MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arrosenberg | 2025-08-01 00:59:00+00:00
If a small number of landlords continue to control the supply (which I understand to also be part of the premise) then they can charge whatever rate allows them to profit. Housing is pretty inelastic and is a first order priority for most people, so they will pay the maximum they can afford if they have to. At least near me, most of the housing being created is owned by large corporations like the Irvine Company, it’s not individual owned.
by 14 | 2025-08-01 00:59:19+00:00
While at the end of the day I don’t think people should be bailed out, I don’t agree that everyone who over paid is a speculator. Many people are just wanting to own their own home. The market has been crazy for the last 5 years. Many people are just buying to own not to flip it for a huge profit. So when a new home owner buys something and suddenly the value drops $100k and the bank wants the money I do feel slightly sorry for them.

For the person who ownes multiple houses and buys simply to rent and flip a profit well I have very little sympathy for them. They are the true speculators.
by beeflet | 2025-08-01 00:59:24+00:00
Even if you can observe this induced demand locally in a city or two, the net supply is going up.

Globally, demand isn't even fixed. It's proportional to the population size, which we would expect to shrink.

The only way this could work in the opposite direction is that you build enough that it becomes feasible for everyone to live in a few supercities where demand keeps growing due to network effects, and the supply outside of the supercities is useless.
by AngryData | 2025-08-01 01:00:07+00:00
I would imagine refuelings are limited because at some point you are going to need to inspect and potentially replace some of the critical components that have been exposed to hard radiation. Materials that we would think of as stable can degrade in such high radiation environments. Like a large chunk of steel can have its crystal structure disrupted as atoms get displaced by high energy neutron strikes or other fission fragments, changing its material properties and making it weaker or in most cases more brittle. Localized impurities can also be formed by either alloying elements in the metal being displaced the same way, or from transmutation of atoms into other elements from the strong radiation. And along with disrupting the material strength those impurities can cause hot spots in the metal causing more stresses and fatigue and further reducing it's lifespan.

We are actually pretty good at making alloys and materials today that can resist radiation problems better and more predictably these days, but there is still a bit of randomness from manufacturing variables that means you need a pretty large safety margin to prevent problems. They probably would work for a dozen refuelings, but the consequences of a reactor breech are too high to not have a massive safety margin. And maybe after they ran these for a few refuelings and inspected enough of them they could bump up the refueling limit before inspection or replacement a little.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-01 01:01:07+00:00
I'm still confused about the purpose behind these laws. Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up? Because there's now two whole generations of kids who have grown up watching porn (my generation, and the one after). So far younger people don't seem any more fucked up than people were before, only the older people seem to be getting worse.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-01 01:01:20+00:00
When interest rates were rock-bottom a bigger chunk of new builds were purchased, but they're not anymore. Vacancy rates in cities, though, are very low, and if you constrain supply of rental units, rent prices go up. That impacts the poor demographic far more. People who rent entire houses are not typically poor, unless maybe you count places where houses are cheap like Mississipi.

The actual data does not agree with you at all. In places that have implemented zoning reform, housing gets cheaper. In areas where it's easier to build (red states), housing is cheaper. There is no reality at all where supply of housing jumps high but prices do also.

> Personally I'd like to see legal constraints on investment in primary, single-family homes, and fewer legal constraints on building them.

Where investors are concerned, these are purchased to flip, or with the expectation that prices would rise. Given that we had inelastic supply but perpetually growing demand, that was a good bet. So, if you build way more, an investor wouldn't be so confident about that price increase. Now compound that with the risk of borrowing at higher interest rates to buy those properties.
by coderatlarge | 2025-08-01 01:02:15+00:00
similarly i wanted to be an entrepreneur until i met the daily grind of it. no questionnaire would have dissuaded me. the highs were high and the lows were low; even in retrospect i’m not sure it was the wrong choice. but it would take abnormally high certainty for me to do it again now that i know the score first hand.
by tptacek | 2025-08-01 01:02:31+00:00
I'm asking: how does a small number of landlords continue to "control the supply" of an ever-increasing supply of housing when each of their holdings is non-remunerative (and, in fact, incurs tax and maintenance costs). This seems like a pretty simple math problem, a bet that you would not take if it was laid out in front of you, but I'm waiting for someone to explain how that might not be the case.

