MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bnralt | 2025-08-01 01:25:14+00:00
> We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.

I think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.

You're larger point is entirely correct, that there's a ton to be learned from old school journalism, and there are people out there doing it. But it's unsettling how much of it only gets covered by citizen journalists doing this in their free time, not by professionals who are supposed to be doing this for a living.

For example, the D.C. Attorney's Office had been simply dropping 2/3's of the criminal cases that came to them. No one noticed this until a anonymous internet account, DCCrimeFacts, went through the records and realized that this had been happening for years. Once that account wrote about it and it gained traction, major papers like the Washington Post started reporting on the story, it eventually ended up being an issue in Congressional hearings, and lead to changes in the way the U.S. Attorney's Office operates.

The account spent a lot of time digging through records and reporting on issues with the criminal justice system you wouldn't find elsewhere. But it was someone's side project, and there haven't been posts in a year.

Another example is the FAA scandal, when the best information has come from a single blog post by a law student who happened to go through the legal paperwork and was surprised that this hadn't been reported on.

The professional news media outlets do have some good reporters, and sometimes there are important deep dives there as well. But they feel few and far between, usually opting to chase infotainment (or sometimes the pet projects of a particular journalist).

It's amazing how many big stories we only get if some random citizen happens to spend their free time doing a personal journalism project, and if that project happens to get enough traction that people actually read it.
by woooooo | 2025-08-01 01:26:01+00:00
> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.

This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala.

People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.
by stillpointlab | 2025-08-01 01:26:21+00:00
Mailing list is on the roadmap but doesn't exist just yet.

What you could do: sign in using one of the OAuth methods, go to the user page and then go to the feedback section. Let me know in a message your email and I'll ping you once the blog is setup.

Sorry it is primitive at this stage but I'm prioritizing MVP before marketing.
by VikingMiner | 2025-08-01 01:26:23+00:00
IMO it is far easier to read this:

function add(a: i32, b: i32): i32 { return a + b; }

Than the example you provided and it is approximately the same length. I used to arrow functions everywhere in TS/JS and it made it difficult to read IME, and there was zero benefit. They are find for things like event handlers, promises chains etc. But I'd rather just use function when I don't have to worry about the value of this.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-01 01:27:14+00:00
This is a great point and well made.

I would take it a step further and argue that it's not so much a topic as facts. Like objectively measurable things about the real world.

There's always going to be some limit to what we can actually measure and how much time we have to do it, but there's no reason not to try to get close to what we we're capable of doing.

I would argue that there are very few people who are actually authorities on a subject worth uncritically transcribing for 3 hours on a subject. Elon Musk is an easy target, the only thing he's an expert on is being Elon Musk, which isn't a very interesting topic.

What he has to say on any given subject does sometimes matter, because some people believe what he says, so it's useful for me to know some of it, but it's more useful to know what the actual facts are.

I don't want reporters who write an article that says "well I talked to one side and they said it's raining and I talked to the other side and they said it was hailing", I want a reporter who goes out and checks what the weather actually is.
by protocolture | 2025-08-01 01:27:35+00:00
My dad bought a burnt down pub for a dollar. He spent 15 years working on the place and now its worth quite a lot. He is always telling me to find something that requires hard work, but in the end leaves you with a significant asset. He put a cafe in the pub, and a coffee machine. He worked out the beans at some point. I think he had like 6 different POS systems.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-01 01:27:45+00:00
There's that, but also it's more difficult to get mixed-density builds than detached homes developed, or the type of builds the left associate with "affordable housing".

While being able to build detached homes faster is nice and all for those on the market, for an effective YIMBY approach allowing density is preferable.

Plus, trying to sprawl out into perpetuity is putting cities in the hole. The suburbs are money pits that are subsidized by the city cores.
by Onavo | 2025-08-01 01:27:50+00:00
NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-01 01:29:03+00:00
Someone "interviewing" a pundit by letting them speak for 3 hours contributes very little to our understanding of reality. We might understand a bit more about the pundit's opinions, which can be entertaining, and could theoretically be valuable, but rarely is.

Someone actually looking for facts about reality would be far more useful and valuable to society. Not that we reward that sort of thing.
by hopelite | 2025-08-01 01:29:11+00:00
This really kind of highlights that not only is the “age check system” not at all about children, it is also about conditioning the adults into total control.

If it were about children then it would be the children that would need to be restricted from accessing the open internet, not adults of legal age who are supposed to have the rights needing to gain access to their inalienable rights … at least in America.

