MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-15 16:33:24+00:00
There was a vaccine developed for Lyme disease in the early 2000's. It was canned because the market wasn't believed to be favorable. Lyme disease is an awful illness that often progresses to chronic and incurable.

Tick populations have exploded recently with our new warmer climates, and now a new vaccine is slated to enter the market in the next few years.

Unfortunately however the vaccine will not protect against lone star tick bites, which can make you allergic to red meat.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:33:25+00:00
> It's not new affordable housing, but the people moving in to the new expensive houses are leaving their old houses, and the people who buy those are leaving their old houses, so eventually the price drops happen on the older, smaller homes at the bottom end of the market.

As I commented elsewhere, that’s the paper math version that doesn’t resemble reality for those of us living in it. Buyers of new luxury stock are increasingly just leveraging prior housing equity to fund the new purchase and renting out old stock at “market rates”, which doesn’t actually increase supply or decrease pricing. Laws have made short-term rentals and long-term landlording immensely profitable for those who got into the game early, especially in major metros that lack regulations on rent control or have preferential property taxation schemes. When actually affordable housing is built (i.e. starter homes), they’re frequently snapped up by PE firms and investors rather than being sold to first-time homebuyers.

The “property cycle” you mention does not exist anymore, and that’s by design. It’s why meaningful legislation and taxation policies are needed to deter landlording of SFH properties and prevent exploitation of renters by implementing rent controls.
by Anthony-G | 2025-08-15 16:33:26+00:00
I saw this earlier today and thought it might be of interest, considering that other German court decisions are currently being discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912085

Note: the headline is somewhat misleading. The first line of the article reads

> A court in Hamburg, Germany, has stated in the details of a ruling concerning a Karl Marx reading group that Marx’s teachings may be contrary to the “free democratic basic order.”

(emphasis mine)
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-15 16:33:42+00:00
> to send the private beta when the next update goes out

Meaning I only can try the software after sign up, or did I miss the obvious repo link?

What language is this project written in, what build system does it use itself?

I just don't feel comfortable pasting my email address into a Google site. I can use a temp mail, but I will loose access to it in a few minutes/hours, so I don't know if that would annoy you.

What kind of times do you expect in the form, serial or parallel build time? What kind of file do you want to be modified. When I modify main.c, basically nothing gets rebuild, when I modify the central header file, it will be like a total rebuild. Can you clarify that in the form?
by cameldrv | 2025-08-15 16:34:19+00:00
Me too. One thing I noticed in the 2000s was kids being more and more restricted and then they started getting drivers licenses later, living with their parents after college, etc. It felt as if parents thought that when their kid turned 18, that they would magically mature and become independent. Of course this is a process, and you can start it at 7 or you can start it at 18…

On a happy note, we were out eating at a cafeteria type restaurant, but we were sitting outside sort of picnicing about a 3 minute walk away. My son wanted another slice of pizza, but I didn’t really want to go inside and get it for him, so I decided to give him some money and let him get it himself. He came back with the slice of pizza on a plate, on a tray, with the right change and absolutely beaming and he talked about it for days.
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-15 16:34:29+00:00
1 Tsar Bomba (50 MT = 2e17J) is about 1/28,000,000 of the total solar power delivered to Earth annually, so about 1.4 seconds of top-of-atmosphere solar power (~1.5 million PWh / year).

On the other hand, it roughly equals 1/2000 to 1/3000 of annual global energy consumption (~175 PWh / year) so about 4 hours of human energy.

The energy of those 8000 Tsar Bombas in the Mediterranean then is the same as all of human energy, electrical and fossil and otherwise, going to heating up that sea for a little over 2 years straight, or focussing all sunlight over the disc of the Earth on it for 3 hours.

(All these figures depend on who you ask as all the figures are a little bit fuzzy).

