MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway22032 | 2025-08-25 18:45:32+00:00
I feel as if I've been reading some variant of this for the last 30 years (not just American, UK too).

But then what of it? I had more money at age 20 than I did at 15, more at 25 than 20, more at 30 than 25, and so on and so forth.

When I'm 70 I'll have more in real terms than I do now. Each year, barring some sort of disaster, most people work and bring in enough to survive whilst the surplus stacks up.

The main difference in my mind driving the rate of change in the proportions is just that the median person is more aware of things like the stock market, real estate, etc, now.

Basically, people are acting more efficiently. I'm more savvy than my parents were; they are/were proper working class "spend it as soon as it comes in, it might be gone" whereas I'm more like "never touch the capital, diversify".

(There are some issues, like how in the UK pensioners are given _extremely_ generous benefits, but I don't think that's relevant to the global picture).
by jt2190 | 2025-08-25 18:45:55+00:00
I think that’s what the paper was trying to express: That the older cohort got more leverage from the increase in housing prices because they had more invested when prices shot up.

> Summary and Concluding Remarks

> The paper focuses on the slippage in the net worth ratio among households under age 35 relative to all households between 1983 and 2022 and its phenomenal rise among households aged 75 and over. Based on differential leverage between the two groups (the much higher debt- net worth ratio among younger families compared to older ones), we would have expected exactly the opposite – namely, that the net worth of younger households should have risen relative to older ones. Indeed, the average real rate of return on net worth of the youngest age group over years 1983-2022 was 5.67 percent while that of the oldest was 3.29 percent. What factors explain these seemingly perverse results?

> The first is increasing net home equity for the elderly. The increase in the ratio of mean net home equity to the overall level over 1983- 2022 explains a substantial 38.3 percent of the relative gain in net worth of the 75 and over age group but very little for that of the youngest group. The second is surging mortgage debt among the youngest households. This explains 297 percent (.160/.054), of the actual decline in the group’s mean net worth ratio – that, is almost three times the actual decline. Its relative decline also accounts for a significant 35.2 percent of the increase in the oldest group’s mean net worth ratio. However, it should be stressed that these results are not additive across the various factors considered in the analysis

> Third, the homeownership rate might well be close to a “smoking gun” for the oldest age group. It shoots up by 11.5 percentage points for this group, and the group’s relative wealth holdings expand by a sizeable 50.4 percent. Likewise, relative to the overall average homeownership rate, that of the oldest enlarges by 8.9 percentage points from 6.0 to 14.9 percent. The fourth is the fantastic growth in stock holdings among the oldest age group, which could constitute another smoking gun. The value of the group’s stock portfolio relative to the overall average skyrockets from 0.56 to 3.47, which accords with the sharp increase in its relative net worth, and accounts for a staggering 269 percent of its gain in net worth relative to the overall average.

> Fifth, among the youngest age group, despite dire press reports, educational loans fail to appear as a significant factor. As a fraction of overall mean student debt, it actually fell from 2.45 in 2007 (the first date of available data) to 1.66 in 2022, so that the trend is contrary to that of the group’s relative net worth. Moreover, subtracting the change in the group’s mean educational debt over 2007- 2022 from its 2007 net worth ratio lowers the group’s mean net worth ratio by a rather trivial 0.006. 24 References Bricker, Jesse, Jacob Krimmel, Alice Henri
by corimaith | 2025-08-25 18:46:12+00:00
The definition of a language model is literally the probability distribution of the most likely next token given a preceding text. When OP says "memorizing patterns and repeating stuff", it's a strawman of a basic n-gram model, obviously with modern language it's more advanced because we techniques like vector tokenization, but at it's core it's still just probability that's limited to the corpus it was trained on.

Or at it's core, if you give it question that it's never seen, what's the most likely reply you might get, and it will give you that. But dosen't mean there is a internal world-model or anything, it's ultimately wether you think language is sufficient to model reality, which I probably think not. It obviously would be very convincing, but not necessairly correct.
by someotherperson | 2025-08-25 18:46:30+00:00
> If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US

No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is.

> same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center

Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.
by cuuupid | 2025-08-25 18:46:35+00:00
Everyone has been repeating this for months but inflation remains relatively normal so prices are not rising. Maybe it's a delayed effect that we won't see until later in the year, but at this point it is a theory and far from a fact, not something that needs to be repeated.

We have already observed that the opposite does not hold - in 2017 we slashed corporate income tax by 14% across the board, roughly the same as the tariffs but with far more surface area, and yet prices did not react and the benefits were not passed along to the consumer.

