MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-04 06:28:03+00:00
It seems like I post this graph here a lot. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Basically flat since WWII, despite significant growth in GDP per capita, and before that it was lower.

The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fictional because at the time there were so many loopholes that nobody actually paid them. If you think there are a lot of loopholes now, you have no idea. When the marginal rates were lowered, enough of the loopholes were closed at the same time that if you tried to guess when it happened by looking at that graph, you wouldn't be able to tell.

Also, some of the loopholes are still there, but what does that imply for the theory that lower rates are the relevant change? When Richie Rich (or Microsoft) is claiming no taxable income, 60% of nothing is the same as 20% of nothing.

But if that isn't the change, what is? Well, in 1995 the largest company by market cap was GE at ~$92B. In today's dollars that's ~$197B. The largest company today is $4154B. More than 2000% bigger even adjusted for inflation.

And it's the corporations buying the politicians anyway. Who is paying the money, Larry Page or Google? It's Google. If the company is that big, it doesn't matter if it's owned by one person or a million, the CEO has control of enough resources to buy the government, and then does.

Make business small again.
by fragmede | 2025-09-04 06:28:47+00:00
Setup a site to stream Pixar's latest movie, or post some CSAM, and see if you don't get imprisoned. It's not like totally arbitrary, just don't criticize dear leader. Where the US is though, is that Trump wants to make criticizing him online a crime. We know this is true because of the actions taken by him against people who are immigrants who have been critical of him online. So I'll let a tiny bit of doom out, but he way the US is headed, the trains won't run on time and you can't run your mouth about shit the people in power don't like as well.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-04 06:30:23+00:00
It costs a few hondred a month for a cash delivery service. Even if you're only handling a few thousand dollars a day in cash, that's still only around a 1% cost. For most stores, it's probably a fraction of that. Other than that, it's just a few minutes of time to close out the register, which is the one thing employees do reliably quickly, because they get to go home afterward.

For people running a little mom-and-pop business, delivery costs could add up, but they are likely to be in a more-time-than-money situation, and make bank runs on the way to or from the business.

There's also a lot less liability, because counterfeit money is easy to detect, and there aren't any fees or losses from stolen cards or chargebacks.
by flomo | 2025-09-04 06:31:01+00:00
> I have some theories as to why

Curious what those might be.

I think might not have been so simple as well "Jobs = Le Bad". There might have been some oldskool unix thinking about linking. (Both commercial and gnu.) And *Step was a dynamic message API, so it "didn't fit their model". Total speculation I have to admit. It also seemed like a commercial dead-end pre-iphone.
by mehulashah | 2025-09-04 06:31:13+00:00
I’m surprised by the argument. It’s not wrong. You need more data, but that presumes that the task is to pre-train on data. Additional compute is also useful for unearthing tacit capabilities in the models. This requires inference time scaling and post training usually on specific downstream tasks using RL. Sure that generates data, but it’s not the same as the Internet, and can be scaled.
by socalgal2 | 2025-09-04 06:31:32+00:00
Is this a problem solved by current or near current tech? Like (1) you can read the transcript or captions (2) you can get it respoken by some tech?

I guess I'm used to those accents though.

I wouldn't have brought this up but I recently ran into an auto translated youtube video. I have my youtube set to Japanese. I watched a presentation I know was in English but Youtube presented it with Japanese voices. I didn't actually want that and couldn't find how to turn it off but I was still impressed. So maybe that can add dialets so you can choose California English and someone else can choose Singlish and someone else can choose Scotish English, etc...
by cmhernandez | 2025-09-04 06:31:45+00:00
Location: Sparks, Nevada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Ruby, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, Docker, Kafka, OpenAI, RAG

