MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-08-15 16:47:50+00:00
It's more than love - I have friends who will actively refuse to buy games on other stores, even for significantly better prices.

(To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time you launch the game...)
by psunavy03 | 2025-08-15 16:48:46+00:00
Except Washington has rolled out broad-based bans which statistically do nothing except harass law-abiding citizens. I live in Greater Seattle, and the vibe seems to be much more "ban them all" than "how do we responsibly have these tools in society." The attitude here towards guns is as irrational as the attitude in Mississippi towards people having gay sex.

The Swiss will sell you your service rifle converted to semi-auto when you leave the military, yet somehow these "assault weapons" don't cause them problems.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-15 16:48:57+00:00
Developer is also a professional with experience/refinement so he knows the magic specs to make things, magic things to say in the emails to the bureaucrats, magic words to put on the applications to avoid getting fucked by a bunch of "you need a survey for this" and "you need an engineer for that" and "akshually since you've done this you need a new septic" type landmines that cost $1-20k individually the little guy is gonna run right into.
by taeric | 2025-08-15 16:48:58+00:00
This seems to be claiming something different, though? You are pointing at that development slows as prices go down. Which seems somewhat expected?

That is, adding supply lowers prices. And lowering price reduces potential profit such that fewer people will build. With fewer people building, prices should go up again.

Stated differently, thin margins reduce the number of people offering products in a market. Ironically, the main way to get more building is with bigger builders in that scenario.
by w10-1 | 2025-08-15 16:49:08+00:00
Adding supply would only reduce prices if it was added at the average or below.

Even if the number of units increase, the price can actually go up.

The relative market power matters most. A developer with cheap bridge financing and a large portfolio of unsold units has every incentive to hold prices to set expectations, while buyers who are occupiers generally are compelled to buy in a certain time frame and location.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:49:36+00:00
Again, on paper it does.

But paper often neglects reality. A reality where it can be more profitable to simply hold the land rather than lease out the home on it. Where a constructive loss can improve tax savings. Where the intent is to have it vacant for some other perceived use or gain - like a vacation home, AirBnB rental, Pied-a-terre, or just letting the structure languish until it can be condemned and bypass red tape around teardowns/rebuilds.

Current incentives and structures do not mandate that homes are made available when someone buys another domicile. That’s one of the myriad of issues affecting the housing crisis.
by uv-depression | 2025-08-15 16:49:38+00:00
GP was incorrect that it doesn't increase supply, but correct on pricing. Besides, if I can't afford $3000/mo rent, it doesn't matter to me how many rental units are available at $4000/mo. With massive pricing collusion having been the standard for the last few years (RealPage) and the demand for housing always being extremely inelastic, the supply/demand curve is extremely complex.
by tombert | 2025-08-15 16:49:39+00:00
This is why I almost always send emails as plain text. I want people to be able to read their emails in any font they would like, not necessarily the font I used when I wrote the email.

This isn’t just superficial, some people might use certain fonts that are easier to read for dyslexia, and I don’t think I should make their life artificially harder if it’s trivial for me to simply send a message as plain text.
by Y_Y | 2025-08-15 16:49:45+00:00
I wish I could live like this, but I don't use the internet just for pleasure. There are things like buying flights, buying concert tickets, anything with a bank, etc. that require exactly the setup that the web developer had, lest the site explode.

It's also very difficult to delegate since they'll want some cybersecurity theatre "verifciation" that requires multiple devices, cursed mobile apps, and "selfies".

I don't see any way around this apart from not taking flights, or paying a lot more for these privileges.
by legitster | 2025-08-15 16:49:48+00:00
> The houses are purchased by hedge funds and other smaller investors.

The hedge fund thing is way overblown. Even if they buy up homes in hot markets, their incentive is still going to be to sell them if/when the market cools. Corporations do not enjoy the same tax incentives as homeowners in this country, and the risks/costs to rent out older homes just doesn't pen out for non-local investors. If PE wants to get into housing, it's such a better deal for them to just build apartments.

Currently less than a percent of homes are owned by private equity. And the majority of those are owned for the purpose of turning around and selling them, like Home Partners.

(Zillow also tried buying up homes for the purpose of arbitrage and it ended up blowing up in their face).
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-15 16:49:49+00:00
I don't see how that really matters. If you keep making homes and investment buyers keep buying them then the price will keep going up and regular folk will still be priced out. If you make so many homes via this strategy that institutional buyers are no longer interested, I think it's because the homes have somehow become genuinely worthless, at least to the investors. I don't see how to do that without legislation that makes the investment unattractive (unprofitable) to them. Policies such as rent control, "you can't buy that house because you're not living in it", etc., are the proper solution.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-15 16:50:19+00:00
What? No, I think jury trials are very, very important, for all their flaws, but I don't think it demonstrates deference to authority to say that it makes sense that your average judge is likely to be more invested in your average trial than your average jury, for the same reason that volunteer militaries tend to have more dedicated soldiers than conscript militaries.