All we _know_ right now is that this is going to negatively impact economic growth by hitting corporations, the same way slashing corporate income tax positively impacted economic growth by benefitting corporations.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-25 18:46:37+00:00
Invisible hand forces prices down.

If tarrifs on imported goods are high then people choose non imported goods (which might be substitutes for goods which can’t be made in America) as there are no tarrifs.

They are dangerous though. If country A stops selling to US it sells cheaper to other countries. It also stops importing from the US (and chooses subsidies).

Overall everyone loses out - at least in theory, as everyone uses worse substitutes.
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-25 18:46:38+00:00
This is the issue for postal systems.

In every country in the world, you could send a package by post and the receiving country’s customs will assess duty/taxes/admin fees and charge the recipient as the default procedure.

As of later this week, the US will not do that procedure (or allegedly charge some absurd flat rate, like $50-$200 on even a $1 package).

Sending postal systems don’t want to deal with the aftermath of rejected/refused packages. And it’s unknown if US Customs and US Postal Service is even capable of charging that flat rate anyway.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-25 18:47:01+00:00
> I don't know when we'll literally get "The Year of Linux on the Desktop"

Not for as long as we keep telling people that the best software is like this:

> Because I do think that Hyprland deserves its reputation of being difficult! Not because the core tiling window manager is hard, but because it comes incredibly bare-boned in the box. You have to figure out everything yourself. Even how to get a lock screen or idle timing or a menu bar or bluetooth setting or... you get the idea.

My mom just bought a replacement Windows laptop, and even that needs some gentle prodding before it can be used by a regular human person - and that's only gentle because we told her that she should buy the Professional version of Windows, and not the adware-riddled Home one.

I guess as long as we assume that the Year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived when a slightly higher percentage of nerds who are happy to endlessly tinker with settings adopts it as their daily driver, then sure. It's any day now.
by jmaestrooper | 2025-08-25 18:47:46+00:00
Very dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI.

I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold.

General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from stolen books and social media (and increasingly on its own slop)? Very likely.

Architectures allowing the said chatbots trigger actions online or (worse yet) IRL? Almost definitely.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-25 18:47:49+00:00
Maybe like this:

"It's common for an algorithm's performance to depend not just on the size of the input, but also its arrangement. In such cases we typically use big O notation to describe the worst-case scenario. However, note that we may perform similar analysis on the best case or the average case as well."

But here:

> You may sometimes see the Greek letter "theta", Θ, instead of the letter O in big O notation. This is used when the best and worst case have the same order of growth. We can't use it for bubble sort because the best case is O(n) and the worst case is O(n^2).

This is plain false, the worst-case runtime of bubble sort is indeed Θ(n^2). Either delete it, or write about the upper bound / lower bound thing.
by machomaster | 2025-08-25 18:47:53+00:00
> What makes you think they don't think it through?

Basing it on a lot of stupid decisions youtube has made over the years, the last being the horrendous autotranslation of titles/descriptions/audio that can't be turned off. Can only be explained by having morons making decisions, who can't imagine that anyone could speak more than one language.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-08-25 18:48:44+00:00
Here's Elbridge Colby on a debate about Ukraine and China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMRYvl2Jefg

Hegseth on China

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/41... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/27/asia/pete-hegseth-asia-to...

I don't think the views of all the "high level strategist" types align precisely. But there are very few true isolationists like Rand Paul in the executive branch

I find it doubtful that the current admin would just let China walk in to Taiwan. Trump doesn't want a war, but he's not going to want to get bent over and make the US look weak either.

And its not all that different from Democratic position, its a bit of "Washington Consensus" type of situation, like anti-Communism was during the Cold War. The approach between admins is slightly different however, and the Trump admin doesn't like Europe all that much.
by immibis | 2025-08-25 18:48:54+00:00
The root zone file is publicly distributed by IANA [1] so you can download it and ignore the servers themselves. Then your lookup (from the resolver you're running yourself) starts at a particular country's top level.

As for censorship, because it's hierarchical, they'd have to remove an entire country code from the root servers.

[1] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files
by stouset | 2025-08-25 18:49:01+00:00
It's absolutely insane.

I know we don't want HN to devolve into political bickering, but this is a deeply important meta-observation about what's happening in our country right now. Trump's stochastically random decisions are so inscrutable, but his following is so cult-like, that his followers are forced to flail around to try and find any plausible justification for these actions.