Resume: Available on request

Email: cmhernandezdev@gmail.com

Hi I'm Cruz, a full-Stack software engineer with several years of experience across multiple ecosystems. I co-created Tumbleweed (https://tumbleweed-cdc.github.io/), an open-source framework that uses Change Data Capture to keep data in sync between microservices I have contributed to Mozilla Firefox and more recently have been building RAG based AI chatbots. Let's connect!
by ninjin | 2025-09-04 06:32:08+00:00
reMarkable (1) user here since 2019, what does the software stack look like for the Supernote? The A6 looks interesting as a form factor for someone like me that uses it solely for note taking (all I want is a "non-linear notebook") rather than annotation and reading (I use a printer and scanner for annotation/feedback and an "ancient", never-online Kindle for reading books). reMarkable has always been open-ish rather than properly open, so I would hope for Supernote to be more open to the idea of users having access to code and control over their devices (even if I never connect my reMarkable to the network).
by noodletheworld | 2025-09-04 06:32:43+00:00
> people are going to get a variety of results.

Yes, but the point of this article is surely that on average if it's working, there would be obvious signs of it working by now.

Even if there are statistical outliers (ie. 10x productivity using the tools), if on average, it does nothing to the productivity of developers, something isn't working as promised.
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-09-04 06:32:56+00:00
I think it's an issue of hierarchies and the Society of Mind (Minsky). If a human touches a hot stove, or any animal's end effector, a lower-level process instantly pulls the hand/paw away from the heat. There are no doubt thousands of these 'smart body, no brain' interactions that take over in certain situations, conscious thinking not required.

Ken Goldberg shows that getting robots to operate in the real world using methods that have been successful getting LLMs to do things we consider smart -- getting huge amounts of training data -- seems unlikely. The vastness between what little data a company like Physical Intelligence has vs what GPT-5 uses is shown here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16DzKxYvRutTN7GBflRZj57WgsFN... 84 seconds

Ken advocates plenty of Good Old-Fashioned Engineering to help close this gap, and worries that demos like Optimus actually set the field back because expectations are set too high. Like the AI researchers who were shocked by LLMs' advances, it's possible something out of left field will close this training gap for robots. I think it'll be at least 5 more years before robots will be among us as useful in-house servants. We'll see if the LLM hype has spilled over too much into the humanoid robot domain soon enough.
by green7ea | 2025-09-04 06:33:58+00:00
This 1000x.

I was working in Europe for a big American company, which will remain nameless, and they started shutting down most, if not all, of their European operations.

A change in the US tax code made software development amortize over 5 years in the US and over 15 years overseas. It was later changed instant deduction in the US but still 15 years for overseas. It no longer makes sense to outsource software development in many cases.
by lemontheme | 2025-09-04 06:34:21+00:00
Plausible take. My first time using a coding agent was with Zed’s. As a sceptic, I was blown away. Two or weeks later Claude Code dropped and I haven’t used the Zed agent since. I canceled my subscription because 20 EUR/month for AI features I no longer use felt silly. And with the massive investment from Sequoia, and the real possibility of enshittification, I couldn’t mentally classify it as a monthly ‘donation’ to sponsor ongoing development either.

That last part is just me maybe. But I’m sure they poured a lot of time into their (granted, very nice) agent, only for many users to switch to Claude shortly after release. Letting others build the agent but being the place where the agent get used seems like a smart move
by rhubarbtree | 2025-09-04 06:34:59+00:00
Recently I tried to scaffold a website with a well known coding agent.

It didn’t work. I asked a colleague. He had the same problem. Turned out it was using out of date setup instructions for a major tool that has changed post training.

After spending time fixing the problem, I realised (1) it would have been faster to do it myself and (2) I can no longer trust that tool to set anything up - what if it’s doing something else wrong?
by beerws | 2025-09-04 06:35:28+00:00
Sad news. 'In Our Time' episodes are actually timeless, I am frequently amazed by the quality of episodes from over twenty years ago.

