MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by legitster | 2025-08-06 20:21:30+00:00
We need to reframe the conversation on public and low cost housing. It's not about providing homes for only the deserving or the hardworking. The tough reality is that a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street. Demanding that you only give housing to people who can make it through a treatment program or find gainful employment means most of them are still going to be on the street.

Even if you are only completely motivated by selfish desires, we want these people off the street for our benefit. It make cities nicer and America safer.

Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.

And if we can add in some market-based options and give down-and-out humans the option of self-selecting to nicer facilities and working their way up to something better in life, all the better.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-06 20:21:41+00:00
There isn't really question of morality here, China simply operates different than the US. US companies will need to provide a return to investors and want a secret competitive edge. Chinese companies will need to provide the state with AI, money isn't a concern.

As for why the US gets all the VC love, it's because the US has an extremely friendly business environment. People leave their home countries to start businesses in the US because of it. Europe has done a pretty good job suffocating their tech industry in comparison.

The US government only plays a relatively minor role in this too, because unlike China the US is not a planned economy.
by kolinko | 2025-08-06 20:21:45+00:00
> LLMs are not search engines, and I'm not gaining any followers or customers in any meaningful way because an LLM indexes my site.

Friends of mine run a service company, and they already see a significant number of customers reach out because they found them using ChatGPT (et al), not Google. By significant I mean ~20% or so.

Also, for e-commerce, Deep Research from OpenAI, is way better in doing product recommendations than Google. That's my goto place to find most stuff novadays (e.g. I purchased dancing shoes, pants, air cleaners, an air conditioner, supplements and a ton of other things using the recommendations of DR - no search engine comes even close to it)
by nerdponx | 2025-08-06 20:21:47+00:00
The kind of actual voter fraud that ID requirements would prevent is extremely rare. There are better ways to rig elections than hiring thousands of people to physically show up at different polling centers and vote several times under different names. Even disregarding the fact that voter ID laws are (and historically have been) widely abused to disenfranchise specific groups in the USA, what do you actually gain by requiring ID?
by louthy | 2025-08-06 20:21:56+00:00
Bartosz Milewski’s Category Theory for Programmers lectures [1] are good. Especially paired with his book [2].

I actually find that category theory is remarkably simple. At least at the level where it applies to day-to-day programming concepts. The one major benefit I got from it, was that it helped me reason about high level/abstract structure better (which helps my architectural designs/thinking).

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7FMa...

[2] https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf
by shayway | 2025-08-06 20:22:01+00:00
Speaking as an older gen-Z-er living in with their parents, this is very true of me and many people I know around my age (most, now that I think about it). If I could live somewhere nearby that doesn't eat up 50%+ of my income I would go there in a heartbeat. On HN there's a tendency to assume people are either well-off or destitute drug addicts who have given up on life but there's a wide range in between.
by huitzitziltzin | 2025-08-06 20:22:18+00:00
Entirely useless recommendations and very dubious empirical claims here. Let’s take them one at a time….

- “The climate crisis and socio-ecological issues are broadly absent from economic curricula.”

-> I don’t believe that for a second. Externalities are taught in every Econ 101 class I’ve ever heard of.

“75% of universities do not teach any ecological economics”

-> as a whole class maybe not but that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t get covered.

“ instead, when issues of ecological sustainability are taught, environmental damage is considered as something that needs to be priced into market mechanisms.”

-> which is a completely normal, standard idea among economists for good reason!

“Economics education does not address historical and contemporary power imbalances”

-> that’s not our job? Wtf - that’s not part of economics at all. Does it get covered in statistics? In history? I don’t know who’s responsible but it’s not us.

“55% of universities do not provide meaningful teaching on questions of historical slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism at all. History and ethics are absent from these discussions.”

-> economics departments are not being held responsible for this supposed omissions but I really doubt this supposed fact is true. Does an American history class count or not ? It’s just not possible that slavery is not taught.

“Mainstream neoclassical economics dominates the economic theories taught.”

-> also a good sign as that’s the standard. We don’t teach Marxist thought anymore. That’s progress.

“Of the 480 theory modules we graded, 88.3% of them included mainstream neoclassical economic thinking focusing on rational, self-interested individuals.”

-> Show me any alternative that’s credible. Also: behavioral methods are widely taught. We are plenty criticism of our own models. That’s also Econ 101 material.

“They are almost entirely taught through quantitative technical skills.”

->. Good. Also: as opposed to…? What exactly?

“Economics is taught in isolation from other social sciences. The discipline of economics should be embedded within the social sciences, and students should be encouraged to learn across other disciplines such as politics, sociology, geography, and history, but for the most part, it remains siloed”

-> that’s true of what happens in every other department too. Leave it up to universities to set distribution requirements.