You'd think that at some point the sheer effort of this would trigger some sort of introspection, but it never seems to come. Someone, somewhere, latches onto an explanation that's catchy enough, vague enough, and impossible to disprove enough, that the tribe can take the explanation at face value and latch onto it, no matter how thin.

This will be studied for a long, long time.
by bitwize | 2025-08-25 18:49:53+00:00
The Atari ST ran at 8 MHz. The Amiga ran to nicely sync with the video signal; slightly different numbers for PAL (7.09 MHz) and NTSC (7.16 MHz) systems. But yeah, it used to be you could design a system with rock-solid timing that made an implementation specialized to certain I/O applications cheap and easy... now... not so much
by AlienRobot | 2025-08-25 18:50:18+00:00
This is a great article about the topic! It covers everything.

But can someone explain this to me?

>Light is technically something called electromagnetic radiation and it has a frequency and wavelength. That wavelength can vary, depending on the energy of the wave. High energy waves have a higher frequency and shorter wavelength, and low energy waves have a lower frequency and longer wavelength.

>This means that the same amount of energy at different wavelengths will not be perceived as the same brightness. For example, a light with a wavelength of 555 nm (green) will appear brighter than a light with a wavelength of 450 nm (blue) even if they have the same energy.

The article asserts that the wavelength (thus color) changes with the amount of energy, but then it says that you can have light of different wavelengths (color) with "the same energy."
by salynchnew | 2025-08-25 18:50:26+00:00
> After first publishing this article a helpful commenter let me know Logitech released the MX Ergo S in late 2024, with quieter switches, USB-C, and a $20 price increase. Let's just pretend I wrote this article a year ago! Still, at least this project let me avoid some e-waste.

This is slightly funny, but I've noticed over the years that Google's decline in function as a quality search engine has correlated with lots of wasted time on my end, DIY-ing things that I later found to already exist somewhere in the world.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-25 18:50:41+00:00
Imagine if the concept of a phone call did not exist. We still have these computers in our pockets, but without the history of the telephone system.

Then, one day, an app developer thought: Wouldn't it be cool if there was an app that would interrupt what the user was doing, play a sound, vibrate the device, and put up a full-screen dialog, that this all could be activated remotely by any other device by simply typing in a short numeric code, and that if the recipient pushed a button, the remote attacker could send audio data and activate the recipient's microphone? Most app stores would classify this as malware, yet here we are today with devices that all have built-in apps that do exactly this, and only because of how normalized the legacy idea of a "phone call" is.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-25 18:50:57+00:00
From what ive been seeing. schools are hostile toward cellphones and AI.

Which is the complete opposite of what I would do. Id be actively teaching this new learning tool to the maximum.

That perhaps classrooms being >30 students and overworked teachers doesnt need to be solved, instead the endless questions from students could be sent to regulated AI options. Making the teacher's job that much easier. Perhaps even on average ending up with significantly better educated students.

>Should governments, teachers, heads of ministries up the priority of compensating the negative offsets in cognitive abilities due to the use of AI or will the progressive improvement of youngsters in/with/due AI use be enough?

There's a great deal of sensationalism, fake news around this at most.
Show HN: Expansions of Programming Related Acronyms
by lirena00 | 2025-08-25 18:51:10+00:00
A while back I came across https://github.com/npm/npm-expansions, a fun repository where people came up with alternative meanings for "npm." By the time I found it, though, the repo was no longer being maintained.

So I decided to start my own version, not limited to npm, but covering all sorts of programming related acronyms as well.

It’s just a lighthearted fun project, nothing too serious. You can even use it in your own projects via its API :) though I do wonder where exactly you’ll end up using it.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-25 18:51:14+00:00
> It's still an extra fingerprinting signal, and all things being equal you'd want less fingerprinting vectors

Yes, but it's value to the interested party is minuscule, precisely because it's not a permanent and distinguish enough signal. They already have a lot more stronger signals so ditching ipv6 for ipv4+nat would not improve your privacy in any meaningful way.

> User-agent provides very limited set of information

Yes. But if you have two 'users' in your ipv4+NAT network and the one is using an Apple device while the other uses some Android device - you already, without providing any 'extra fingerprinting signal' like a ipv6 address, gave a signal strong enough to distinguish between those users.

> You'd need to get into canvas/webgl fingerprinting to uniquely identify a device

No need for that to distinguish between different users behind a NAT. Your cookies, your UA, your logged in accounts, your requests to fonts.google.com for a fancy website - they all give enough information to do that already. I remind the original point about CGNAT - it's massive amount of users who are intermingled on the same IPv4 pool and even sometimes change the used address in process.