Frankly, I believe that instead of finding a new presenter, the BBC could be retire the whole series and its legend. Let the new presenter start a new series, even if the set-up remains the same (including having further discussions with a cup of tea after the radio time limit has ended)
by SillyUsername | 2025-09-04 06:35:44+00:00
I miss the days of Sun Solaris' CDE desktop.

Afterstep looks too much like Stardock's Window Blinds from around 2000 (see the weird glass effect, font etc), but Etolie seems to nail the aesthetic for me.

I hope this comes back, I'd love to use it on an old netbook I have for accessing my servers remotely.
by palmfacehn | 2025-09-04 06:36:55+00:00
Even if we take the empirical claims from highly partisan sources at face value, obvious axiomatic problems remain. AI employment doom, like other forms of neoluddism is predicated on a zero-sum view of economics.

As an example, consider the claim, "Steam shovel adoption is destroying entry level jobs in ditch digging"

Yes, we want more productive technologies to be used where applicable. We want workers to specialize and become more productive with less hours worked. This isn't destructive at all. Framing it as such is either deliberately misleading or demonstrates a misunderstanding of basic econ.
by pbmonster | 2025-09-04 06:36:58+00:00
> I wonder how many hidden magic search strings like this there are

This drives me insane. I often use OSM for things like "show me all sources of drinking water along this route". But you need the magic key word.

In this case, it's certainly not "drinking water (food) and not "drinking water (tourism)". It's also not "water tab (service)". "Fountain" works mostly OK (since fountain water must be labeled as non potable by law here if it is), but sometimes the fountain will be a tiny bird bath in someone's back yard.

It's so stupid, OSM has data on publicly accessible drinking water, I know because I add them. There's even meta data on whether there's an explicit sign "potable" or not. I just haven't found that magic key word to display them.
by hansvm | 2025-09-04 06:37:01+00:00
We don't have anything close to the totality of human knowledge digitized, much less in a form that LLMs can easily take advantage of. Even for easily verifiable facts powering modern industry, details like appropriate lube/speeds/etc for machining molybdenum for this or that purpose just don't exist outside of the minds of the few people who actually do it. Moreover, _most_ knowledge is similarly locked up inside a few people rather than being written down.

Even when written down, without the ability to interact with and probe the world like you did growing up it's not possible to meaningfully tell the difference between 9/11 hoaxers and everyone else save for how frequent the relative texts appear. They don't have the ability to meaningfully challenge their world model, and that makes the current breadth of written content even less useful than it might otherwise appear.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-04 06:37:10+00:00
> Just your GPU not counting the rest of the system costs 4 years of subscription

With my existing setup for non-coding tasks (GPU is a 3060 12GB which I bought prior to wanting local LLM inference, but use it now for that purpose anyway) the GPU alone was a once-off ~$350 cost (https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-windforce-oc-gv-n3060wf2oc-1...).

It gives me literally unlimited requests, not pseudo-unlimited as I get from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

> and with the sub you get the new models where your existing hardware will likely not be able to run it at all.

I'm not sure about that. Why wouldn't the new LLM models run on a 4yo GPU? Wasn't a primary selling point of the newer models being "They use less computation for inference"?

Now, of course there are limitations, but for non-coding usage (of which there is a lot) this cheap setup appears to be fine.

> It's closer to $3k to build a machine that you can reasonable use which is 12 whole years of subscription. It's not hard to see why no one is doing it.

But there are people doing it. Lots, actually, and not just for research purposes. With the costs apparently still falling, with each passing month it gets more viable to self-host, not less.

The calculus looks even better when you have a small group (say 3 - 5 developers) needing inference for an agent; then you can get a 5060ti with 16GB RAM for slightly over $1000. The limited RAM means it won't perform as well, but at that performance the agent will still capable of writing 90% of boilerplate, making edits, etc.

These companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc) are at the bottom of the value chain, because they are selling tokens, not solutions. When you can generate your own tokens continuously 24x7, does it matter if you generate at half the speed?
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-09-04 06:38:19+00:00
I think this is a combination of things.

