MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2025-08-01 03:54:31+00:00
> It does. Twenty thousand units represent about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Commit to adding this many units to the housing stock every year for the next 10 years and you'll have solved the housing crisis. (You'll probably need to bail out recent homebuyers, who will be permanently underwater, but that's a separate issue.)

"Committing to doing this every year" is VERY different than doing it in one particular year. Yes, that would solve it. But of course, 2022 was part of a very unusual cycle including a lot of migration and you should note the last line in the article:

> Meanwhile, the pipeline of new apartment buildings is drying up. The number of properties under construction is down by roughly one-third from the peak in 2023, the report found. That likely means fewer units coming available in the months ahead, potentially giving landlords room to start raising rents again.
by kazinator | 2025-08-01 03:54:34+00:00
I would say that it's lesser than macros because macros let you write a "metacircular compiler".

You can maintain performance across multiple nestings of compiled languages.

Where as if we write a metacirular interpreter in a compiled Lisp, we now have something lesser than the host language: an interpreted dialect. And then, if we write another meticircular interpreter in that dialect, we have something even slower: and interpreter interpreting the code of an interpreter which interprets code. With each level of embedding, we lose orders of magnitude of performance.

Metacircular interpreters are good for showing something cool: that you can document a possible model of how a language works using nothing but a small amount of code in that language. Someone who has learned how to use the language can then read that small amount of code understand it and acquire that model easily. Hopefully with the understanding that's not the only model. (Like for instance that lexical variables don't have to be an association list extended by consting.)

And of course academics have studied metacircular interpreters, and their theoretical properties. In that way they're also legitimate objects of interest.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-08-01 03:55:14+00:00
That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models.

Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"
by silentpuck | 2025-08-01 03:55:50+00:00
Yeah, that’s a fair point. Abstraction is part of progress — and we do rely more and more on things “just working.”

But that trust can be dangerous when we don’t even know what we’re trusting. And when something breaks, it can leave us completely blind.

I’m not saying everyone needs to go all the way down to the metal — but I do think it’s important to at least understand the boundaries. Know what’s underneath, even if you don’t touch it every day.

Otherwise, it’s not engineering anymore — it’s guessing.

And I’ve never been good at just “believing” things work. I need to poke around, break them, fix them. That’s how I learn. Maybe I’m just stubborn like that.
by athrun | 2025-08-01 03:57:16+00:00
Sounds like you're just applying somewhat arbitrary purity rules to what falls into the "leftist" bucket or not.

I believe that for most people "leftists" means "on the left side of the political spectrum", and so, in the US, it would be a strict superset of democrats & Liberals. But for you, it sounds like it's only subset of these, based on some criteria you haven't made explicit.

Fair enough, but that's a somewhat non-standard definition.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-01 03:57:42+00:00
Because if you're buying a house for a house, then it (mostly, generally¹) doesn't matter that the housing market has moved downwards and you'll be underwater until you pay down a bit on the house. You still have a house! So long as you can afford the mortgage — something you should have already planned for given you bought the house — you can still afford it. You might have remorse at having paid +$100k right before the market moved, but that's what the parent is saying: that's buyer's remorse, that is speculating on the price, when instead, you should be saying "am I willing (and financially able) to trade $400k for a home to live in?"

(¹I don't want to get too much into the sidetrack that is "but if you're underwater you could lose your home" — yes… that's possible. The example here is a 20% fall in prices — which would be astounding to those of us wanting a home, the thing of dreams — but you put 20% in the down payment, so a single mortgage payment & you're no longer underwater. In reality, the price drop (in rent, but let's work with what we got) was 3.7%. (Don't get me wrong, I'd take that too, as a renter.))
by asta123 | 2025-08-01 03:58:37+00:00
In Australia most of the narrative on the housing affordability crisis is around lack of supply and nimbyism. In the meantime Melbourne has dropped to 4th most expensive city in the country and becoming more affordable. Most likely reason - land tax change in that state which is turning off accumulating multiple properties through investment and investors turning to other states where prices are still going up. So, while supply is relevant, I would say it is investor demand that is driving prices up.
Show HN: Gmap: Explore Git Repos Visually from the CLI
by seeyebe | 2025-08-01 03:58:40+00:00
I built gmap, a command-line tool to visualize Git activity, weekly heatmaps, file churn, authorship stats, and more, right from your terminal.

Install with: cargo install gmap

Or on Arch via AUR: yay -S gmap

Repo: https://github.com/seeyebe/gmap

Feedback is welcome. Contributions too. if you’re into Git internals, CLIs, or terminal UX.
by dvrp | 2025-08-01 03:58:58+00:00
Can you point to a URL with the tests you’ve done?