“There are two programmes that are critical, climate-conscious, and provide an economics education fit for the 21st century. SOAS and the University of Greenwich introduce students to a range of intellectual and methodological perspectives within the economics discipline. They put a learning focus on climate, power, and inequality throughout the course.”

-> eye roll.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-06 20:22:19+00:00
Good, because this “next generation search” doesn’t cite sources, invents falsehoods, steals content, and doesn’t direct traffic to the site in question, which was the whole point of search engines in the first place.

The fact LLM companies constantly keep getting dinged for ignoring every barrier we throw up to stop their scraping short of something like Anubis shows what their real goal is: theft, monopolization, and reality authoring.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-06 20:22:33+00:00
I think another metric that's probably just as important is what percentage of those investors are large institutional investors vs. "Mom and Pop" landlords with one house for rent.

I mention that because I remember reading during the pandemic that institutional investors generally make shittier landlords: they're quicker to evict, quicker to raise rents, less likely to work with a tenant on a payment plan, and they have fewer ties to the community. There was a concern that with all the eviction moratoriums during the pandemic that large landlords could wait it out, while smaller landlords got screwed and got out altogether in some cases, leaving their housing stock to be gobbled up by the shittier institutional landlords.
by treetalker | 2025-08-06 20:22:52+00:00
Meanwhile look what's happening in Texas: another gerrymander attempt, since even some Republicans are sick of Trump's authoritarian dumpster fires and the kowtowing Republicans in Congress. And, sensing the impending Midterms bloodbath, the GOP is picking its voters instead of letting the voters pick their representatives.

True, Democrats and others have gerrymandered too. But I sense that most people don't want the gerrymander to be possible. Yet we can't get it changed because we're beholden to some dead guys who laid down rules hundreds of years ago, which none of us agreed to or had any input on; and we don't really have representatives in Congress to change things according to law the way we want them to, because they self-deal (looking at you, Rick Scott) and because Citizens United cemented the power of those who really get representation —those with money, and corporations. The People will revolt if things don't change fast.
by mistahchris | 2025-08-06 20:22:52+00:00
I really like gleam. I have a few unfinished side projects in gleam with about 10k lines of code, so I've had enough of a taste to know I like it. I can't wait to see how it matures. I plan to write more gleam in the future. I am particularly excited about the possibilities of sharing more code between webapp frontends and backends. Gleam has so much potential and is already quite productive.

I am not that online of a person. But I joined the discord to say hi and ask a few questions and I have to say the community really does have great vibes. If I were spending more time online, I would likely bias to spending it in the gleam community. They're a bunch of very friendly, and smart people working on a wide variety of interesting projects.
by closewith | 2025-08-06 20:22:59+00:00
From a customer perspective, that sounds like:

* Your sales team passionately championing solutions tailored to my needs

* Them securing the resources and commitments needed to accelerate delivery

* Them inspiring the engineering team to rise to ambitious deadlines, ensuring my project stays on track and delivers real value

Maybe if the devs shared their dedication to meeting my goals head-on, they'd be able to ensure my business objectives would be achieved without having to crunch.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-06 20:23:04+00:00
The POSIX name for the function is clz() [the C23 name is stdc_leading_zeros(), because that's how the committee names things now, while the GCC intrinsic is __builtin_clz()]. The name of the x86 instruction, on the other hand, is BSR (80386+) or LZCNT (Nehalem+, K10+) depending on what semantics you want for zero inputs (keep in mind that early implementations of BSF/BSR are very slow and take time proportional to the output value). The compiled code uses BSR. (All of these are specified slightly differently, take care if you plan to actually use them.)
by neaden | 2025-08-06 20:23:22+00:00
But it works fine. There have been extensive efforts to find people voting illegally and it turns up a small handful across the entire country, and many of those are things like returning a recently dead persons mail in ballot that voter ID wouldn't even help with. The fact is that all the evidence says an incredibly small number of people vote who are not legally eligible to do so, and only a small proportion of those are non-citizen immigrants.
by rglover | 2025-08-06 20:23:26+00:00
> What I observe right now is that we are not, at this moment, in a depression despite federal debt being such a high percentage of GDP.

Because the "experts" keep redefining what it means to be in a recession, depression, etc. Not to mention the fake job numbers/revisions and the delusion that the value of the stock market is anything near representative of the actual book value of the companies it trades.

So, to that end, you're right. If we continue to delude ourselves indefinitely while the wealth gap continues to expand (and nobody does anything about it), then we won't have a book-defined depression (i.e., no sudden GDP collapse or soaring unemployment per se).