Ad platforms already need to work with an 'non-identifiable' IP:port combo datapoint in the first place, so they do their work to identify you from the every breadcrumb they can leave on your device.

And by the way, if you have any 'cloud enabled' app on your device the big boys already knows where and who you are. Eg: any app what uses Firebase, or Location APIs or bazillion of other 'cloud' things...
by npteljes | 2025-08-25 18:51:20+00:00
>what's the point if things are ineffective

To be human, for one.

Extreme example: all you need to do to end all scams (and other, human-caused ills in the world) to just kill all humans. No humans, no human-made horrors.

Or, in case we'd like living humans, they could be kept in a way where they can't interact with one another. Boom, human on human solved.

>Pedophilia can be a one time traumatizing act while a scam victim can lose a lifetime of work.

This is very offensive, and makes zero sense, not in itself, not in the context of your argument. Please do reconsider.
by immibis | 2025-08-25 18:51:23+00:00
The end user will find out whether their ISP is blocking them or Netflix is blocking them. Usually by asking one of them or by talking to someone who already knows the situation. They will find out Netflix is blocking them, not their ISP.

What, exactly, do you want ISPs to do to police their users from earning $10 of cryptocurrency a month, or even worse, from playing free mobile games? Neither one breaks the law btw. Neither one is even detectable. (Not even by the target website! They're just guessing too)

There are also enough websites that nobody is quitting the internet just because they can't get Netflix. They might subscribe to a different steaming service, or take up torrenting. They'll still keep the internet because it has enough other uses, like Facebook. Switching to a different ISP won't help because it will be every ISP because, as I already said, there's nothing the ISP can do about it. Which, on the other hand, means Netflix would ban every ISP and have zero customers left. Probably not a good business decision.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-25 18:51:35+00:00
He has codified massive funding to ICE in the BBB, which he has direct control over.

So he can order people to be detained and deported, knowing that the legal system can't handle the appeals of that many people.

Furthermore, the only way he will leave office is if his disease gets bad enough to where he can't function. And then the assumption is that the crazies he has hired aren't going to basically take over the government completely. If he is able to function in 2026 and 2028, US won't have real elections.
by michaelt | 2025-08-25 18:51:38+00:00
> TPU chips are hooked up in series in the loop, which naturally means some chips will get hotter liquid that has already passed other chips in the loop. Cooling capacity is budgeted based on the requirements of the last chip in each loop.

Of course, it's worth noting that if you've got four chips, each putting out 250W of power, and a pump pushing 1 litres of water per minute through them, water at the outlet must be 14°C hotter than water at the inlet, because of the specific heat capacity of water. That's true whether the water flows through the chips in series, or in parallel.
by samwho | 2025-08-25 18:51:49+00:00
I think it's pretty common for folks to enter the software field without a CS degree, start building apps, and see big O notation without understanding what it is. These people have jobs, deadlines, they want to ship features that make peoples' lives easier. I'd bet many of those people don't care so much about calculus, but a quick intro to what all this big O nonsense is about could help them.
by giardini | 2025-08-25 18:51:50+00:00
That may be so, but what you say doesn't answer my question: can they unscrew a lightbulb that is literally falling apart as they unscrew it?

ANSWER:

If the power is off, they likely will remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and finally, remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.

If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
by choo-t | 2025-08-25 18:52:01+00:00
You don't really have to replace the microswitch, at least on my Logitech (M570) I can pull them open, bend the metal strip a little, close the switch back and I'm good for another year or two.

It's still tedious, as the metal strip is really small and is hard top manipulate, but far easier and less risky for the pcb than desoldering.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-25 18:52:24+00:00
There are some companies making heat batteries that you can install inside your house. They won't last very long but it's a great way to store excess energy from your rooftop solar and use it for heating and warm water. Also it allows you to timeshift when you draw power from the grid (i.e. when it's cheap rather than when you need hot water).

Larger scale batteries can store enough energy for seasonal storage. The larger the size, the better the insulation can keep the heat losses to a minimum. Basically you have a smaller surface area relative to the volume and mass. But even with a small unit, you can keep it hot for quite long.

Stuff like this is easier in areas that are already on some sort of district heating or have some kind of water based central heating. For those systems it's pretty much plug and play. You don't really need to modify the houses.

I think Helsinki has a few larger scale units already operational and a few more under planning / construction. I think the largest one will store 90ghw of heat. Which is quite a lot.

The beauty with thermal storage is that almost any kind of mass with enough heat capacity works. Water, rocks, sand, etc. All fine.