Also, FWIW, this model focus was around aesthetics rather than strict prompt adherence. Not to excuse the bad samples, but to emphasize what was one of the research goals.

It’s a thorny trade-off, but an important one if one wants to get rid of what’s sometimes known as “the flux look”.

Re: Wan 2.2 I’ve also been reading of people commenting about using Wan 2.2 for base generation and Krea for the refiner pass which I thought was interesting.
by willprice89 | 2025-08-01 04:00:24+00:00
Those early machines really were impractical. From the Wikipedia article:

"The typewriter employed 36 keys divided into four banks: the first was numbered 0 through 5, and the other three were numbered 0 through 9. To type a character, the operator simultaneously pressed one key from each bank. Each four-digit combination corresponded to one of 5,400 Chinese characters, punctuation marks, numerals, letters of the English alphabet and other symbols etched onto a revolving drum which had a diameter of seven inches and a length of 11 inches. The drum made a complete revolution once per second, allowing the operator to achieve a maximum typing speed of 45 words per minute."
by majormajor | 2025-08-01 04:00:55+00:00
This Colorado story includes construction already slowing so why should we be convinced this is the start of a downward trend toward affordability vs a corrective blip after the Covid-era remote work migration trend?

Affordability and desirability are always going to be in constant tension, and any given change - including construction - can tip things more one way than the other. The long-term affordability trends are poor even in states like Texas - is that purely because of construction? No, it also has to do with policies like trying to poach established businesses from other states and importing wealth and high salaried individuals. But it shows that development is no panacea and that even in areas with more open land to build more new construction on there are still powerful trends in the US towards sprawl, low-to-medium density, and rising cost of living. Without explicit intervention like subsidies or direct government construction development will slow - focusing on higher-ROI units for the same spend vs pure unit count - as developers worry more about not being able to command the per-unit price they want if they were to aim for quantity.
by 7e | 2025-08-01 04:01:36+00:00
It is instructive to look at how we got expensive housing in the first place. Expensive housing comes from a surplus of people. How did we get all those people? By building more housing and having people breed there.

New housing is only a temporary salve and perpetuates a vicious cycle. The people who move into these new units will have more babies, because they have new habitat. These babies will grow up and eventually drive up housing prices. Even before then, people will move or emigrate into cheap housing and fill it up. Housing then becomes expensive again, only with more people filling up the earth: polluting the air, straining water supplies, clogging roads, uglifying neighborhoods with massive buildings, overrunning parks and trails.

Thankfully, expensive housing, in part, has reduced American baby making to 1.6 per woman, a sustainable rate. Unfortunately, because humans are living longer, the US population still continues to rise. The U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the resident U.S. population will peak at nearly 370 million around the year 2080, before it gradually declines to about 366 million by 2100. If immortality is invented before 2080, the population may never go down, ever.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates put the current U.S. population (as of mid‑2025) at approximately 342 million. The population has increased roughly 4.5x since 1900. From building new housing.
by 999900000999 | 2025-08-01 04:02:48+00:00
Excessive regulation is 90% of it.

Here's how a rational market works. If I build an apartment complex, eventually those apartments will get older and more affordable. And even before that upper middle class folks will move in, freeing up their previous homes.

But that's not how many in local governments see it. So you have affordable housing quotas on new developments.

You have developers building units for the homeless at 600k each. https://abc7news.com/post/new-high-rise-building-house-skid-...

Affordable housing vouchers, section 8, etc, become a dystopian nightmare.

11 year waiting list. https://laist.com/news/section-8-waiting-list

The problem is twofold, first it's too difficult to build homes. In California you can literally just claim a new highrise will block your sunlight and make you sad. That's enough to delay a construction.

Parking requirements ensure space that could be occupied by people is instead reserved for vehicles. Plus the parking structure itself drives up the cost to build, 30% of your construction cost isn't unreasonable.

On a macro level, many cities should of fixed their issues with inadequate housing construction decades ago.

On a personal level, you need to go where you can afford.

After about 4 generations of living in LA about half my family has left. It's more than possible to make it off a middle class salary, but you need to make that choice.

If you stay in an unaffordable city you can't wait around waiting for politicians to fix it.
by davidw | 2025-08-01 04:03:16+00:00
Really? It's very small, isolated and while there is a ton of outdoor stuff, I don't think there's much else. There are tons of people who enjoy the urban amenities in places like NYC or San Francisco who would have fun for about a week and then be desperate to go somewhere with more going on.

Just as there are plenty of people from outdoor towns who would enjoy hanging out in NYC for a week but then miss mountain biking or something.

