MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lesuorac | 2025-08-05 04:55:40+00:00
Median household income is 80k [1].

It's really easy to paint this in a negative light. You can go study for an extra decade to be a doctor to make as much money as not studying for a decade and working in fang. Becoming a doctor over many over professions puts you literally millions of dollars behind. Doctors are not the most lucrative profession.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
by mrbungie | 2025-08-05 04:56:11+00:00
Yes, obviously it does cost compute (to them) but customers are not paying for the compute per-se, but rather for correct results/outcomes. This is a big alignment and accountability problem, relevant enough to some make companies like Lovable refund credits to customers when errors and token/credit mishandlings are too serious to ignore. That seems unsustainable in the long run though.

I expect this to become even bigger when the hype cools down and companies start looking for ROIs.

PS: I obviously talking about model errors (i.e. like use N tokens in a LLM solving a problem by just deleting/deactivating a test), and not end-user mistakes.
by danpalmer | 2025-08-05 04:56:32+00:00
It's not just about the initial deployment, although these may help. If you're running Wordpress, the question "why is it slow" is pretty limited in scope – you need a faster webserver, database, or maybe need those two to be closer to each other. A simplification but not much of one. For this, is it the app server, the task queue, or one of several other components, or is it in the Supabase layer, or is it a dependency that someone else runs... etc.

Figuring out issues get more complex, scaling gets more complex, backup and recovery get more complex, now you need monitoring for it all too, and with many services the complexity multiplies.

All of that complexity is somewhat justified for a team that exists to build and operate the system (i.e. SaaS), but doesn't really work for a team who exist to build something else and have just been tasked with operating this.
by pepinator | 2025-08-05 04:59:33+00:00
This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize: when you pay rent, every moth, an important part of your salary simply disappears, leaving nothing for the future. When you pay a mortgage, your paying the house you'll own. Of course, there are interests and fees and whatnot, but you'd need to pay huge amounts so that it becomes unviable; I can't imagine a single scenario where that occurs.
by widhhddok | 2025-08-05 05:00:05+00:00
You have to view it from a new investor's perspective. They have just started their career, earning (small amounts of) money for the first time, and investing would have them see a loss of 5-10% of their hard earned money, at least in the short term. They wouldn't know, or would have to believe that the loss will be outweighed by future returns at the time.

It's tough to swallow.
Show HN: A simple website to analyze mortgage called "Mortlab"
by branga | 2025-08-05 05:00:20+00:00
Hello Folks,

I recently built "Mortlab" which is a simple, free website to help people analyze whether it's better to rent or buy a home based on their situation.

It includes:

A clean rent vs buy calculator

Monthly and long-term cost breakdowns

Refinance and affordability tools

No login, ads, or affiliate spam, it's just data

I’d love feedback from the community — especially from folks who’ve built similar tools or have strong opinions on the rent vs buy debate. I know there are a million calculators out there, but I tried to keep this one minimal and useful.

Thanks in advance.
by hamandcheese | 2025-08-05 05:00:22+00:00
For me the appeal of protobuf is the wire-format forward-backward compatibility.

It's hard enough to not break logical compatibility, so I appreciate not having to think too hard about wire compat. You can of course solve the same thing with JSON, but, well, YOU have to solve it.

(Also worth noting, there are a lot of things I don't like about the grpc ecosystem so I don't actually use it that much. But this is one of the pieces I really like a lot).
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-05 05:01:22+00:00
The simple answer to #3 is advertising, including telemetry, tracking and other forms of web-based surveillance. These usually rely on certain browser "features" and/or default settings.

The goal is not to make the content usable. The goal is to get the traffic.

When advertising alone is the "business model", e.g., not the value of the "content", then even Cloudflare is going to try to protect it (the advertising, not the content). Anything to get www users to turn on Javascript so the surveillance capitalism can proceed. Hence all the "challenges" to frustrate and filter out software thatis not advertising-friendly, e.g., graphical.

Cloudflare's ruminations on user-agent strings are perplexing. It has been an expectation that the user-agent HTTP header will be spoofed since the earliest web browsers. The user-agent header is a joke.

This is from circa 1993, the year the www was opened to public access:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic/mas...

Cloudflare's "bot protections" are not to ensure human use of a website but to ensure use of specific software to access a website. Software that facilitates data collection and advertising services. For example, advertising-sponsored browsers. Any other software is labeled "bot". It does not matter if a human is operating it.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-05 05:01:24+00:00
An email from my boss telling me to implement something using rust transpiled to wasm certainly impairs my authority to determine the best approach.

My argument is not the EO has the legality to make a claim; it's that the top half of the EO is at odds with the disclaimer at the end. If you mandate somebody to do something then you're impairing their authority to have chosen not to do something.

