MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-09 19:55:19+00:00
> can combat inflation by speeding up the run off of their egregiously large balance sheet and keep El Jefe happy by lowering interest rates

The Fed lowers rates by buying assets, i.e. taking bonds out of the market and putting cash into them. Lowering rates means paring or reversing the last three years' balance sheet reductions [1].

Running down the balance sheet faster would require raising rates. You can't lower rates and reduce the balance sheet unless you're doing off balance sheet fuckery.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
by jawns | 2025-09-09 19:55:20+00:00
You've misunderstood the case.

The suit isn't about Anthropic training its models using copyrighted materials. Courts have generally found that to be legal.

The suit is about Anthropic procuring those materials from a pirated dataset.

The infringement, in other words, happened at the time of procurement, not at the time of training.

If it had procured them from a legitimate source (e.g. licensed them from publishers) then the suit wouldn't be happening.
by Levitz | 2025-09-09 19:55:32+00:00
>Whether an action has gotten a legal thumbs-up or not is of little relevance here.

On the contrary, I don't think there's anything more relevant.

That such action can be legal speaks volumes about the state of what is legal and tolerated within the US. This, like pretty much everything about the current administration, is not explicitly about Trump, but something that has been cooking for at the very least the past two decades.
by mandeepj | 2025-09-09 19:55:42+00:00
> I legitimately can't tell if this is satire.

Mine was not, but yours definitely felt like it.

> Who does the regulating? The current Trump regime? Huge First Amendment violation

When you are running a YouTube channel or anything similar with millions of subscribers or even a few thousand, you are no longer an individual; in fact, you become just a news channel at that point. FCC has rules [0] for news channels, and those rules should apply to these unhinged political podcasters as well.

License Revocation: In extreme cases, the FCC has the power to revoke the station's broadcast license.

In other words, work with the firm (Meta\Google) to get that channel suspended.

Alternatively, let people add facts. I don't think YouTube does that currently.

> Are you sure you want something worse than UK's Ofcom proving your American identity just to speak?

What's wrong with only allowing citizens and residents to comment on their country's political matters?

[0] https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-09 19:56:09+00:00
He's talking about a time period when the stock market was in the doldrums and inflation was high. Right now inflation is considered high (even though it isn't really, historically) and the stock market is berserk.

And why wouldn't the stock market be considered a valid investment in the presence of inflation? Where else are you supposed to park your cash if you want to outperform TIPS? Remember that in the 1970s there basically was no retail stock market compared to what we have now, where everyone and their dog has a 401(k) and trading is basically free.

Even if valid, his point doesn't seem relevant. It is going to be hard to apply any lessons from the 1970s to what we're facing now, when incompetent and erratic policymakers are driving the US economic picture rather than external influences like OPEC and Viet Nam. (And if we thought OPEC was a malevolent cartel, just wait'll the rest of the world starts forging its own trade agreements without inviting us to participate.)
by figassis | 2025-09-09 19:56:11+00:00
Dropbox saw that the only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box, and they did not like it. Also, we kept criticizing Dropbox for moving away from a "folder that syncs".

I agree with a folder that syncs. Today I use dropbox, but I do my best to avoid interacting with it, because just clicking on the menubar icon makes me upset that no feature there is what I actually need. No sensible ignore rules, etc.

But I could have been wrong and focusing on dropbox was not the only path. But even if it wasn't, they fumbled every promising product they could. I mean, Mailbox, they pioneered (read acquired) the email swipe UX, then killed it.

Then there was that launch where they hyped some iCloud sync service that would allow apps to store settings and game states, etc. Whatever happened to that?

Today I'm so afraid that dropbox's more daring products will die faster than Google can retire theirs, that I simply do not use it for anything other than a folder than syncs where I can share links. And now that I think about it, it's been a while since I had to share a single link, so maybe I can just move to synching.
by fzeroracer | 2025-09-09 19:56:16+00:00
The Supreme Court literally just signed off on doing just this based off of racially profiling people. Trump has threatened to deport even some of his biggest sycophants like Elon Musk. They've been harassing people that DO have a legal basis to be in the country and finding ways to deport them anyways. Hell, they've even admitted, openly, to looking for avenues to denaturalize people so that they can be deported.

This isn't 'partisan brainrot', this is literally and explicitly what they are saying and doing.
by sfink | 2025-09-09 19:56:24+00:00
I understand this might seem unlikely given that it's working fine as 64-bit, but that crash dump makes me want to suggest running a memory tester. It has "Possible bit flips max confidence" of 25%. Ignore the exact percentage, I don't think it means much, but nonzero is atypical and concerning. (Definitely not a proof of anything!)

"It would crash in random spots" is another piece of evidence. Some legitimate problems really do show up in a variety of ways, but it's way more common for "real" problems to show up in recognizably similar ways.