Keep in mind: as soon as you concede that investor-owners are letting out properties, they are competing in the market: further supply of housing decreases their returns, because they compete with all other suppliers of housing, the high-order bit of which is existing owners. You have to make this math work with owners who deliberately keep their units vacant, or it doesn't even work as an idea.
by hungmung | 2025-08-01 01:02:44+00:00
Well we might have seen it...the old hep c antiviral has been known to give people a lot of trouble mentally. I know one guy who had it, and while he was an extrovert with a lot of charisma, he developed crippling anxiety and agoraphobia which lasted for years after he was cured. YMMV.

IANAD(octor) btw, I've just seen a few people go through hep treatment and heard doctors' stories and opinions.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-01 01:03:41+00:00
That surprise connection makes me think of how there are several common vegetables which look rather different, but are all a species of Brassica Oleracea, warped into different cultivars. (Cabbage, Broccoli, Kale, Brussel Sprouts, etc.)

https://www.businessinsider.com/brassica-oleracea-broccoli-k...

That said, the trippy fractals of Romanesco look the best.
by godelski | 2025-08-01 01:03:44+00:00
> You should only do this if you have to in order to have better business outcomes.

Correct. As I explained.

> These are Chekhov's footguns

I think you're confusing "Chekhov's rifle" with "footgun".

A "footgun" is a reference to (shorthand for) the idiom "shooting yourself in the foot." The idiom refers to a self-inflicted problem. Just as how someone may carelessly handle a gun and shoot themselves in the foot.

On the other hand, Checkhov's rifle is a foreshadowing device. There is no requirement that the owner shoots themselves or that even any harm to the protagonist is caused. The protagonist can use it to kill the antagonist, the antagonist can use it against the protagonist, and anyone can even use it as a footgun. It's just a subset or extension of the "rule" "every scene should advance the story".

But a footgun is a very different thing and I think the miscommunication may be driven by this misunderstanding.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/shoot...
by whatever1 | 2025-08-01 01:04:25+00:00
Housing crisis is just a result of increasing income inequality and the resulting real estate investment craze. The population of America (real demand) did not suddenly double at any state/city.

Rich have become so much richer that can afford bidding wars at unattainable prices. They can buy investment homes and be cashflow negative for decades in anticipation of the increased market bidding prices. Of course they oppose any sort of legislation that would increase competition.
by esseph | 2025-08-01 01:04:30+00:00
I think I was confused (speed) reading through it and hit the Democrats part and was just thinking to myself... They have extremely limited power right now, and aren't passing laws?

There are some wild political takes on the internet sometimes, and it can be hard to parse out exactly what the person is trying to say (especially if the reader failed their speed reading comprehension ;-) )
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-01 01:05:56+00:00
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.

If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?

The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
by protocolture | 2025-08-01 01:06:17+00:00
>I think a key point of it is that those in power know that if there is bipartisan support, they can ignore all protests.

Charles Stross calls it the Beige Dictatorship. As long as they agree on 99% they can do whatever they want without public support. And you bring this up with low information voters and they just say "But Blorbus will decrease health spending by 3% thats a huge difference!!!" meanwhile all our civil liberties are eroded.
by Gigachad | 2025-08-01 01:06:52+00:00
All of them can but I don't think they are equal. Back before I deleted twitter about a year ago, no matter what I did, how many accounts I blocked, I'd get a feed of AI generated ragebait. Meanwhile TikTok and Youtube seem to respect my preferences more. There is ragebait on those platforms but it isn't shown to me. Facebook just seems to be entirely Boomers and Gen Xers angry at the news.

Reddit has historically respected your subscriptions but it does look like they are drifting away and making the home page just whatever they want to show you.
by hinkley | 2025-08-01 01:06:54+00:00
Let’s not pretend to be offended that someone else is making up an unfair scenario, as if you guys didn’t already make one up.

Nobody’s dropping off a nuclear fucking reactor in the middle of a disaster area on six hours’ notice in any universe other than the bizarro one invented by their PR firm.

You’re maybe running water desalination for an island that has known for years they want an alternative to shipping in diesel, or you’re shipping diesel generators to a disaster area because the Red Cross has a stack of them in a warehouse ready to go.

Or you’re some hyperscaler data center hoping to not have to maintain fifteen generators onsite for you eight server rooms (8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 15), and those could potentially be replaced with battery systems or gas turbines. And again, on six months or more of notice.

