MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t_mann | 2025-08-17 22:04:16+00:00
There's nothing rigged about loans being made for something that can't be repossessed and without collateral, there's a whole segment of the lending market for that (consumer lending, eg people take out loans to go on vacation). So absolutely nothing rigged about that. And those loans can still be discharged in bankruptcy. There's a government guarantee, but that's at least as much an advantage for the lender as for the borrower. The relatively low interest rate is a result of that, the loans aren't high risk for the underwriters. Government guarantees aren't unique to student loans either btw. The only thing that's really unique is that the loan can't be discharged, and that is very much a disadvantage for the borrower. So student loans are rigged against the students. No bank would want to make those loans under normal circumstances, so the government has rigged the game in their favor to entice them into the market.
by time0ut | 2025-08-17 22:06:11+00:00
It hurt to read this. I have seen all of this and more.

- Teams that produce negative output for years with no consequence - Six figure monthly AWS bills on unused resources - Technical people who can't use a computer - Constant re-orgs and turn over

Wait until this guy experiences the wrath of big consultants...

It is hell, but it pays. I get my fulfillment building my own things outside of work and dream of the day I can escape.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-17 22:06:54+00:00
Good summary of the theory, but the weird thing is that every time I’ve rewritten code to use async the total throughout went down by about 10%… which is what I estimate is the overheads introduced by the compiler-generated async state machinery.

I’m yet to see a convincing set of A/B comparisons from a modern language. My experiences don’t line up with the conventional wisdom!
by carlnewton | 2025-08-17 22:07:14+00:00
I was looking into a syntax error. It seemed to be taking issue with a line that looked fine to my eye. Copying and pasting the line resulted in the error, but manually typing it didn't. I started pasting fragments of the line about to find out what it took issue with and it was just a function name. Something like getResults. While I sat there scratching my head, I mindlessly tapped the left and right arrows on my keyboard over the characters and noticed that I'd have to press twice to get between two of the characters. This was my introduction to the zero-width space.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-08-17 22:07:46+00:00
Everything other than the isHuman part is absolutely detectable. It's just a matter of building a system for it.

The ability to detect isHuman just seems to be on chopping block as far as I can tell. There is little to no barrier remaining today to prevent people from leveraging AI to get around this entire problem. There's a few outlier solutions that work for now, but AI does two things really well given time: solving classification and regression problems.

What can still be done is maintaining short lived replication logs and pattern analysis in this space. There is no reason that a player's actions can't be logged, analyzed, and responded to. It doesn't even need to be real time, it can just be latent. The server doesn't need to rely on reported timestamps for the analysis part, because the server can use it's own timestamping upon arrival to at least see how far apart the order of operations occur.

I know it's not an easy problem space to be in, I don't envy it, but I can't agree with the sentiment that it's impossible knowing how these systems are already designed in larger engines.
by fhd2 | 2025-08-17 22:08:34+00:00
I've thought about this quite a bit, and my conclusion is that the ultimate missing component here is trust. I don't trust star reviews, they can be bought, and platforms don't care about that too much as long as they're making good money.

I trust three things: Recommendations from competent acquaintances, actually good review sites, and brands I've been happy with in the past.

My acquaintances and the review sites I frequent are pretty niche. If they weren't so niche, they'd probably inevitably become corrupted and promote the offering of whoever pays the most. I think it would be amazing if this could be scaled without the corruption, but I don't know how.

That leaves the brand recognition as the one thing that scales. And that mostly happens through marketing. You hear about something and eventually build enough trust to invest, and if the offering is good, you found a good supplier and they found a potentially loyal customer. I think that mechanic isn't so bad, though far from ideal.
by jakelsaunders94 | 2025-08-17 22:09:22+00:00
Hey, thanks! These are really cool bits of inspiration.

> but the Radio shack kit never really explained why anything worked the way it did...

This has been my experience also. We recently built a solar powered toy with my nephews and when we got to the end they asked 'so how does it work?' which hit the point home for me.

Do you have any ideas on how to create engaging content for the app around this? We've got so far: - Mini articles on each component (with accompanying video). - Mini quizzes to embed learning.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-17 22:09:52+00:00
Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage.

Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really seem only to lead to more of the things they say are bad. In this list we have:

> There are actual opportunities for career development.

Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?

> It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people.

Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-17 22:11:09+00:00
> If you can only sell at 1 price point

What was unclear about "the proposed law wouldn't make multiple prices illegal"

As for what would happen in a competitive market with everyone acting in their best interest, I'm not sure what exactly would happen. But they're allowed to have multiple prices. It's not the prices causing the problems. And there are other ways to distinguish products that aren't artificial limits.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-17 22:13:07+00:00
I find it quite personally impactful that I've never had to bend the knee to a king. Without the ability of certain historical figures to keep secrets from their king, I think things would be quite different in that regard.

If most people can reason about the current historical moment as it relates to policy decisions, well I guess that's an equally dangerous sort of problem.
by time0ut | 2025-08-17 22:13:15+00:00
If it is a higher up, someone I am actively working with, or someone I know well, then I take the "quick call". Otherwise, I push back and ask them to write out their question somehow.

This ends up a few outcomes, usually positive:

- They give up (pretty common) - Writing it down helps them to answer the question themselves - I can directly answer with a response or link to the relevant docs - We have an actual agenda for the meeting they want to have
by thatbrownguy | 2025-08-17 22:13:34+00:00
Most of us aren’t short on AI tools. We’re short on time to use them well.

This week’s Beyond the Metrics dives into a real question I keep hearing from operators: “Where does AI belong in our workflow?”

Because while the headlines talk about GPT transforming almost everything, most CRE teams are still buried in PDFs, Slack threads, and pricing decks built by hand.

We explore some of the real-world use cases where AI is already saving time, and how it’s helping teams refocus on the work that actually moves the needle. If your team’s testing AI in leasing or investment, let me know what’s working (or what isn’t). Always curious how smart operators are actually using these tools on the ground.
by GistNoesis | 2025-08-17 22:13:42+00:00
The way that really made me understand gradients and derivative was when visualizing them as Arrow Maps. I even made a small tool https://github.com/GistNoesis/VisualizeGradient . This visualization helps understand optimization algorithm.

Jacobians can be understood as a collection of gradients when considering each coordinates of the output independently.

My mental picture for Hessian is to associate each point with the shape of a parabola (or saddle), which best match the function locally. It's easy to visualize once you realize it's the shape of what you see when you zoom-in on the point. (Technically this mental picture is more of a hessian + gradient tangent plane simultaneously multivariate Taylor expansion but I find them hard to mentally separate the slope from the curvature).
by k310 | 2025-08-17 22:13:45+00:00
Bookmarking. I grew up when those kits were science fiction from the future. Long story short, years after dinky circuits, and train-transformer power supplies, I started building microcomputers and built a career from that "hobby". I never took an electronics or computer course in my life. It's a blast.

STEM before there was STEM. :-)

I had a plan to work with kids after school to collect data in the field and analyze it on computers with open source software, and give them a CD/DVD to take home (it was that long ago) and give them access from home. Pride of ownership. "This is my work".

I am interested in how this can be implemented. Many kids aren't self-teachers, and will need some and they will need some guidance, i.e. proof and reinforcement, especially that "how to solder" part, if it comes up.
Ask HN: What is the easiest way to paywall native software?
by prhn | 2025-08-17 22:13:56+00:00
I'm building what amounts to a Windows DLL. It will be loaded as a windows shell extension. It does not talk to a server. It's all native.

What is the easiest way to paywall this? I've seen services like keygen.sh, but the licensing fees are quite high.

I don't want to build, deploy, and maintain a server just to manage serial numbers and perform license authentication.

What are y'all using?
by JoshPurtell | 2025-08-17 22:14:32+00:00
RL is not about delayed reward. Multi-armed bandit problems have no credit assignment component, but are often the first RL problem taught.

In its most general, RL is about learning a policy (state -> action mapping). Which often requires inferring value, etc.

But copying a strong reference policy ... is still learning a policy. Whether by SFT or not
by mikewarot | 2025-08-17 22:15:35+00:00
A CNC engraving machine, fully assembled, new in box, $200, about 5 years ago at MicroCenter. It kinda worked, but the work area was really small 16 x 10 cm, and the motor left a lot to be desired.

The state of the art back then sucked.... now I'm pondering something a bit better, like the Carvera Air.

Before that, Turbo Pascal for $49 was amazing.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-08-17 22:15:49+00:00
Part of this is driven by people engaged in repetitive feedback loops. The links offer a kind of rhythm and the responses usually follow a recognizable pattern.

The funny thing about this here audience is that it is made up of the kinds of folks you would see in all those cringey OpenAI videos. I.e. the sort of person who can do this whole technical criticism all day long but wouldn't be able to identify the correct emotional response if it hit them over the head. And that's what we're all here for - to talk shop.

