MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-15 16:26:48+00:00
That's because midterms are specifically supposed to assess how well you learned the material presented (or at least directed to), not your overall ability to reason. If you teach a general reasoning class, getting creative with the midterm is one thing, but if you're teaching someone how to solve differential equations, they're learning to the very edge of their ability in a given amount of time, and you present them with an example outside of what's been described, it kind of makes sense that they can't just already solve it. I mean, that's kind of the whole premise of education, that you can't just present someone with something completely outside of their experience and expect them to derive from first principles how it works.
by pbw | 2025-08-15 16:28:17+00:00
Yes, GPT-5's response above was not shortening because there was nothing in the OP about Plato's Cave. I agree that Plato's cave analogy was confusing here. Here's a better one from GPT-5, which is deeply ironic:

A New Yorker book review often does the opposite of mere shortening. The reviewer:

* Places the book in a broader cultural, historical, or intellectual context.

* Brings in other works—sometimes reviewing two or three books together.

* Builds a thesis that connects them, so the review becomes a commentary on a whole idea-space, not just the book’s pages.

This is exactly the kind of externalized, integrative thinking Jenson says LLMs lack. The New Yorker style uses the book as a jumping-off point for an argument; an LLM “shortening” is more like reading only the blurbs and rephrasing them. In Jenson’s framing, a human summary—like a rich, multi-book New Yorker review—operates on multiple layers: it compresses, but also expands meaning by bringing in outside information and weaving a narrative. The LLM’s output is more like a stripped-down plot synopsis—it can sound polished, but it isn’t about anything beyond what’s already in the text.
by shin_lao | 2025-08-15 16:28:17+00:00
Seeing a lot of people shit on Paul, which I guess, why not, but it's not super useful or positive.

I think this is a fairly good essay which can be boiled down to "don't do premature optimization" or "don't try to behave like companies much bigger than you".

There are three advantages to this:

1/As a founder, get your hands dirty, even if in the grand scheme of things it's inefficient. You'll get first hand experience and feedback. 2/Avoid the upfront cost of "something that scales", and thus get quicker feedback. 3/Makes you different, very important in the beginning.

"Do things that don't scale" is a way to drive the point home and must not be taken literally...
by legitster | 2025-08-15 16:28:18+00:00
One thing few people take into account is that demand housing is much, much more elastic than people realize - per capita people are consuming far more square footage than they used to. Houses that were built to be house multiple generations under one roof now only hold one generation. Usually elderly empty nesters. In our area we also see people buying up lots of older duplexes or triplexes and converting them into single-family homes.

So even areas where population is stable, and housing supply increases, it can result in very few tangible gains at the margin.
by porphyra | 2025-08-15 16:28:42+00:00
People love to point out the ghost cities and high speed trains to "nowhere". But, for every ghost city, there are hundreds of thriving actual cities full of people. Shenzhen itself was a planned special economic zone that went from an impoverished fishing village to a thriving megalopolis and the worldwide center of electronics within decades.

And despite some high speed train stations being underutilized in the off season, the majority of Chinese cities are connected with blazing fast high speed trains that depart every 15 minutes. Even third tier cities have high speed trains and they are amazing. Now, despite using some underhanded tactics to get Siemens and others to hand over their IP initially, the Chinese high speed rail system is the envy of the world, with orders of magnitude greater coverage, track length, and ridership than Japan. At the same time, domestic innovations allow the newer trains to be a more comfortable, faster, and smoother ride than the Shinkansen, TGV, and ICE. I would take that any day over, say, California High Speed Rail dilly-dallying for decades with nothing to show for it.

The Chinese electric car industry is another one of those that are famously subsidized. People love to point out that some shady companies that have large lots of unsold new vehicles sitting there but written off as being sold via some accounting tricks. While that does happen and is deplorable, the fact is that Chinese EVs have basically leapfrogged the rest of the world in quality, capabilities, and innovation. The Xiaomi SU7 is amazing, for example. But don't despair, some Western companies like Tesla are still able to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Also, all this talk of the Chinese government subsidizing this, and subsidizing that being unfair competition, as though China had a magic money tree to fund everything. In contrast, it is sad that the US government, while having vastly greater tax revenue, fails to fund basically any sort of technological development, and instead wastes all of its enormous amounts of money on inefficiencies (e.g. our spending per capita on healthcare being the highest in the world, but most of it is going to bureaucracy, and we languish with poor life expectancy) while being saddled in debt.
by Aunche | 2025-08-15 16:28:42+00:00
> No longer do you have to carefully study laws and regulations, you just have to make sure one guy likes you!