I also want to protect children from pornography, especially since I know people who have been deeply harmed by it, but it should be that any device that is for or used by children, people with curtailed and subordinate rights, are restricted by white-lists, not the other way around.
by dmoy | 2025-08-01 01:29:32+00:00
Three general categories missing:

1. The core stack of internal (or internally created but also external) - protobuf, gcl, etc

2. Some more well-known languages that aren't as big in Google, but are still used and people wrote indexers for: C#, lisp, Haskell, etc.

3. All the random domain specific langs that people built and then worte indexers for.

There's a bunch more that don't have indexers too.
by lbourdages | 2025-08-01 01:30:00+00:00
70 years? That's just plain false.

This website from the government of Canada here says the max term is 25 years, or 30 if it is your first property: https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

Edit: ah, I missed one part. You can have longer terms if you have more than 20% cash down. TIL.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-01 01:31:44+00:00
Housing stock definitely goes up in those cities that have the demand. Other cities drain out as a consequence and housing is razed in the cities that are no longer popular, like Buffalo and Detroit.

Do we really want that? Of course, housing has to be maintained and has a lifespan (the Japanese are good at rebuilding housing stock after 20-30 years), and so it can simply die off in the places that are no longer popular, but it seems like a waste of infrastructure investments that then have to be re-done in the new hot places.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-01 01:32:01+00:00
This is a fair point, but the analogies to vehicles don't really work anyway: they're a depreciating asset, houses are not. Even a tiny rundown place can cost millions owing to location.

But all things held equal, if you have a new house that's big and a new house that's small, the smaller one is cheaper. And further, mixed density builds will be cheaper than single detached homes. Beyond that there's nothing caked-in to the walls that makes a house cheaper or expensive. Shitty houses are just unmaintained, dilapidated. Flooding the market with houses will drop prices.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-01 01:32:32+00:00
It's kinda pathetic that this news outlet literally self-censors the word 'porn'. I've noticed that some of the loudest online moral entrepreneurs crowing about freedom of speech are also the quickest to self-censor and demand others do the same.

As for the story itself, it's depressing but sadly unsurprising that the whole population of the UK seems to accept being infantilized in this fashion in a country notorious for letting politically well-connected people evade any consequences for actual sex abuse.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-01 01:32:38+00:00
At this point, my perspective is that the bubble talk has effectively boiled viewpoints into booster or doomer camps based solely on one’s buy-in of the argument these companies have created actual intelligence that can wholesale replace humans. There doesn’t seem to be much room for nuance at the moment, as the proverbial battle lines have been drawn by the loudest voices on either side.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-01 01:32:51+00:00
Will Carbon improve the ABI situation? Will Carbon be easier to interface with from other languages?

A major role that C plays today is being the common protocol all languages speak[0]. C++ can't fill this role, and neither can Rust.

There is a huge opportunity for some language to become the next common protocol, the common ABI, that all languages share in common.

(Maybe Rust could do this, but they haven't stabilized their ABI yet, and I don't the details.)

[0]: https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/
by throwawaygmbno | 2025-08-01 01:33:17+00:00
There's quite a few accounts on here that will argue in good faith and bad faith that people enjoying oral, anal, gay, bi, or any kink has already ruined society, whether it's solely via porn or real life.

The argument usually starts with an assumption that nobody did those things before and it's obvious that life was better before for everyone when those things were viewed as shameful.

Personally I think it's been known for centuries that sex is a pleasurable activity and controlling pleasure is a good way to control people.
by pzullo | 2025-08-01 01:33:23+00:00
Not original commenter here, and not by first hand experience. BUT. I got this kind of feedback from some communities, and I wanted to understand what companies think of this, I asked some dev that works in a company that sells software to enterprise he says that enterprise still use langchain mostly and they are fine with it. On a personal level I agree with the feedback in that langchain has some drawbacks, but at the same time it's a great way to get started.
by 0xcafefood | 2025-08-01 01:33:42+00:00
This is a really interesting point. Managers are the _only_ people I've heard say things like "it's only a matter of time till all coding interviews are just 'write a prompt to...'" or "soon all coding will just be LLMs writing machine code directly."

It's struck me as odd that managers of software engineers would seek to negate the field of software development almost completely. But maybe you're onto something.
by doodlebugging | 2025-08-01 01:33:46+00:00
The author mentions that locating metric fasteners in bulk may be a problem.