I couldn't stand the rain in Seattle. You'd have to pay me to live there. Some people apparently like it or at least don't mind it much, though!
by vanillax | 2025-08-01 04:03:19+00:00
Right now, requiring users to understand every field in a deployment manifest feels unnecessarily complex. Since Kubernetes YAML is already quite straightforward to copy, paste, and modify from examples, the added cognitive load of deciphering each field may not provide proportional value—especially when the same manifests can be generated more efficiently.

What would be far more valuable is a feature that lets users import a Helm chart URL directly into the UI, then visualize and interact with the chart’s values in an intuitive way—no need to dig through documentation. Being able to explore, modify, and export the values in a user-friendly interface would save significant time and reduce friction, especially when working with complex or unfamiliar charts.

In short: instead of manually parsing YAML or hunting through Helm docs, a visual, interactive view of Helm values—especially when tied to a chart URL—would be a game-changer for productivity and usability.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-01 04:05:17+00:00
It's folk wisdom, generated by a long line of people who did not have proper dæmon management despite such tooling having been available since the 1990s. Any sort of service management, from running things once at bootstrap to having a long-running service, becomes hammered into the shape of a cron job.

There are loads of people over the years who have reached for cron instead of reaching for proper general-purpose dæmon management (SRC, SMF, daemontools, runit, daemontools-encore, perp, s6, ...). It is on Stack Exchange answers and in people's personal "How I did this" articles on WWW sites. (Although the idea goes back to the Usenet era.) It became one of those practices perpetuated because other people did it.

The next step is always discovering that cron's error handling and logging are aimed at an era when the system operator sat in the console room, and received "You have new mail" notifications at the console shell prompt.

And the step after that is (re-)discovering that the anacron approach does not fully cut the mustard. (-:
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-01 04:07:29+00:00
I can't read this article because of the paywall. Are they saying that taxable tips are subject to payroll taxes (which employers pay out of pocket)? That would actually benefit both employers and employees in some sense.

Some tipped workers, like bartenders, can make more in tips than a junior software engineer lol. Less taxes definitely helps their cause.

If you are concerned with indirect effects, there's quite a few pros and cons that you could extrapolate from the no tax on tips policy. These arguments are far less compelling in general.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-08-01 04:08:02+00:00
Recent history has been corporate rents not decreasing amid tight supply, the question being asked repeatedly (and repeatedly not answered) in this thread is “how exactly would landlords continue seeking high rents if housing were no longer scarce?” The only answer so far has been “by buying up the supply and renting it out” which completely ignores the obvious fact that renting out housing may reduce the supply of purchasable properties, but increases the supply of rental properties. There is no reason to assume collusion among a set of landlords would be enough to keep rental prices high if supply is no longer tight. So how exactly would landlords continue seeking be able to keep prices high if supply continues to increase?
by energy123 | 2025-08-01 04:08:02+00:00
You can consider the o3/o4-mini price to be half that due to flex processing. Flex gives the benefits of the batch API without the downside of waiting for a response. It's not marketed that way but that is my experience. With 20% cache hits I'm averaging around $0.8/million input tokens and $4/million output tokens.
by ch4s3 | 2025-08-01 04:09:39+00:00
> Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.

That’s why I specified NYC. There’s actually very good economic work on how the housing market is segmented and how demand and supply spill over. There’s some good studies from the NYU’s Furman Center on the topic.

> It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.

Warehoused condos make up a small fraction of high cost housing in NYC and exist almost solely in a handful of blocks in Manhattan. They have virtually no effect on the broader luxury market, and take up very little land as they are mostly crammed into a small number of buildings.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-01 04:09:45+00:00
Tcl 8 was just released, and yes we were using it, it hardly mattered that much.

Our product was inspired by AOLServer and Vignette, providing similar kind of capabilities, we had Rails in Tcl, but we were not a famous SV startup, rather mostly serving the Portuguese market.

The founders then went on to create OutSystems, built on top of .NET and Java, nowadays using other stacks, while offering the same kind of RAD tooling.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-01 04:09:58+00:00
This is one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a a long time. I’m not sure what is better, the “I quite literally set out to find support for my narrative and find exactly one (1) guy that’s both willing to call himself an expert and give me my desired answer for each of my individual points” thing or the lazy neocon virtue signaling

> The antitrust left

I love this phrasing. Derek Thompson has done some Serious Journalism and has discovered that if you support competition between homebuilders you are a Leftist.

Also there isn’t a concentration of homebuilders (in Dallas) but even if there was it doesn’t affect prices (in Dallas). Well there may be a concentration of homebuilders nationally, but Thomson spoke to a guy that doesn’t care about that. Anyway, wasn’t the takeaway from the Great Recession that monopolies are good?

