MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-08-01 00:39:14+00:00
You never know what your house or apartment or condo is worth, even to you. Maybe you can afford $400k barely, but you'll be hugely squeezed. Or maybe you'd get a bigger place if prices had dropped for your family size.

You hope conditions won't change. You can look at the current market trends to try to value it. But things will change in the next few years probably. You can guess, but you'll never "know with pretty good accuracy". The economy can go down, interest rates can change, major employers can come and go, there can be an earthquake or cancerous ground discovered there.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-01 00:40:20+00:00
I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If you visit the DSA contingent I doubt you'd find anyone per se against zoning revisions to build more housing. Eg, Mamdani had literally building more housing as a part of his platform.

Leftists tend to feel very little solidarity with wealthy progressives and don't really vibe with their political interests, in general. It seems really weird that the specific label of "leftist" is being thrown around in this context. Especially in the context of organizing the Democrats where there is a meaningful and material difference between liberal and leftist.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-01 00:41:15+00:00
Similar thing, snapped outside of work, Brisbane area, near sea level:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rEVYBieIEMfV9Mt4guL2xZLU3pf...

It was gone an hour or so later, presumably wandered off to somewhere more private. Or got eaten by a magpie.
by kettlecorn | 2025-08-01 00:42:35+00:00
> I think a more realistic (but depressing) goal is modest loss to inflation (so prices go up by 1-2% less then inflation).

If you read between the lines that seems to be what Canada's approach to house affordability is going to be. Their leaders are promising housing will be more "affordable" but that the goal isn't to decrease home prices.
by dvsfish | 2025-08-01 00:42:55+00:00
Hmm I don't feel like this should be taken as a tenet of AI. I feel a more relevant kernel would be less black and white.

Also I think what you're saying is a direct contradiction of the parent. Below average people can now get average results; in other words: The LLM will boost your capabilities (at least if you're already 'less' capable than average). This is a huge benefit if you are in that camp.

But for other cases too, all you need to know is where your knowledge ends, and that you can't just blindly accept what the AI responds with. In fact, I find LLMs are often most useful precisely when you don’t know the answer. When you’re trying to fill in conceptual gaps and explore an idea.

Even say during code generation, where you might not fully grasp what’s produced, you can treat the model like pair programming and ask it follow-up questions and dig into what each part does. They're very good at converting "nebulous concept description" into "legitimate standard keyword" so that you can go and find out about said concept that you're unfamiliar with.

Realistically the only time I feel I know more than the LLM is when I am working on something that I am explicitly an expert in, and in which case often find that LLMs provide nuance lacking suggestions that don’t always add much. It takes a lot more filling in context in these situations for it to be beneficial (but still can be).

Take a random example of nifty bit of engineering: The powerline ethernet adapter. A curious person might encounter these and wonder how they work. I don't believe an understanding of this technology is very obvious to a layman. Start asking questions and you very quickly come to understand how it embeds bits in the very same signal that transmits power through your house without any interference between the two "types" of signal. It adds data to high frequencies on one end, and filters out the regular power transmitting frequencies at the other end so that the signal can be converted back into bits for use in the ethernet cable (for a super brief summary). But if want to really drill into each and every engineering concept, all I need to do is continue the conversation.

I personally find this loop to be unlike anything I've experienced as far as getting immediate access to an understanding and supplementary material for the exact thing Im wondering about.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-08-01 00:43:00+00:00
There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or intentionally scoped the project too big.

Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
by so-cal-schemer | 2025-08-01 00:44:03+00:00
Btw, I've just read the first section of Chapter 5 [Computing with Register Machines] for the first time, and think it's the best introduction to assembly that I've seen (and I've seen a few).

Calling it 'fake' is dismissive. Also, it isn't written in Scheme, but merely described in the native data format: lists of symbols.

The next section builds a virtual machine that is written in Scheme to run the code. One of the beauties of Scheme/Lisp (and source of much of its power) is the simplicity of the syntax. It allows it to be incredibly succinct.

The last section in the chapter builds a compiler to translate Scheme into this virtual machine assembly code so you can run it in the virtual machine simulator. An ouroboros.

SICP is a gem. Thank you Hal and Gerry!
by tptacek | 2025-08-01 00:44:27+00:00
Again, if you try to collapse this down to "leftists" vs "Derek Thompson", you're totally missing the point. Thompson's rhetorical adversary here are "people who believe we shouldn't do the zoning and envelope reforms required to increase the supply of housing", a subset of whom are on the political left and thus in his target audience: his term for them --- fairly applied! --- is "the antitrust left", but you could (like I do) call them "left-NIMBYs" and be in the same rhetorical place.