And having a cluster in graphics stuff can sometimes mean it's triggered by heat or high bus traffic.

I'll admit I'm biased: I work at Mozilla, and I have looked at quite a few bugs now where there were good reasons on the reporter's side as to why it couldn't possibly be bad RAM, and yet the symptoms made no sense, and it ended up being bad RAM. Our hardware is surprisingly untrustworthy these days. But I also happen to be working on things where bad RAM problems are likely to show up, so my priors are not your priors.
by 6510 | 2025-09-09 19:56:41+00:00
I live in the Netherlands. In the 80's we use to have giant stores owned by couples living above or behind it. They owned 100% of the building, they owned everything inside it.

One particularly memorable instance to me was an old couple, the store had a ceiling two floors high with an 8 shaped cast iron balustrade wrapped around it. I want to say they sold puzzles, postcards and mostly wooden toys but technically that was what they had in stock, they didn't sell much of anything. If they sold 3 postcards and 2 puzzles per day it was enough to buy food. Food was really cheap.

The store was empty most of the day, if customers arrived they switched some of the lights on from behind the counter. If a wave of tourists arrived the place lit up brightly like a xmas tree. They sold the single key chain and one post card and went back to their living room on the other side of the door behind the counter. It was a magical place with many items aged into antiques on the shelve.

The old couple eventually died and the place was sold for many millions, stripped down and modernized for millions followed by a parade of over priced tourist traps that went bankrupt one by one.

Everyone working there has to pay for housing too! The rare place to live that becomes available would also be far away enough that you need a car, a long drive 2x per day and places to park it. Then you need to work hard, there need to be at least two shifts, you need to sell lots of things with very large margins.

The difference is much larger than people imagine. A bad day use to be one post card for some potatoes. Today's postcard is 1/100 the production cost, sold for 6 times more but the revenue isn't enough for one employee to park their car.

For just 6 employees at 1500 pp plus say 6000 for the store you end up with 15 000 just for housing everyone (not counting the 80 year olds such store has no use for)
by BeetleB | 2025-09-09 19:56:43+00:00
> I'm not sure if I'd count a person who can buy enough investment properties

Enough means "1 or 2". So yes, many average people can.

They'll often put, say, $50K down and that's it.

Here's how it works.[1] Homeowner has a house that has some significant flaw that's so bad no bank will mortgage it. This means the homeowner cannot sell via traditional methods. It will cost, say, $100K to repair the house and bring it up to market standards, but homeowner doesn't want to spend the money. He may already be ready to move (this may be a second house - or an inherited house, etc).

His only option is to sell for cash. The house is currently worth $250K, but market rates are $450K.

Wealthy non-RE investors won't buy his house - they want a house ready to move in to.

So what does the "average person like you" do? He gets a hard money loan. A private lender gives him $300K. $250K is to buy the house, and $50K is to help with the repairs. The average guy also puts in $50K of his own. At the end of 6 months, the house is all fixed up, and now worth $450K. He sells the house, and pays back the loan, and makes a decent profit.

Alternatively, he gets a mortgage on the house, pays back the private lender, and rents the house out.

What's in it for the lender? A very high interest rate. Back when mortgage rates were 4%, private lenders charged 12%. While this sounds scary high, the average guy plans to be done with everything in 6 months, so it's only 6 months of high interest.

What's in it for the "average guy"? Well, he just got a house, right? Also, what happens if things go south (e.g. runs out of money because he misestimated repair costs)? He loses the interest and his $50K, and that's it. The private lender gets ownership of the house, but cannot go after his assets.

So if you can save up $50K, you can get a house. The real hard work is to identify the right property (i.e. one that can't be sold easily).

Everyone I know who's done this earns less than a SW engineer. Some people are blue collar workers.

Another model: The homeowner is in a bad financial situation and has not have been paying property taxes. Now the county is threatening to take away his house because he owes $20K in taxes. There are only a few weeks left for the deadline.

The investor contacts the owner and says "Hey, let me pay the $20K you owe, and sell me the house for $30K. If you can sell the house for more to someone else, go for it. But if not, here's my number."

If the owner could have sold it for higher, he likely would have already. Both ways he's losing the house, but this way he gets money.

Again, such properties are hard to find.

[1] This is just one model. There are others.
by chasd00 | 2025-09-09 19:57:02+00:00
The Patriot Act was an eye opener to me. Fear has to be, by far, an authoritarian's best tool against the masses. I was shocked "we the people" let the Patriot Act happen, i was also shocked when people locked themselves up for a year voluntarily during covid. All you need is a way to produce fear in the population and they'll do and believe anything you say. Anything.
by panick21_ | 2025-09-09 19:57:03+00:00
I disagree at least in the longer term, I don't think people want to own cars. Generally people are not car people, bike people or train people, most people just react to what makes the most sense.