The judge decided to pursue this career, studied law, is fairly well paid for the position, and has nowhere better to be. The jury is likely losing pay, is worried about parking and where and when they're going to eat lunch, and probably just wants the trial to be over (for all that they would of course prefer the outcome to be correct) so they can go home and return to their normal lives.
by throwaway5752 | 2025-08-15 16:50:47+00:00
Plants and any organisms in photosynthesis-dependent food chains may have issues with modifying the degree of insolation.

Also, again, the Mediterranian is 1/100-1/200th of global ocean surface area. And we have melted a lot of ice cap/glacier mass. The latent heat of fusion of water is very large, also.

Long term, insolation and retention are important, but short term we are reaching the limits of the "Free Ride" portion of climate change where energy sinks absorb the additional delta created by the CO2 induced greenhouse effect.

edit: the tsar bomba was to try to make it tangible, as people don't understand these orders of magnitudes well.
by kamranjon | 2025-08-15 16:50:48+00:00
I get the feeling that it is not actually the tech involved in the printers that distinguishes Bambu from Prusa, I think it's more about the supply chain and the distribution network. If I go to Prusa right now to order a core one printer from the US it tells me this: Estimated lead time 1–2 weeks

That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 60$ to 300$ depending on the printer... Bambu has warehouses on US soil where they maintain stock of frequently purchased items and their printers/parts can be at my door in a matter of days with shipping ranging from 20$ to 100$ for their largest printer. It seems small but when you run a business that is reliant on 3d printers - these things matter. I think Prusa just honestly needs to focus on their distribution chain.

Like I really have considered Prusa printers for my business many times, but they either have had crazy lead times/shipping times or the prices out the door just don't make sense.
by rayiner | 2025-08-15 16:51:05+00:00
> The pitch is still compelling, but the elephant in the room is cost: renewables (including storage) are cheaper and getting cheaper still.

We need to ramp up base load capacity so everyone can charge their EVs at night, or run their heat pumps through a cold winter night.

We’re not shooting at a static electric usage target. In our house, we have been electrifying everything and it’s quite surprising how much our electricity usage has gone up. In much of the country, you have design-point winter days where you need 90k BTU that’s currently being supplied by heating oil. Even with an efficient heat pump, that’s 12-13 kW, for everyone at the same time, all night. That’s an insane amount of energy storage.
by mediaman | 2025-08-15 16:51:33+00:00
This analogy seems confused.

If someone in Chicago moves to Seattle, then our policy options are (1) no new condo in Seattle or (2) new condo in Seattle.

Under policy 1, the new buyer from Chicago must outbid locals for the fixed housing supply; they will wind up buying older housing stock, which otherwise would have gone to existing local residents. Prices go up.

With policy 2, the new entrant buys the new condo and does not compete for pre-existing housing stock.

In this scenario, whatever house is freed up in Chicago is irrelevant to the housing stock in Seattle. I'm not sure why you included it.

The entire question can be contained by the assumption that "there is someone new coming to Seattle" and whether it would be better to have a new condo unit to sell to them or have them compete for existing fixed stock. The whole bit about the Chicago housing market is a distractor, because it stays the same under either policy.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-15 16:52:34+00:00
I didn't say it would be effective. My point is that it is thematically aligned. I agree that it is counterproductive assuming that was what his goal is.

Our military budget remains a comically bad allocation of funds. If we're going to be isolationist and we are, we should cut our number of carrier groups in half and throw all of that money into subsidies.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-15 16:53:06+00:00
If I build 4 houses, and someone speculatively buys 1 house, I've still added 3 to the housing supply.

As a solution to the housing shortage, building new is 25% inefficient? Great, it's 75% efficient. That's not bad for a solution. So let's do it, in volume, and actually make a dent in the problem.

And for the builders, they don't care. A speculator bought that house? It payed me just the same. But even better, the demand is still there, so I should build another one.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:53:37+00:00
Yup, but I also take the tact of educating the current winners of the increasing cost of their inevitable loss when the pendulum swings the other way. Pre-pandemic, the “loss” of home valuations might’ve been 10-15% in many areas once supply was increased and made available to homebuyers; post-pandemic, that loss could be as much as 50% depending on where you bought and what the actual local demand is. That results in fiercer resistance against change that would improve the problem even a modest amount, because now they have more to lose.

