MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-09-14 21:50:34+00:00
Revolution simply rolls the dice again. In states which used to have functional institutions and the organizational memory is still present, they can lead to good outcomes. In states which never had them, they cannot be created out of thin air.

A historian called Sarah Paine explained this nicely with examples of how the occupation of Afghanistan failed to create democracy but the occupation of post-WW2 Germany succeeded because Germany used to have a democracy whereas Afghanistan never did.
by NetMageSCW | 2025-09-14 21:50:46+00:00
I think you greatly underestimate the iPhone’s original impact and the reason that other very successful companies went out of business entirely due to it. It broke new ground in more than just technology e.g. also in the relationship between the phone manufacturer and the carrier, and advantage it kept for some time and in the software developed for it e.g. a full browser versus WAP.
by arnonejoe | 2025-09-14 21:50:53+00:00
I have owned a few homes over the years and have also had many landlords. The house we rented in Lafayette, Ca in 2010 was in a nice hood. At the time it was 2 years past the financial crisis and homeownership was not something I wanted to do for a while. The land lady we rented from wanted to sell the house for 650k. That house is now 4.3 million on zillow. Granted it has since had a renovation and an addition, but still. We also rented a townhouse in Encinitas, Ca. The rent was 3k a month in 2017 and now a similar townhouse in the same complex is renting out for 6500. The problem with renting is that eventually you get priced out of the nicer hoods. The problem with not buying a house when a deal shows up in a decent hood is that eventually that hood will never be affordable to mere mortals again. Maybe these rules only apply to California.
by themafia | 2025-09-14 21:51:26+00:00
I took the middle way. I bought an RV and I rent the space I keep it in. I can move to a new park if I want and there are several counties where you can live in an RV while building a home or you can just permanently live in an RV.

I get good flexibility and value for my dollar. The savings over renting is insane.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-09-14 21:51:30+00:00
Your stream of submissions for your own GitHub repository are also not in the spirit of the HN guideline against self-promotion:

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."

The HN guidelines are available at the link at the bottom of the page.
by stavros | 2025-09-14 21:52:23+00:00
As someone who's both renting and has bought (renting my main flat and bought a summer flat), I think I prefer buying. I'm always living in fear of being told I have to leave, and the flexibility is overrated because everyone I've talked to tends to just like where they happened to live. Everyone generally finds the positives of their current area to be the positives they really like, and the negatives manageable.

This means that, generally, no matter where you buy, you won't want to have bought anywhere else after a few years. There are cases where you might hate it, of course, but you could still sell/rent to someone else and buy/rent elsewhere.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-14 21:52:24+00:00
It seems to be an established fact that humans are loss averse, and feel the pain of a loss more than the pleasure of a gain. This seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view - taking a risk to gain something, at the expense of losing something already in hand, seems generally maladaptive (perhaps moreso when you are old and frail, and less resilient to loss).

Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?

OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.
by Sleaker | 2025-09-14 21:53:13+00:00
This article seems to present surface level arguments that aren't entirely fleshed out very well. Ex: what is the actual emotional impact of renting vs buying as that seems like it is the core underlying argument being made. I think the argument presented is dubious specifically because rents are a non fixed cost and provide no direct guaranteed long term benefit. Even as someone that purchased in 2021 with a price locked in from 2020, rents in my area are now equivalent or higher and it only took 2 years for the rent to catch up!. The graph tells the story that others are pointing out:

https://www.realpage.com/storage/files/blog/posts/images/202...
by moooo99 | 2025-09-14 21:53:25+00:00
First of all, I fundamentally disagree on the notion that buying a home should be considered an investment (I would go as far as to argue that this attitude is part of the reason the real estate markets are so broken in many places of the world). I don't want to be rich and I don't need to be - I just want a place where my kids some day can grow up, where I can enjoy the sun in the garden and invite family and friends over to spend a nice evening. I do not care about the financial aspect of it beyond "can I afford this without overstretching and putting my family into financial danger".

From a purely financial perspective, I think you could say: the more protections you as a renter receive, the more renting makes sense.

Living in Germany, I do have quite a few protections as a renter. My landlord can't arbitrarily hike prices, etc. In my current city, it would be absolutely impossible to get a mortgage anywhere close to my current monthly rent (even with substantial equity)
by matthewfcarlson | 2025-09-14 21:53:26+00:00
As someone who spends his non work hours convincing a half baked quasi person to not do dumb things (a two year old), I have zero interest in convincing a half baked quasi person to not do dumb things during work hours (most coding agents).

I’ve had good results with Claude, it just takes too long. I also don’t think I can context switch fast enough to do something else while it’s churning away.
by thephyber | 2025-09-14 21:53:31+00:00
I think the subtext of what I wrote in that paragraph was about the additional cognitive load of having to worry about every little action. For most people who are less informed about scams/cybersecurity, there is a lower cognitive load tax on their mind/attention (but that lower cognitive load results in less skepticism and more susceptibility to scams). Or put another way, the heuristics they use are at a different point on the tradeoff curve between effort/resources and accuracy.
by jvanderbot | 2025-09-14 21:54:01+00:00
When my computer was getting too loud, I took a drill, made a hole to the closet, and moved it in there and ran the cables through the hole.

