MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9dev | 2025-08-08 14:52:01+00:00
Those people seem incapable of considering that being surrounded by healthy people is a lot more enjoyable than being surrounded by the sick and poor. You don’t live in a vacuum. You interact with a lot of people every day, consciously or not, that probably earn less than you do, and clean your streets, wash your car, care for your elders and children, handle your food, serve your beer, and do a myriad of other things they can only do at good health.

That’s where those benefits go - to a functioning society where everyone gets a basic shred of dignity. Is it really so inconceivable to keep a little less of your disposable income in exchange for that?
by kiru_io | 2025-08-08 14:52:08+00:00
I’ve created a few "daily puzzle" games (e.g., [0] and [1]), and it still surprises me when I meet a random stranger who occasionally plays them. Even now, I can’t quite explain why people keep coming back to the site every day. But maybe for many, it's just a small daily ritual to distract for a few minutes.

[0] https://mathlegame.com/ [1] https://colorguesser.com/
by naasking | 2025-08-08 14:52:31+00:00
> Imagine a field where experiments take days to complete, and reviewing the results and doing deep thought work to figure out the next experiment takes maybe an hour or two for an expert.

With automation, one AI can presumably do a whole lab's worth of parallel lab experiments. Not to mention, they'd be more adept at creating simulations that obviates the need for some types of experiments, or at least, reduces the likelihood of dead end experiments.
by epistasis | 2025-08-08 14:52:35+00:00
Big numbers with no context come across as a way to misinform.

Viewed in light of total healthcare spending of roughly $5T per year, eliminating insurer profits does not appear to be even a drop in the bucket.

Our healthcare costs are certainly a policy choice, but eliminating profit does not fix the system, and many far more cost effective systems around the world are fully profit based.

Edit: absolutely wild to see somebody more focused on fringe political goals than caring about the health of the most vulnerable of our nation, and the bigger systemic changes that are needed. Fringe, frequently innumerate, and frequently wrong political rags like Jacobin are about politics, not about achieving better outcomes for the American precariat.
by jltsiren | 2025-08-08 14:52:51+00:00
There is no particular reason to assume that recursive self-improvement would be rapid.

All the technological revolutions so far have accounted for little more than a 1.5% sustained annual productivity growth. There are always some low-hanging fruit with new technology, but once they have been picked, the effort required for each incremental improvement tends to grow exponentially.

That's my default scenario with AGI as well. After AGI arrives, it will leave humans behind very slowly.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-08 14:52:53+00:00
If those statistics are even available. Part of the employment numbers is a 60,000 household survey they conduct with the help of the census bureau I doubt there's going to be a consistent survey of that scale done on the private dime. Not to mention all the statistics businesses are required legally to submit to the government that these hypothetical private replacements would never have access to.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-08 14:53:02+00:00
It's not just windows that I love popping up in my face actively! interrupting what I'm doing, but also ones that have autofocus elements, doubly stealing my attention and not having a debounce for ignoring actions, as others here have mentioned.

Type-type-type...HEY THIS APPLICATION HAS SOME UPDATES HERES A CHANGEL-keypress closes window

I wanted to read that, damn it!
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-08 14:53:16+00:00
I thinking mainly countries, criminals, and specialized artisans and industrial manufacturers take physical delivery of large quantities of gold.

I'm sure there are always some usual requests to insist on physical delivery of gold in the case of options. Example: https://www.ibkrguides.com/kb/en-us/phys-delivery-comex-meta...

Perhaps instead we should create aqua regia and dissolve copious amounts of gold, Fields Medals, and Nobel Prizes to be smuggled as, say, industrial waste. /s ;)
by infecto | 2025-08-08 14:53:50+00:00
I don’t know why so many take these discussion with such a high emotional level. Has the ability to constructively discuss a topic been lost? I know you usually respond with high emotion and brash but at least try to be constructive.

It’s a valid point and that’s the biggest question when it comes to the medium to long term business plan. Those R&D costs are an important part of it. My point is that since runtime is profitable there is a lot more runway to figure out how to tweak R&D spend in such a way that it becomes a viable business for the long term.

There are a lot of questions that they need to answer to get to pure profitability but they are also the fastest growing company on a MAU number in history with a product that you can see has a chance at become profitable from all sides. They may fail or become sidelined but the hyperbole and lack of critical discussion here is disappointing.
by rwnspace | 2025-08-08 14:54:14+00:00
Again you speak completely arrogantly, you have no idea what decisions I've taken in my life, no, none of the list, and yes, ones that involve significant threat to life. I specifically did not use the word "entertain" for those ideas because I have firsthand experience of the aforementioned sting. There's a reason I described myself as "post-rat". Yarvin was taken seriously for quite a time and is far more well-aligned with the sorts of people and views you're alluding to. Scott's Jewish, for god's sake.

