MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-09-04 20:10:37+00:00
> Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system.

Control does not imply lack of negotiation. The population at large still has to gather and sort out their issues and contentions, ultimately settling upon an agreement in the end.

A representative democracy takes that model and decentralizes it, seeing the population at large gather only at a local level, hiring messengers to carry the final determination at the local level to a central meeting place where it is compiled with the results of all other localities, but the idea of people gathering, communicating, negotiating, and ultimately reaching an agreement remains the same.

> Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics.

Right, but we're talking about government, not politics. "Delivering the results" is the role of government. Politics takes place during the time when the people have gathered. Once they figure out what they want, then it is handed off to the hired workers in the business known as government to fulfill the wishes of the people. To reiterate: Politics comes before government gets involved...

Well, it does in a democracy, at least. I expect what you are trying to say is that in China the politics happens inside government? That's fair. But what China is saying is that in many so-called 'democracies' the politics is also happening inside government, thereby making them not really democratic either. So, while it doesn't claim to be democratic, it is saying that on the spectrum it is closer to being democratic by at least trying to serve the interests of the population at large rather than, say, "corporations".
by basisword | 2025-09-04 20:11:05+00:00
It's sad the tech industry is in such a state that a team can build a really great, innovative product, and then have to abandon it to create a little bit of AI slop so they can sell that to a company that is completely unrelated to that products market.

You have a great product, passionate users, and you have to throw it all away (because you've accepted too much money from investors who don't care about anything other than quick returns).
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-09-04 20:11:13+00:00
The risk of a nuclear war is fairly low compared to historical flash points. From memory there were at least 2 instances where if people followed orders to the T we would have had a nuclear exchange.

First one was cuban missile crisis that had a lot of escalation, but most poignant was probably dropping depth charges against submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis). On that front - thank god Khrushchev chickened out.

Second one was a false detection by Soviet early warning system which should have triggered an immediate retaliation, but was stopped by one person with critical thinking skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...).
by js2 | 2025-09-04 20:11:24+00:00
Second sentence in the second ("Game Play") section:

> Game play for 16-inch softball is mostly consistent with standard softball game play. In contrast to standard, or 12-inch (30.48 cm) softball, it is played with a ball 16 inches (40.64 cm) in circumference.

FWIW, softballs by are sold by their circumference, so it would be unconventional (and unwieldy) to change the page title to "16-inch circumference softball". And I mean, it should be obvious.

(I agree a photo would help and wiki pages are easy to edit, but I looked for a creative commons licensed 16" softball photo and couldn't find one.)
by bigwheels | 2025-09-04 20:11:29+00:00
100% agree. In case it's helpful, here is the best image I was able to find: https://live.staticflickr.com/54/128223579_34056fb847_b.jpg

That's a pretty, uhm, big ball. I imagine it'd be highly entertaining to see the Savannah Bananas play with these 16 inchers!

https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/NYPICH...

https://thesavannahbananas.com/
by slg | 2025-09-04 20:11:37+00:00
Yeah, it seems like these "investments" are halfway to endorsement deals. He endorses the companies for marketing purposes and is paid in access to investments that typically aren't available to someone of his specific tier of wealth.

I also see no real indication that Barkley is especially good at what he is doing here. Is there a reason to believe that anything but luck separates his investments, including in crypto, from deals his peers like Tom Brady and Steph Curry made with FTX that got those guys pulled into the company's legal problems?
by kortilla | 2025-09-04 20:11:52+00:00
The developer experience is irrelevant when it comes to handling money in volume.

Take the spacex example above. They are using a stablecoin to abstract away a bunch of illiquid and unstable foreign currencies. Getting rid of that huge pain of carrying 100 countries’ currencies via various banks is the value prop. The API could be cobol and it wouldn’t matter.
by pc | 2025-09-04 20:12:04+00:00
Does that imply that some day users would be able to pay using Tempo?

I don't think that customers or businesses should see Tempo very much. In the success case, Tempo is a platform like SWIFT or ACH that others employ behind the scenes to orchestrate transactions. "Decentralized, internet-scale SWIFT" isn't exactly the right analogy (there are clearly lots of differences), but it's not totally wrong either.

Why are businesses finding crypto easier/faster/better?

Yeah, I think this is the natural follow-up question. The answer differs a bit based on the use-case, but there are a few common reasons:

* Instant on-chain transfers avoiding trapped liquidity. If you're transferring money from financial institution A to institution B, and the transfer takes a day, you're either slowed a day in taking the next step or you have to somehow cover that float. Depending on your movements and their predictability, that can require big buffers.

* Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)

* Reliability. This sounds funny, but, when sending money between countries, there are many more manual processes involved at the associated financial institutions than one might think. Money is frequently just... lost, and humans are required to hunt for it. (We see this all the time at Stripe.) Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.

* Fewer currency conversions. Wholesale FX for major currencies is very cheap, but minor currencies can have bigger spreads, and the actual fee incurred by a regular customer (e.g. with their bank) can be significant. Stablecoins often make it possible to skip conversions that would otherwise happen.

* Access to USD-based functionality. The US is the world's most sophisticated financial services market. Having a stablecoin means "having an on-chain asset", but it also typically means "having a USD asset", and a lot of major parts of the ecosystem (e.g. US equities and credit markets) primarily, or only, deal with US dollars.

Acknowledging the obvious, a reflexive answer frequently invoked here is "it's regulatory arbitrage", but I think this is some combination of misguided and incurious as an explanation. First, stablecoins are now formally regulated in the US (with the GENIUS Act) and in Europe (under MiCA), so their use is now very explicitly regulated. Secondly, it implicitly assumes that the only reason one would seek an alternative to the traditional ways of doing things is because someone is doing something illegitimate. I think this usually indicates a lack of understanding of the challenges, complexities, and costs associated with high-volume cross-border money movement. Indeed, and somewhat ironically given the claim, one of Bridge's large customers is the US government.
by oceanplexian | 2025-09-04 20:12:04+00:00
I barely made it out of high school because of homework. And flunked college mostly because of it.

What was going on with computers was far too interesting, I'd spend 10 hours learning to code or playing around with Linux, go to school the next day with 4 hours of sleep and missed homework. It worked out though, and I wouldn't do things any differently given the chance.
by underlipton | 2025-09-04 20:12:18+00:00
Off the top of my head:

Bitcoin was around $1k in 2017 and, after jumping up to about $20k, was back at around $4k in 2018. It's recently been over $100k, and fairly reliably been over $40k for much of the time in-between.

Gamestop's share price was below $10, stock split-adjusted, for many years, bottoming at $1 ($4 unadjusted). It infamously rocketed to over $100 ($400) in January 2021, with several similar, seemingly-random bursts of upward volatility since. Even now, depending on your entry, buyers from before the high would have seen somewhere between 200% and 2000% returns. There are a number of other so-called "meme" stocks which briefly performed similarly, though most have not retained even a fraction of their increase.

Both could have been used to hit $2m or more with a single set of buy-sell transactions. That's not considering leveraged trading like options. Keith Gill infamously turned $50k (briefly) into a billion dollars (and is likely, more durably, a centimillionaire).

In short: crypto and options, buying early and holding long. 2017 was actually almost the perfect time to jump in. Someone who was looking in the right direction could easily have struck oil, as you say. (Let's not even talk about the guys who made $660m off the negative oil price incident in 2020.) ZIRP and lax oversight of the securities market structure make odd things happen.
by astrobe_ | 2025-09-04 20:12:44+00:00
Not so strange. Just like communism slips to oligarchy, capitalism slips to plutocracy, and as such actively undermines democracy. It doesn't that campaign budgets are capped when you have the right media owners on your side.

People decide on resource allocation, period. It is as "efficient" as choosing human laws versus natural selection, the latter being exactly the model capitalism is copied from.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-04 20:12:55+00:00
There are 3rd-party enforcement mechanisms. It's not as simple as the seller saying "We don't pollute, trust us"; there are actual government inspectors and NGO delegates that go out, visit factories, and fine them if their actual emissions don't match the declared permits:

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/mrr-enforcement

The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions.

But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-04 20:13:35+00:00
I really liked X-COM Chimera Squad. Different capabilities were really cool and interspecies banter made the whole thing feel alive. Don't get me wrong, I still like shadowy claustrophobic climate of the original just as much, but for example X-COM reboot was almost spoiled for me because of one character, Bradford. I never hated any alien as much as his nagging, orders and tone.

Also the mechanic in the reboot was a bit misguided. They eliminated sneaking up and ambushing the enemy and replaced it by little animated introduction of the enemy as soon as they land into a very large circle around your soldiers, almost regardless of terrain. X-COM 2 brought it back a little bit with you soldiers starting in stealth mode and some of them potentially re-entering stealth again using a skill.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-04 20:13:55+00:00
> If I can quickly generate software from natural language to solve a very specific problem

This isn't likely to happen -- if the problem is very specific, you won't be able to sufficiently express it in natural language. We invented programming languages precisely because natural languages are completely unsuited for the task of precisely specifying a problem.