Like by definition the EO impairs agencies that were using their authority to issue paper checks to continue doing so. It may be advantageous to stop issuing checks but to claim mandating that they don't doesn't impair their authority is just false.
by 827a | 2025-08-05 05:02:13+00:00
Also, FTL technology existing would naturally abate the prospects of interstellar war under the Dark Forest theory, because it means FTL communication is possible; and factions that can communicate with each other quickly are far less likely to fight each other. This was, at least in the first book, a (iirc stated) reason why the Dark Forest theory exists.

Of note: It might not require the outrageous levels of technology you might expect to accelerate technology to the delta-v 3I/ATLAS is traveling at, simply because there are absolutely star systems near ours already traveling at a pretty large sun-relative delta-v. We get a ton of galaxy-relative velocity for free from our solar system; we just have to shoot the probe at slower solar systems. Putting (and surviving) biological life in there, however, is a different matter.
by bshzzle | 2025-08-05 05:02:15+00:00
Hey just following up on this - we just shipped support for any model that supports the OpenAI Chat Completions API (1), including Ollama and Llama.cpp. You can checkout the docs here: https://docs.sourcebot.dev/docs/configuration/language-model...

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/chat
by Tokumei-no-hito | 2025-08-05 05:03:36+00:00
i agree. i think the point i agree with perplexity on is that CF is a central authority that is claiming to be the gatekeeper while (allegedly) being disingenuous and incapable.

i also tend to agree with the concept that scraping != consuming on behalf of a user. they explicitly point out that they do not store the data for training, which would fall under scraping by proxy.
by adinisom | 2025-08-05 05:03:49+00:00
Two that come to mind:

1) Embedded systems typically do not allow data to grow without bound. If they were going to keep debugging data, they'd have to limit it to the last N instances or so. In this case N=0. It seems like the goal here was to send troubleshooting data, not keep it around.

2) Persisting the data may expose the driver to additional risks. Beyond the immediate risks, someone could grab the module from the junkyard and extract the data. I can appreciate devices that take steps to prevent sensitive data from falling into the hand of third parties.
by oofabz | 2025-08-05 05:05:18+00:00
I find it interesting that the transform was controversial in the '90s.

Today, it seems like a normal solution to the problem to me, and the controversy seems silly. I have much experience with the map function from Javascript. It is too simple to be objectionable.

But in the '90s, I would also have had trouble understanding the transform. Lambdas/closures were unheard of to everyone except Lisp dweebs. Once I figured out what the code was doing, I would be suspicious of its performance and memory consumption. This was 1994! Kilobytes mattered and optimal algorithmic complexity was necessary for anything to be usable. Much safer to use a well understood for loop. I have plenty of experience making those fast, and that's what map() must be doing under the hood anyway.

But I would have been wrong! map() isn't doing anything superfluous and I can't do it faster myself. The memory consumption of the temporary decorated array is worth it to parse the last word N times instead of N log N times. Lisp is certainly a slow language compared to C, but that's not because of its lambdas!
by mrbungie | 2025-08-05 05:05:55+00:00
Even with a CFO-level explanation, it feels like a weak excuse for "fuck the customer" as always.

Notice that in some places (with good enough customer protection rules) pre-paid credits can't expire, as expiration itself is a clear abuse of market power: they are forcing out revenue from services not given, even if it is "made clear at buy-time". Especially at such short time horizons like 1-year.

And yet they are supposed to be the good guys.
by jesterson | 2025-08-05 05:06:44+00:00
> I'm going to look and feel great and my health will be far better than that of my peers

Comparing your health (or anything to that matter) to your peers is a great way to boost and maintain insecurities. There is always gonna be a healthier, sexier, younger and so on. Good luck chasing that.

At risk of sounding very banal, comparing yourself to your version from yesterday is the best approach.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-05 05:07:33+00:00
> Like Kennedy invoking it during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Kennedy didn't significantly reference it as far as I can tell:

https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-k...

The one question asked on Monroe Doctrine was not answered with precise reference to Monroe. Either way, JFK was responding to the challenges of the Cold War, which were altogether different than the circumstances under which Monroe opined on the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban nuclear missile crisis was sufficiently terrifying on its own, there was no need to harken back to Monroe to justify action there, even if he did at one point or another.

Part of Monroe's doctrine was for America to stay out of Europe and for Europe to cease colonizing the Americas. A lot changed since then, including World War I and World War II and then the ensuing Cold War. We ended up fighting two wars in Europe and establishing military bases there to fend off the USSR after WWII.

When Monroe Doctrine is invoked, it's usually in reference to maintaining influence and dominance in the Western Hemisphere. WWII forced our hand to extend our power projection to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The most significant evidence of this is NATO, of which the U.S. carries 68% of the defense spending.