I can only conclude you're a troll with far too much time on your hands. Goodbye.
by LurkandComment | 2025-08-08 14:54:25+00:00
The whole productivity movement is turning out to be a lie:

1) With the internet you can work from home and not have to travel. Time savings.

Your company: We want you to commute in everyday and waste time.

2) Use our platform to network productively.

Also platform: Waste hours of time playing shitty games.

3) AI will save you time.

Your Company: Don't negotiate with us because you are being productive. We will replace you with AI... really some people overseas we call AI.
by v4nn4 | 2025-08-08 14:54:25+00:00
I’ve been watching this space for a while and built my own puzzle with Cursor. Vibe coding speeds things up, but getting the idea, difficulty balance, and UI right is still tricky. Probably depends a lot on the type of puzzle (word-based vs. object placement, etc.).

Shameless plug: https://play7fold.com
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-08 14:54:29+00:00
There's also an element of economic drag caused by AI that did not exist with the internet: for example, the proliferation of slop content and AI-driven scams. The internet did not almost immediately make previous modes of doing business more difficult but instead slowly replaced them with more efficient alternatives. AI has already enshittified things like Google search and product reviews. In many ways AI is undoing some of the gains of the internet without providing a replacement.
by jeffyang | 2025-08-08 14:54:57+00:00
I mentioned this in a sibling comment, but one idea I have is instead of doing this extra work which is unrecognized, you spend your extra time on gaming the presentation and appearances aspect of it. Which you might not be good at at first but would be practice and probably have compounding gains in your career. And to add an extra interesting challenge is how can you game it with high integrity.
by jeremy_k | 2025-08-08 14:55:04+00:00
Not a lot of mention for the collaboration aspect that local first / sync engines enabled. I've been building a project using Zero that is meant to replace a Google Sheet a friend of mine uses for his business. He routinely gets on a Google Meet with a client, they both open the Sheet and then go through the data.

Before the emergence of tools like Zero I wouldn't have ever considered attempting to recreate the experience of a Google Sheet in a web app. I've previously built many live updating UIs using web sockets but managing that incoming data and applying it to the right area in the UI is not trivial. Take that and multiply it by 1000 cells in a Sheet (which is the wrong approach anyway, but it's what I knew how to build) and I can only imagine the mess of code.

Now with Zero, I write a query to select the data and a mutator to change the data and everything syncs to anyone viewing the page. It is a pleasure to work with and I enjoy building the application rather than sweating dealing with applying incoming hyper specific data changes.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-08 14:55:18+00:00
> Which is what AGI enables.

I appreciate the well-crafted response, but respectfully disagree with this sentiment, and I think it's a subtle point. Remember the no free lunch theorems: no general program will be the best at all tasks. Competent LLMs provide an excellent prior from which a compelling program for a particular task can be obtained by finetuning. But this is not what OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic (to a lesser extent) are interested in, as they don't really facilitate it. It's never been a priority.

They want to create a digital entity for the purpose of supremacy. Aside from DeepMind, these groups really don't care about how this tech can assist in problems that need solving, like drug discovery or climate prediction or discovery of new materials (e.g. batteries) or automation of hell jobs. They only care about code assistance to accelerate their own progress. I talk to their researchers at conferences and it frustrates me to no end. They want to show off how "human-like" their model is, how it resembles humans in creative writing and painting, how it beats humans on fun math and coding competitions that were designed for humans with a limited capacity to memorize, how it provides "better" medical opinions than a trained physician. That last use case is pushing governments to outlaw LLMs for medicine entirely.

A lab that claims to push toward AGI is not interested in assisting mankind toward a brighter future. They want to be the first for bragging rights, hype, VC funding, and control.
by parineum | 2025-08-08 14:55:36+00:00
It's not a given but Altman is a public figure for a reason while I don't know the names of any of the other CEOs off the top of my head. He talks a lot and when he talks, it's about AI. Even talking about the dangers of AI is hype because it implies it's an important topic to discuss now because it's imminent.
by OptionOfT | 2025-08-08 14:56:16+00:00
Thanks for that. That was an interesting read!

I ended up in this situation like I end up in most, by just learning as I go.

With this I learned that the libc allocator has a max amount that it'll add to the heap, and how mmap works, and that doing frequent munmap is slow.

Now I learned why it is slow!
by rantallion | 2025-08-08 14:56:33+00:00
If you're doing nothing in that 30-45 minutes other than stare at a loading screen, you're doing it wrong.

I'm not sold on the efficacy of AI and I share your reservations about having to scrutinise their output, but I see great value in being able to offload a long-running task to someone/something else and only have to check back later. In the meantime, I can be doing something else - like sitting in those planning meetings we all enjoy!
by gotoeleven | 2025-08-08 14:56:48+00:00
UnitedHealth has 147 million customers, according to google. 20 billion / 147 million = $136

So they're making $136 dollars per customer in profit. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. 136 is much less than the crazy costs that people are complaining about.