It also shows that any key to climate change revolves around adjusting the modulation of insolation and/or retention - the actual energy used by humans is, for the forseeable future, completely irrelevant except on local scales like warm water outflows into rivers and seas.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-08-15 16:34:50+00:00
I think it probably could be cheap enough. Part of the issue is actually just that new home sizes keep getting bigger. Like yeah, new homes are more expensive now even in relatively cheaper parts of the countries compared to decades ago, but it's also true that the homes are much larger than they used to be.

A lot of the homes from the 50s and 60s that people talk about being very affordable at the time they are made, were very small things by today's standards.
by LargeWu | 2025-08-15 16:35:02+00:00
IDK, I think there's clearly arguments to be made against so-called "late stage capitalism", where capital is directed towards efforts that extract value rather than create it, and shareholder theory that prioritizes short term gains and creates externalities at the expense of other stakeholders.

But at the end of the day, everything is subject to market forces and it's folly to deny that.
by rvrb | 2025-08-15 16:35:19+00:00
My understanding may be out of date, but the C# support was created before GDExtension existed. The team has been working hard on porting it over to GDExtension. Once they are done, it should be much more performant, and they will finally be able to ship only one version of the editor. I believe the original C# bindings do a lot of unnecessary marshaling at the ABI.

With GDExtension, the core builtin types like `Vector3` are passed by value. Avoid unnecessarily wrapping them in Variant, a specialized tagged union, where you can. You can see the documentation here; you have direct access to the float fields: https://gdzig.github.io/gdzig/#gdzig.builtin.vector3.Vector3

Engine objects are passed around as opaque pointers into engine managed memory. The memory for your custom types is managed by you. You allocate the engine object and essentially attach userdata to it, tagged with a unique token provided to your extension. You can see the header functions that manage this: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/e67074d0abe9b69f3d...

But, this is how the lifetimes for the objects gets slightly hairy (for us, the people creating the language bindings). Our goal with the Zig bindings is to make the allocations and lifetimes extremely obvious, a la Zig's philosophy of "No hidden memory allocations". It is proving somewhat challenging, but I think we can get there.

There's still a lot of surprising or unintuitive allocations that can happen when calling into Godot, but we hope to expose those. My current idea is to accept a `GodotAllocator` on those functions (and do nothing with it; just use it to signal the allocation). You can read the code for the `GodotAllocator` implementation: https://github.com/gdzig/gdzig/blob/master/gdzig/heap.zig#L8...

If we succeed, I think Zig can become the best language to write highly performant Godot extensions in.
by jjk166 | 2025-08-15 16:35:37+00:00
I don't see how that conflicts with my point. The period from Jan 1978 to Jan 1982 was a momentary spike, peaking January 1980, which was nearly 3 times the long term average from 1971 to 2008. If you set that as your baseline, everything looks like a massive decline, but really the average was quite stable from 1982 to 2004. Note that the period of the spike in gold price (1978 to 1982) was a period of extremely high inflation.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-15 16:35:44+00:00
I just went ahead and tried it out :)

I can get it to work for some sub-sets of our project, but for quite a bit of it I get the following error:

cc1: error: cannot load plugin /opt/rh/gcc-toolset-13/root/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/13/plugin/externis.so: /opt/rh/gcc-toolset-13/root/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/13/plugin/externis.so: undefined symbol: _Z14decl_as_stringP9tree_nodei

I suspect this is because these are C or Fortran sub-projects. I'm looking for some clean way to tell Cmake to apply externis to all the C++ only subprojects if possible. I'll see what I can come up with.

I'd also like to know, if multiple GCC commands end up pointing to the same trace.json, especially in a parallel build, will externis automagically ensure that it doesn't step over itself?
Show HN: I built an native macOS app to clean junk files from USB drives
by xmasterdev | 2025-08-15 16:36:04+00:00
I built CleanMyUSB to solve a problem: macOS leaves hidden files all over USB drives, causing issues when using them with Windows PCs, car stereos, cameras, and other devices.