Thing is - we don't actually influence others' thinking with the right emotional language just by leaving an entry behind on HN. We're not engaging in "amigdala-hijacking" to "shut down criticism" when we respond to a comment. There is a bunch of repetitive online cliché's in play here, but it would be a stretch to say that there are these amigdala-hijackers. Intentionally steering the thread and redefining what negativity is.
by schoen | 2025-08-17 22:17:08+00:00
A great and inspiring example is the SOPA/PIPA thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Opposit...

Now, there are other less inspiring examples (e.g. SESTA/FOSTA)! and this didn't somehow form a durable political consensus (or an entrenched legal principle), but people looking at this issue in advance would have thought, and did think, that obviously this legislation would pass. And then it didn't.
by manquer | 2025-08-17 22:17:22+00:00
For a company also running a hosting service like GCP? nothing.

They already have plenty of unused compute /older hardware / CDN POPs, performant distributed data store and everything else possibly needed .

It would be cheaper than the free credits they giveaway just one startup to be on GCP.

I don’t think infra costs are a factor in a decision like this .
by duckmysick | 2025-08-17 22:18:25+00:00
> If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.

Not necessarily. First, you somehow need to reach the initial batch of customers - whether by free samples or talking to power users, you're already engaging in marketing. Then, even when they like your product, they have no obligation to do the advertising for you, for free.

And it's possible the company folds before the product reaches the critical mass to rely just on word-of-mouth.
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-17 22:18:49+00:00
No, robust healthcare is cheaper than the US system.

Here in Sweden we had this even back in the day when we spent 5% of GDP on defence, mostly materiel, and upon that had mandatory military service.

The US healthcare system is more expensive than a Swedish-style healthcare system. Another fun fact: our university education is cheaper per head than our high school education.

I think the education of physicians is maybe 1.5x as expensive as high school education, but that's an unusually expensive program.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-17 22:19:36+00:00
Unsure what you're familiar with but California does indeed have an oil industry, although it's much smaller than other states known for oil production like Texas and Alaska.

We also have a governor fueled by Getty (oil) money. The people he's appointed to oversee the electric utilities have rubber stamped rate hikes to the point where even heat pumps barely make financial sense because natural gas is so much cheaper (well under $2.50/therm).

https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-17 22:19:36+00:00
It’s relevant because every single time the American green energy transition is brought up, people like you make bad-faith attempts to derail the conversation by going “it doesn’t matter what we do because China will still make tons of carbon”, and this information is demonstrating that’s not true. China is actually making considerable progress in decarbonization, and it’s us— and only us— who are the laggards.
by commandar | 2025-08-17 22:19:48+00:00
>Pricing/usage will be very simple - a fixed subscription and we will no longer know the tokenomics because the provider will have greatly abstracted and optimized the cost per token, favoring a model that they can optimize margin against a fixed revenue floor.

Personally, I think it's far more likely that a year from now either SotA models will have shifted elsewhere or Anthropic will have changed their pricing model to something less favorable than the current MAX plans. Either of those scenarios could suddenly result in the current Claude subscription models either not existing or no longer being the screaming deal they are now. I think it's exceedingly unlikely we see any major provider go to an unmetered business model any time soon.

And if you've built your entire workflow around tooling specific to Anthropic's services, suddenly you have an even bigger problem than just switching to a more cost effective provider. That's one of the bigger reasons I'm very skeptical of these wrappers around CC generally.

Even Claude Code itself isn't doing anything that couldn't and hasn't been done by other tools other than being tied to a really cheap way to use Claude.
by spookie | 2025-08-17 22:21:03+00:00
No, the meshes involved are in the same ballpark as children's drawings for 2D art.

I'm sure the most difficult part here is just understanding blender UI. Clearly more difficult than picking up a pencil. But, a tutorial video should suffice.

For the chair example you pick a face on the default cube and the use the extrude tool on the left. Now you have a base.

Add 4 more cubes, and do the same. Now you have legs.

Then boolean them.

For the hat? Use a sphere, go to the sculpt tab and go ham.

There are way better ways to do this, of course. But really, there is not such a high degree of skill involved here, nor that being just a little more patient (one more day of trying) is that much to ask.
by or_am_i | 2025-08-17 22:21:23+00:00
It sucks when your communication preferences are overridden! To be fair though, many valid reasons to prefer a quick call over a message (a potentially infinite sequence of messages, really). Even on the receiving end of a request: perhaps I want to poke around the context behind their non-urgent ask, like what they are _actually_ trying to achieve, why not do X instead etc. -- often easier to call and solve all the follow-up questions interactively on the spot.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-08-17 22:21:37+00:00
This is a nifty little project. If I wasn't already neck deep in blocknote adoption in a small experiment I'm doing, I'd be taking this for a spin.

