system that's milking creators as hard as possible.

Hopefully we will get a new system that will work for creators until they are crushed by the system.
by kube-system | 2025-08-15 16:21:35+00:00
Colloquially you can see this in sentiments such as:

"All these developers are building is just expensive new luxury apartments"

And as the study mentions:

> To the extent that ordinary people form loose mental associations between “housing development” and “housing affordability,” they may well associate more development with higher prices rather than greater affordability. New housing, being new, tends to be more expensive than existing, depreciated housing.

It is just a perception bias thing. You don't really "see" everything around you aging because it happens slowly.
by idontwantthis | 2025-08-15 16:21:43+00:00
You hear this shit all the time from politicians and activists. Somehow high density housing is built for corporate greed and won’t lower prices. It’s self contradictory at it’s base level but is driving the narrative. It’s maddening.

Edit: Here I am getting downvoted by people who don’t have the bravery to confront their own contradictions and realize that their own beliefs are being manipulated to ruin their own lives.
by TrueDuality | 2025-08-15 16:21:52+00:00
We're currently running ~30 Llama 3.1 models each with a different fine-tuned LoRa layer for their specific tasks. There was some initial pain as we refined the prompts but have been stable and happy for a while.

Since the Qwen3 0.6B model came out we've been training those. We can't quite compare apples-to-apples, we have a better deeper training data-set from pathological cases and exceptional cases that came out of our production environment. Those right now are looking like they're about at parity with our existing stack for quality and quite a bit faster.

I'm going to try and run through one of our training regimen with this model and see how it compares. Not quite running models this small yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if we could.
by xdennis | 2025-08-15 16:22:37+00:00
> You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).

It's amazing that after so many failures people are still preaching communism.

You'd have a leg to stand on if you could produce a single communist society which worked for the working class instead of the communist elites.
by bambax | 2025-08-15 16:22:43+00:00
This whole thread shows many people don't mind spending time building their own content library and making their own little Netflix on their NAS. I think this is just the beginning.

I have been a happy user of JellyFin for a couple of years. Then when Spotify raised its prices again I realized I mostly listen to the same songs, most if not all I still own the CDs.

So with Navidrome and a couple of Python scripts to transform playlists, I made my own little home Spotify as well (Homify? Hopify?)

Works perfectly. No fees. No ads. No stupid email at the end of the year bragging about all the data Spotify collects and stores about me. Perfect.
by ramshanker | 2025-08-15 16:22:45+00:00
Requiring an annual patent maintenance tax proportional to pre-declared fair licensing fee will ensure fairness for everyone. Including foreign patents. So whichever jurisdiction, patent holders want to retain the rights, can pay the tax annually. We can even come up with a public domain threshold as well. If 1000 people / company paid your pre-declared licensing fee, it becomes public domain. And no more per device license fee. 1 Patent, 1 Fee, 1 Annual Tax.

Same for copyrights.
by danudey | 2025-08-15 16:22:46+00:00
Most websites use ad networks, and typically have no idea which ads are being shown on their sites unless users complain about something egregious; as such, it tends to be the case that telling an ad network "here's a rectangle for you to show something" doesn't really affect a site's journalistic integrity.

If a site that reviews televisions was contracting directly with Sony to show ads then yes, that's definitely an issue, but if they're telling an ad network to pick some ads then (typically!) that's sufficiently arm's-length.

Meanwhile, affiliate links can be much more directly bad; use offer code SCAMTOBER for 25% off this thing that I can assure you I've tried and tested and given a fair review, and which will definitely not turn out to have been a scam. Click here to purchase this laptop that I was sent for free and rated 9/10 and I'll get a 5% cut of whatever you buy.

I guess this is where affiliate programs through retailers are slightly more trustworthy; if anything I buy from your Best Buy link gets you a 5% commission then it doesn't really matter all that much which laptop you recommend because you're getting a cut no matter what I buy. As soon as Alienware offers you a 10% commission on that $3500 laptop, though, things get dicey.
by MBCook | 2025-08-15 16:22:54+00:00
I can sort of understand that.

They’ve been building houses in my area non-stop since 2010 or so. Prices haven’t gone down.

There are other factors than supply. But most of the new supply is large houses. If you don’t want 4+ bedrooms and a 2000+ sq. ft. house the supply hasn’t changed much at all.
by dkenyser | 2025-08-15 16:22:55+00:00
I had pretty much the exact same experience even with a childhood diagnosis and extensive records indicating I only responded well to stimulant-based medication.

The whole process became so burdensome I just gave up and now I self medicate with Nicotine pouches.