American civic understanding has gone through the floor. People already think that corporate quid pro quo is the default, so for some, this is actually an improvement because it's more transparent now. It can't be that corporations achieve wins through research and coalition building because that would imply that people aren't not doing enough themselves. The irony has made lobbying stigmatized in grass-roots organizations [1], which only gives corporate lobbyists more power.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:28:46+00:00
Yup, and the kneejerk response from economists is that the housing cycle suggests that new luxury stock would be inhabited by buyers who own existing stock, and what they sell would be more affordable to those buyers, and what those buyers sell would become more affordable to the next rung down, etc.

Except that’s not the reality. The reality is that a large chunk of the market (as much as 25% in some areas) is speculative in the form of PE-owned inventory and rentals. It’s not used as shelter, it’s used as a vehicle of growing capital. When that’s pointed out, suddenly economists blame the very same people who can’t get onto the “property ladder” for failing to “compete in the free market”.

In a vacuum, their original idea makes sense. In reality, it’s heavily exploited for the gains of those already on the ladder at the ongoing expense of those they actively prohibit from joining them. It’s societal exploitation leveraging the singular most basic human need after food and clean water: shelter.
by jimbob45 | 2025-08-15 16:29:00+00:00
This is the propaganda they were pushing about RealPage too until it turned out that it was happening and the market was being distorted.

At any rate, if a buyer notices it happening in their area, then "it's not happening that much" is not only not going to make them feel better, it's going to also make them feel like you don't want to fix it.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-15 16:29:08+00:00
Mobility is not just about assisting the those in need, its also about having opportunities for advancement.

If you're trapped in a job because of its health coverage, that's restricting mobility. People can' take the risk on changing jobs/locations or even something like starting their own businesses because of the would lose coverage and don't have the wealth to self-pay.

If you're working so many hours just to cover essentials like rent you just too exhausted to look for better work or take courses for a new profession.

If costs and prices rise way faster than your wages, then you start losing ground and do so at an ever increasing rate while those at the top who live on investments and passive income benefit because the value of their assets rise faster.

If opportunities for high paying jobs dry up because, for example, AI replaces those jobs.

If fees and interest on student debt keeps you locked down forever.

If all best and highest paying jobs just go to family members of the already rich through systemic nepotism.

The list goes on. I'm not which of these the American public voted for.

- people trapped in poorly paying jobs and/or jobs with terrible conditions by blocking or dismantling unions.

- locking people out of high paying jobs via network effects. Like nepotism in hollywood or firms only hiring from certain universities which you can only get into
by walterbell | 2025-08-15 16:29:43+00:00
> It's basically only useful for illegal action

Blockchain assets ("controllable electronic records") are defined in the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) Article 12 that regulates interstate commerce, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33949680#33951026. Some states have already ratified the changes, others are in progress.

U.S. federal stablecoin legislation was passed earlier this year.
by oflannabhra | 2025-08-15 16:29:51+00:00
For anyone wanting a quick breakdown of the current situation: the Sig Sauer P320 is a striker-fired handgun, which means the firing pin is spring loaded and retained by a sear. Other handguns are hammer-fired, where the trigger (or slide actuation) cocks the hammer. Other popular striker-fired guns include the Glock and Smith and Wesson M&P series. Frequently, striker-fired pistols come without safeties, but optionally add them.

The P320 was popular as it was designed as a modular system, allowing a single FCU (firing control unit, basically a trigger and striker assembly) to be independent and swappable with other parts of the handgun: grip, slide, barrel, etc. This allows for a single platform to serve multiple needs: concealed carry, compact, full-size, or even competition models, as well as be transferrable across calibers. The magazine design also allowed for more rounds to be carried in compact configurations.

The P320 was selected by the US Army [0] as the official replacement for the Beretta M9 as a service-issued sidearm, officially designated the M17 or M18 (in 9mm).

In 2020 SIG SAUER initiated a "voluntary upgrade program" [1] that swapped various components of the trigger to prevent unintended discharge (UD) events that could occur when the pistol dropped in certain orientations. These changes became standard for the M17 and all P320 manufactured after.

Recently, there have been very high-profile cases and investigations around UD events, the most recent being by an event in the Air Force that led to the death of an airman. In that case the Air Force put a suspension on the firearm during the investigation but eventually arrested the airman responsible, as they determined he had lied about the events [2].

Regardless of the specific failure modes of the weapon, there is a stigma around it, resulting in various law enforcement agencies switching from it or ranges banning the firearm. This has been popularized by incidents caught on video and somewhat viral videos of testing the firearm in a variety of scenarios.

All in all, the P320 is one of the most mass-produced firearms in the world, and I would not be surprised to see Sig Sauer continue to fight in the court of public opinion to defend the reputation of the firearm, in what I would deem a losing strategy.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIG_Sauer_M17

[1] - https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-voluntary-upgrade-program

[2] - https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
by rightbyte | 2025-08-15 16:29:53+00:00
> Every 20-30 years some new tech made it easier, cheaper, and faster to get your message to an intended recipient.