Instead, we'll have a slow but sure move to a full blown oligarchy—implemented by hoovering up hard assets (like real estate) with cheap money—thanks to low interest rates—while the middle-to-lower class are struggling to survive (and media narratives often reinforce the idea that everything is fine, even when data on wages, asset ownership, and real inflation tell a different story). Frankly, I expect this to be far more likely than anything based on the people involved and recent evidence of this very thing taking place [1].

> It is not at all clear to me that debt percent of GDP and badness of depression have a linear relationship.

I didn't say it had a linear relationship, but it is a bellweather of a country that doesn't have its finances under control (and is rapidly approaching an inability to service its debt). Eventually, you run out of the capital (in this case, either monetary or geopolitical) to simultaneously service the debt—which we're on track to do by about ~2030—and stimulate growth.

Considering how embedded the USD is in global economics, if the above oligarchy scenario doesn't take place, the only thing that could happen is a global depression (because the thing propping up the whole system globally—dollar hegemony—has just collapsed/hyperinflated—imagine Venezuela, but globally).

Put simply: if debt outpaces revenue, interest spirals, and trust in the dollar fades, then whether we call it a "depression" (on paper) or not, the outcome is the same: widespread economic pain, asset consolidation, and long-term instability.

---

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-singl...
by bakkoting | 2025-08-06 20:24:00+00:00
As far as I'm aware none of those were ever supported in more than one engine (specifically Firefox) and so cannot reasonably be considered to have been part of JavaScript. JS really does make a point of not removing things.

There are some _very_ rare exceptions, but they're things like "support for subclassing TypedArrays", and even then this is only considered after careful analysis to ensure it's not breaking anyone.
by jchw | 2025-08-06 20:24:04+00:00
Framing it this way implies that open source is "flawed" specifically because it was trying to eschew the ideological aspects of the free software movement and make it more appealing to businesses and underscore its technical advantages rather than ethical. However this oddly common viewpoint ignores that the free software movement doesn't really define "free software" much differently than the open source software movement defines "open source software"; free software licenses still can't discriminate against different users or use cases.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> Free software can be commercial

> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.

What Amazon has done is of course bad for a lot of kinds of businesses like Elastic, but neither open source nor free software is about business models or how software development can be sustainable. For obvious reasons the perspective of VC-funded startups is overrepresented and overrated here of all places, but outside this space nobody cares. You license out your software to a community in hopes that it will help your business, and it might; you can get your software into package managers and Linux distributions easier if it is OSI/DFSG approved. The fact is, it's not a bug that this allows Amazon to go and use it and monetize it. Amazon uses and monetizes Linux and associated projects every single day, and it is ultimately beneficial to Linux and many open source projects. Best I can say is maybe you could argue Amazon can abuse their market position to compete unfairly with others, but that is truly irrespective of software licensing.

So what I make of this is simple: you shouldn't open source your flagship product unless your business model has a robust way to remain sustainable. In doing so, you are making a gamble that nobody else can monetize it better than you. Using an unfair CLA to trick people into contributing to a product that you already know with near certainty will be eventually closed source is just a dick move, and not knowing any better than to avoid this circumstance is negligent. Yes, as a proponent of the benefits of open source software, it is a bummer that we can't just have nice things. However, the last few years of CLA-based rugpulls have done great harm to people's trust in open source projects and startups based on open source, and I ultimately don't think we're better off for it.
by taeric | 2025-08-06 20:24:19+00:00
Don't forget that apartments are a thing. And are far far cheaper than houses. Both in terms of direct rental costs, and in terms of upkeep. Heck, the plumbing and electric are probably magnitudes cheaper to maintain for an apartment block than for a subdivision.

Directly to your first, though, most people stay in dorms for college because that is the best that they can afford. New students moving to a city to go to school almost by definition can't afford a house. I don't imagine that would be easy to ever change.
by neutronicus | 2025-08-06 20:24:42+00:00
I have a couple more!

I take it this is all back-end work? Have you tried out one of the Haskell-y front-end languages? Elm?

> Both of these are very (!!!) well complimented by magit, which is so good at AI supervision it seems designed for it, by a genius.

Can you expand a little on this point?
by breakyerself | 2025-08-06 20:24:50+00:00
100%. I'm a far left anticapitalist, but facts are facts. Zoning, restrictive building codes, and the death of much of the housing construction industry post 2007. All contribute to housing costs and homelessness.

I'd like to see zoning opened back up for increasing density wherever it's needed, but I would also like to see a strong social housing policy.
by com2kid | 2025-08-06 20:24:57+00:00
Seattle allows them, it wasn't a magic bullet. ` We need to look at historically successful housing and just legalize that.

