MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterBright | 2025-08-08 19:54:09+00:00
I was born into a lower middle class family with several siblings. My dad skirted bankruptcy. My first car literally came from a junkyard in pieces, bought with money I earned from my paper route. Hardly 0.1%.

(I didn't know how bad things were for him until I went through his papers after he died.)

I began investing with my first real job, with another crappy car I repaired with junkyard parts.

A good friend of mine grew up in a family that qualified for welfare but wouldn't accept it. He didn't get past high school. He managed to make himself $10m before his tragic death. Yes, the US is the land of opportunity. Other countries can emulate it if they want to.

A couple years ago, I booked an Uber ride. The driver was a refugee from Afghanistan. He arrived in the US with nothing but his skin. Within a few months he had a thriving business, driving the Uber in whatever extra time he had left. It was fun talking to him - he was hella ambitious!
by geoffeg | 2025-08-08 19:55:07+00:00
I imagine it's someone that doesn't have the monetary means to rent or buy a plane combined with a bit of mental health issues.

At the uncontrolled community airport I got my PPL at there were a few pilots who were known to have expired medical certificates and long expired flight reviews flying planes that they owned that hadn't had an annual inspection in years. All older guys who had nothing to lose if the FAA found out and grounded them.

I'm not sure why the owner of that aircraft doesn't setup an alert for it's tail number on one of the many aviation tracking sites. Call the airport management, police or local FBO once he sees it on approach to land at some airport.
by behnamoh | 2025-08-08 19:55:11+00:00
Apple seems to overlook how much timing matters for Mac sales in academia. Macs—especially MacBooks—absolutely dominate among professors (I’d guess ~90% in my department).

The academic fiscal year often ends in Aug/Sep, and new faculty usually get a “technology fund” for buying their first computer. A lot of us use that to get the latest Mac. Historically, Apple’s October refresh was just late enough to miss that budget window, but people would still wait a month or two for the new models.

If they push announcements even further (as the article suggests—early 2026), it’s a different story. New hires can’t wait half a year with no laptop, so they’ll just buy whatever’s top-of-the-line right now. For research folks who need GPU power, that could easily mean a 5090-based laptop instead of a Mac.
by altairprime | 2025-08-08 19:55:23+00:00
The missing dynamic is that businesses are encouraged to increase growth in profit YoY.

Each year, a business needs to grow faster than it did the previous year.

If business owners get wealthy more rapidly than workers, then eventually the business will not be able to maintain increasing rates of growth, as its profit velocity exceeds the wage velocity of households. Think of a car fuel pump: you can accelerate all you want, at least your until the engine explodes, but if your fuel pump can’t pump more than 50mph of fuel, uour acceleration will crater into the negative and then flatline at 50mph when you hit that threshold — unless your efficiency gearbox has another upshift in it.

The only solutions that maintains profit growth velocity in that scenario is for the business to decrease wage velocity relative to profits velocity, and to decrease labor dollars per product. Namely, wage stagnation (which leads to wealth inequity), enshittification (which reduces customer brand investment), and layoffs (which decreases customer spending).

If, instead, businesses ensured that wage velocity matched profit velocity, then households wouldn’t have increasing wealth inequity and would be able to continue funding the growth velocity through spending. Businesses are prohibited from this by their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

AI is a last ditch attempt to discard 95% of the human creative labor force in all industries rather than face the rapid deceleration of profit growth going negative market-wide as household spending power (after inflation) continues to decrease. If AI succeeds, the eventual crash of growth velocity is delayed a few years until AI saturates the market. If AI fails, the market crashes, as investors can no longer expect positive growth acceleration from the market as a whole.

For any economic system where business profit growth acceleration exceeds wage growth acceleration, the eventual collapse of business is assured unless a miracle of productivity delays it. That’s why AI workers can get paid a quarter billion dollars: pocket change, compared to the wage inequality reckoning. That’s also why economists can’t explain inflation: they’re not yet willing to confront profit growth vs wage growth acceleration inequity as a primary cause of inflation.

Job growth has decelerated rapidly because otherwise profit growth decelerates rapidly. If this seems like killing the golden goose, that feeling typically correlates with a lack of faith in AI providing the necessary efficiency factor to permit sustaining profit growth after the one-time, profit-accelerating, inflation-spiking layoffs.
by piker | 2025-08-08 19:55:49+00:00
Well there are actual realizations in the ETF and mutual fund context, and the market has simply decided that structure still works for the commingled investments of US taxpayers. PFIC taxation I concede is a head-scratcher, but it's somewhat orthogonal to the capital gains issue. The big take home is that the US wants tax on all of your income, and it doesn't want you hiding any of that offshore. I'm an expat who deals personally with the last issue, and again I agree it's quite frustrating, but that's not what punitive means. That's just the type of frustration that arises when one is required to synchronize one or more complex systems.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-08 19:56:30+00:00
> > Even if deglobalization were a great idea, then the execution is haphazard, incompetent, rushed.