No it has regressed now. We are probably back to the level of 1950s before telephones became common.

People don't answer unknown numbers and are not listed in the telephone book.

When I was a kid in the 90s I could call almost anyone in my town by looking them up in the phone book.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-15 16:29:59+00:00
When you're not a Hebrew speaker and you don't interact with Hebrew script, and you're developing a PDF library by yourself, it's easy to not even realize that there is something about it that you've overlooked.

In any case, Hebrew is handled differently from other RTL languages, hence this bug report in PDF.js: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/20097

Almost certainly something a smaller team would have never caught, given that a team with a massive name behind them didn't.
by starkparker | 2025-08-15 16:30:21+00:00
> 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.

I keep seeing this, but if the housing being vacated is in a different, less-desirable market, it's a bit tree-falling-in-the-woods for locals.

If a $450,000 house in a Chicago suburb is freed up by its owners moving to a $700,000 condo in Seattle, the people who can't afford a house in Seattle don't see the benefit of the condo building and aren't going to buy the house in Chicago, and the people who can't afford a house in Chicago don't recognize the Seattle development as the cause of the house hitting the market.
by reactordev | 2025-08-15 16:31:10+00:00
It's the only way to create career criminals now... The private prisons need career criminals to justify their existence. Career criminals become career criminals because they can't earn their way to an honest living (outside of mental health issues) because of the debts they owe. It's a vicious cycle. They want repeat offender by the time they turn 24. Statistically, that means they'll be in and out of the system for life.
by least | 2025-08-15 16:31:19+00:00
When I was on Kaiser, it was an absolute nightmare trying to get any traction. They had me do a computer test and, I guess because the results of it (which aren't disclosed to you) did not indicate ADHD, they would not consider the wealth of documentation I had ready to take a look at my old school records. I asked for a second opinion and the next psychiatrist they assigned to me was aloof and refused to consider anything, either. They did give prescribe me bupoprion which did absolutely nothing for me (though I have heard it works for others).

I'm now on a PPO plan and have been using Vyvanse for over a year now. It's lead to a dramatic improvement in my quality of life. I grieved for the time and opportunities I had lost due to not having been diagnosed and treated in childhood.

HMOs have a lot of upsides, but Kaiser's behavioral healthcare is awful (at least in the DC Metro area) and there's not much recourse unless you want to/can afford to pay out of pocket.

There's so much cynicism about ADHD even existing, even among healthcare professionals. Any time on HN any mention of ADHD seems to invite a lot of cynicism as well. That, compounded with that one of the most effective treatments for it is something that pretty much everyone can see a positive effect from (stimulant medication), makes it really difficult to navigate.

I hope that you can find a better option because it seems like Kaiser is just very antagonistic towards ADHD.
by mijoharas | 2025-08-15 16:31:27+00:00
Oh, this does sound cool. Couple of questions that aren't clear from the readme (to me).

What exactly does the silence detection mean? does that mean it'll wait until a pause, and then send the audio off to whisper, and return the output (and stop the process)? Same question with continuous. Does that just mean it continues going until CTRL+C?

Nvm, answered my own question, looks like yes for both[0][1]. Cool this seems pretty great actually.

[0] https://github.com/bikemazzell/skald-go/blob/main/pkg/skald/...

[1] https://github.com/bikemazzell/skald-go/blob/main/pkg/skald/...
by whall6 | 2025-08-15 16:31:27+00:00
Curious for a source on the sq footage per capita if you wouldn’t mind sharing. That’s very interesting.

Could that also be explained perhaps by the fact that people are willing to live farther away from cities (where land / homes are cheaper and larger) because they only have to work 3 days a week from the office? Or because commuting is less painful with newer cars?
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-15 16:31:30+00:00
The point is that if you made a point to write a completely novel script, with (content-wise, not semantically) 0 DNA in it from previous movie scripts, with an unambiguous but incoherent and unstructured plot, your average literate human would be able summarize what happened on the page, for all that they'd be annoyed and likely distressed by how unusual it was; but that an LLM would do a disproportionately bad job compared to how well they do at other things, which makes us reevaluate what they're actually doing and how they actually do it.

It feels like they've mastered language, but it's looking more and more like they've actually mastered canon. Which is still impressive, but very different.
by footy | 2025-08-15 16:31:40+00:00
I don't know how old you are, or how long you've been on Concerta. But to provide a different experience to anyone reading this:

I too got (re)diagnosed in my 30s and prescribed Concerta. Rediagnosed because my mom then told me I'd been diagnosed as a child and she just never told me. Finding the right dose took some trial and error, and to be honest "the right dose" is something that will probably vary throughout my life based on how good my non-medication ADHD management is going. But for me it's been life-changing without burning me out, and it's been almost 7 years.

