MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-08-03 17:01:12+00:00
> Thing is, they do it because they can.

Our parents did, maybe, but we're doing it because we have to.

Inner cities went from unlivable crime dens to highly gentrified in the span of about a few decades. The moment the crime went away, people moved back in. But most of the people who actually show up to town council meetings are the people who grew up seeing riots in LA and graffiti-covered NYC subway cars. So building any more of the now highly valuable high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that inner cities have is a drawn out political fight with people who think making their neighborhood more valuable will ruin it.

And this situation also applied before the last major urban crime wave too. The low-density suburban neighborhoods that are also expensive now used to actually be affordable. You could build cheap housing on low-value land at the outskirts of town and sell it for a huge profit, to people who had extremely generous government loans[0]. This is what triggered the white flight[1] that started the inner city crime wave[2] that Americans now cite as why density is always bad.

Problem is, that's unsustainable, there's only so much land that can be near a valuable set of jobs. So now you have cities where both the high-density core and the suburbs are equally as unaffordable. The next rung on the latter would be to move to smaller cities, except then COVID happened, and suddenly the housing market was flooded with people moving out of San Francisco at the same time rich Chinese people were buying up houses to hide their money from the CCP, themselves in competition with hedge funds like BlackRock that want to buy up entire neighborhoods and rent them back to the people who lived there.

America's obsession with single-family home ownership is an unsustainable system, propped up by deliberate market distortions. We don't buy into it because we're so much richer than anyone else, we buy it because the system is built to make it the only option for most people.

[0] To be clear, nobody would loan you money for 30 years, on a fixed interest rate, and let you pay it back early otherwise. The amount of risk shouldered by the bank is insane, but for the fact that the US government pumps money into banks to make this kind of financing viable to offer.

[1] The peak of suburbanization happened before desegregation.

[2] Don't forget leaded gasoline! Once racial minorities were trapped in cities, we made their kids breathe shittons of lead fumes, creating fuel for the crime wave fire.
by ben_w | 2025-08-03 17:01:29+00:00
Other than the rockets and Starlink, I do not trust anything from Musk. Mainly because while everyone whose opinion I trust about rockets says "LGTM", everyone whose opinion I trust on all the other things he does says as per https://xkcd.com/2030/

I don't trust Zuckerberg. Bad vibes about everything Facebook ever since I went to one of their developer conferences in London a bit over a decade ago, only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't even pay for ads on their system, given the ads I see think I want dick pills and boob surgery, and are trying to get me to give up a citizenship I never had in the first place while relocating to a place I've actually left. Sometimes they're in languages I don't speak.

And while I can't say that I have any negative vibes from Altman, I've learned to trust all the people who do say he's a wrong 'un, as they were right about a few other big names before him.

And I wouldn't invest in any of the companies making LLMs, because I think the whole "no moat" argument is being shown to be plausible by way of how close behind all the open models are.

But LLMs are, despite all that, obviously useful even if you see them as only autocomplete. They're obviously useful even if you think they're just a blurry JPEG of the internet. They're obviously useful even if they're never going to meaningfully improve.

LLMs are not like NFTs. Might be like Mars, though.
by graemep | 2025-08-03 17:01:49+00:00
Yes, definitely.

Most small business I have dealt with use AWS do just need a VPS. If they are willing to move to a scary unknown supplier I suggest (unknown to them, very often one that would be well known to people on HN) then I suggest AWS Lightsail which is pretty much a normal VPS with VPS pricing - it significantly cheaper than an instance plus storage, just from buying them bundled (which, to be fair to Amazon, is common practice).

My own stuff goes on VPSs.
by PseudoComputer | 2025-08-03 17:02:05+00:00
I think the core audience for Stirling PDF is a lot different from ours. Stirling PDF looks like there built for enterprise users and big business. We built LuxPDF to be more for students, small business owners, freelancers, etc. To be honest we saw our site as an alternative to FreeConvert & PDFCandy, not for Stirling PDF.
by k310 | 2025-08-03 17:03:03+00:00
When you're that big, you're allowed to make mistakes without major damage. Microsoft did it for ages. Remember Zune?

But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem.

And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later"

As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine.

"Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.
by siliconc0w | 2025-08-03 17:03:23+00:00
They claim they've built more of a 'platform' now and so are less of a consulting shop. It's not a new narrative and I haven't really see a lot of examples of how this platform is especially powerful compared to other say low-code tools to build interfaces on top of datasets but given it's so secretive and there is so much money sloshing around, it seems like people are believing it.
by conradmk | 2025-08-03 17:04:25+00:00
That's right. I'm truly sorry. This race had three times the traffic of a normal race and twice the traffic of the previous day's qualifying, so i had to urgently upscale our server instances, and i confirmed that several instances experienced issues..