Are people who like to quote these big numbers just not capable of critical thinking or is it just that they like the chance to rage at capitalism's supposed failings and they know their readers are too dumb to do division?
by gjm11 | 2025-08-08 14:56:56+00:00
If you prefer "accusation" to "attack", that's fine with me. I take it that the actual meaning in this context is "something it's reasonable to respond to by defending oneself", since velcrovan was claiming it was somehow bad for gwern to do that.

I agree that if you are "facing feedback in an advisory role" then it's likely best to avoid being defensive. But gwern isn't in an advisory role here, and he wasn't facing feedback. Feedback is when someone talks to you and tells you what they think; this was velcrovan making a public statement about bad things gwern has allegedly done in the past and their implications for whether he's likely to do this future thing well.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I have no opinion, or at least none that anyone should care about, as to whether gwern will do well as an adviser or mentor to would-be once-a-day bloggers.)
by xivzgrev | 2025-08-08 14:57:00+00:00
I didn't know food was so high but I believe it.

My Costco runs used to be about $200-$300, now they're regularly $400-$500.

And yet half of the country votes for the orange one, whose big beautiful bill cut SNAP and Medicaid, basically food & health care assistance for the poor.

But hey it's really all about winning the culture war, and making sure we don't have a woman president, right?

I feel bad but I just don't know what to do when so many people vote against their own self economic interest. A good leader would make rally the country to make progress on these (like Obama did with health care), vs focused on their own grift.
by boston_clone | 2025-08-08 14:57:26+00:00
It's interesting phrasing, here - property doesn't really make a community, but people do.

Anti-police activists rightly recognize that property is typically insured and easily replaceable, whereas people's lives are not. There is a deluge of evidence to support the notion that random encounters with police can be fatal for black men with no provocation. There is also overwhelming evidence to support the assertion that a disproportionate percentage of cops have abusive and / or racist tendencies.

I'll leave with a poignant quote from the author Jermaine Lamarr Cole - "I came fast like 9-1-1 in White neighborhoods".
by coldpie | 2025-08-08 14:58:13+00:00
> To me it just seems like he's killing any and all credibility he had. Probably a bad long term strategy?

He's already got more money than God and there's an infinite supply of suckers who think wealth and skill/intelligence are correlated for him to keep feeding off of (see also Goop and Tesla, incredibly successful companies also run by wealthy hucksters). Sam Altman will be just fine.
by lapetitejort | 2025-08-08 14:58:22+00:00
My locally owned coffee shop adopted hang.com as a rewards program. They have a daily wordle clone that gives three free guesses. If you don't get it in three, you have to be close to the store to unlock the last two. There's also a bingo board that is filled in when you buy a specific drink or pastry, loot boxes when you earn enough points, tasks, and most recently a candy crush clone to earn 10% off a drink.

I'll freely admit it works on me. I have changed my schedule to work from the coffee shop just because I didn't guess the word in three turns. However, if this were attached to a national chain I might be less hesitant to participate. It's kinda funny to me that a local "snooty" coffee shop has adopted the practices of the oppressors.
by jrmg | 2025-08-08 14:58:45+00:00
I’m no lover of the US healthcare system - other countries get better outcomes for less than is spent by the US government - and basically all their costs are borne by the government, unlike in the US.

But: you have to be careful with large numbers. There are 0.3 billion people in the USA. United Healthcare says they cover 51 million. That $20 billion is $392 per insured person - a lot, sure, but hardly a large fraction of what they each pay.

Compared with other countries, the inefficiency of for-profit healthcare is a far worse problem than the amount of profit they make.

I agree with the gist of your comment overall. The system needs massive overhaul, which will take a lot of political will.
by self_awareness | 2025-08-08 14:58:53+00:00
Well, you can use the "poverty line" definition to separate people who will get grants (below the line), and people who will pay for the grants (above the line).

So being just barely above the line means that you pay, not that you get. This is the worst place to be in.

Also, a lot of sane US citizens seem to use the "poor" word to describe someone who is not able to get the newest model of iphone. That's why it's generally hard to talk about the issue.
by FredPret | 2025-08-08 14:58:59+00:00
These numbers are always given on a "real" basis, accounting for inflation.

Inflation is hard to measure because products get better and houses get bigger over time. But by every measure I've ever seen, purchasing power per hour worked has been going up exponentially or at least geometrically for 200 years now.

If you don't believe this, the World Bank, the IMF, and the US Federal Reserve publish reams of statistics about it.
by donatj | 2025-08-08 14:59:05+00:00
It’s really not that simple.

- Populations have grown in the last 7 years. Workforces have changed. - Stocks rise on hype, debt, and low interest rates — not from actual value or work done. - Borders are porous. Cheap labor moves. - Companies come and go.