1: knot theory is somewhat obscure. it generally only comes up in undergrad in a topology class for a week or two so there aren't a ton of people interested

2. It's 5 cuts on a joining of 2 knots with 6 crossings. it's brute forcable, but not trivially (i.e. you have to code it up and possibly wait a while)

3. for conjectures that feel intuitively true more effort goes into finding the proof than looking for a counterexample that feels unlikely to exist.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-04 06:39:12+00:00
if you don't accept a>b and b>c, you have nothing to say about "therefore a>c"; you can say nothing about it. if you did accept a>b and b>c then you would agree "therefore a>c"

>"I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center.

"I think", according to you, implies that I implies a center of thinking, and you don't believe that there is a center, so you don't believe "I think" even more than you don't believe "therefore I am". You don't have an opinion about therefore I am.

it doesn't matter about the "existence" in the predicate, because you don't accept the "I" in the subject.
by srean | 2025-09-04 06:39:22+00:00
Another example that shows up in mid school is how we measure angle.

Like the Greeks and Babylonians we usually measure it in degrees. Later around 18th century radians started getting used, especially in power series expansions.

In India, historically, angle was measured in the units of length (for a standardized circle). That made functions like sin be a function from length to length.
by FlatPotato22 | 2025-09-04 06:39:31+00:00
Great question, let me break down the exact flow. The app processes files one by one, right from your machine.

Here's the step-by-step:

1. Setup: You point the tool to a local input folder (with your source files) and a local output folder (which starts empty). You select a model (like Gemini 2.5 Flash) and write your detailed system prompt. For example:

You are an experienced JSON content translator. Your task is to translate all English text in the provided JSON files into Spanish, while preserving the original JSON file structure and formatting. It is crucial that the file structure, keys, and everything else (except the text content that needs to be translated) remain unchanged. Do not add any comments or additional text, only the translated JSON file. Make sure the translation sounds natural to the target audience.

2. Processing: The tool takes file #1 from your input folder, sends its entire text content to the API along with your prompt, and waits for the response.

3. Output: It then saves that raw text response into a new file inside your output folder, using the exact same filename and extension as the original. Then it moves on to file #2, #3, and so on.

The "then what?" is you come back to a fully populated output folder that mirrors your input folder, but with every file processed by the AI according to your instructions.
by vrighter | 2025-09-04 06:39:53+00:00
And yet, the human brain is still (way way wayyyyyyyyy) more capable than the LLMs at the actual thinking. They're as wide as an ocean and as shallow as a puddle in a pothole. And we didn't need to read all of the internet to do it.

As for the "write a book" part, the LLM will write a book quickly sure, but a significant chunk of it will be bullshit. It will all be hallucinated, but the stopped clock will be right some of the time.

No humans have this scaling capability? What do you call the reproductive cycle then? Lots of smaller brains, each one possible specialized in a few fields, together containing all of human knowledge. And you might say that's not the same thing!, to which I reply with "let's not kid ourselves, Mixture-of-Experts describes exactly this".
by baq | 2025-09-04 06:41:07+00:00
Ads are a way to get money from users who don’t want to pay with their money. You can’t beat free on price and crucially you can’t beat free on convenience - paying even 1 cent above free introduces complexity and friction.

Solve this and you’ll solve the ad problem, but I’m afraid it isn’t possible because money involves controls and regulations which you can’t weasel out of and not end up in jail.
by hashstring | 2025-09-04 06:43:15+00:00
> getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping

The company also dropped 80% in value [1]. I don’t think Musk his value destruction at Twitter is that inspirational.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
by socalgal2 | 2025-09-04 06:44:37+00:00
I find it fascinating that people, myself included, get nervous about speaking in public. Logically, I and most people can talk at the dinner table in front of my family. Most people can be at a party with friends and announce something "Time for Cake!", "Hey! Group Photo!". Most people can be in group of 4-8 friends and say something to all of them "Hey, how about pizza?" etc.... Most people can be in team meeting and state what they are working on, what problems they're having, and give their opinion.