Most leftists gag over current anti-housing laws (I wish that were true of the right, but right-YIMBYs make up a tiny minority of the political right).
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-01 00:45:15+00:00
Value is partly subjective but all value eventually can tied to the reversal of entropy. And the reversal of entropy costs energy.

It is naive to think the topic is wholly subjective. Subjectivity is one aspect of value but not only does the subjectivity coincidentally correlate with entropy reversal… but entropy reversal is also intrinsic to all value as even a human being alive and assigning value to something carries an energy cost. This cost is non trivial as it takes a lot for you to live and a lot more to have the luxury to think in terms of value.
by windexh8er | 2025-08-01 00:45:37+00:00
This is 100a% wrong from my perspective. I host multiple sites using UniFi, old Router/SwitchOS as well as AirOS/UISP. I have many VLANs under management spanning these different variations of "old" and "new" implementations and none of them are "a miserable place to be". Maybe if one doesn't actually understand networking nomenclature or interop, sure. I happen to have a pretty deep networking background - but Ubiquiti products have actually made it easier in many cases to do some of the more advanced things in other routing platforms.

While I don't like many of the shady things Ubiquiti did with respect to OSS and for a while I did try to move away from them. However what I found was the prosumer market riddled with less polished alternatives. Microtik does offer some interesting hardware for edge cases that UniFi doesn't cover, but when it comes to a unified system Ubiquiti have done an amazing job.

The pricing has gotten a bit outrageous. For example: trying to find a reasonably priced high wattage PoE switch in UniFi's line is no longer an easy task. It's tradeoffs all the way down. I have an original (SwitchOS) 48 port GbE & 4 SFP+, full L3 with a >250W budget and replacing it will be rather pricey or I'll have to make concessions.

But overall... There's no better prosumer option - good, bad or otherwise. They haven't enshittified the product with subscriptions / software upgrades and my guess is they're making this move back to self hosted options to actually save themselves money. A win on both sides.
by mathattack | 2025-08-01 00:47:15+00:00
The last paragraph should temper our enthusiasm. Allowing people to build more when there is a shortage is the best way to have markets solve problems.

—-

“ 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 Spooky23 | 2025-08-01 00:47:29+00:00
I love my ubiquity kit, but they annoy me with half finished stuff.

I upgraded my venerable USG with the new UXG as I have gig service now. The gear is great, even supports IPv6, and uses much less power. But… no internal DNS is enabled. So now, I ended up buying a thin client on eBay to roll my own DHCP/DNS. Not fun. It is baffling to me because there’s lots of complex new features in the Unifi stack, and they already had an interface to configure static names in dnsmasq.

I went the Eufy route for cameras as the batteries were a big draw for me.
by dceddia | 2025-08-01 00:49:07+00:00
I know it’s usually taken as a given around here that Electron is slow, and many of the big-name apps using it are cited as examples with good reason.

From working on a Tauri app myself for a few years (video editor) I just think the blame is misattributed. These things are not inherently slow. Slower than native? Maybe, probably, at the level of milliseconds. Visibly laggy? No, that’s the badly-written UI code’s fault. (see also: the latest iterations of the macOS System Settings UI, where the search box lags like crazy)

A webview can be extremely responsive. It won’t be if you treat it like a web page (where clicking buttons fires off HTTP requests) or if you let the JS framework code get out of hand, but those are not the fault of the wrapper.

If you like building with HTML/CSS/JS then I’d recommend doing some perf experiments to see how far these tools can take you. Of course if you don’t want to use that stack then pick something else :)

If you’re building photoshop, the main UI will probably be canvas anyway, where drawing is fully under your control, no matter which framework you go with. That stuff can be very fast or very not-fast depending on how the code is written.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-08-01 00:49:10+00:00
> houses should be cheaper by any means necessary.

That's basically the position Klein has in the book Abundance, but everywhere I go online the left automatically comes out hostile to it or anything that embraces market solutions. Your anecdote might be true but beyond your small sample size it doesn't seem representative. Broadly, they want populist solutions. This is why Sanders and Warren gave a lukewarm criticism of tariffs, and why they like price controls for grocery stores despite their having small margins, and risk of food shortages it could bring.
by Retric | 2025-08-01 00:49:42+00:00
For single family homes square footage alone has a fairly modest impact on housing prices.

Land, driveway, number and quality of fixtures, electrical hookups, cabinets, countertops, doors, clearing land, water, sewage, etc can be nearly identical costs for a 1,000 sf or a 3,000sf home. Many things like wall insulation and heating demand increase sub linearly with square footage.