If someone had an easy non-snake-oil nuclear solution we would be using it already. A realistic person would assume incremental improvements in portable nuclear over the next twenty years, not an overnight success.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-01 01:07:16+00:00
I mean this started with Stable Diffusion 1.x->XL which were only loosely open, and has just gotten worse with progressively farther from open licensed image gen models being described as “open weights”, but, yes, Flux.1 Krea (like the weights-available versions of Flux.1 from BFL itself) is not open even to the degree of the older versions of Stable Diffusion; weights available and “free-as-in-beer licensed for certain uses”, sure, but not open.
by arrosenberg | 2025-08-01 01:07:19+00:00
I’m not arguing they’re keeping it vacant, that’s someone else in the thread.

I reject the notion that the units are not making money, and the notion that they are competing on price. We know corporate landlords engage in cartel behavior using price setting algorithms, and there is a deep well of tax-incentives for real estate (eg 1031s) that make it a more complex math problem than you are making it out to be.
by Supermancho | 2025-08-01 01:07:22+00:00
>> single family homes will continue to be bulldozed and replaced with 8 story wooden boxes, owned by national corporate landlords of course

> Source? Why of course?

Maybe I'm talking past someone, but the concept that was being described is self-evident. So, I'll just say this isn't a controversial take, from an urban planning standpoint. It's been demonstrated for hundreds of years (albeit, slightly different wealth sources).

The pattern of smaller, high density housing, is the most efficient way to build profit in a population center. As density increases, central hubs appear. Land (specifically residential land) skyrockets in value as it's most scarce, within and immediate^1 and surrounding areas. 1 family paying rent on the land is less efficient than 1xN. The investment necessary to risk and realize those N returns are out of the reach of any entity other than a conglomerate. Singular elite investors generally do not engage in that risk, although there have been historic outliers. Cities also find it more expedient to eminent domain aging single family homes, more than taking on the corporate owned high density housing, further entrenching their relative durability. Despite the highly variable timelines, American cities have followed the common pattern of density housing owned by corporations replacing single family homes, in population centers, for a very long time.

^1 For some value of immediate, based on available mass transit and other environmental factors
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-01 01:08:30+00:00
Probably owing to the legal/licensing constraints other users brought up.

I don't want to buy movies, 99% of the time. Renting is cheaper, and I don't care to rewatch most things.

Games we used to rent those too, before they got to be 50-100 hours long. For several reasons it's no longer practical.
by RickJWagner | 2025-08-01 01:08:38+00:00
A few examples of AOC’s reasons for proper comparison to MGT. Personally, to these I would add acts of drama like the emotional breakdown at the border, modeling the expensive ‘Tax the rich’ dress, etc.

Google can bring many more examples. AOC is not more intelligent than MGT. They are two sides of the same coin.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/1857375/three-gaf...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/politics/alexandria-ocasio-co...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/10/30/alexandri...
by metalman | 2025-08-01 01:09:06+00:00
apperently thats part of it, but the real issue is that Canadians, dont give a fuck sure it will be a lot(huge) amount of work to re tool for other markets, but those markets are there, and Canada is working at capacity, and for a lot of it, the US does not have another option, so the costs will fall on american consumers and in the cases of US manufactured goods intended for export, they may no longer be afordable, anywhere, even under threat, such as Canadian made parts going into US car factorys, that were intended for export.....to Canada, needless to say that is the reason that Toyotas stock is riseing
by reactordev | 2025-08-01 01:09:30+00:00
But couldn’t one argue that’s true of most languages, they promise incremental progress toward rewriting your behemoth into miniature monoliths? I think the only one where they clearly drew the line at being able to pull in headers is .Net. You just can’t do it. Others like Golang or rust, you can point to the C headers and bam…

Honestly, while I find the syntax terse, I welcome more low level languages able to push performance.
by wyre | 2025-08-01 01:10:09+00:00
Increased rental supply at the cost of decreased home ownership.

There is already price manipulation with rental properties. If a cartel is in control of enough of the supply they can set their prices as high as the market can afford. There is already a nationwide shortage of affordable housing in desirable places with jobs and the idea ITT is that it will only get worse as the investment class are the only people that can afford desirable property.
by jordanb | 2025-08-01 01:10:12+00:00
There's this Deep Space 9 episode called Past Tense.

The crew goes back to 21st century earth to find that being unemployed is illegal and they quickly get put in a ghetto with other indigents.