> Doesn't this apply to globalization as well? Saying "learn to code" to people who lose their jobs due to globalization is not great execution either and sets the stage for backlash.

Globalization, or more loosely, more and more people or societies trading with each other over greater distances and competing at who does something best, has been a steady trend over the centuries and a force for good.

While an individual could get caught off guard one morning when their job is gone, when you zoom out the megatrends are slow but forceful and you can foresee a lot of the big picture. It is also easy to conflate "globalization" caused my job loss with "automation" caused my job loss.

The current deglobalization efforts, by contrast, have been haphazard, incompetent, rushed.
by timpera | 2025-08-08 19:56:31+00:00
“GPT 4.5 genuinely talked to me, and as pathetic as it sounds that was my only friend,” a user on Reddit writes. “This morning I went to talk to it and instead of a little paragraph with an exclamation point, or being optimistic, it was literally one sentence. Some cut-and-dry corporate bs.”

This is very sad.
by tracnar | 2025-08-08 19:56:49+00:00
While I see the usefulness of lazy imports, it always seemed a bit backward to me for the importer to ask for lazy import, especially if you make it an import keyword rather than a Python flag. Instead I'd expect the modules to declare (and maybe enforce) that they don't have side effects, that way you know they can be lazily imported, and it opens the door for more optimizations, like declaring the module immutable. That links to the performance barrier of Python due to its dynamic nature as discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44809387

Of course that doesn't solve the overhead of finding the modules, but that could be optimized without lazy import, for example by having a way to pre-compute the module locations at install time.
by fwip | 2025-08-08 19:57:09+00:00
The first link says that patients can't reliably tell which is the therapist and which is LLM in single messages, which yeah, that's an LLM core competency.

The second is "how 2 use AI 4 therapy" which, there's at least one paper for every field like that.

The last found that they were measurably worse at therapy than humans.

So, yeah, I'm comfortable agreeing that all LLMs are bad therapists, and bad friends too.
by rco8786 | 2025-08-08 19:57:19+00:00
I'll answer this in earnest, assuming you're asking in good faith.

The president commands an enormous amount of power, and has an army of people who will do his bidding and simply adopt his opinions on any number of subjects. Shouting out to millions of his followers to state that the CEO of a private company is "CONFLICTED" and must resign is, by any definition, propaganda. Propaganda that changes the minds of the citizens of the country, riles up the base, and does nothing productive except to stoke anger and fear.

Working privately with this CEO, having a professional discussion with him, investigating the facts, determining that the best course of action for national security would be for him to step down, and maybe even putting some political pressure on that person to do so, and then publicly announcing the facts of what happened, is responsible governance.

It's genuinely an enormous difference.
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-08 19:58:44+00:00
To each their own. I'd personally sleep far more soundly with even a car battery UPS under my bed than with one of those consumer ready lithium ion portable power station batteries they sell on Amazon.

But if you can't explain the difference between voltage and current, or know what "short circuit" means, then this isn't something to poke at.
by formerly_proven | 2025-08-08 19:58:50+00:00
Well if you use argparse or one of the many argparse wrappers for a moderately complex CLI you end up lazyfing the CLI parser itself because just fully populating the argparse data structures can easily take half a second or more, so with other startup costs you easily end up with "program --help" taking >1s and any CLI parsing error also taking >1s.
by quantified | 2025-08-08 19:59:16+00:00
> The model is simple: airlines sell miles to card issuers; cardholders earn miles by spending; and those miles are eventually redeemed for travel. Each party benefits. Banks and other financial firms gain loyal customers, travellers enjoy flights and perks, and airlines secure a steady stream of profits.

Not mentioned are the merchants who are being paid by credit card. They lose a greater percentage.
by tptacek | 2025-08-08 20:00:01+00:00
I'm interested in what's actually happening, not how it feeds the narrative about Trump. We saw the same thing yesterday with a dozen people on HN het up about how the Library of Congress Annotated Constitution had removed Habeas from its online copy of the Constitution (along with the Navy, letters of marque and reprisal, and the No Favored Ports clause) and people said the same thing there: stop claiming this was just a website fuckup and normalizing Trump!
by techpineapple | 2025-08-08 20:00:28+00:00
I feel like for the broad median of us, there’s a balance between giving a shit and healthy detachment. Unless you’re at the top, I don’t think working 90 hours a week in with tunnel vision will make you happy, you’ll probably end up burned out and possibly cast aside in a reorg.

On the flip side, I cringe at the posts that go too far in the other direction emphasizing it’s just a job and the job doesn’t love you.