Which is why home builders so heavily favor large homes by historic standards. This is slightly less true of high rises, but making the building wider doesn’t require more elevators, internal hallways, etc.
by tptacek | 2025-08-01 00:49:50+00:00
Restating something I said upthread, but I think the right way to think about Thompson's rhetorical adversary here is "people on the political left who believe that antitrust is the high-order bit on housing affordability and that zoning reform shouldn't occur until after antitrust issues are addressed". He's arguing with people who are pushing back on legalizing housing density. He is not arguing broadly against the political left; in a reasonable US macro view of politics, he is part of that political left; there are people much further to his left that are nonetheless in lock step with him on housing, all of whom I believe he'd be thrilled to endorse.
by windexh8er | 2025-08-01 00:50:05+00:00
I have a couple sites with both types of cameras. And I really love all the customizability with my Frigate / Reolink site. But UniFi can command the premium on the camera hardware because of all the features they give you on the software side of their NVR. It's far better than what you get out of the box compared to something like Reolink in terms of detection and set-it-and-forget-it mentality.

I have a site that has 8 cameras and 2 of the 8 are original cameras that are >5 years old still getting firmware updates. Reolink does not do this and I have had much higher failure rate with them as well. Especially in outdoor cameras that have to handle snow/ice/extreme cold.
by Animats | 2025-08-01 00:51:44+00:00
Here's a related company, Ultra Safe Nuclear, making TRISO fuel units.[1] They went bankrupt in April 2025.[2] They at least got as far as making fuel units, although I suspect the video shows dummies being made, because they are not taking enough precautions for handling enriched uranium.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg

[2] https://nuclear-news.net/2025/04/04/update-on-the-bankruptcy...
by tptacek | 2025-08-01 00:52:11+00:00
No. Republicans believe in full privatization of schools, Social Security, and Medicare, in flat taxation, the abolition of the regulatory state, the replacement of government-provided services with cash vouchers, and policymaking devolved out to the states. Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs.

I've gone out of my way here not to make value judgements; Republicans have coherent arguments for why all these policies are better. "Republicans who don't hate minorities" is not a good way to describe liberals, who make up the majority of the Democratic party, the "other" American party that opposes the Republicans.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-01 00:54:16+00:00
Current core dump on care vs assholery dilemma:

-Dark traits have an energizing component-- just like black gold (fossil fuels). Neuroticism otoh an autodepressant, assholes prefer stimulants

-Dating apps, narcissism, attention flywheels, false abundance, etc

-Hofstede's cultural dimensions are the personality traits for demography.

-also interesting for me is how Monumentalism vs Flexhumility is counterintuitive(-ly named), & roughly aligned with Jacobs' Guardian vs Commerce

-Populism+emotivism to be understood on the expressiveness axes. Hitler did especially well in a Southwest country (helped by Austrian-ness?). As did Napoleon in Northern France, etc. Switzerland cannot currently scale because most undeveloped humans expect their leaders to be emotionally expressive. (Clinton the high water mark of American emo dev? Emotionally expressive individuals tend to be difficult to negotiate with? Keep Calm & Carry On a counterpopulist heirloom from Saxe-Coburg&Gotha)

Revisit presumptions to solve quandary
by wand3r | 2025-08-01 00:54:41+00:00
This is a pretty wild story but also an illustration of just how dystopian the world has gotten. The UK has gone completely bonkers with this "real id to use the internet" law. In the US Google is using a crazy AI algorithm to prohibit people under 18 from viewing some content on YouTube. Obviously, the stated purpose of the policy is good IMO. However, I can't help but take a cynical view that Google is using this as an excuse to fully profile everyone EVEN MORE extensively with a behavioral AI algorithm coupled with all the user data which they use in conjunction with all the tracking data they have accumulated. They will say it is to protect the children, but in reality they have cranked their tracking and surveillance up to 11. I am open to being corrected, but this seems dystopian: both the UK verification laws and the AI trac king policy roll outs.
by Silhouette | 2025-08-01 00:54:55+00:00
Enterprises often have to pass audits and have regulatory compliance requirements.

So do many smaller organisations. The market for prosumer/SOHO/SME tech is in a sorry state lately with many being pushed towards what is essentially consumer level junk with a slightly different finish on the case and a different badge.

There is an irony here in the UK that we're finally seeing widespread availability of FTTP broadband with gigabit+ speeds and the latest WiFi standards but trying to find decent routers, switches, and access points that support 10G internal networking and the full rates of the available broadband and WiFi standards is a nightmare. It's like the only conceivable options are extremely expensive "enterprise" products and consumer junk that you control with a mobile app (until it becomes unsupported at some indeterminate future date presumably) that phones home to the manufacturer's servers (until they get shut off at some indeterminate future date presumably) and only works with an account on the manufacturer's system (until it deliberately or accidentally gets disabled for any reason presumably) and possibly a subscription payment (that can increase arbitrarily in future years presumably). It seems like literally no manufacturer that has previously provided reputable mid-level equipment still trying to compete in this segment of the market any more and that is both sad and potentially dangerous.
by quodlibetor | 2025-08-01 00:55:41+00:00
> a few tenths of a percentage point of NYC

Feb 2024 (last year there's data, I think) was a record low and it was 1.4% empty, according to NYC[1].