> Now it's true that John Kerry said the Monroe Doctrine was over in 2013, but John Bolton said it was "alive and well" in 2019. Bolton being National Security Advisor at the time to the guy currently occupying the White House.

Right, because Monroe Doctrine is just an opinion on how foreign policy and strategy should be played out and not a binding law of any kind, it can be invoked or uninvoked arbitrarily depending on whatever is convenient for the administration in power.

>The EU doesn't have military bases. > hmm, you're right - obviously the EU should pay less.

The OP article references deep water buoys being deployed for oceanic temperature measurements under the Argo program, with the primary aim being scientific and having nothing to do with national defense. If you want EU to pay less, this should probably just move to NOAA and cease to be an international collaboration.
by BrawnyBadger53 | 2025-08-05 05:07:43+00:00
Anything but expanding copyright laws. Tbh, a pay per citation with an opt in database to add your info (think music streaming style monetization) would be reasonable to me. Not that I think it's a good scheme for music but I think it's fitting for web crawling. Though it does inevitably lead to enshitification. Pick your poison I guess.
by dotancohen | 2025-08-05 05:08:29+00:00
How do you render into structured data, from disparate letters that are not structured?

D10 E1 H0 L2,3,9 O4,7 R8 W6

I'm sure that you could look at that and figure out how to structure it. But I highly doubt that you have a general-purpose computer program that can parse that into structured data, having never encountered such a format before. Yet, that is how many real-world PDF files are composed.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-05 05:10:00+00:00
I'm surprised that especially financial service providers don't have a very clear "in the event of death/emergency" flow. I know you can sometimes label an account payable-on-death/joint-ownership/trust/other weird tax-dodge shaped things, but that doesn't solve the technical problem of "how do I log in and initiate my claim when Grandpa kicks the bucket."

I prepared the fire-safe paper, but I can imagine my family getting stuck at the institutions who demand 2FA and probably won't have access to my phone or email at the time.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-05 05:11:28+00:00
In the majority of markets an individual that invested the down payment into the SPY500 as opposed to a house comes out a head. Especially if you sell the house on average every 7 years ...

Just do the math yourself; it's pretty easy [1] [2] [3] [4].

That said, not every decision in life needs to be profit maximization. You can enjoy owning a house.

[1]: https://research-tools.pwlcapital.com/research/rent-vs-buy

[2]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/calculator/rent-vs-buy-calculator

[3]: https://www.zillow.com/rent-vs-buy-calculator

[4]: https://www.calculator.net/rent-vs-buy-calculator.html
by js8 | 2025-08-05 05:15:36+00:00
I am not sure what you're saying that I am not. Read the vibe coding definition given by grandparent (according to Karpathy) - you can see that compilers already satisfy that definition - we don't read the final code being produced, we just trust it blindly. That's my problem with that definition, and I claim and agree it is more about the predictability/understandability of the output based on the input.

And I agree with the logic part too. I think we could have humans input fuzzy specification in some formal logic that allows for different interpretations, like fuzzy logic or various modal logics or a combination of them. But then you have a defined and understandable set of rules of how to resolve what would be the contradictions in classical logic.

The problem with LLMs is they are using a completely unknown logic system, which can shift wildly from version to version, and is not even guaranteed to be consistent. They're the opposite of where the software engineering, as an engineering discipline, should be going - to formalize the production process more, so it can be more rigorously studied and easier to reproduce.

I think what SW engineering needs is more metaprogramming. (What we typically call metaprogramming - macros - is just a tip of the iceberg.) What I mean is making more programs that study, modify and transform the resulting programs in a certain way. Most of our commonly used tools are woefully incapable of metaprogramming. But LLMs are decent at it, that's why they're so interesting.

For example, we don't publish version modifications to language runtimes as programs. We could have, for example, produce a program that would automatically transform your code to a new version of the programming language. But we don't do that. It is mostly because we have really just started to formalize mathematics, and it will take some time until we completely logically formalize all the legacy computer systems we have. Then we will be able to prove, for instance, that a certain program can transform a program from one programming runtime to another at a certain maximal incurred extra execution cost.
by gertlex | 2025-08-05 05:16:14+00:00
What I think they're referring to is their sheer size (ratio of customers or $ invested to staff) has meant historically the annual % fees on mutual funds and other investments have been lower than at other institutions.

It's... less unique to Vanguard these days, as several of the large providers have equivalent low-cost funds you can invest in; but 15 years ago it was more significant, iirc.
by esseph | 2025-08-05 05:16:53+00:00
Recently I looked at what it would cost me to move.

First, I would be giving up several acres of land, and my dog and cats would be very unhappy.