And there's far more to it than that. Saying it is "really that simple" is nothing but call to outrage.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-08 14:59:39+00:00
Microsoft account service logins for 365 are also currently, actively broken for any accounts receiving "Let's keep your account secure. We'll help you set up another way to verify it's you."

You will get stuck in a loop on https://mysignins.microsoft.com/register and never be able to sign in.

It's been months.

I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work."

--

Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months.

--

I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development.

The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.
by bgirard | 2025-08-08 15:00:15+00:00
I'm playing with Claude Code to build an ASCII factorio-like. I first had it write code without much code supervision. It quickly added most of the core features you'd expect (save/load, options, debug, building, map generation, building, belts, crafting, smart belt placing, QoL). Then I started fixing minor bugs and each time it would break something eg. tweaking movement broke belts. So I prompted it to add Playwright automation. Then it wasn't able to write good quality tests and have them all pass, the test were full of sleep calls, etc...

So I looked at the code more closely and it was using the React frontend and useEffect instead of a proper game engine. It's also not great at following hook rules and understanding their timing in advance scenarios. So now I'm prompting it to use a proper tick based game engine and rebuilding the game up, doing code reviews. It's going 'slower' now, but it's going much better now.

My goal is to make a Show HN post when I have a good demo.
by bcrl | 2025-08-08 15:00:15+00:00
It really depends on the culture of the organization, personal and team goals. Very few places have everything in place to support engineers by making work low friction, productive and with the right support from the rest of the team combined with interesting tasks and goals. Once in a while a job like that comes along, but usually it ends up changing over time as priorities for the organization and individuals shift.

But yeah, I'm pretty down on tech these days (and even telecom). Bullshit happens everywhere and drains virtually all the fun out of everything. There are loads of incumbents, pole owners and municipalities that don't even do the bare minimum required by responding to permits in a timely manner. It's depressing that it is refreshing to me when people do the bare minimum -- replying to emails on the next business day (making it possible to get to the real work of installing cables for a customer). Most days for me now are hounding people to do what they should have done weeks / months / years ago, or writing legal documents to try to address harm they're causing. <sigh>
by brunohaid | 2025-08-08 15:00:24+00:00
Bit thin on details and not looking like they’ll open source it, but if someone clicked the post because they’re looking for their “replace ES” thing:

Both https://typesense.org/ and https://duckdb.org/ (with their spatial plugin) are excellent geo performance wise, the latter now seems really production ready, especially when the data doesn’t change that often. Both fully open source including clustered/sharded setups.

No affiliation at all, just really happy camper.
by garaetjjte | 2025-08-08 15:00:32+00:00
>If that manufacturer key is known, it only takes two samples from an authenticator to determine the sequence key.

Not if seed with appropriate length is used. Though I don't know how common that is, back in 2008 authors noted that "We would like to mention that none of the real-world KeeLoq systems we analyzed used any seed" (https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto2008/51570204/51570204.pd..., section 4.3)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-08 15:00:45+00:00
https://www.kff.org/health-policy-101-international-comparis...

> Unlike the U.S., similarly large and wealthy nations have long had universal or near-universal health coverage and more robust access to health care. Although the U.S. has recently reached an all-time high rate of insurance coverage, it still lags behind its peers and the ongoing disenrollments from Medicaid may cause the uninsured rate to rise. Additionally, even people who are insured in the U.S. often face such high out-of-pocket costs for medical care that they go without needed care or incur medical debt. Future policymaking in the U.S. may continue to focus on improving insurance coverage rates and addressing cost-related and other barriers to care.
by conductr | 2025-08-08 15:01:16+00:00
Inflation and affordability are different concepts. I think affordability is the term I’ll use as it’s best for casual/lay economic discussions.

It would be unstable at first, like how inflation during Covid differed by industry/product type. This is a big shock to the system. But over time as it normalized sure things will have inflated but relative affordability basically will return to what it is now or where it started.

If you make $10 and food is $1, it’s no different than if you make $100 and food is $10. What’s been happening due to wage growth (lack of), is you make $11 and food is $2, next year you make $12 but food is $3, etc. from a relative perspective food cost is growing too fast to keep up. To make people feel wealthier, we need the ratio to move the other way, $15/$2 then $30/$3 or something similar. This is how a middle class would get re-established. It’s a tough thing to accomplish is our complex global economy. Were marching towards a global income equilibrium, which only puts downward pressure on a high labor cost economy like the US/CA/EU.
by teeray | 2025-08-08 15:01:47+00:00
Food is far from a solved problem. There are many food deserts in the US, where the best you can hope for for groceries is a gas station mini mart. “They can just drive further to a real grocery store.” Yes, but they start cutting into their grocery budget driving there and back, limiting what they can buy. In extreme cases, it obviates the purpose of the trip entirely.