I plan to implement stabilization measures throughout the live timing server code during this summer break.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused during this important race.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 17:05:00+00:00
Those are synonyms.

"From the people" = supported by taxes. If it's supported by some small pots of private money, then it's not from "the people", it's from a select few people.

For example, Bezos "donates" (owns) WAPO. Would you classify WAPO as "from the people"? Obviously not. Just doing private money exempts you from being "from the people".

"For the people" = equal access. The only services that have equal access are tax payer funded ones.

Is your private insurance equal access? No, it's tied to your employer.

Now what about roads, parks, sidewalks, the fucking DMV? Are those equal access?

I'm sure someone, somewhere, can find a counter example, but a counter example does not a rule make. 99.99% of the time, "private stuff" = only for some people, "tax payer funded stuff" = everyone at least has an equal opportunity to access it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-03 17:05:39+00:00
> There is no consumer market for 4TB+ SSDs. There never was, and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future.

Gamers certainly are a market. Borderlands 3 for example, a 2019 game, clocks in at 75GB on Steam, GTA 5 at 105 GB, MSFS 150 GB. And that's all OLD games. CoD Black Ops wants 175 GB, GTA 6 is rumored to want anything from 100 to 300 GB. You don't want that on spinning rust.
by mitchbob | 2025-08-03 17:05:57+00:00
Obligatory mention of Atul Gawande's piece in the New Yorker, still a classic:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250104014248/https://www.newyo...

The fun part is about 4/5 of the way in and starts with

> Some people are pushing back. Neil R. Malhotra is a boyish, energetic, forty-three-year-old neurosurgeon who has made his mark at the University of Pennsylvania as something of a tinkerer. He has a knack for tackling difficult medical problems. In the past year alone, he has published papers on rebuilding spinal disks using tissue engineering, on a better way to teach residents how to repair cerebral aneurysms, and on which spinal-surgery techniques have the lowest level of blood loss. When his hospital’s new electronic-medical-record system arrived, he immediately decided to see if he could hack the system.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-03 17:06:11+00:00
Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070.

Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of debt. It predictably leads to endless price appreciation until you fill the bubble up enough to burst it, then we simply repeat again. Same thing happened to education. It's a 'commodity' seen as priceless and the government ensured access to endless debt to purchase it. You'll never guess what happened next.

[1] - https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-jap...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
by Jolter | 2025-08-03 17:06:20+00:00
Who is “they”, who lost money?

I don’t think 19.3 B is their current market cap, it’s only what was sold at the IPo. Anyway, 19.3 instead of 20 would have been no big deal IMO

Adobe certainly lost money, because they have had to compete against the better product, so have been able to charge less for their own offering. And will presumably continue to do so until further notice.

Any employees who would have been swiftly laid off after the acquisition should certainly be glad for this outcome. They still have jobs, and if there are layoffs after the IPO it will be less dramatic. If they had equity, they probably got a much better deal in an IPO, especially if they sold some of it off after the “pop”.
by unsupp0rted | 2025-08-03 17:06:41+00:00
The more you travel, the better you understand that there are differences between cultures and some cultures are better at specific things or worse at specific things.

Those specific things have such an outsized impact that it's obvious after living there for a bit that one culture is overall better or overall worse than another.

We're fine to compare company cultures and to insist that company cultures are decisive in company success. But when it comes to national cultures we pretend that they're all comparable and all equally good. They are not.
by pests | 2025-08-03 17:06:51+00:00
Fireworks was great when I was a young teen and first learning the difference vector graphics could make.

Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.

I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe thing.
by YSummary | 2025-08-03 17:07:02+00:00
I labeled it as a revolution because I am thinking of not just YoutubeSummary (YSummary) , but more to NewsSummary (NSummary) and FacebookSummary (FSummary), BlogSummary (BSummary) and BookSummary(BkSummary)...etc. These summaries will replace Yahoo and Google as the gate to internet. Youtube is only a subset of the whole schema.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-03 17:07:32+00:00
Isn't this purely English problem?

I never heard about any other language culture encouraging children to guess words. They have natural tendency to do so, which pretty much anyone understands, is counterproductive to reading and must be suppressed. The most common "in the moment" instruction for a kid learning to read, when they try and fail is "Don't make stuff up! Read!" (In their respective language of course). Encouraging kid to guess what's on paper seems absolutely idiotic.