At one point they're trying to get on the internet (the show was aired in 1995 so they predicted the 21st century internet) but they can't login because you have have a real identity and be a citizen in good standing (so nobody in the ghetto).

It's really the most prescient episode of Star Trek ever made.
by coderatlarge | 2025-08-01 01:10:43+00:00
my daughter loves chemistry and says she wants to be a chemist. she does great ai it at school. so mom and dad helped her find an unpaid spot in an actual lab. so far she loves it but has also learned that it means working all day at 18 degrees c and constantly smelling her colleagues’ lab animal feed. we’ll find out soon if that was too much reality too soon. i hope it will lead her to double-down with the full reality in sight.
by starkparker | 2025-08-01 01:11:08+00:00
> I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do.

As someone both built for and trained to do it, I can tell you I'd be making at least US$150k/year less if I was still doing it. I wager I'd be short about $1.25M in career earnings through just salary in the time since I moved from the copy desk to tech.

That's factoring in how, through the first third of my tech career I was still making just $35-60k/year. And I was ecstatic, because $35k was a five-figure raise over running the front section of a daily newspaper.

Every person in the first two newsrooms I worked in is either dead or has left the journalism field completely, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the entire team of editors, artists, and photographers who worked on the winning story. Most are now in PR, consulting, or (as a symptom of being near the Gulf Coast) in some arm of the fossil-fuels industry. One of the last whose career I keep track of just took up mail-order baking.

It's a financially unsustainable field in any market. At 5 years' experience at the head of the editing wheel, I was living paycheck-to-paycheck paying just $400/month in rent, living with two roommates in a single-wide trailer in the middle of a sugar cane field.

The vast majority of those City Desk-style journalism jobs made primary-school teaching salaries look attractive _25 years ago_, much less now. By the time I left, all of those jobs that I knew of had either moved to contract gigs or stringers (freelancers paid by column inches of text) unless you were in a big-city market or working for a regional/national paper.

The myth of building up a journalism career at an institution from the bottom of the org through shoe-leather reporting alone, without already knowing or being related to someone who could move you ahead of the rest, was already far past dead in most of the US.

If I could find a journalism job that paid half what I make now, made me travel constantly, had shit benefits, got me put on watchlists, made me deal with some of the slimiest people on the planet in the forms of career local politicians and court lawyers on the daily, and put me in precarious situations... I'd still probably take it, because I miss it every day. But that job flat-out does not exist in any form that I'd get a callback for unless I married into a publisher's extended family, and hasn't for decades.
by Syzygies | 2025-08-01 01:12:33+00:00
Yup. As a retired mathematician who craves the productivity of an obsessed 28 year old, I've been all in on AI in 2025. I'm now on Claude's $200/month Max plan in order to use Claude Code Opus 4 without restraint. I still hit limits, usually when I run parallel sessions to review a 57 file legacy code base.

For a time I refused to talk with anybody or read anything about AI, because it was all noise that didn't match my hard-earned experience. Recently HN has included some fascinating takes. This isn't one.

I have the opinion that neurodivergents are more successful using AI. This is so easily dismissed as hollow blather, but I have a precise theory backing this opinion.

AI is a giant association engine. Linear encoding (the "King - Man + Woman = Queen" thing) is linear algebra. I taught linear algebra for decades.

As I explained to my optometrist today, if you're trying to balance a plate (define a hyperplane) with three fingers, it works better if your fingers are farther apart.

My whole life people have rolled their eyes when I categorize a situation using analogies that are too far flung for their tolerances.

Now I spend most of my time coding with AI, and it responds very well to my "fingers farther apart" far reaching analogies for what I'm trying to focus on. It's an association engine based on linear algebra, and I have an astounding knack for describing subspaces.

AI is raising the ceiling, not the floor.
Show HN: Change Image Aspect Ratio Tool
by devxiyang | 2025-08-01 01:12:34+00:00
Hi HN,

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Would love your feedback or suggestions!
Show HN: Merge Images – A Minimal Tool to Join Multiple Images into One
by devxiyang | 2025-08-01 01:13:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I made MergeImages.co, a lightweight web tool to combine multiple images vertically or horizontally. •Drag-and-drop interface •Rearranging supported •JPG/PNG/WebP •Instant merge in-browser (no uploads)

It’s built to be fast, privacy-friendly, and mobile-friendly. Hope it helps others too!