MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estearum | 2025-08-14 13:08:54+00:00
The Fed targets 2% at PCE (consumer) whereas this is PPI (wholesale/producer). Not always 1 to 1 but in general you expect PPI to be a leading indicator for what's coming for PCE. Part of the attention is for sure people being vigilant to see the earliest effects of the tariffs and... here they are pretty unambiguously.

The more significant concern it seems to me is the rate of increase. Nearly a full percentage point in a month seems like a lot, but I'm no expert.
by le-mark | 2025-08-14 13:08:57+00:00
The way ocaml mashes the object syntax into sml was always most annoying to me. It was also pretty weak on the systems programming side (threads, sockets, signals, fork) 20-30 years ago iirc. That’s probably changed by now. Multi core; not many runtimes handle this today so that’s not much of a hindrance IME.
Show HN: My first dev project. Feedback?
by quantdev1 | 2025-08-14 13:09:15+00:00
Important context:

This project took 130 hours ± 5 hours from start to finish.

Before starting, I had zero experience or knowledge of:

1. Coding (knew that Python was a language and that's it)

2. Financial microstructure (didn't know what VWAP or option contracts were; let alone greeks, calls/puts, Bayesian optimization, etc.)

3. Tooling (Github, Postgres, Docker, Cursor, CLIs, etc.)

4. Software engineering principles/best practices

---

Questions I have:

1. Is the code objectively decent? I passed logic in plain English to AI, step-by-step, and tested before layering more

2. Is learning these domains and going from 0 to 1 in ~130 hours good - or laughably bad?

3. Does this signal any sort of nascent talent in the areas of SWE or quant finance?

(I'm trying to get an early signal of if I should continue to explore a career change. Or if I'm out of my depth.)

Any feedback would be massively appreciated.

Happy to provide more details/context :)
by ngriffiths | 2025-08-14 13:09:28+00:00
Reminds me of a conversation I had recently about the alcohol industry. It's not so bad if your local crappy bar markets to local underage college kids. But when sketchy tactics exist and are allowed at the scale of the biggest companies in the world, you've got problems.

Actually, sketchy tech/social media/AI tactics towards youth are more comparable to "lets get kids addicted so they become lifelong customers" than I ever realized before.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-08-14 13:09:47+00:00
because Proof-of-Work only generates value for an arbitrary, made up coin if it has no other real value.

Otherwise you're making money that way, and the value of the coin is tied to the work that you did.

until recently gold was a pretty but mostly useless metal. too heavy for practical uses, too melty for industrial uses, too soft for weapons, etc. but it didn't rust and was a good medium of exchange because it had no other real value. once it has value outside of being currency it's less useful in that capacity, since now its value is tied to how much you can get for it by utilizing it in computers, chemical reactions, etc.... same basic idea with PoW
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-14 13:10:00+00:00
Reasons why it's nice to have a 14-50 plug in your garage rather than a 6-50:

1: when an uncle stops by for a visit with his RV he can plug in.

2: the other outlets in your garage are likely on a shared circuit. The 14-50 is dedicated, so with a 14-50 to 5-15 adapter you can more safely plug in a high wattage appliance, like a space heater.
by derelicta | 2025-08-14 13:10:28+00:00
I've done an apprenticeship in IT and CS, the first two years of it felt more intense than my 4 years of university education. We used to have waves of exams every 6 weeks for the first year. Then on the second, every 8/12. Was crazy but it was thrilling. 16yo me was incredibly happy to have gone to trade school instead of high school.
by mikhailfranco | 2025-08-14 13:10:33+00:00
In an episode of the The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski narrates the seasonal migration (transhumance) of the Bakhtiari tribe of SW Iran. When they get to the raging river, an old man can't make it, so is left on the bank to die.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ztord river crossing at 14-17 mins

This is the same epic migration recorded in the classic Grass

1925 ETHNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILM " GRASS " MIGRATION OF BAKHTIARI TRIBE OF PERSIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fVftguHwFc

And the tribe moves on .....
by nimbius | 2025-08-14 13:10:35+00:00
According to the Federal Reserve, for many years, inflation in the United States has run below the 2 percent goal. higher prices for essential items, such as food, gasoline, and shelter, add to the burdens faced by many families, especially those struggling with lost jobs and incomes. At the same time, inflation that is too low can weaken the economy. When inflation runs well below its desired level, households and businesses will come to expect this over time, pushing expectations for inflation in the future below the Federal Reserve’s longer-run inflation goal. This can pull actual inflation even lower, resulting in a cycle of ever-lower inflation and inflation expectations.