When I need anything metric (automobiles use a lot of metric fasteners of various sizes) I order them from BelMetric.com [0].

You can order one or one hundred or one thousand and they assemble your order and get it out to you faster than any other provider of fasteners that I have used.

They have an excellent selection including specialty parts that might be useful for building telescopes.

https://belmetric.com/

They're the best.

Overall this looks like an interesting project that is not difficult to make. I may need to level my printer bed and see what happens.
by cocaclub | 2025-08-01 01:34:16+00:00
My guess is that the "leftist critique" isn't one of not wanting new houses built, but of not wanting extensive government subsidies and political energy to go to builders and other groups who will not solve the problem, a la our storied history with broadband subsidies.

This pitched debate may very well simply represent an attempt to forestall action by bogging efforts down in debate over what's effective or correct, of course. It's worked for any number of groups looking to forestall what seems like an obvious and inevitable solution: reducing lead exposure by banning its use in consumer products, reducing tobacco-related illness by making it difficult and more uncomfortable to partake, and, in our case, making housing affordable by letting prices fall.
by boastful_inaba | 2025-08-01 01:34:26+00:00
The U.S. Internet Preservation Society writes about chokepoints in the financial processing system (inspired by recent events with games stores) and the several layers present that are not obvious to people outside the system.

UPIPS covers why payment networks are effectively immune from competition, and why creating a new competing payment network without restrictions will not provide benefits due to contract lock-in and other problems.

They also cover proposed legislation's benefits and weaknesses for addressing the problem.
by kylecazar | 2025-08-01 01:34:36+00:00
I like this list (and Collison's)!

One thing I would say -- the Sagrada Familia definitely didn't have to take the incredible time it has. Maybe not a good example of something that could only be done over the long term. Gaudi didn't prioritize it, and a civil war ruined it.

It is, however, an example of something beautiful that did take a long period of time.
by XorNot | 2025-08-01 01:35:30+00:00
Assuming "the people" are on your side on this is first and foremost your biggest folly.

I see this problem over and over again - people start from "the politicians" (the other) is not listening to us (and we obviously represent everyone).

It leads to extremely unconstructive messaging ideas, where you assume no one can ever change their minds and if they do they are to be forever considered "lesser" for not being "right" the first time.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-01 01:36:03+00:00
I'm trying to track this argument through this thread but I feel like something has gotten lost here, is there someone arguing against increasing the housing supply? Like, did someone upthread say something like "no, I think we should not build more houses"?

Or is the argument that merely building more houses isn't sufficient?

(Also presumably you could build an infinite amount of houses, but the land itself is somewhat of a fixed supply...)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-01 01:36:04+00:00
(Back slashes were accidentally omitted)

# previous: download and compile w3c-libwww-5.4.2 pwd|grep "w3c-libwww-"||exec echo wrong directory export x=$(pwd) export examples=$x/Library/Examples export linemode=$x/LineMode/src export commandline=$x/ComLine/src export robot=$x/Robot/src y=" libwwwinit.a libwwwapp.a libwwwhtml.a \ libwwwtelnet.a libwwwnews.a libwwwhttp.a \ libwwwmime.a libwwwgopher.a libwwwftp.a \ libwwwdir.a libwwwcache.a libwwwstream.a \ libwwwfile.a libwwwmux.a libwwwtrans.a \ libwwwcore.a libwwwutils.a \ $x/modules/md5/.libs/libmd5.a -lm" cd $x/Library/src/.libs for z in \ head libapp_1 libapp_2 libapp_3 libapp_4 init chunk \ chunkbody LoadToFile postform multichunk put post \ trace range tzcheck mget isredirected listen \ eventloop memput getheaders showlinks showtags \ showtext tiny upgrade cookie do gcc -s -static -O2 -Wall -o $examples/$z $examples/$z.o $y done gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $linemode/www \ $linemode/www-HTBrowse.o $linemode/www-GridText.o \ $linemode/www-ConView.o $linemode/www-GridStyle.o \ $linemode/www-DefaultStyles.o \ $x/PICS-client/src/.libs/libpics.a $y gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $robot/webbot \ $robot/webbot-HTRobot.o $robot/webbot-RobotMain.o \ $robot/webbot-RobotTxt.o $robot/webbot-HTQueue.o $y gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $commandline/w3c \ $commandline/w3c-HTLine.o $y # next: symlink binaries to a folder in $PATH # or export PATH=$PATH:$examples:$commandline:$robot:$linemode

Also typo: libww should be libwww
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-01 01:36:11+00:00
What honestly blew my mind was the whole Cookies debate.