It’s true, on its surface it’s good to have healthy detachment, but it’s also good to take risks, make yourself vulnerable and give a shit. Yes, know that it’s a transactional relationship but then give a shit within that framework. Give it your all, make friends with your coworker, be moderately devoted to the company in the moment, while respecting your own definition of work-life balance and being ready to say goodbye when it’s over.
by OisinMoran | 2025-08-08 20:00:42+00:00
I actually found him originally from his incredible clock: https://mitxela.com/projects/precision_clock_mk_iv

Which was posted here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44144750

I'm a sucker for a novel clock concept, and the level of detail he's operating at is beautiful to witness. I actually have a collection of cool clocks here: https://lynkmi.com/oisin/Clocks
by abtinf | 2025-08-08 20:01:03+00:00
Yep, and I’ve noticed the same thing with in vscode with both the cline plugin and the copilot plugin.

I configure them both to use local ollama, block their outbound connections via little snitch, and they just flat out don’t work without the ability to phone home or posthog.

Super disappointing that Cline tries to do so much outbound comms, even after turning off telemetry in the settings.
by mquander | 2025-08-08 20:01:32+00:00
I'm pretty much an AI layperson but my basic understanding of how LLMs usually run on my or your box is:

1. You load all the weights of the model into GPU VRAM, plus the context.

2. You construct a data structure called the "KV cache" representing the context, and it hopefully stays in the GPU cache.

3. For each token in the response, for each layer of the model, you read the weights of that layer out of VRAM and use them plus the KV cache to compute the inputs to the next layer. After all the layers you output a new token and update the KV cache with it.

Furthermore, my understanding is that the bottleneck of this process is usually in step 3 where you read the weights of the layer from VRAM.

As a result, this process is very parallelizable if you have lots of different people doing independent queries at the same time, because you can have all their contexts in cache at once, and then process them through each layer at the same time, reading the weights from VRAM only once.

So once you got the VRAM it's much more efficient for you to serve lots of people's different queries than for you to be one guy doing one query at a time.
by duxup | 2025-08-08 20:01:42+00:00
As far as I know The Black Cauldron is not referenced in their parks and if anything some fantasy land (outside say the princess castle and sword in the stone) would be great.

I actually think it was a good movie. The airy, strange, but very capable princess seemed like an interesting change from the typical Disney princess.

Granted I get it, people had expectations of Disney movies and that one was not it.
by fergal_reid | 2025-08-08 20:01:55+00:00
I think the most direct answer is that at scale, inference can be batched, so that processing many queries together in a parallel batch is more efficient than interactively dedicating a single GPU per user (like your home setup).

If you want a survey of intermediate level engineering tricks, this post we wrote on the Fin AI blog might be interesting. (There's probably a level of proprietary techniques OpenAI etc have again beyond these): https://fin.ai/research/think-fast-reasoning-at-3ms-a-token/
Show HN: Text Cleanse – Free Online Text Cleaner and Case Converter
by sowadgg | 2025-08-08 20:02:06+00:00
Hi HN — I built TextCleanse to solve the mess I kept getting when copying text from PDFs, PDFs→Word→emails, and messy web pages.

What it does: remove extra line breaks, strip HTML tags, remove emojis, dedupe lines, and convert case — all in the browser with no signup. Built with: JS + simple UI (link: https://textcleanse.com) Ask: I’d love feedback on edge cases or feature ideas — especially for developers who need an API or clipboard-friendly flow.

Thanks! — Sowad
by alurm | 2025-08-08 20:02:06+00:00
Yeah, in general (a bit of a tangent), ideas from Plan 9 are really powerful. For example, the Acme text editor exposes it's API as a file system (it's represented via Unix sockets in plan9port, but FUSE is available as well there). It's easy to write scripts to manipulate the editor, and quite fun.
by geoffeg | 2025-08-08 20:02:31+00:00
Some smaller airports are pretty sleepy. There's no control tower at his home airport (Corona Municipal Airport) and it doesn't look like there's an FBO there. There's probably generally no one at the airport unless someone is there to take their plane up. Even if there is someone there running out to the ramp every time they hear a plane startup would get tedious very quickly.
by pasquinelli | 2025-08-08 20:02:56+00:00
> How does increasing wealth inequality drive price increases?

i'm not the person you asked, and i'm just spit-balling, but here's a way: wealth inequality means there's a group that has substantially more wealth than normal, let's call that group A, and the complimentary group of people who don't have substantially more wealth than normal, let's call them B. A's wealth ultimately comes from B-- you know, you got workers who make you more money than you pay them, you extract rent from them, they buy your stuff.

past a certain point of inequality, A controls so much wealth that they could exert power over the market to squeeze B even more-- wages lag further behind productivity, rents go up, goods cost more. this is inflation, yeah?
by mhh__ | 2025-08-08 20:03:10+00:00
It's not uncommon to have a fast core and then an API that alpha / research teams feed signals into

if you are someone like HRT I presume the bulk of their money comes at very short holding periods so you have e.g. fast signals that work short term and then mid frequency alpha signals that spit out a forecast over a few timeframes i.e. it might not be that they buy (aggressively) really quickly but rather than someone sells to them and then they hold onto the position for longer than they would if they have no opinions.