Second, for me to get a house with the same bedrooms, housing cost would almost DOUBLE, and on average it looks like I'd lose around 800sqft.

I've been here for more than a decade. Moving would cost us a TON of money for no gain. (If we went to buy another home)

And that calculator also agreed (on rent not being viable, either!)
by evanjrowley | 2025-08-05 05:17:28+00:00
"To login to your bank account, you must first prove you are human by envisioning your name on our new promotional credit card for 30 seconds. Make sure your brain reader is turned on and transmitting before focusing your thoughts. You must also accept our privacy, safety, and sharing agreement before continuing. Warning: This feature is not available to citizens of the EU."
by jazzyjackson | 2025-08-05 05:18:16+00:00
I pray you focus on your core product and don’t fall into an agentification rabbit hole.

If you do want everything to be automatable take a page from Blender and give every action a key binding plus a Python method, so Python scripts can take the same actions a human would, but as function calls instead of clicks. Then maybe maybe maybe you can have a text field that allows natural language to transform to an action, but please god stay away from chat interfaces.

Rhino CAD is another interesting interface to look at, there’s a million buttons and menus but there’s also a text field at the top of the viewport where you can just type a command if you already know the name instead of rummaging through submenus. Kind of a CLI within the GUI.
by sandreas | 2025-08-05 05:18:28+00:00
While I appreciate the effort and like the approach in general, in this use case I really would prefer extensions / extension functions (like in Kotlin[1]) or an IEnumerable / iterator approach (like in C#).

$arr = [ new Widget(tags: ['a', 'b', 'c']), new Widget(tags: ['c', 'd', 'e']), new Widget(tags: ['x', 'y', 'a']), ]; $result = $arr |> fn($x) => array_column($x, 'tags') // Gets an array of arrays |> fn($x) => array_merge(...$x) // Flatten into one big array |> array_unique(...) // Remove duplicates |> array_values(...) // Reindex the array. ;

feels much more complex than writing

$result = $arr->column('tags')->flatten()->unique()->values()

having array extension methods for column, flatten, unique and values.

1: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/extensions.html#extension-functi...
by barrell | 2025-08-05 05:18:53+00:00
I’ve been working on https://phrasing.app for a while now, including many iterations of the SRS. It’s been my experience that most of these sorts of improvements are really imperceptible. While I use FSRS as a base, and I’m very happy with the results it provides, it’s really only a few percentage points off of the SM-2 algorithm from the 90s. It’s slightly less stressful, definitely more accurate, but I think only astute users would even notice the difference.

I’ve incorporated many different things into the SRS, from vector embeddings to graph based association to lemma clustering to morpheme linking, and was surprised how much of these I took out.

Most of the unlocks with the SRS have been more in application space. Doing reviews with Anki feels like a chore, and I’m always counting down the reviews left to do. Reviews with Phrasing however are much more addictive, and I routinely spent an extra 30+ minutes in that “ok just one more card” loop.

We will never be able to know with 100% certainty how well you know a card, but FSRS gets us darn close. I think the interesting stuff is less about improving that metric, and more about what can you do with that information.

Thanks to the whole FSRS team btw (I assume y’all will be reading this hn post) <3

And if anyone is curious I wrote up a bit about my SRS here: https://phrasing.app/blog/humane-srs
by Swizec | 2025-08-05 05:20:47+00:00
> This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize [rent is throwing money away]

This greatly depends on your specific numbers.

We did the math with my partner: our current rent is 5k/mo. Our mortgage for the same place bought when we moved in would be 9k/mo + transaction cost + maintenance. It will take our rent almost 10 years to catch up to the cost of a mortgage. Max increases are capped in California.

Over those 10 years, investing the delta in index funds puts us about 200k ahead of buying in terms of net worth. We’re also not handcuffed by a mortgage for 30 years which gives us optionality.

Not buying has let us build about 700k net worth debt free in the last 10 years we’ve been together. We’ve also moved 3 times with essentially zero transaction cost. I think that’s fine
by wouterjanl | 2025-08-05 05:20:55+00:00
Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?

Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
by Tokumei-no-hito | 2025-08-05 05:22:13+00:00
fair point.

where's the front page CF callout for google search agent? they wouldn't dare. i don't remember the shaming for ad and newsletter pop up blockers.

that being said, agree with you that sites are not being used the way they were intended. i think this is part of the evolution of the web. it all began with no monetization, then swung far too much into it to the point of abuse. and now legitimate content creators are stuck in the middle.

what i disagree on is that CF has the right to, again allegedly, shame perplexity on false information. especially when OAI is solving captchas and google is also "misusing" websites.

i wish i had an answer to how we can evolve the web sustainably. my main gripe is the shaming and virtue signaling.