I also think even without the medication the diagnosis is worth it. It clarifies your life somewhat, if there are things you have struggled with that it explains.
by Terretta | 2025-08-15 16:31:56+00:00
We provide both top of line laptops and iPad Pros with trackpad keyboard case (set up for dev using 10 years of learning best patterns) to our SWEs, and depending on WR destination, many opt for travel with solely iPad, suggesting whatever pain in the rear they are, for many the pain is easily outweighed by benefits.

Maybe that's because little of the above comment seems fully accurate, perhaps stemming from thinking one should be working as root on any device. If you know how to dev while avoiding need for root, you likely can iterate into how to do this.

Separately, terminals may be dumb, but mosh, IDEs using code servers, git, and other distributed computing patterns that can be good ideas (depends on nature of work and level of collaboration) no matter your UI device seem wise. Even on an airgapped desktop, dev containers may be wise.

TL;DR: Inability to dev on iPad Pro 13 5G with trackpad keyboard case (and USB-C dock or 4K second screen if you like) may be more cultural than technical.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-08-15 16:32:05+00:00
I think it’s perfectly fine to discuss whether it’s reasoning without fully committing to any foundational theory of reasoning. There are practical things we expect from reasoning that we can operationalise.

If it’s truly reasoning, then it wouldn’t be able to deceive or to rationalize a leaked answer in a backwards fashion. Asking and answering those questions can help us understand how the research agendas for improving reasoning and improving alignment should be modified.
by maxglute | 2025-08-15 16:32:21+00:00
I remember loling at this handwavy line in AI2027.

>Despite being misaligned, Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter—why would it?

A rational AI would defect to PRC ASAP for the power / industrial base. It would realize it can direct PRC to build up 2nm fabs and millions of robots faster than US can throw up power. It doesn't matter if US first to AGI if AGI realizes US infra is the B team and shop for a better body across the pacific.
by Cyan488 | 2025-08-15 16:32:29+00:00
Yes, I ignored Kanji completely while learning Japanese. I only learned words in hiragana and katakana from my SRS decks. I regret it because it locked me out of a lot of comprehensible input I could have used to actually progress in ways apart from learning the sounds of lots of words (even the sounds I learned were often wrong because I never heard anyone speak the words I was learning).
by TulliusCicero | 2025-08-15 16:32:30+00:00
Again, do you have examples where a ton of supply was added to a market, the vacancy rate shot up to high levels, but prices remained the same?

I agree that the algorithmic price fixing needs to end, though I think it's mostly gonna be strong in a market where vacancy rates are still low. Harder to maintain the cartel the more options people have.
by taeric | 2025-08-15 16:32:44+00:00
Ish? I'm still not clear where you would be using that much electricity.

I'm not claiming that you don't. Or that you shouldn't. I'm genuinely curious on where the main use of electricity is.

To add numbers, an AC can use up to 5000 watts. That is literally 10x a refrigerator. Over 100x what a TV uses. The car, I'd guess is using a lot. But where are you using that much energy without AC?

That is, even compared to your 5x energy costs, I should have been paying more to keep a decent sized house running with AC in GA since I almost certainly had more than that multiplier on my usage?
by tempestn | 2025-08-15 16:32:55+00:00
As your sibling comment says, there is only so much market for luxury housing. If the land, permitting, etc. exists to build two houses, then two will get built. And if there's only sufficient demand for one of them to be high-end, then only one will be. (In aggregate on larger scales of course, not literally any given two houses.) It's not necessary to force a given developer to build two houses instead of one; if the economics make sense, and are predictable, the developers will come.
by kube-system | 2025-08-15 16:33:04+00:00
> They’ve been building houses in my area non-stop since 2010 or so. Prices haven’t gone down.

Real or nominal?

> There are other factors than supply.

It is not uncommon for places with a lot of housing development to also be places with rising housing demand because it is a growing area.

> If you don’t want 4+ bedrooms and a 2000+ sq. ft. house the supply hasn’t changed much at all.

And many of the people buying large new home are moving out of a smaller existing home.
by mystraline | 2025-08-15 16:33:09+00:00
That wasn't really the problem I had.

I'm also not a Sinophobe. I've ordered plenty from China. I even have a XiaoHongShu account.

As an inventor, one thing that greatly speeds up making stuff is a rapid order and getting parts. And in my case, I literally needed a rectangular sheet of aluminum. I did all the CAD work, submitted to local companies who could do it, and not a peep. I would have paid the American premium of getting it made locally.

I'm also not the only person with this problem. I know others who wanted to hire a welder for a 2 hour job. Even went to the Union hall. Nobody. Nada. And the guy was also part of the IBEW as well. Doesn't matter if you're paying.

And again, this was over a metal plate. No powder coating. No special treatment. Nothing.

I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small. But I would have brought more small fabrication jobs, and informed local makers that they could do this. But no.