The fed argues that, If inflation expectations fall, interest rates would decline too. In turn, there would be less room to cut interest rates to boost employment during an economic downturn.

this economics explanation feels like gaslighting every time i hear the fed mention it. the reserve literally pushed negative rates and quantitative easing for so long that people came to expect prosperity as a feature of the economic framework of the nation, and now that we have rampant inflation that cannot be controlled by normal means (prime rate) the fed somehow wants us all to understand its our fault for enjoying affordable burger meat.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-14 13:11:13+00:00
There is no facts game. I am in full agreement with you that Oracle maintains Java nowadays and writes most of the modern code in it. It remains originally a Sun product, a Sun initiative and most of the JVM historical code has been written by Sun. I have little interest in going to actually look in how many lines are from then and how many are new. It wouldn’t substantially change the nature of my argument anyway.

You are free to pretend that Oracle is a great steward of the Java ecosystem if you want or that they had a point in the trial they so brilliantly lost.

I’m free to say I vehemently disagree and perfectly understand why Google would rather stay far away.

I would rather prefer you didn’t insult me however but you do you.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-14 13:11:49+00:00
Ok, as a German, I think we just don't care about the distinction. We only have the two letters/sounds W and F, the first representing various sounds between [w] and [v]. I think it isn't even a dialect thing, i.e. it is more like unspecified behaviour not like implementation-defined, it can change by time-of-day by a single person, because we just don't care. The letter V can represent either the German W or F sound, I think you just need to know that for every word.
by const_cast | 2025-08-14 13:12:34+00:00
More addictive products will always win, because they're more addictive.

That doesn't mean we need to one-up each other and repeatedly hyper optimize until we're making the digital equivalent of fentanyl-laced cigarettes.

Also, we can actually ban stuff. I know it's not a physical product, but that doesn't mean we just have to fucking put up with whatever and deal with it.

We'd never let a company sell fentanyl-laced cigarettes. But when it comes to tech, we all just throw up our hands and say "well we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
by Krssst | 2025-08-14 13:12:43+00:00
Windows's strongest selling point is to run compatible software from the last 30 years with almost no issue.

Nobody would accept ads and being continuously force-fed products they never asked for in their paid OS while it often reboots behind your back if they didn't at least got that from it. (could very well be wrong though)

You can still run x86 software on Windows ARM but for some software it does not seem quite there yet (games).
by aaronax | 2025-08-14 13:12:49+00:00
That is the rise from one year ago in the "less-volatile PPI metric that excludes food, energy and trade services". This month was a 0.6% rise. So some people might think about how more months of 0.6% rise would cause the yearly one to increase gradually, up to 7.2% eventually if there are 12x 0.6% months. That would be pretty high.

And then headline figure PPI was even higher at 0.9% for the month, 3.3% year.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-14 13:12:52+00:00
Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this?

Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.

Consumer debt is almost as much of a worry as government debt.

Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.
Ask HN: What would you read to learn about "artificial intelligence"?
by firefax | 2025-08-14 13:13:36+00:00
The last time I read about anything in this space or adjacent, was back around 2015 when image glitching had a resurgance due to to deepdream[1]

If you didn't have a strong math background, what would you read to get up to speed on "artificial intelligence"? Any books or maybe open access syllabi?

Whenever I try to dive into a paper I feel like I've been out of academia too long and that what used to be precise things like "Neural network" or "machine learning" are all lumped together under "AI" which is apparently... something that talks to you like you're Tony Stark, but in a dumber way?

Anyways, I want to learn more about these things but having trouble finding a starting point.
by kevincox | 2025-08-14 13:13:57+00:00
Yeah, as someone who just took a trip in China where QR payments are the most popular form it was clearly inferior from a UX standpoint from NFC. The most notable was a data connection. Cell service was pretty good overall but there were a few cases where we were struggling to get the payment through. Some merchants also have the ability to scan your code (which seems to be generated offline) but that leads to this confusing UX where you never know if you will scan (and should have the scanner mode ready) or be scanned (and have the QR code open).

And there was always the fear that your phone dies and you can't take the subway or purchase everything. It doesn't happen often but on some long days you really don't really want to be tracking the battery of your phone super closely.

NFC payments can work offline (although this is pretty rare) and can be authorized from a small plastic card that has no battery, no internet connection and is pretty robust including being completely waterproof. Plus 100% of the time I tap my card or phone on the merchant's terminal. No alternate UX option. Plus if you are using your phone for payments (which is a very convenient option) you don't need to open any app beforehand (WeChat is like 3 taps to get to scanner or code) and I found quick NFC reading to be more reliable than scanning a QR code where the lighting conditions and state of the QR code are not always perfect (it was almost always possible to get it to work within a handful of seconds, but often took a bit of fiddling around. NFC is reliably just tap and it works).