In a certain sense, public speaking is no different than those situation. Even better, the people you're in front of you don't really care about, where as you do care about your family and friends. In other words, it should be that embarrassing yourself in front of friends and family "should" be the worse thing since you will have to face them again where as you won't have to face these strangers you're speaking in front of.

And yet, even though I've given ~10 public talks I still feel those butterflies, at least until the talk actually starts. Once it starts, for me, they go away. That assumes I know my topic. I'd say a best person talk at a wedding is more nerve wracking, for me, than a talk about anything I'm working on. I can talk about what I'm working on easily because I know it inside and out. Sure I need to practice my talk but if someone came up to me in a hall and asked me about my work I could talk their ear off with no practice. Conversely, the wedding talk topic is not a topic I know inside and out, hence it's harder, at least for me.

I know it was certainly nerve racking the first time I had to give a public talk at school. I wonder if the teacher had asked in private, something like

Teacher: Are you nervous about your talk?

Student: Super nervous

Teacher: Do you have a favorite video game?

Student: Yea, Minecraft

Teacher: What do you love about it.

Student: (with teach prompting, goes on for 5-10 minutes what things they love about Minecraft, things they made, experiences they had...)

Teacher: You just gave a public talk to an audience of 1. Just organize and practice a little and you'll do great!

I don't know if that would help but I'd like to think it would.
by dboon | 2025-09-04 06:46:50+00:00
I actually disagree, against conventional wisdom.

If it’s string manipulation, my formatting library is as ergonomic as, say, Python (plus or minus some sugar). You move format arguments from inside the string to explicitly arguments, but for short strings this isn’t worst and for long strings the builder API is way better

And if it’s performance…of course Python can be performant, but it’s at least one order of magnitude easier to understand and debug the performance characteristics of the C program.

Like I said in the article, having allocators which obviate the need for granular memory management completely changes what C code can be ergonomically

Thanks for reading!
by spwa4 | 2025-09-04 06:47:00+00:00
Your GP post says 3 conditions justify reacting against civilians of that country and even group. I point out that Palestinians satisfy all 3 conditions, as do all muslims, and that you're a racist. That for you those 3 conditions only justify anything if used against Jews, that you'd come up with some excuse to not apply them to anyone else.

And here we are. Some excuse, with accusation, to do exactly what I predicted.
by crabmusket | 2025-09-04 06:47:06+00:00
That quote was the inspiration for one of my favourite bits in the Lehman Trilogy, "the twist". There's a glimpse of it in the trailer here https://youtu.be/Lo4VC43h7ts?si=ebl9WwK2NIgW0sHD&t=49

"Bobby Lehman is ninety three years old and he dances the twist. He is 100 years old! 120! Maybe 140! He dances like a madman!"
by rtpg | 2025-09-04 06:47:34+00:00
My experience has been that it's very easy to flip through a pile of papers, and I tend to "know" where the info is.

The beauty of physical interfaces like for paper is that you really can just flip through a stack while talking to someone and find what you need.

The big thing that I think works well in paper world is simply having things organized chronologically. I often remember around when I collected a piece of info.
by aurareturn | 2025-09-04 06:47:41+00:00
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china

I think a lot of people in America (and HN commenters) think that life in China is closer to North Korea than Singapore based on massive media propaganda. In reality, in T1 and T2 cities in China, quality of life has exceeded American cities in my humble opinion. They're quite close to Singapore from my experience.

When I visited Shenzhen and then came back to the US recently, I felt like I went back in time 15 years.

I've been saying on HN for years that the commenters here should buy a ticket and go see China for themselves. It's extremely safe. Far safer than any American city/suburb. No, they're not going to detain you and send you to jail. They don't care about you. People are generally friendly even if you're from the US.