For example - SF's row houses. You can't build anything like those due to rules about stairs, environmental laws about multiple family dwellings with internal stairs, and building codes that have such strict environmentally friendly rules that people cannot afford to live indoors.

Up here in Seattle I was inquiring about extending my roof out to convert my cape code into a salt shaker style house, basically giving me two more bedrooms on the same lot. From an environmental perspective this is great, my house is over 70 years old, it is a sunk cost in terms of building material, and it was already updated with modern insulation years ago. I had an energy assessment done with I first moved in, and basically was told there isn't much I can do except fix the duct work but sadly no one does duct work anymore (I tried to find someone!)

So anyway, my roof extension? The city would want me to replace my roof with larger wood so I could put in more insulation. An expensive undertaking that would have ZERO benefit to the house's energy profile. If they wanted me to paint the roof white, sure, that'd make sense and help more than $30k extra of roof work.

Another example is how the electrical code keeps getting more and more strict, such as having outlets every few feet in kitchens. That adds a lot to costs, with little to no benefit. If you add up all the incremental safety rules since the 90s, we're paying a ton for a very very small margin of improvement in safety.

And none of these rules are making houses better! "Home inspector discovers entire subdivision has leaking walls" is an entire sub-genre of video on YouTube.

So we're paying a lot small things we don't need (kitchens with a dozen outlets, AFCI breakers everywhere, 30k of lumber to save $5 a month on cooling) while the important things (walls that don't leak) are being ignored.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-06 20:25:27+00:00
See https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

for a classic analysis. Software has numerous problems that are on the "critical" path, if you say that there are five things, let's just say

-- requirements elicitation -- analysis -- implementation -- testing -- deployment

and each of these takes 20% of the work, you can see a product which eliminate just one phase of this work still leaves 80% of the work undone! So the answer is that to make a revolutionary change you have to speed up everything.

Deploy is interesting, for instance, in the cloud age in that you really could deploy with "just one click" into hosting provided by the vendor, but many organizations would want to be on premise or in the cloud they control which just vastly complicates it all, as every organization does it the "army way", not the right or wrong way. [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-a-thing-in-the-US-Army-to-say-Th...
by zer00eyz | 2025-08-06 20:25:59+00:00
> We need a scale reform for modern businesses - platforms and companies like Microsoft are logistically incapable of providing good service to their customers, or moderating hundreds of millions or even billions of users, effectively separating these companies from all the harm they cause.

And here is where "you have to spend X number of days a year doing CS" should be a requirement for every engineer, dev, product manger, and executive.

I do not think you understand the level of abject stupidity that customers are capable of. I do not think you understand how likely customers are to do dumb things and blame the company.

Companies who provide support charge more for their products to pay for it. How much? Well how many people break things and then ask for refunds. The company pays for those people by marking up all the other products.

IN any organization: first friend outside your team should be in accounting. The second should be in customer service. These are the most valuable resources you will have regarding the tempo of what is going on inside your organization. They are the front line and the oracles of "truth" (the books dont lie, unless your Enron' and then you have bigger problems).
by kcplate | 2025-08-06 20:26:22+00:00
What’s the net difference though? Most of my neighbors with solar I have spoken to (central FL) are at basically a wash between payment for the solar vs power bills pre-solar, although admittedly recent rate hikes are probably changing that mix a bit. Many of them basically made the finance term to the useful life of the panels. One neighbor that tried to sell and had a couple offers contingent on solar removal.

It just feels to me to be very nearly zero sum game financially, with even a bit of adverse risk leaning towards opting for a solar installation considering potential for roof warranty and insurance issues due to some of the less reputable providers/installers out there. Certainly if the reputation of the technology takes a hit, a barrier to selling your home could be a pain point as well.

I’ll say this, I don’t hear any regret, but for me these things are a barrier to adoption unless I was planning on being in the home for a longer (20+ years) term and wasn’t financing the system.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-06 20:26:47+00:00
Articles like this pop up a lot, and not just here. I took economics. On one hand, I did find my education to be very high quality, relevant, gave me a good understanding of the economy and all the principles are sound.

The problem with economics is that people and politicians either don't listen or want specific outcomes that aren't good for the economy as a whole.

Voters will always vote for handouts, not for a robust and sustainable economy for everyone. Rich people will always vote for things that increase inequality, because they're the beneficiaries. Homeowners will always vote to simply increase the value of their assets, after they bought them of course. And so on...

The only place anyone listens to economists is in banks and hedge funds. But then you're probably not creating the change that led you to consider economics in the first place...