In the 70s people in the Netherlands they were not 'bike people' but now that's what they look like.

Same in the US, most people are not car obsessed, they have simply been 'brainwashed' into a society where you 'need' a car. And therefore everybody says they want to own a car, because the idea of not having a car or not wanting a car is like hating Apple Pie and the American Way.

If you watch urbanist youtube, you will see the topic discussed, people who live their whole live in the subburbs don't even understand how people without a car get groceries. This is a common question that gets asked.

Yes, some people are 'car' people, just there are people on bikes, even when it is not very save. But that's going to be a small group of people, just as there is now for bikes in dangerous places. In a world where you don't need a car, and its cheaper to not have one, the waste majority of people will not adopt 'car' as a hobby.

That said, even optimistically if 'full self driving' happened, that would take decades. And the 'car' hobby in the US would survive a very long time, 100000000s of millions of garages and parking spot have already been built, millions of people have been educated on car repair and so on and so on. So I think even if full self driving was solved, the culture shit would take a generation.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-09 19:57:21+00:00
Related:

iPhone 17

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186023

iPhone Air

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186015

iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186044
by xp84 | 2025-09-09 19:57:25+00:00
I'm continually impressed that Dropbox continues to exist, so long after their primary product offering was so thoroughly sherlocked by the big two B2C companies (Google and Apple) and the big two B2B companies (MS and Google). Especially because I've never worked anywhere that used Dropbox, so they don't have the long-tail life support legacy B2B money keeping them afloat like say, Lotus Notes did.

B2C was lost to them the minute Google Drive and iCloud Drive both got decent enough. Clearly with all their random acquisitions and stuff they were trying to become a #3 to MS and Google for corporate, but it's such a moat to penetrate, since they'd have to become at least a little better than at least one of them at most of the big productivity things (email, calendar, documents & drive, chat, meetings), or be a lot better at one specific thing, enough that businesses will have an appetite to keep paying for GOOG/MS's bundles and add-on additional cost to pay for Dropbox too. If I had to vote for a company least likely to succeed I'd pick Dropbox, and that's without any shade to the people running it. They're just in a terrible market position.
by runjake | 2025-09-09 19:57:46+00:00
My ancient Canon Rebel camera, I think a T3i, takes stunningly detailed photos against even my iPhone 15 Pro.

But, I never have my Canon and it's too bulky to carry around everyday. I do carry my iPhone everywhere I go. And so, the capabilities of my iPhone camera are more important.

I imagine this is the same for the overwhelming majority of people.
by fsflover | 2025-09-09 19:57:51+00:00
Yes, you can install postmarketOS [0] with, e.g., SXMo [1] or KDE Plasma [2].

[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Sxmo

[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile
by bjourne | 2025-09-09 19:58:10+00:00
Yes, water is wet and all that. The harm done by Google and others by running ads for casino sites is probably much greater than the harm done by running Israeli propaganda. However, that battle has already been lost, in a way, and Google won't stop running casino ads because they make so much money on them. But perhaps they can be persuaded to stop running propaganda from genocidal states such as China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, etc.?
by showerst | 2025-09-09 19:58:16+00:00
I think DC has the start of a really good system here. There's universal Pre-K 3 and 4. Most elementary schools offer it, but you can also get a large subsidy to go towards a private daycare. I'd love to see that expanded to all ages. Day cares here are super heavily regulated (and thus expensive) and apparently the paperwork is a nightmare for the day care, but in practice it's super easy for parents.

I see all these comments in the vein of 'why should you force people to work in the mines and not get to love their child' and I wonder if any of these people have ever had toddlers. I love my kid, and love spending time with her. But she really likes daycare (and now school). Not only does she get better socialization than me taking her to the park for 2 hours, but she learns skills that I wouldn't be consistent about teaching. It turns out, being taught by people who have years of practice and degrees in childcare is a pretty good idea!

We did Prek-4 at our public school and you could immediately tell the difference between the daycare kids, the nanny kids, and the home-parent kids. The daycare kids were much more prepared and able to cope, and this is at a school where parental involvement was quite high. I don't think the different approaches are universally better or worse, but it's clear to me that the quality of the daycare and the parent matters a lot more than which one you choose.
by TomasBM | 2025-09-09 19:58:21+00:00
I think we're referring to different debts.

Your original comment said:

> at some point in the future the rich have to pay that work back with something of equal value [e.g. food, gadgets, etc.].

And this is true in the abstract sense that some rich need to provide the goods, or the money that workers can exchange for said goods, or they'll face consequences. In other words, they better pay their debt, because history has shown that bad things happen - to specific rich individuals or across the society - when debts to workers aren't paid. This is one large part of the social contract.