Is Ken Goodman the Andre Wakefield of education, just without the ulterior motiv?
by ben_w | 2025-08-03 17:08:00+00:00
0.5% of USD 100 trillion per year, with a usual accounting I've seen being that you can count that boost for the next 20 years, is worth 0.5% * $100T/year * 20 years = USD 10 trillion.

Now, we don't have a single investor making this investment nor getting the reward for the investment, but that's the kind of overall shape of the reasoning behind why people are willing to invest so much in AI.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-03 17:08:35+00:00
> when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too.

It was not used routine, it was for times when the entire team is looking at an SDK for the first time, we all have a group item to discuss, and times like that. It's like a non-meeting, ambient party call. Not for continual use, by any means.
by gardnr | 2025-08-03 17:09:17+00:00
They had these at BigCorp I worked at. Anyone can make a channel like #x-gardner and then people can join that channel if they choose. The way that you find them organically is by searching the chat app for some random thing that you are interested in and then finding a few people discussing it in an X channel.

It felt very natural and created connections where they otherwise wouldn't be.
by devjab | 2025-08-03 17:09:31+00:00
They sell survailance tools and platforms with heavy AI/ML integration. Tools that frankly have no real rivals for most western countries, since we still consider it better to hand all our data over to USA than other nations with similar products. I think you could view them as a company with the capabilities of the Captain American Hydra styled algorithm to determine whether you are a good citizen or not.

Whether you consider that to be evil or not, is probably up to your personal morals. One of the reasons they are in the "spotlight" in countries like mine (Denmark) is because of their ownership and managment being questionable. The reason we still buy their platforms is because we have no alternative, and frankly, the USA has all our data anyway.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-03 17:10:05+00:00
Pazyryk is thousands of miles from the Hellenic or Roman world - it's right by Mongolia and Xinjiang. And those interred in Pazyryk were Saka.

It's most likely a simurgh/śyenaḥ/mərəγō saēnō or a Huma/Homāio/Humay, which was a very common in Indo-Iranian culture

While Central Asia is now Turkic speaking, before the Mongol and Turkic invasions, it was historically Indo-European, as was seen with the Sogdian, Bactrian, and Khwarezmian.

The Greco-Roman myth of the griffin itself appears to have it's origins in the Indo-Iranian motif.

That said, the Pazyryk burials were from an era when the Indo-European migration was still occurring, so cultural and linguistics overlaps were still significant.
by Hizonner | 2025-08-03 17:10:07+00:00
If I run out of IPv4 addresses for my own network, I can install NAT and make that problem (sort of, mostly, vaguely) go away.

If I want to use IPv6 to solve my IPv4 address shortage problem, and I want to communicate with you, I have to wait for you to also install IPv6.

SNI isn't really the same thing. For one thing it has actual positive benefits, very much unlike NAT (and no NAT is not a fucking security feature and is orthogonal to fucking firewalls don't make me come over there). And for me to use SNI, your browser (or whatever) has to send SNI, so it's still a change on only one end. But it still does let me put more than one service on a single IP address, and you only have to upgrade one program, probably a program you were going to upgrade anyway, rather than change your whole networking structure.

The way this should have worked was that IPv4 should have been turned off completely in the public Internet around 1997 or 1998. But ISPs didn't want to tell the much smaller number of much more sophisticated admins back then that they had to, you know, change things. So people just kept baking IPv4 into more and more things, and throwing in more and more NAT, and not even bothering learn or teach IPv6... and ignoring all the things they were breaking.

Many (not all!) of the things they were breaking were things that really came into play if you were trying to do P2P. Like, for instance, the ability to, you know, actually make a connection to any random peer. There are hacks, but they work poorly when they work at all. So since NAT was everywere, P2P didn't have a chance. There were other forces at work too, but basically everybody's business model and expectations gelled around centralization in a way that might have had a chance of not happening if there hadn't been NAT all over the place.
by mazugrin2 | 2025-08-03 17:10:09+00:00
The cones aren't to alert the pedestrians the the crane. The cones are to mark out a path in the road for pedestrians and to alert auto drivers to that path. As an American I get that you don't typically walk anywhere but I can't believe you've never ever encountered a set of high visibility cones marking out a temporary path around construction equipment on a roadway.
by kmill | 2025-08-03 17:10:29+00:00
My understanding is that the proof doesn't exist in written form in its entirety.

Plus, Kevin Buzzard is a world expert with some ideas for how to better organize the proof. In general, formalization leads to new understanding about mathematics.