As I learned watching Union vs Non-Union labor interactions, it’s exponentially cheaper to do the right thing sooner than being forced to do a compromise thing later. The fact the crisis has gotten so bad that there’s campaigns for national rent control schemes and “homeownership as a human right” legislation means they have already lost by not doing the right thing sooner. Once organization happens, you’ve lost the game.

The rest is just time.
by lokar | 2025-08-15 16:54:02+00:00
In the cost to build vs what would be affordable I think people on both sides over generalize.

Liberal land use and other rules would eventually bring down prices to affordable levels for most families. But not all of them. Every country has to have some strategy to provide housing for the bottom of the income range, since they typically won't be able to afford "dignified" housing based purely on the Capex/depreciation/opex value of the housing (they will always be renters).

So you need something like liberal land use to provide for 80%, and then some kind of government intervention for the bottom 20% (numbers will vary based on the location/nation/etc)
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-15 16:55:08+00:00
Survivor bias is not as powerful an effect as the HN contrarians who always bring it up seem to think. Here's an example of why: Each kid reports not only their own experience, but also those of the people they know. Kids with active social lives grow up knowing 20~100 other kids. The death of a friend is a memorable event. There's no world in which kids were dying a lot from playing outside but we just never hear their perspectives, because in that world, every surviving kid would be talking about their three or four childhood friends who all died from lethal accidents on the playground or crossing the street.

Those things did happen and still do, but they were rare and impactful occurrences that had lasting influence on the lives of the people in the victims' social circles. If anything, each one will have been overrepresented in the self-reported stories of random commenters.
by foldr | 2025-08-15 16:55:30+00:00
The first part of your comment seems inconsistent. First you say that you have statistics to challenge my claim that crime in London has trended down overall in the past 10 years, but then you accept that "the 10-year trend shows overall decreases".

You'll find this note about the increase in 'headline crime' in 2025 vs 2024:

>the latest rise in CSEW headline crime was because of a 31% increase in fraud (to around 4.2 million incidents); this is the highest estimated number of incidents since fraud was first collected on the CSEW in YE March 2017

Surely you can't argue that fraud makes people feel unsafe when walking the streets. Fraud is a serious problem and the increase in fraud is concerning, but it's not a personal safety issue.

If you think about it, there are a lot of different categories of crime, numbers are bound to fluctuate, and so some of the categories will naturally show increases between one year and the next (just as others will show decreases). You can easily cherry pick one or two individual categories to paint whatever picture you want. I could equally point out that knife offenses, firearm offenses and robbery have gone down compared to 2024. Really, as many posters have pointed out, it makes more sense to look at longer-term trends rather than reading too much into year-on-year increases or decreases in specific crime categories.

The overall picture is that London is neither unusually safe nor unusually unsafe for a large European or American city. This has been the case for decades.

>I can communicate with Londoners

Well, can you? You're communicating with one now, but you seem quite determined to convince me not to believe either the official statistics or my own experiences.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-15 16:55:33+00:00
Yeah, one corollary is that membership-oriented groups like Greenpeace, the NRA, PIRG and such are not effective at representing member’s interests because they have no way of communicating displeasure other than leaving whereas the sponsor of something like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network

Has a meaningful voice. See another book from about the same time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
by msgodel | 2025-08-15 16:56:00+00:00
It was a big deal when Google started doing it 15 years ago on YouTube. They were explicitly changing weights for recommendations wrt middle eastern videos. At the time it was considered a moral thing because it was done to prevent ISIS from radicalizing people.

I remember warning people at the time they'd do it for domestic political videos, it was really frustrating how no one believed me. It's a little more frustrating that after experiencing people continue to use sites with artificial cybernetics.
by qnleigh | 2025-08-15 16:56:04+00:00
Though it's not obvious to me if you get this association from raw training, or if some of this 'emergent misalignment' is actually a result of prior fine-tuning for safety. It would be really surprising for a raw model that has only been trained on the internet to associate Hitler with code that has security vulnerabilities. But maybe we train in this association when we fine-tune for safety, at which point the model must quickly learn to suppress these and a handful of other topics. Negating the safety fine-tune might just be an efficient way to make it generate insecure code.

Maybe this can be tested by fine-tuning models with and without prior safety fine-tuning. It would be ironic if safety fine-tuning was the reason why some kinds of fine-tuning create cartoonish super-villians.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-15 16:56:17+00:00
> We have not evolved

We're still just apes with hats. Very complicated hats, but it's still an ape wearing it. You can teach a few apes a whole lot of tricks, but it takes a lot. Most of the apes won't learn much. The few smart apes will learn tricks and incentives, which when properly applied, allow those few smart apes to control the rest of the apes. That control is called society.
by nostrebored | 2025-08-15 16:56:19+00:00
Saying renewables are cheap is like saying SDE interns are cheap. The operational instability created by large scale adoption of renewables is an important part of the TCO.