So, I agree with you there. Then, when you said:

> But if in the new world the rich have AI to do the work they want done, the jobless masses can simply be cut out of the picture.

To this, I provide the caveat that any rich individual could at any point in history cut out any working individual (let alone non-workers), as long as they could get away with it. The only reason most didn't get away with it was because no one else could do the work, and/or they couldn't protect themselves against eventual retaliation. But most did get away with providing what we today consider to be unfair compensation.

So, if any rich individual gets that equation back in their favor, no one will uphold the social contract (i.e., balance the equation) unless the rest of us do it.

For this, you don't need AGI or robots that can do anything a human can, or a large pool of non-workers. You just need reliable autonomous weapons to coerce most work, or enough automation to get work done when coercion fails; humans can do the rest.

> The workers quickly call the debt to get food and shelter in return.

This is different from my point. As far as that one rich individual is concerned, their debt to the workers stops when he gives them the money, regardless if it's US dollars or Disney dollars. It's up to the state or another rich individual to accept the money for the goods & services. So, that's the other debt, i.e., that goods will be provided for the money.

I'm not as worried about that other debt, where some money becomes worthless, or the state stops enforcing its currency, or people stop accepting money for goods. I'm more worried about the former debt, where someone can renege or just pay much less, because rich and state interests align. So, even if the state takes over with UBI, and you continue working, you'll just have less and less overall, and there'll be no real leverage against it.
by jshen | 2025-09-09 19:59:12+00:00
Debt cycles would be one example that's not a policy decision. https://youtu.be/SoKr0QVCLPA?si=kKcXNetb-kAPr1S8

Edit: having said that, "these economic problems are ENTIRELY the result of bad policies". That's a very bold claim, which warrants some strong evidence. No one has provided any strong evidence that it's ENTIRELY from bad policies.
by mips_avatar | 2025-09-09 19:59:22+00:00
I think a different type of decentralized web is growing. It's in Hetzner datacenters but it's a lot more "free". We're at an age where besides GPU inference an indie can afford to create cutting edge web services. There's still players that could really harm this new ecosystem (looking at you cloudflare) but the fact that the majors like Google and Facebook tried to kill it and failed to kill it proves something.
by hypeatei | 2025-09-09 19:59:32+00:00
> The market appears to be stuck in the trees, and is oblivious to the forest. In this case, the "forest" was bluntly and worryingly mapped out for us by Powell

I agree that this market is irrational but everyone knows the popular saying about that. In the meantime, you can probably make some returns by assuming the money printer will keep stocks propped up for a bit longer. This isn't financial advice. This year has shown that the dollar losing value = higher stock prices. Calls it is.
by csa | 2025-09-09 19:59:42+00:00
> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

Great onservation and great Fussell reference.

Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.

Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
by K0nserv | 2025-09-09 19:59:43+00:00
The core tenets of web3; privacy, data sovereignty, encryption, open source, open protocols, and peer-to-peer networking are all good. The problem is the movement was never truly about this, and, even to the degree it was, it was taken over by crypto grifters. The ultimate indictment of web3 is that the old school nerds weren't interested, they are the perfect audience, and yet...
by refulgentis | 2025-09-09 19:59:45+00:00
It's somewhat disturbing to see pop economics discourse recently - if I turned this in as a paper in a 200 level+ class at my middling statue university, I'd get D >= X >= C+, where X is my grade. The reason beings:

- I lead with a thesis about health care jobs.

- I immediately discount it as unknowable based on the data.

- It's a novel idea to worry about job concentration in a particular industry in a modern capitalist economy.

- Adding 20-50% taxes on imports is a hare-brained, earth-shattering, idea. I can't think of an analogue in computers, other than legislating computing is only secure moving forward if we use terenary instead of binary.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-09-09 20:00:34+00:00
Vouchers are just a bribe to get people to actually vote for higher taxes that fund social services that they themselves aren't going to use or benefit from.

"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.

People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.
by bluGill | 2025-09-09 20:00:54+00:00
> Taxing non-owner-occupied single-family residences at higher rates (incentivizes sales)

We already do that in the form of homestead tax credit. This just discourages renters though and so I oppose it. If you come up with a way to ensure that if the house is rented the renters pay the lower rate (get a tax rebate?) I'm for it.

> Mandating housing as a human right (myriad of knock-on effects for decades after)

I have no idea how you do that in practice. There are many choices, but everything I've seen as serious unintended consequences that end up being worse.

> National rent control (helps renters save, incentivizes construction since growth must now be achieved through volume, not price hikes)

Unintended consequences get you. Every rent control I've seen disincentivizes construction since you can't be sure of a profit.