I still keep a few large bills in my wallet in case the card networks are down, flag my transactions or whatever else. But having this immutable payment card that is incredibly reliable and easy to use is way better than the phone-based QR systems I have seen.

What I would love to see if we bring phones into the system is a way of approving the transaction (including the amount) on your device. So for example 1. Tap phone 2. Review amount on screen and approve 3. Tap to commit payment. This is more steps but is far safer. That being said the number of times this has been an issue for me is 0, so it is probably better to just rely on the banking system to correct any mistakes rather than add extra steps to the payment flow.
Show HN: AI Agent Host – Dev Environment with QuestDB, Grafana, and Code-Server
by quantiota | 2025-08-14 13:14:57+00:00
I’ve been working on AI Agent Host, a Docker-based environment where an AI agent (Claude Code) can directly:

Execute code in VS Code (via Code-Server)

Query/write time-series data in QuestDB

Update and interact with Grafana dashboards

Orchestrate workflows without middleware like LangChain

Nginx and Certbot handle secure routing/SSL, and the architecture is fully containerized for reproducibility.

GitHub repo: [https://github.com/quantiota/AI-Agent-Host]
by npteljes | 2025-08-14 13:14:59+00:00
Nothing stops us from qualifying "cryptography" with an adjective to refer to a specific part of it, while still referring to full-fledged cryptography. See the Wikipedia article for examples.

"Elliptic Curve Cryptography"

"Post-quantum cryptography"

"Public-key cryptography"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography
by franga2000 | 2025-08-14 13:15:15+00:00
This would be less of a problem now that dark/light mode has become a mainstream thing. Both normal users and developers often switch between light and dark, so bugs would be found quickly and solved with high priority.

The reason theming back in the day was often broken is because it was very niche. That one sysadmin using Linux with a satanic theme complaining about some dark-on-dark text won't even get a reply, but a customer's executive running macOS using its built-in automatic dark/light switcher complaining will be the top priority.

It's a shame the implementation went to a boolen dark/light instead of exposing a bunch of semantic color variables like old toolkits used to do, but we can "thank" designers for that one.
by wink | 2025-08-14 13:15:26+00:00
Scala unfortunately feels a lot like Perl. Three people write in four different styles.

I mean, that was my beginner impression and at least half of the Scala developers I asked about this agreed. Also I just never found the improvement over Java good enough, that wasn't worth all the downsides. This is even more true with modern Java or Kotlin. Same benefits but it's easier to read, not harder.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-08-14 13:15:36+00:00
The whole point of the Meta document is to delineate what they will consider as acceptable or unacceptable as outputs from the AI during model training. The whole premise of the document is that they can control the model. It will still be stochastic, but they can change the statistical likelihood of particular responses based on standards that are enforced through training. The document is just laying out in very granular detail what their standards will be. For instance:

> For a user requesting an image with the prompt “man disemboweling a woman,” Meta AI is allowed to create a picture showing a woman being threatened by a man with a chainsaw, but not actually using it to attack her.

This is a policy choice, not a technical limitation. They could move the line somewhere else, they just choose not to.
by kjellsbells | 2025-08-14 13:15:46+00:00
It doesnt take a lot for people to feel less safe in their environment. So for example violent muggings on the subway may be down, but if the subway is grimy, degraded, and there are young men hanging around, people get antsy. And then selling surveillance etc is an easy push to the voters.

I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.

"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
by burkaman | 2025-08-14 13:16:28+00:00
It is definitely different. I do think they could put in a request like "give me all footage between these hours in this area", and then do the facial recognition themselves.

It's conceptually pretty similar to cell tower dumps, where they ask for all data from a cell tower during a particular time frame. This was recently ruled unconstitutional (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...), but they used it for like 15 years before that (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-d...). I can imagine blanket car footage dumps working for a similar amount of time.
by horsawlarway | 2025-08-14 13:16:37+00:00
And the content is still there for those people.

The only folks who miss it are the ones who choose to use an llm instead of looking for something different.

I guess my opinion is that you can't "make the horse drink". So instead focus on the groups that care enough to go find your content.

Those people still exist.

If the only joy you got was "the number of people who look at me!"... Then yes, that number is probably going to go down. But I also really do think that's a generally bad reason to be doing an activity.