Even places like Australia, which are naturally blessed in terms of wind and sun prevalence, are not able to divest from large scale coal power plants.

Intermittency is a huge problems for grids, and many of the widely deployable energy resources are inherently intermittent (which projects like Xlinks try to solve with other flaky engineering solutions)
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-15 16:56:25+00:00
You keep talking about "no other studies" as if that holds power but the strength of your argument rests on a single study

It's no surprise to me that devs who are accustomed to working on one thing at a time due to fast feedback loops have not learned to adapt to paralellizing their work (something that has been demonized at agile style organizations) and sit and wait on agents and start watching YouTube instead. The study reflects usage of emergent tools without training, and with regressive training on previous generation sequential processes, so I would expect these results. If there is any merit in coordinating multiple agents on slower feedback work, this study would not find it.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-15 16:57:11+00:00
False binary choice in one sense, but also living America invariably becomes a Hobson's choice or a Catch-22 between survival and morality. Where I grew up in the SF Bay Area, the income required is $390k/yr to afford a home mortgage.. and there are very few ethical and legal / productive ways to make that much money working as an employee. It's basically not possible without starting a business, becoming a criminal, and/or serving immoral businesses in war, financial trickery, or megacorps.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-15 16:57:37+00:00
> What is less obvious is that this still increase housing supply. It's not new affordable housing, but the people moving in to the new expensive houses are leaving their old houses, and the people who buy those are leaving their old houses, so eventually the price drops happen on the older, smaller homes at the bottom end of the market.

Two things to think about when making this argument:

* Older housing could have been torn down to build new housing. So before, you had a rooming house with 10 or so low cost tenants, and now you have three town homes with three very rich families moving in. Life just became a lot harder for people in the lower end of the market. Gentrification of entire neighborhoods is an extreme example of this: a blighted neighborhood is great for cheap housing options, but then people start coming in and redeveloping it and...it is no longer blighted, the neighborhood is better, and the cheap housing is gone replaced by much more expensive housing.

* Demand is induced by new supply. We accept this as a fact for highway construction, but it is somewhat also true for housing in a hot market where everyone wants to live. So building a bunch of new housing in Seattle could attract new resident, causing the population to grow, rather than adding supply to deal with fixed demand. Yes, adding housing in Buffalo isn't going to run into that, and yes, overall the situation becomes better for the country (or world if you are inducing demand from other countries), but locally you feel like you are going nowhere with the problem. A more extreme example of this is handing out housing to your unhoused population (you'll almost certainly wind up with more unhoused than when you started even though you've given some housing).
by steine65 | 2025-08-15 16:57:51+00:00
Agreed! I love my Trident. This is the best hobby I have taken up in a long time. So fulfilling. Especially now that I'm learning freecad. Getting started can be expensive. There is an awesome community on discord that loves to help, and there are lots of small businesses that sell every part you can think of, custom mods from github, and if you email them they will respond promptly and personally. 10/10
by threePointFive | 2025-08-15 16:58:23+00:00
My company just implemented the SaaS Bitwarden with Google SAML on their Enterprise Plan. Very easy to set up, not too expensive ($6/user/month). Their compliance page made it much easier to sell to my manager who had to give the final approval: https://bitwarden.com/compliance/. It is only used by my department so far and we're still doing manual invites rather than integrating with the SCIM features so I can't speak to that. My biggest annoyance is that, as an admin, unlocking the vault still prompts for the master password rather than letting me select SSO without logging all the way out.
by hnfong | 2025-08-15 16:58:38+00:00
It's actually very weird to "believe" LLMs are "intelligent".

Pragmatic people see news like "LLMs achieve gold in Math Olympiad" and think "oh wow, it can do maths at that level, cool!" This gets misinterpreted by so called "critics of LLM" who scream "NO THEY ARE JUST STOCHASTIC PARROTS" at every opportunity yet refuse to define what intelligence actually is.

The average person might not get into that kind of specific detail, but they know that LLMs can do some things well but there are tasks they're not good at. What matters is what they can do, not so much whether they're "intelligent" or not. (Of course, if you ask a random person they might say LLMs are pretty smart for some tasks, but that's not the same as making a philosophical claim that they're "intelligent")

Of course there's also the AGI and singularity folks. They're kinda loony too.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-15 16:58:40+00:00
I believe you are correct on the hedge fund point; I was confusing it with something else that's related but different (I recall investing in a platform that made some of its profit from financing the construction of homes). The effects that I worry about still seem to be actualized by the "smaller investors" I mentioned, such as the head of a household being able to afford to purchase another home as a rental or a replacement as they rent out their old home.