Real problems it solves: - USB drives not playing music in car stereos (thanks .DS_Store!) - Windows users complaining about "junk files" when sharing - SD cards showing "file error" in cameras - Can't delete Spotlight indexes on exFAT drives

What it cleans: - .DS_Store files: The culprit behind "USB not recognized" in car stereos - Spotlight indexes (.Spotlight-V100): Wasting space and useless on other systems - AppleDouble files (._): Resource forks that clutter Windows folders - System junk: .Trash, .fseventsd, .Trashes hidden folders - Temp files: .tmp, .cache, .log and various temporary files - Cross-platform conflicts: Thumbs.db, desktop.ini, System Volume Information

Technical approach: - Real-time USB/SD card detection with auto-cleanup prompts - Smart file recognition to protect important data - Special exFAT filesystem handling

Why I built this:

Got tired of manually cleaning USBs before giving them to Windows users. Got tired of troubleshooting why car stereos won't read my USB. This tool eliminates these annoying little frictions.

Pricing & Availability: $9.99 one-time purchase, 7-day free trial.

Important Note: Due to App Store sandbox restrictions, the Mac App Store version cannot clean certain system files (.Spotlight-V100, .fseventsd, .Trashes). The direct download version from our website has full functionality. If you previously purchased the App Store version and need the full functionality, please contact me and I'll provide you with a free license for the direct version.

Website: https://cleanmyusb.app Would love your feedback!
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-15 16:36:58+00:00
"Money is just a way of keeping score." - attributed to oil baron H. L. Hunt.

One might just as well ask why the person with the largest collection of toasters (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-c...) wants them since there's a limit to how much toast he can consume. Soime people have passions and they work to realize them, whether it's something silly toasters or something crass like as wealth and power.
by 9rx | 2025-08-15 16:37:33+00:00
That is quite true. Early Americans had absolutely no trouble living in their 300 sq. ft. log cabin with eight children under foot. You don't technically need the behemoths we see today (or even what we saw in the 50s, which were still huge by historical standards). But it remains, if it was cheap enough, people would already be doing it. The law sometimes gets in the way, sure, but that's another subject entirely.
by oappapapapa | 2025-08-15 16:37:36+00:00
While the other commentator is unnecessarily toxic they seem correct. You don’t ask a fish how to catch fish - you ask a fisherman.

Some glaring issues in the article:

> Yet not everyone is ready to listen to men

Nobody ever listened. Men seized power and told others how to do things. Ideally these are good, honorable men who care about their people. Noblesse oblige, etc. I don’t mean to sound harsh here - these kind of leaders will naturally attract followers, despite how “toxic” my description sounds.

> Men are built to be strong and use that strength for physical protection

This is one aspect of it. There’s also a major non physical component that parallels the physical - men should confident, aggressive, bold, independent, etc. to some degree. This is why men are by and large leaders (and no female lead society has ever really amounted to anything). Leaving these out is a key misunderstanding that is evident later on in the article.

> in contrast, there is little room left for warriors and combatants

There was always only the room you made for yourself. That’s a key part of being a man. It’s no different now, outside of increased pushback from modern society.

> women can provide for themselves

Not really. The state provides the things women physically can’t (protection, dangerous jobs, etc). We’ve replaced men with the state (via other men). Millions of men pay taxes so women can have protection without a man. Not claiming one is better than the other.

The author is pretty decent at describing certain categories of men, but the solutions are all rather lacking. The majority can be solved by “manning up”, and some are unsolvable (some men are just not fit for society - it’s why there’s not many female geniuses nor jack the rippers). Go build the life you want. That’s the ultimate privilege and curse of being a man. You may be ostracized, but you have to live by your principles. There will be bad times, but you only lose when you give up.

I’ll also say there’s a missing cultural component here. Diversity causes stratification in society, and makes it even harder to determine what those principles are. Try to live near people who look like you. Read old books by people who looked like you. Theres a lot of wisdom and strength to be found in your history.
by jchw | 2025-08-15 16:37:36+00:00
I honestly think that reflects more on the state of education than it does human intelligence.