Not proud of it and probably not the best alternative but it helps me focus and keeps me out of the stress of the constant back and forth that healthcare providers put you through.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-15 16:23:09+00:00
>In many areas the new houses are built by a few large home builders doing a few large developments, and the new apartments are owned by a few large corporate owners. That can slow down prices reaching their market value.

Because all the same voters (demographically, if not also frequently literally the same individuals) voted for a bunch of red tape that's only passable for the big vertically integrated businesses and even then it's only profitable when they're doing cookie cutter single family on .25ac or 5 over one apartments.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-15 16:23:11+00:00
Another user made the point: maybe you care about 3D printERS. The vast majority of people care about the printed end result, and buying more printers in the case of massive failure (which is already rare) makes more sense. If you're 3D printing for fun at home, a Bambu will basically never break.

Spending 3 days tracking down the parts for a Prusa, taking it apart, fixing it, realising some settings have gone to shit, fixing it? I hope you have a lot of time to burn in your personal and business life :)
by tolmasky | 2025-08-15 16:23:25+00:00
You listed two violations: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

I can understand the first one, but the second I think is debatable. RFK Jr.'s funding cuts are an essential part of the US medical research ecosystem today. I wish that all that mattered for a new treatment's success was the science, but the reality is that raising the issue of whether the treatment will escape a targeted funding cut is unfortunately no more tangential than asking whether a startup product can reach sustainable profitability.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-15 16:23:32+00:00
I think this is bad, but I didn't seen any reference to the opposite. How many people pretend to hold more right wing views than they actually do. Self-censorship is the nature of society, and it seems like a microscopically brief window of time where this wasn't true, if at all. I would probably argue that self-censorship on economic issues may matter more (How many people would admit they hold socialist / communist views? I would definitely feel worried about it).

So I'm not all that convinced by this argument. I observe in a lot of ways the classical liberal movement has a very narrow perspective on the acceptable range of beliefs; for sure "wokeness" has spread like wildfire, and I have my criticisms, but I don't think the people who care do so because they lament the loss of academic freedom, it's just annoyance at feeling like they lost control of the narrative. PG's recent screed on free speech was reviewed by a whose who of people who have a very narrow set of "acceptable" liberal beliefs.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:23:55+00:00
It’s not that I don’t believe adding supply will reduce prices, rather that adding supply alone won’t reduce prices. As the paper gets into, it’s a combination of supply, and homeowner entrenchment, and government policies barring construction or teardowns, of zoning restrictions, but also of Private Equity acquisitions of housing stock and builders, of artificially manipulating supply to keep prices high and promote higher returns for builders or sellers at the expense of buyers.

The problem is that demand for housing is relatively fixed, in that every human needs a shelter, and every human wants a home. That doesn’t change outside of population statistics: in a vacuum, all things being equal, every human would buy a home.

The issue is that the supply side is so heavily gamed by existing players that the entire market is deliberately engineered for maximum extraction of wealth from new buyers to prop up valuations of existing owners and builder/landlord margins.

Relatedly, this is why I’ve stopped fighting each niche front individually and instead focused on the “nuclear option” of mandating affordable housing as a human right. That would open the floodgates to lawsuits against communities, states, and companies that hoard existing stock and bar newer, denser construction. It would add a sorely needed lever of pain to deter hostile housing practices, by threatening things like rent/price controls or forced divestitures unless the supply problem was meaningfully addressed post-haste.
by vcarrico | 2025-08-15 16:24:04+00:00
I might be mixing the concepts of intelligence and conscience etc, but the human mind is more than language and data; it's also experience. LLMs have all the data and can express anything around that context, but will never experience anything, which is singular for each of us, and it's part of what makes what we call intelligence (?). So they will never replicate the human mind; they can just mimic it.

I heard from Miguel Nicolelis that language is a filter for the human mind, so you can never build a mind from language. I interpreted this like trying to build an orange from its juice.
by f0daf0da | 2025-08-15 16:24:07+00:00
I made an account just to post this as I’ve gone through something similar. Get a formal psychiatric evaluation done out of network by a neurologist who specializes in ADHD. The exam will take a few hours and they will send you a full report and diagnosis. This paperwork will help you a LOT. I’ve used it multiple times when I’ve had difficulties getting care and was well worth the time and money.
by mattmaroon | 2025-08-15 16:24:31+00:00
If arguing about this on Facebook has taught me anything, it is that most people definitely do not believe it. They always make the same argument, which is that new housing stock tends to be high priced homes, so if what we need is low price homes why are we building high priced homes? Anybody who understands economics knows why this argument is wrong, but most people don’t.