I noticed on the site the really cool animation you got has a 1px solid border on one of the overlays in firefox. Figure you might care since it's clearly supposed to be flashy.
by Trasmatta | 2025-08-17 22:21:51+00:00
Sometimes I consider optimizing for money, and getting a much higher paying job at $ENTERPRISE, then peacing out once I have enough saved for an extended sabbatical. But just the thought of going through the interviewing hazing ritual takes the wind out of my sails immediately.

I'm currently at $MIDSIZENOLONGERSTARTUP, which incidentally has its own slew of insane and draining things that are breaking me in its own way.
by bondarchuk | 2025-08-17 22:21:56+00:00
I think what BoiledCabbage is pointing out is that the fact that it's a next-token-predictor is used as an argument for the thesis that LLMs are not intelligent, and that this is wrong, since being a next-token-predictor is compatible with being intelligent. When mikert89 says "thinking machines have been invented", dgfitz in response strongly implies that for a for thinking machines to exist, they must become "more than a statistical token predictor". Regardless of whether or not thinking machines currently exist, dgfitz argument is wrong and BoiledCabbage is right to point that out.
by tombert | 2025-08-17 22:22:18+00:00
I don't think it would even cost me very much to host all these links on a GCP or AWS thing, I don't think more than a couple hundred dollars a year.

Obviously raw server costs aren't the only costs associated with something like this, you'd still need to pay software people to keep it on life support, but considering how simple URL shorteners are to implement, I still don't think it would be that expensive.

ETA:

I should point out, even something kind of half-assed could be built with Cloud Functions and BigTable really easily; this wouldn't win any kind of contests for low latency, but it would be exceedingly simple code and have sufficient uptime guarantees and would be much less likely to piss off the community.

If I had any idea how to reach out to higher-ups at Google I would offer to contract and build it myself, but that's certainly not necessary, they have thousands of developers, most of which could write this themselves in an afternoon.
by jakelsaunders94 | 2025-08-17 22:22:42+00:00
Thanks for the bookmark!

> I never took an electronics or computer course in my life.

Same! One of my favourite things about these fields is that you can take the time and learn everything you need to know just by looking at the internet.

> I had a plan to work with kids after school to collect data in the field and analyze it on computers with open source software, and give them a CD/DVD to take home (it was that long ago) and give them access from home. Pride of ownership. "This is my work".

This sounds really interesting. Why did it not work out? I think pride of ownership is an important aspect of this so keen to take any learnings.

> Many kids aren't self-teachers Totally agree, the aim here is to get away from 'looking at random blogs for 4 hours' to building your first project. Then introduce them to trawling the internet for arcan knowledge slowly ;)
by tzs | 2025-08-17 22:22:45+00:00
The most important thing is why they stopped:

> The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump who has described herself as “a proud Islamophobe”.

> In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, Loomer had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with false claims that their shouts of joy were “jihadi chants” and that they were “doing the HAMAS terror whistle”.

...

> After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone”, Loomer demanded to know “who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone”.

> “Is Rubio even aware of this?” Loomer wrote, in reference to the secretary of state who was at the time in Alaska meeting Vladimir Putin.

> “Why would anyone at the State Department give visas to individuals who live in Gaza, which is run by HAMAS?” Loomer wrote, before falsely stating that “95% of GAZANS voted for HAMAS.”

(The articles notes that in fact Hamas got 44% of the votes, not 95%, and only won 2 of the 5 districts, and that the last election in Gaza was in 2006).
by qalmakka | 2025-08-17 22:23:16+00:00
I don't understand the point of "fake meat" burgers. Like, there are so many good recipes and ingredients out there that don't try to mimic meat and are still good and tasty. Look at Indian food, for instance. They sure found a way to make pulses and other humble ingredients tasty and delicious. Or the many Mediterranean dishes that just happen to be vegan or vegetarian, but are meatless because they simply were good enough like that.

I think fake meat wasn't really about "getting people to eat less meat", it was based on the expectation that the average person only wants to eat the same exact thing they ever did without ever widening their culinary horizons. The only problem is, that a person that's open enough to try fake meat is probably open minded enough to try new things in general, including foods that aren't served between two slices of bread.

The people that stubbornly refuse to vary their diets often won't try new stuff anyway