But then I’m not sure he knows what a monopoly is

> If a homebuilding monopoly purposefully made crappy new homes, they’d be out-competed quickly

Or what is a good outcome or a bad outcome

> Can big companies hurt subcontractors by forcing them to accept lower prices?

> “Maybe, but if big homebuilders can offer trades longer guaranteed contracts”

Hmm… they can force subcontractors to accept lower rates, but that’s not that big of a deal because they can force them to accept lower rates for a longer period of time. Like for example it would suck to have your paycheck cut in half but knowing that there’s no chance of it going back up for several years would take the sting out of it. This is the reasoning of somebody that took a Hat Man dose of Benadryl
by graeme | 2025-08-01 04:10:40+00:00
Realistically basically no one is aware of the details of zoning policy or the mechanics.

Are there pitchforks in Denver or Austin? Are angry homeowners overthrowing governments and blocking homebuilding?

People seem to complain that housing costs too much. The straightforward bet is that lower prices would be popular.

For example, re Texas, 9 out of 10 say housing prices are too high: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/08/texas-housing-afford...
by tptacek | 2025-08-01 04:10:44+00:00
That the people writing it do very little of their own reporting. "Reporting" isn't writing or thinking; it's the act of collecting external facts. Calling a primary source on the phone is reporting; traveling to a location and observing events is reporting. Synthesizing existing facts and reporting is not reporting. It's still journalism! Reporting is a specific practice within journalism.
by majormajor | 2025-08-01 04:11:56+00:00
> For large and complex codebases, unfortunately the effects of tech debt (read: objectively subpar practices) translate into context rot at development time. A properly architected and documented codebase that adheres to common well structured patterns can easily be broken down into small easily digestible contexts. i.e. a fragmented codebase does not scale well with LLMs, because the fragmentation is seeding the context for the model. The model reflects and acts as an amplifier to what it's fed.

It seems like you're claiming complex codebases are hard for LLMs because of human skill issues. IME it's rather the opposite - an LLM makes it easier for a human to ramp up on what a messy codebase is actually doing, in a standard request/response model or in terms of looking at one call path (however messy) at a time. The models are well trained on such things and are much faster at deciphering what all the random branches and nested bits and pieces do.

But complex codebases actually usually arise because of changing business requirements, changing market conditions, and iteration on features and offerings. Execution quality of this varies but a "properly architected and documented codebase" is rare in any industry with (a) competitive pressure and (b) tolerance for occasional bugs. LLMs do not make the need to serve those varied business goals go away, nor do they remove the competitive pressure to move rapidly vs gardening your codebase.

And if you're working in an area with extreme quality requirements that have forced you into doing more internal maintenance and better codebase hygiene then you find yourself with very different problems with unleashing LLMs into that code. Most of your time was never spent writing new features anyway, and LLM-driven insight into rare or complex bugs, interactions, and performance still appears quite hit or miss. Sometimes it saves me a bunch of time. Sometimes it goes in entirely wrong directions. Asking it to make major changes, vs just investigate/explain things, has an even lower hit rate.
by Squakie | 2025-08-01 04:13:30+00:00
I feel called out, lmao. I’m building an agentic framework for automated pentesting as part of an internal AppSec R&D initiative. My company’s letting me run wild with infrastructure and Bedrock usage (bless their optimism). I’ve been throwing together some admittedly questionable prototypes to see what sticks.

The setup is pretty basic: S3 for docs and code base, pgvector on RDS for embeddings, Claude/Titan for retrieval and reasoning. It works in the sense that data flows through and responses come out… but the agents themselves are kind of a mess.

They think they’ve found a bug, usually something like a permissive IAM policy or a questionable API call, and just latch onto it. They tunnel hard, write up something that sounds plausible, and stop there. No lateral exploration, no attempt to validate anything in a dev environment despite having MCP tools to access internal resources, and definitely no real exploitation logic.

I’ve tried giving them tools like CodeQL, semgrep and Joern, but that’s been pretty disappointing. They can run basic queries, but all they surface are noisy false positives, and they can’t reason their way out of why it might be a false positive early on. There’s no actual taint analysis or path tracing, just surface-level matching and overconfident summaries. I feel like I’m duct-taping GPT-4 to a security scanner and hoping for insight.

I’ve experimented with splitting agents into roles (finder, validator, PoC author, code auditor, super uber hacker man), giving them memory, injecting skepticism, etc., but it still feels like I’m missing something fundamental.

If cost isn’t an issue, how would you structure this differently? How do you actually get agents to do persistent, skeptical, multi-stage analysis, especially in security contexts where you need depth and proof, not just plausible-sounding guesses and long ass reports on false positives?