Nonetheless, I don’t think this has much to do with the public policy as it stands because the people who make the policy do understand this. So while I think the assertion is correct, people do not believe it, I do not think that is a large factor and why the policies restrict housing.
by sandeepkd | 2025-08-15 16:24:37+00:00
Interesting to see a PR being merged after good 2 years. Thought about the idea of reviewing the changes for self learning, however the number of files involved made me to give up on that idea soon enough. The number of comments (610) gave an impression that the PR must have been reviewed thoroughly, however a close look tells that the comments are mostly about the topic itself, not about the code changes. Unless the code review is managed internally, the PR gives an impression of mostly happy paths.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-15 16:25:01+00:00
I think that what contributes to this view is that new construction always seems to be at the high end of the market. This makes sense, it doesn't cost the builder a lot more to build a $500k house than to build a $250k house, and building two $250k houses will take twice the time and close to twice the costs. So builders/developers are going to build what is most profitable, which is the most expensive houses that they think they can sell in the local market.

What is less obvious is that this still increase housing supply. It's not new affordable housing, but the people moving in to the new expensive houses are leaving their old houses, and the people who buy those are leaving their old houses, so eventually the price drops happen on the older, smaller homes at the bottom end of the market.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-08-15 16:25:03+00:00
This is a great article! My cofounders and I read it when we were first starting our business, and it significantly impacted the decisions we make, usually for the better. But don’t forget to scale at some point!! For example, we’re still doing our own bookkeeping and tax filing. When we started it was simple and it was a “thing that doesn’t scale” which we could still do. But at this point it’s a waste of time. We’re finally outsourcing it, probably a year later than we should have. I think we overindexed on Paul’s advice a bit. Which, to be clear, is still really really good advice, just don’t take it too far.

Edit: business is mydragonskin.com
by n4r9 | 2025-08-15 16:25:09+00:00
> nobody can ever prove good or bad intent

You're certainly happy to throw about assumptions.

> The outcome here was the dam was blocked

It was slowed but not "blocked". The dam exists!

> the taxonomists were wrong

Still in dispute.

> There's no accountability.

Academic reputation is a surprisingly strong form of accountability, and even more so in the 1970's.
by lordnacho | 2025-08-15 16:25:42+00:00
This is right. People ask my how on earth I know what every one of my high school classmates is up to, when we were the last class of the millennium. Along with a number of old teachers and other randoms from years ago.

I just stopped having a filter. When I think of someone, I just fire off a message. The message doesn't have any warnings on it like "oh I know it's been a while" or "you might not remember me". I write to everyone as if we are best buddies who just had lunch last week. People I've known since the age of 4, to people I've known for four days.

If I see someone I know at a wedding, I just go and talk to them about whatever we have in common. Normally someone we know.

I really think it's the guarded, tentative, "you don't have to talk to me" that turns people off. Of course people are free to not talk to me, but I don't lead with that. If you lead with that, people feel awkward, like "is he just being polite?". If you just pretend you are best buddies, people play along and they end up quite comfortable quite quickly.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-08-15 16:25:45+00:00
> One legitimate reason to not think supply reduces prices is because of big financial companies buying up lots of houses and having effectively free rein to price how they want.

Big corporations don't have unlimited money to do this kind of thing.

And in practice, the expensive areas they do it in, are usually very limited in how much new housing goes up, they're still very much supply constrained markets.

If what you're suggesting was really happening, then what you'd expect to see is an area with a relatively high vacancy rate (due to all the new supply), like 8% or even higher, but stubbornly high prices in spite of that. And I can't think of any examples where that happened. Can you?
by 9rx | 2025-08-15 16:25:54+00:00
If you could build houses for free then obviously adding supply would eventually reduce the price.

But I have been looking at the cost to build a home, it costs even more to build than to buy a used one. Who, exactly, is going to be able to afford to buy the new houses while selling their current home at a lower price than it would currently fetch?

Maybe if AI replaces all the software developers they can flood the home construction market in their quest to find new work and push the price of labor down, thus reducing the cost to build a house, but otherwise...
by balfirevic | 2025-08-15 16:26:46+00:00
Which ones do you have in mind? Enclosed "desktop" mills, like Nomad 3 - that I can understand (although that one is pricey, and I can't can't even find what it would cost to get where I live).

Regular mills and lathes would basically turn the room where it's located into a shop, with chips flying everywhere, so you better have a spare room. Noise might also be a problem. Even moving them is a project by itself. Tall ask for a hobbyist.