So how are you going to express the specificity of the problem to the LLM in natural language? Try, and you'll discover their shortcomings for yourself. Then you'll reinvent programming languages.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-04 20:14:31+00:00
The AI bundling problem is over. The user interface problem is over. You won't need a UI for your apps in a few years, agents are going to drive _EVERYTHING_. If you want a display for some data, the agent will slap together a dashboard on the fly from a composable UI library that's easy to work with, all hot loaded and live-revised based on your needs.
by nxobject | 2025-09-04 20:15:17+00:00
> I also don't understand what it means to "interpret" Swift to Swift. Do they mean they compile Swift to Swift (or the more modern "transpile" which means the same thing)? But it sounds like they're doing something dynamically at runtime, so it sounds more like decompiling machine code back to Swift, but the rest of the post doesn't match that interpretation.

My understanding is that this system walks the syntax, creates autogenerated wrappers to API structures/functions, and simply invokes them as the syntax directs – as it says, a "glorified FFI". It is not a full free-standing Swift runtime, but it's a very clever hack.
by Leftium | 2025-09-04 20:15:46+00:00
This moves files to the actual OS system trash/recycle bin: https://www.npmjs.com/package/trash-cli

- Working great on MacOS!

- For some reason the latest versions occasionally didn't work on Windows 11. (I forgot the actual reason...)

I aliased rm=trash and RM=rm so I could still access the real rm when needed.
by ricardobeat | 2025-09-04 20:15:47+00:00
What does the PM title even mean at this point? It's a bit surprising to see a deep dive into technical architecture - though there is massive value in understanding what's involved - as a PM responsibility, this is more in TPM (technical program manager) land which is a different job.

In my book they ideally focus on understanding scope, user needs and how to measure success, while implementation details such as orchestration strategies, evaluation and making sure your system delivers the capabilities you want in general, are engineering responsibilities.
by ketozhang | 2025-09-04 20:15:49+00:00
The data is surprising. However, I do wish this article looked carefully into barriers of entry as it can explain the lack of increases in your data.

For example, in Steam, it costs $100 to release a game. You may extend your game with what's called a DLC and that costs $0 to release. If I were to build shovelware with especially with AI-generated content, I'd more keen to make a single game with a bunch of DLC.

For game development, integration of AI into engines is another barrier. There aren't that many choices of engines that gives AI an interface to work with. The obvious interface is games that can be entirely build with code (e.g., pygame; even Godot is a big stretch)
by dang | 2025-09-04 20:17:33+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121342 - Sept 2025 (313 comments)

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)
by gwd | 2025-09-04 20:17:57+00:00
> "the more you know someone, the less you like them."

That is completely the opposite of my experience. Even the handful of people who, after I got to know them, turned out to be unprincipled or toxic, I actually liked them as people and were kind of sad that they were the way they were. Their negative qualities were a mar on the their individual beauty.

There are certainly people in whom, after a relatively brief interaction, I didn't manage to see anything I liked. But I can't think of a single person whom, after seeing something to like, thereafter didn't see anything to like. Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole, but it never completely eclipsed their good side.

For me, nearly all negative interactions come from not being able to get past various masks to see the interesting part of them or vice versa.
by slg | 2025-09-04 20:18:13+00:00
Retroactive analysis like this is almost worthless because these were incredibly risky investments in the moment and would have required a prolonged commitment to them that most didn't have and/or couldn't maintain. Considering the original claim here was that getting these returns wasn't possible without already being wealthy, you might as well ask why OP didn't get a loan to make these investments if they were such a sure thing.
by simne | 2025-09-04 20:18:35+00:00
> if you can find a way to produce verifiable rewards about a target world

I have significant experience on modelling physical world (mostly CFD, but also gamedev - with realistic rigid body collisions and friction).

I admit, exists domain (spectrum of parameters), where CFD and game physics working just well; exists predictable domain (on borders of well working domain), where CFD and game physics working good enough but could show strange things, and exists domain, where you will see lot of bugs.

And, current computing power is so much, that even on small business level (just median gamer desktop), we could save on more than 90% real-world tests with simulations in well working domain (and just avoid use cases in unreliable domains).

So I think, most question is just conservative bosses and investors, who don't believe to engineers and don't understand how to do checks (and tuning) of simulations with real world tests, and what reliable domain is.
by dperfect | 2025-09-04 20:18:38+00:00
It sounds great, but every time I see this argument, I end up going down the rabbit hole of actually studying how stablecoins operate. And every time, I come to the same conclusion: they always rely on trust in an off-chain oracle or custodian. At that point, a shared ledger implemented with traditional databases / protocols would be faster, easier, and more transparent.