- EU introduces law, making thirdparty tracking cookies illegal

- Every advertisement tracker switches to CNAME based first/secondparty cookies

- EU judges decide they are illegal by default, too, without explicit consent

- Google pushes out Federal Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) prototype, and essentially saying they track so much of the internet, they don't even need cookies to get beyond 98% accuracy.

- Nobody on the internet seems to care. Wtf?
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-08-01 01:38:08+00:00
>So far younger people don't seem any more fucked up than people were before, only the older people seem to be getting worse.

If you look at levels of depression, sexual disfunction the steep drop in relationships and dating among younger people and other metrics you could argue the exact opposite, although obviously there are other factors (social media, ect) in how "messed up" generations are besides the widespread watching of porn by children.
by jschveibinz | 2025-08-01 01:38:12+00:00
Ah this brings back memories of the good old days of analog computer lab for Controls I. There were integrators, differentiators, mixers and amplifier/attenuators.

From what I remember, it was good for seeing how a transfer function (differential equations converted and simplified to s-parameter polynomials) with or without feedback would perform based on the input function. The output was viewed on an oscilloscope.

I think the Mercury, Gemini and early Apollo spacecraft used analog computers, as well?
by jcims | 2025-08-01 01:38:37+00:00
I guess I'm saying that over the past 30 years there have been a number of systems developed that take input from a user and find relevant bits of content from some corpus...aka 'search'.

Searches using vector embeddings are likely better at matching relevant semantics than most other systems, so they are an excellent candidate for RAG. However, if there's a system that's already working quite well at finding relevant content based on user input, then there wouldn't necessarily be any value in adding a vectorized search to the RAG pipeline. Just use the existing system to populate relevant content into the context.

Then the other half of my wondering is why the primary use case for vector databases appears (?) to be for RAG and not just a general purpose search engine.
by bombcar | 2025-08-01 01:38:42+00:00
It’s actually quite hard to definitively quantify if renting or owning is better in a given area/scenario.

Obviously the case near me where the mortgage payment on a house would be $2600/mo but the rent for the identical one next door is $2000 is going to swing heavily toward renting, but there’s more to it than just that.

Maintenance is huge and real and people just seem to ignore it on the “own” side, but 5-10% of the value of the house a year in maintenance isn’t unheard of.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-01 01:39:19+00:00
I believe in your hypothesis..

Auto-karma seems like room temperature superconductor. I'm guessing people competently researching those tend not to want to publicize their lab notebooks. Bridge wouldn't pub a blog showing us how their code integrates with Pix?

It's like asking dang to show us his current git commits?

(Anyways it's most likely not my opinion that you want, so I'm just pretending to be openHoule here

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44748570 )
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-01 01:40:23+00:00
> If interstellar travel ever becomes possible you'd already have access to all the resources of the solar system as well as the output of the entire sun.

I'm not going to argue circular conditions, this is precisely why we should preserve dense energy sources, first an alternative abundant energy source must be demonstrated, before squandering it locally.

> The scale of the problem l, technologically simply renders earthbound resource constraints irrelevant.

Hidden in such statements is the implicit assumption that mining the solar system for fissile materials is less energy intensive than mining them locally.

We should make sure interstellar travel remains affordable by the time we decide to afford seeding other star systems.

Nothing prevents interstellar travel with current technology, it would just take a long time. We should keep this mode of travel, where survival on the ship is powered with known feasible technology (nuclear fission) on the table and conserve fissile materials until we succeed in compact fusion plants, in that case this constraint no longer is an argument to preserve fissile materials.

Speculating other energy storage technology like "antimatter storage as a battery to store solar power" before launching to another star is just that: speculation. We shouldn't squander fissile materials on the basis of feel-good speculation.
by brailsafe | 2025-08-01 01:40:36+00:00
They didn't say 70 year mortgages, they said 70 years to pay off a mortgage, which is still a bit exaggerated (maybe), but would come from the contingent of people who got themselves into variable rate fixed payment mortgages for comically expensive properties, and that had a significant amount of interest remaining before the feds started cranking up interest rates.

If rates go up from 2% to 6+% while you're holding onto a $2m detached house, it's a bad situation to be in.

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2022/11/staff-analytical-notes-2...