My primary assertion is that LLMs struggle to generalize concepts and ideas, hence why they need petabytes of text just to often fail basic riddles when you muck with the parameters a little bit. People get stuck on this for two reasons: one, because they have to reconcile this with what they can see LLMs are capable of, and it's just difficult to believe that all of this can be accomplished without at least intelligence as we know it; I reckon the trick here is that we simply can't even conceive of how utterly massive the training datasets for these models are. We can look at the numbers but there's no way to fully grasp just how vast it truly is. The second thing is definitely the tendency to anthropomorphize. At first I definitely felt like OpenAI was just using this as an excuse to hype their models and come up with reasons for why they can never release weights anymore; convenient. But also, you can see even engineers who genuinely understand how LLMs work coming to the conclusion that they've become sentient, even though the models they felt were sentient now feel downright stupid compared to the current state-of-the-art.

Even less sophisticated pattern matching than what humans are able to do is still very powerful, but it's obvious to me that humans are able to generalize better.
by whall6 | 2025-08-15 16:37:48+00:00
There doesn’t need to be a connection between the purchase and sale events. Any marginal unit of inventory added to a market will place downward pressure on the price of that inventory (i.e., make it more affordable). The reverse is true for a marginal bid for inventory.

The effect is so minimal when you zoom into a single sale of one home and purchase of one condo, but in aggregate this causes real noticeable price movement.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 16:37:51+00:00
It was a series of studies earlier this year that made media rounds; searching for “Wall street housing 25%” returns a myriad of results from mainstream sources citing a number of different studies and papers:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/08/investors-buying-25-us-homes-...

I’m on mobile and can’t dig into total ownership figures at the moment, but I do know that in the sunbelt states property acquisition by investment firms has been a real issue. Even slumlords are getting bought out at top dollar, and affordable housing is increasingly just a trailer rented on land owned by - you guessed it - PE or REITs at consistently inflating rents.
by usefulcat | 2025-08-15 16:37:59+00:00
I think "context" is being used in different ways here.

> "It’s nearly impossible to grasp how much context this gives them to play with"

Here, I think the author means something more like "all the material used to train the LLM".

> "A true summary, the kind a human makes, requires outside context and reference points."

In this case I think that "context" means something more like actual comprehension.

The author's point is that an LLM could only write something like the referenced summary by shortening other summaries present in its training set.
by ASinclair | 2025-08-15 16:38:09+00:00
> If a $450,000 house in a Chicago suburb is freed up by its owners moving to a $700,000 condo in Seattle, the people who can't afford a house in Seattle don't see the benefit of the condo building and aren't going to buy the house in Chicago

Is the existence of the $700,000 condo the limiting factor for those people moving? If it isn't built would they instead bid up an existing unit in Seattle and put it more out of reach of existing Seattle residents?
by c0balt | 2025-08-15 16:38:26+00:00
I'm hosting it for our team at a public institute, we are strongly supportive of OSS and have interest in keeping our data on premise.

Team of <10 though so hosting is trivial with NixOS. We also have almost no money available for purchasing software so official self-hosted bitwarden was not an option unfortunately (if we had money, that would've been the way to go).
by entropicdrifter | 2025-08-15 16:38:52+00:00
I agree with the thrust of your argument.

IMO we already have the technology for sufficient parallelization of smaller models with specific bits of context. The real issue is that models have weak/inconsistent/myopic judgement abilities, even with reasoning loops.

For instance, if I ask Cursor to fix the code for a broken test and the fix is non-trivial, it will often diagnose the problem incorrectly almost instantly, hyper-focus on what it imagines the problem is without further confirmation, implement a "fix", get a different error message while breaking more tests than it "fixed" (if it changed the result for any tests), and then declare the problem solved simply because it moved the goalposts at the start by misdiagnosing the issue.
by nataliste | 2025-08-15 16:38:54+00:00
The author's argument is built on fallacies that always pop up in these kinds of critiques.