Bitcoin (and possibly a few others) is one of the few uses of blockchain that actually makes sense. The blockchain serves the currency, and the currency serves the blockchain. The blockchain exists to provide consensus without needing to trust any off-chain entity, but the blockchain relies on computing infrastructure that has real-world costs. The scarcity of Bitcoin (the currency) and arguably-fictitious reward for participation in mining is the incentive for people in the real world to contribute resources required for the blockchain to function.

Any real-world value given to Bitcoin is secondary and only a result of the fact that (1) mining infrastructure has a cost, and (2) people who understand the system have realized that, unlike fiat, stablecoins, or 1000 other crypto products, Bitcoin has no reliance on trusted, off-chain entities who could manipulate it.

You trust your stablecoin's issuer that they hold enough fiat in reserve to match the coin? You might as well trust your bank, but while you're at it, remind them that they don't have to take days to process a transaction - they could process transactions as fast as (actually faster than) a blockchain. But I imagine most banks would point to regulation as a reason for the delays, and they might be right.

So what are stablecoins really trying to do? Circumvent regulation? Implement something the banks just aren't willing to do themselves?
by k__ | 2025-09-04 20:18:51+00:00
They say it's permissionless.

That can mean different things.

It can mean anyone can use it without needing to sign up.

It can also mean anyone can host a node, i.e. become part of the network, without needing to ask anyone for permission.

The question is how far they went with that and why people wouldn't use another L1 that offers similar features without having Stripe looming over it.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-04 20:19:45+00:00
> C should have only one loop keyword loop{}

How do you implement do while loops? Also I find the niceties of for loops a good improvement. You are able to limit the scope of variables to only the loop, while still being able to use it in the condition, and it separates the transition from the real loop code. I think idiomatic in C is the overuse of for, resulting in while used really seldomly.

What else do you think is really excessive in syntax alone?
by AquinasCoder | 2025-09-04 20:19:55+00:00
The stripe conference focused more than I would have liked on crypto.

I completely understand that there are markets and customers that can find real utility in it, but I wonder how many businesses will really ever benefit from stablecoins.

We're in higher education, and potentially our international clients could avoid hiccups with regulation, delays, compliance, and more using stablecoins, but it's really a guess. In the meantime, the pricing model of stripe seems to prioritize bigger and bigger clients.

That being said from Stripe's perspective stablecoins an easy bet to make. They win by building payment infrastructure within the traditional payment ecosystem and win by providing an alternative completely outside of it.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-04 20:20:15+00:00
Getting it to sort-of-work is fairly easy. Getting it to work well on off-the-shelf hardware without a precisely controlled environment is hell.

For practical applications right now, you'd want a dedicated radar unit at 24GHz or so, probably with two separate reception paths too.

Eventually, we might get usable radar functionality in default Wi-Fi chips with 5GHz/6GHz Wi-Fi and MIMO - but it's not there yet.
by yieldcrv | 2025-09-04 20:20:18+00:00
and yet, when you look at what comprises a stablecoin alongside the frictions unstable foreign countries have, you'll see why they occur on EVMs and not some other architecture

> The API could be cobol and it wouldn’t matter

you can probably get cobol to transpile to bytecode that EVMs can use. I get the point you're trying to make that excludes blockchains, but you don't make that point
by serf | 2025-09-04 20:20:33+00:00
>I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time

I would have failed high school if attendance/classwork mattered at the time. I skated by with test scores and homework -- I was too busy chasing sex and drugs during the social hours of adult-age-day-care public schooling.

I tell people that I didn't learn a damn thing until I hit a university, and I mean it. The "all classwork" policy would have ruined me -- hopefully they'd have had the mercy to kick my ass out on my 7th year of high school..
by physicsguy | 2025-09-04 20:20:40+00:00
I'm British and live in the UK so BBC is a big part of my radio listening anyway, but I agree, the quality both in terms of content and recording quality is largely miles ahead of most podcasts.

Excluding things like political things which wouldn't land the same to international listeners, my favourites are:

The Kitchen Cabinet You're Dead To Me Crowdscience Inside Science Just a Minute The Unbelievable Truth Nature Table Take Four Books Witness History Last Word Gardener's Question Time A Good Read (I wrote a blog post a while ago about scraping the books using LLMs to extract from the text of the descriptions: https://rpep.dev/posts/a-good-read-extracting-books-with-llm...)