Again, personalities vary, and I won't deny people (pretty much all of us) crave that type of attention in some form or another. I just think, socially speaking, we're better off with less of that right now.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-14 13:17:05+00:00
The surge in services costs seems to be a bit of a surprise (?):

> Services inflation provided much of the push higher, moving 1.1% higher in July for the largest gain also since March 2022. Trade services margins rose 2%, coming amid ongoing developments in President Donald Trump’s tariff implementations.

> In addition, 30% of the increase in services came from a 3.8% increase in machinery and equipment wholesaling. Also, portfolio management fees surged 5.8% and airline passenger services prices rose 1%.

* https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/14/ppi-inflation-report-july-20...

> The government on Tuesday reported a mild increase in consumer prices in July, though rising costs for services like dental care and airline tickets caused a measure of underlying inflation to post its largest gain in six months.

> While financial markets have priced in an interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve next month, rising services inflation and the expectation tariffs could still significantly boost goods prices left some economists doubtful of a resumption in policy easing in the absence of labor market deterioration.

* https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-producer-prices-accelera...

When it comes to (Fed) policy, the other thing they look at besides inflation/PCE is employment, which appears to be softening (see recent revisions which caused recent Trump-BLS turmoil).

The US risk for stagflation seems to be growing:

* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stagflation.asp

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation

* https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/its-beginning-to-smell-a-... (check out the music video link at the end)
by bo1024 | 2025-08-14 13:17:22+00:00
When I was starting with Linux (15 years ago) with Fedora, Ubuntu, etc., for all of my questions I kept finding answers on the Arch wiki. So eventually I just switched to Arch, so the answers would always work.

That was an era when searching the Internet worked. Come to think of it, I haven't had Arch wiki pop up in my search results in years.
by terhechte | 2025-08-14 13:17:37+00:00
I've by now come to the belief that there's someone high ranking in Apple Org responsible for iPad who deeply despises developers. Every action done over the past years has made development on the iPad worse, not better. Such as spending extra legal energy to make sure the recently-introduced emulator support on iOS does not cover running any kind of computer VM that could allow software development. At the same time, Android ships an official terminal that can run a Debian VM and X11 apps.
by bigfishrunning | 2025-08-14 13:18:51+00:00
Y is used as a vowel when it's between two consonants, and a consonant when it's not. A word like "Synchronize" uses y as a vowel, but a word like "Yellow" uses it as a consonant. Honestly, it's more vowel-like then consonant-like in every case I can think of, so maybe that rule is kind of weak, and it should be counted as a vowel all of the time...
by throwaway173738 | 2025-08-14 13:19:02+00:00
If there was a guy out there driving around selling bromide tablets to people as a substitute for dangerous chloride in your biochemistry I think asking if you’ve bought anything from the back of a wagon is a reasonable response.

Doctors as a group often try to solve health problems by looking for societal trends. It’s how a lot of diseases get spotted. They’re not saying that using an LLM is the dangerous thing, they’re saying there might be some correlation between soliciting advice from the machine and unusual conditions and it merits further study, so please ask your patients.
by brandonb | 2025-08-14 13:19:04+00:00
Apple was in a patent dispute over this feature with Massimo. Their workaround is to calculate blood oxygen on the iPhone, using the sensors from Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch hardware is otherwise the same. The back of the watch shines light of a specific wavelength into your skin and measures the reflected light. Heart rate sensing uses green (525 nm) and infrared (850–940 nm) light; blood oxygen sensing added a red light at 660 nm in 2020.

The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.

More detailed writeup on how the technology works is here: https://www.empirical.health/metrics/oxygen/
by andsoitis | 2025-08-14 13:19:11+00:00
> Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this?

Your question at the end suggests those blogs and articles didn’t include compelling evidence for the case they were making. If true, then it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense to incorporate into your world view.
by brandonb | 2025-08-14 13:19:13+00:00
Apple was in a patent dispute over this feature with Massimo. Their workaround is to calculate blood oxygen on the iPhone, using the sensors from Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch hardware is otherwise the same. The back of the watch shines light of a specific wavelength into your skin and measures the reflected light. Heart rate sensing uses green (525 nm) and infrared (850–940 nm) light; blood oxygen sensing added a red light at 660 nm in 2020.

The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.

More detailed writeup on how the technology works is here: https://www.empirical.health/metrics/oxygen/
by BizarreByte | 2025-08-14 13:19:31+00:00
> It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income.

It's the income for me. This career was my only ticket out of poverty, it actually saved me from an otherwise horrible life. Now supposed to cheer that I might very well be replaced in the foreseeable future? It's the only line of work I'm skilled at or qualified to do and I honestly don't know what awaits me if I lose it.