Something people outside of mathematics don't tend to appreciate is that mathematicians are usually thinking deeply about what we already know, and that work reveals new structures and connections that clarify existing knowledge. The new understanding reveals new gaps in understanding, which are filled in, and the process continues. It's not just about collecting verifiably true things.

Even if somehow the OpenAI algorithm could apply here, we'd get less value out of this whole formalization exercise than to have researchers methodically go through our best understanding of our best proof of FLT again.
by toast0 | 2025-08-03 17:11:02+00:00
My s-10 is 190 inches long by wikipedia. A same year Honda Accord is 189.5–191.1 in long. The accord is marginally wider.

Driving alone in my s-10 takes the same space as driving alone in an Accord if I had one. And it's easier to see around or through the S-10, so everyone gets more visibility.

The S-10 hood height and length is more than an Accord, so there may be some additional risk there, sure.

Either way, a cabover design like the linked vehicle should appeal. Better visibility to the front, and less wasted space.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-08-03 17:11:03+00:00
I think that a fundamental problem with democracy is that as the state indulges its natural tendency to expand and centralize it leads to a state that is the average of an increasingly large pool of citizens' opinions on how their country should work and much like how the average number of fingers on a human hand is very different from the expected number of fingers on a human hand the average of everyone's opinions on how things should work is completely different from any one person's opinion. Thus, the thing that is ostensibly designed to ensure everyone gets at least some of what they want actually ends in no one getting anything they want, and it promotes factionalism that will eventually lead to separate power structures. It's happening right now, whether its southern sheriffs refusing to enforce gun laws or northern mayors declaring their cities to be sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement, the development of competing power structures has us hurtling toward a constitutional crisis and maybe that's not the most terrible thing? Getting there is gonna suck but maybe there's just a natural boom/bust cycle for democracies where they swing on a pendulum between "growing and consolidating power while watering down voters' intent" and "collapsing back down to a place where voters feel like they're actually part of the society they're governed by". Maybe the antifederalists were right, and this was always supposed to be several independent countries governed by a few overarching laws that should really only ever have been concerned with trade and immigration, and accepting a common currency to further enable both of those goals.
by davydm | 2025-08-03 17:11:21+00:00
I wanted to read this, honestly.

But 10s into being on the site... Bam! Popover pleading me to subscribe.

Dismissed and... This isn't even the article. It's a header and one paragraph. I have to clock through.

So I've already wasted a minute or so with wading past the bullshit, and I'm impatient by now. I'm tired of being fucked around.

Then I start reading, and this is not an article for the impatient. The author rambles and I couldn't be bothered to get to the point any more.

10/10 would skip again. Do better with platforms for writing if you actually want people to read what you wrote.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 17:11:36+00:00
You can't shut conservatives up. When you give conservatives what they want, they don't become less extreme - they double down and become more extreme.

What you're referring to is a kind of "respectability politics". Basically, if we're nice and do what conservatives say, then things get better and they ease off.

We have literal hundreds of years of proof that this is not the case, and the opposite happens.

Think about Donald Trump. When we legitimize him and continue to do so, has he gotten less extreme, or more? In 2016 versus now, is he less extreme, or more? Much, much more. But he got what he wanted, right? Yes. And then he wants more, because he feels emboldened. It's an ideology built on Greed.

If you give conservatives an inch, they take a mile. If you ease up a bit on reconstruction, then suddenly you have Jim Crow. If you you give them a teensy little bit of morality legislation, then suddenly you have mass censorship proposals and the Ten Commandments in schools.

As a gay man, I see this time and time again in my own community. I have been told we are too vulgar, too sexual, too gross, and this is why conservatives target us. That if we just acted more normal, more respectable, they would leave us alone, and the world would be happy.

But there was a time when we were respectable, when we hid in the shadows. When we got wives just for show, just to please the conservative narrative. When we only acted like ourselves in our own hidden bars, our own hidden spaces. Out of sight, out of mind. And, well, how were we treated? Was it better? No. It was much, much worse.

This will not shut them up.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-03 17:11:59+00:00
> the idea of men having to be less social and aggressive

That's a gross misrepresentation.

Regarding aggression, in one's home, one doesn't want to and shouldn't have to explain things to others. One is supposed to be the king (or queen) of their home.

As for being social, sociologically speaking, men work to connect communities they don't belong to, whereas women connect the community they belong to.

Lastly, no, women do not suffer in silence. They are extremely vocal, often a lot more than men.