The "summary vs shortening" distinction is moving the goalposts. They makes the empirical claim that LLMs fail at summarizing novel PDFs without any actual evidence. For a model trained on a huge chunk of the internet, the line between "reworking existing text" and "drawing on external context" is so blurry it's practically meaningless.

Similarly, can we please retire the ELIZA and Deep Blue analogies? Comparing a modern transformer to a 1960s if-then script or a brute-force chess engine is a category error. It's a rhetorical trick to make LLMs seem less novel than they actually are.

And blaming everything on anthropomorphism is an easy out. It lets you dismiss the model's genuinely surprising capabilities by framing it as a simple flaw in human psychology. The interesting question isn't that we anthropomorphize, but why this specific technology is so effective at triggering that response from humans.

The whole piece basically boils down to: "If we define intelligence in a way that is exclusively social and human, then this non-social, non-human thing isn't intelligent." It's a circular argument.
by mgfist | 2025-08-15 16:38:54+00:00
> How about pitching an hour of work to make it easy to read on mobile? Not that I think BH cares, but in this day and age making it layout nicely on mobile is the least you can do and isn’t particularly difficult anymore.

I think it looks great on mobile. It's fast as shit and I'm still just a 2 clicks away from an annual report. Frankly I often prefer the desktop layout even on mobile.
by connicpu | 2025-08-15 16:38:57+00:00
If you reach a point where housing supply out paces demand plus the vacancy rate those investors are willing to tolerate, that's when rent prices will finally start to drop as the big landlords need to generate more revenue to keep up the capital and operational expenses. And if rent prices drop far enough then it will no longer be profitable to spend all that capital snapping up starter homes, and eventually may even be placed back on the market.
by qnleigh | 2025-08-15 16:39:06+00:00
The article here is about a specific type of misalignment wherein the model starts exhibiting a wide range of undesired behaviors after being fine-tuned to exhibit a specific one. They are calling this 'emergent misalignment.' It's an empirical science about a specific AI paradigm (LLMs), which didn't exist in 2008. I guess this is just semantics, but to me it seems fair to call this a new science, even if it is a subfield of the broader topic of alignment that these papers pioneered theoretically.

But semantics phooey. It's interesting to read these abstracts and compare the alignment concerns they had in 2008 to where we are now. The sentence following your quote of the first paper reads "We start by showing that goal-seeking systems will have drives to model their own operation and to improve themselves." This was a credible concern 17 years ago, and maybe it will be a primary concern in the future. But it doesn't really apply to LLMs in a very interesting way, which is that we somehow managed to get machines that exhibit intelligence without being particularly goal-oriented. I'm not sure many people anticipated this.
by Herring | 2025-08-15 16:39:37+00:00
More generally I'd say it's a power grab, like a monopoly. Yes abuses always happen, but even if it was all legal and above-board, the main problem is this mentality of "more power for me less power for you".

Most Americans love this idea of being powerful, which is why he won the popular vote. The rapes probably even helped him in some quarters. This idea also appeals strongly to a lot of HN - Warren Buffet openly talks about the importance of getting a "moat".

It's anti-competitive. In reality a more distributed power structure is much better for overall progress, and even for the monopolist in the long run (Example: Intel, Russia).
by zevon | 2025-08-15 16:39:40+00:00
As mentioned in my parent comment, I've made purchase decisions for FDM desktop printers since before Prusa (as a company and product) was around and I've been responsible for 3D printers from a lot of different manufacturers over the years. I'm not attached to any particular company or anything like that.

If I needed more "quality" (in the sense of less visible layer lines) than what comes out of a modern Bambu, Prusa (or some other modern FDM printers), I would use another manufacturing process instead of FDM printing. And no idea where you are in the world but I'm in Europe where I can get Prusa parts from different vendors very quickly and reliably and most of them (including Prusa themselves) have processes in place for B2B and public sector transactions which can be important for professional life as well.

Again: I'm not saying that Bambu printers are not very good in many ways. As I said in my parent comment: I have one. Doesn't change my other points.