Similarly this shapes where you post your orders e.g. if you really want it then you want to be top of the book
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 20:03:55+00:00
Politics and economics are two different lenses on the same subject matter, because “wealth” and “power over others” are two different ways of saying the same thing.

This is also why capitalism and democracy become progressively more clearly opposed the farther the status quo environment you are working in gets from feudalism or absolute monarchy, under which both seem to be changes in the same direction.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-08 20:04:13+00:00
MacOS only.

The way I deal with applications that do this is to use my router to ensure that all DNS requests go to the server I want (in my case, my own DNS server, but it can be any you prefer). That's an incomplete solution because it doesn't help with DoH or with applications that don't use the standard DNS port, but it catches most things. I have a separate solution to intercept DoH requests, but that's a whole lot more involved.
by tonyhb | 2025-08-08 20:04:16+00:00
Anything that guarantees exactly once is selling snake oil. Side effects happen inside any transaction, and only when it commits (checkpoints) are the side effects safe.

Want to send an email, but the app crashes before committing? Now you're at-least-once.

You can compress the window that causes at-least-once semantics, but it's always there. For this reason, this blog post oversells the capabilities of these types of systems as a whole. DBOS (and Inngest, see the disclaimer below) try to get as close to exactly once as possible, but the risk always exists, which is why you should always try to use idempotency in external API requests if they support it. Defense in layers.

Disclaimer: I built the original `step.run` APIs at https://www.inngest.com, which offers similar things on any platform... without being tied to DB transactions.
by neko_ranger | 2025-08-08 20:05:02+00:00
Four H100 in a 2U rack didn't sound impressive, but that is accurate:

>A typical 1U or 2U server can accommodate 2-4 H100 PCIe GPUs, depending on the chassis design.

>In a 42U rack with 20x 2U servers (allowing space for switches and PDU), you could fit approximately 40-80 H100 PCIe GPUs.
by piva00 | 2025-08-08 20:05:36+00:00
Don't jump directly into the red scare through a slippery slope fallacy, it's just intellectually dishonest while being the most boring thought-terminating cliché on this type of discussion.

Wanting to live in a better and more just system, even if we can most realistically just work towards an improved version of capitalism, is probably something most of us can agree upon.

I don't think anyone sane is against people having their needs fulfilled so I don't think anyone sane would look at any system we live under and think "yeah, this is it, we found the perfect system".

So instead of deflecting into communism as a gotcha, why don't we behave as adults, and agree that discussing how to find ways to improve our systems of production, distribution of wealth, how we view the less fortunate, how society can be better overall for all of us, is quite fucking important?

Going directly into the pigeon hole of ideology is just lazy and unimaginative. Humanity did unthinkable achievements already, we can always try to do better, don't be lazy and unimaginative...
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-08 20:06:09+00:00
>Python devs at HRT really know their stuff.

Its a finance firm - i.e scam firm. "We have a fancy trading algorithm that statistically is never going to outperform just buying VOO and holding it, but the thing is if you get lucky, it could".

Scammers are not tech people. And its pretty from their post.

> In Python, imports occur at runtime. For each imported name, the interpreter must find, load, and evaluate the contents of a corresponding module. This process gets dramatically slower for large modules, modules on distributed file systems, modules with slow side-effects (code that runs during evaluation), modules with many transitive imports, and C/C++ extension modules with many library dependencies.

As they should.

The idea that when you type something in the code and then the interpreter just doesn't execute it is how you end up with Java like services, where you have dependency injection chains that are so massive that when the first time everything has to get lazily injected the code takes a massive amount of time to run. Then you have to go figure out where is the initialization code that slows everything down, and start figuring out how to modify your code to make that load first, which leads to a mess.

If your python module takes a long time to load, this is a module problem. There is a reason why you can import submodules of modules directly, and overall the __init__.py in the module shouldn't import all the submodules by default. Structure your modules so they don't do massive initialization routines and problem solved.

Furthermore, because of pythons dynamic nature, you can do run time imports, including imports in functions. In use, whether you import something up at the top and it gets lazily loaded or you import something right when you have to use it has absolutely no difference other than code syntax, and the latter is actually better because you can see what is going on rather than the lazy loading being hidden away in the interpreter.

Or if you really care, you can implement lazy work process inside the modules, so when you import them and use them the first time it works exactly like lazy imports.

To basically spend time building a new interpreter with lazy loading just to be able to have all your import statements up at the top just screams that those devs prefer ideology over practicality.