But I don't really know the methodology, and according to other nyc gov data it's surprising, since we still haven't recovered our population from COVID[2].

The first statistic (housing pressure) is based on population growth, but the NYC population statistics suggest still meaningful population loss since 2020.

I have seen articles in the past that suggest that apartment vacancy rates in NYC are self-reported and misleading at best, but I don't really understand how that would work and I can't find any sources on that now.

It's also my understanding that some classes of landlords can mark empty apartments as income losses, basically or partially making up for the loss of revenue in tax rebates. But that's also not something I understand well, just something I have seen asserted.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac... [2]: https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/dcp/assets/files/pdf/data-t...
by koyote | 2025-08-01 00:55:44+00:00
> people don't talk about it socially either

I've noticed this as well; especially with the more abstract professions that have words like consultant or strategy in them. Even from friends you'll often get a surprisingly 'corporate-BS' answer.

The best answers I've gotten is by asking people to take me through their last work day hour by hour.

Then again, I've had plenty of people not understand my job either: "I build software applications" sounds obvious to us but I've had people ask the follow up "So how do you actually do that?". The answer they're expecting is something like "I sit in front of a computer and type text into something equivalent to notepad".
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-01 00:56:20+00:00
They are usually also ok with LGBQT people, which is good. Realistically, I think liberals are just not particularly reflective about the economic realities our system creates. Americans are drowning in propaganda, of which the right wing sort which characterizes Trumpism is only the most obvious. Add on top of that that the 20th Century makes a pretty compelling case that leftism as imagined in that century isn't a going concern, its not really a sign of a major moral failing that one might be a "republican who isn't into cruelty."

Also, in fairness, there are a lot of republicans who aren't into cruelty too. Its just that the jerks are an important part of the current right coalition.
by wand3r | 2025-08-01 00:57:04+00:00
Yes, this is a very weird development for a millennial like me. I think this is a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing born out of steep surveillance enforced by the policies of streaming services chatrooms and TikTok. It really seems like the younger generation has really kowtoked to advertisers and self censor words I would consider benign. It honestly disgusts me.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-08-01 00:57:39+00:00
Ecologists have been studying how groups of animals deal with famines, natural disasters, loss of habitat, climate change, etc for many years. These conditions change supply and demand on resources that are out of those animal populations control. Studying cooperation in bacteria colonies from a similar lens was pretty hot in academia in the late 2010s from what I remember.

Each animal defines value differently (heck, different groups of different people define value differently). A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street is trash to you, but a jackpot for your local crow. The crow has no interest in the housing market though.
by tom_ | 2025-08-01 00:58:11+00:00
But the first element is first whatever index you choose. Why 1, rather than, say, 99, or -3?

(You should ideally be able to choose any of these options, and others - e.g., 5, 7, -200, 14,771,589,734,598,742,923,574,835, etc. - because they all make exactly as much logical sense as 1 does and any of them is as elegant a choice as 1 is. But if you get no choice, it absolutely has to be 0, because it's the only non-arbitrary option. No other number guarantees to do nothing to the value you add it to!)
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-01 00:58:13+00:00
Hmm, this makes me wonder though -- I have noticed various projects on Github and various other sites allow for users and fans of projects to donate to the developers and maintainers. Who hasn't seen the "wanna buy me a coffee?" button on a site before?

I am not sure if the money from such sources was ever taxed as income, but if so, then I wonder if such will be non-taxable now? Considering donation and tip buttons have some history behind them, perhaps such "jobs" could be considered "traditionally tipped jobs?"
by gnat | 2025-08-01 00:58:35+00:00
I find the best comments here to be ones where people use their knowledge and experience to discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of the technology in the post. I see a bunch of short single-sentence comments here that add no value.

For my part, I see this pattern repeatedly at different places. The raw tools in the platforms are too codey and the third-party frameworks like Temporal seem overkill, so you build a scheduler and need to solve the problems OP did: only run once, know if it errored, etc.

But it's amazing how "it's firing off a basic action!" becomes a script, then becomes a script composed of reusable actions that can pick up where they left off in case of errors ... Over time your "it's just enough for us!" feature creeps towards the framework's functionality.

I'd be curious to know how long the OP's solution stays simple before it submits to the feature creep demands. (Long may complexity be fought off, though! Every day you can live without the complexity of full workflows is a blessing)