When I didn't like mowing the hill behind my house, I had a retaining wall put in. Also preserving the elevated deck.

When I found i didn't like the elevated deck, I build a new ground level one with my father in law.

I'm not sure I like entering into the kitchen so I'll probably put a door into the porch instead.

I'm not saying I couldn't just rent a new place to find better digs. But I hate moving, hate shopping for new houses, love this yard and house in general, and am not paying more month to month than I was when renting (and get much more space for the dollar).

I don't want this place to make me rich, in the above you might get a sense that I already feel content. That's my decision criteria and I don't know why that's incorrect. You don't have to run a household like an investment company.
by Telaneo | 2025-09-14 21:54:13+00:00
Might be helpful to get some perspective on this. Most cards idle in the 5-10 watt range, but there have been outliers, like the Intel A770 before the drivers were mostly fixed, which ran at 45 watts.[1] I believe there have been even more stupid incidents with cards combined with early drivers, where, if you just happened to have a multi-monitor setup running at two different resolutions, it would go up 70+ watts. Obviously, these are outlier situations probably caused by some optimisations being disabled while the drivers were developed, and never re-enabled before release. 20 watts and below should be easily achievable with pretty much any card, but it's easy to forget that this is still some work that should be done, and shouldn't be left to chance and happenstance.

[1] https://thinkcomputers.org/here-is-the-solution-for-high-idl...
by DavidCanHelp | 2025-09-14 21:54:48+00:00
More context: haters are saying LLM generated content is bad. As a Senior Full Stack Developer with over 26 years of pro experience, I'm having the time of my life with these new AI powers and the doors and discussions they open. People are upvoting. I'm personally not getting anything from this open source sharing. You're the one calling spam. When you pay 200 a month to max your claude code output and really hunker down, think twice before you share its work. Not everyone understands.
by glenstein | 2025-09-14 21:54:56+00:00
The thing that depresses me about offhand references to bilderberg group is it's a missed chance to name real names. I don't know who they are, but from chat gpt'ing it looks like there's some particular agencies regularly behind these. One is "DG Home," an EU department on security that drafts legislation.

Another is Europol, a security coordination body that can't legislate but frequently advocates for this kind of legislation.

And then there's LEWP, The law enforcement working party, a "working group" comprised of security officials from member EU states, also involved in EU policy making in some capacity.

Perhaps targeted reform of these bodies is in order so they don't keep producing this legislation over and over. The blocking minority shouldn't just oppose the legislation itself, but make sure that their representation at those bodies is stopping those recommendations from moving forward. The legislating infrastructure needs to be challenged as much as any particular bill.
by gedy | 2025-09-14 21:55:02+00:00
I don't disagree with the his points, however:

"The flexibility of renting has major financial advantages"

Like 80% of my motivation to make money in past was: to buy a house. I have no interest in FIRE and be a couch surfing digital nomad around the world or whatever.

So it's hard for me to be motivated by the financial aspect if the end result was no house for now basically.
by sidrag22 | 2025-09-14 21:55:14+00:00
its a unique math problem for the individual, but if you ARE buying, that likely means you have a down payment. so if you rent instead, you can then utilize that down payment for other investment opportunities.

this touches on something the author sorta hinted at, mortgage as a forced investment. Some buyers/renters won't view the down payment as an investment opportunity if they go the path of renting, they decide to rent and suddenly theyve got a new car loan and all new furniture or whatever, and that down payment is gone, instead of compounding year over year in an attempt to make renting a financial advantage

you can usually napkin math investing the down payment and it makes more financial sense to rent, but from a human perspective its just not gonna happen like that for so many people. they are gonna mess with that money instead.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-14 21:55:17+00:00
With every update the WSJ’s original article, which largely informs people right now, has fallen apart. It’s so riddled with errors at this point that it should be retracted. I’d go so far as to say it’s deliberate misinformation at this stage.

Any attempts to neatly slot this into “he was left” or “he was right” are a waste of time. He doesn’t fit into that paradigm: https://www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-kirk-was-killed-by-a-...

There isn’t a liberal in the country who follows Nick Fuentes. Dude is clearly a blackpilled 4chaner as described above.
by munificent | 2025-09-14 21:55:19+00:00
Consider how emotionally and intellectually stunted many generations were hundreds of years ago when information wasn't available, we knew very little about human psychology, and the state of medicine and technology meant that almost everyone suffered incredible trauma in their lives.

And yet those where the generations that by care and force of will eventually birthed ours.

Yes, it is a very scary time in the world right now. But it's not as scary as the Great Death, the Great Depression, or WWII and we were able to get from those to the prosperity that we have today.
by pedalpete | 2025-09-14 21:56:02+00:00
As a renter who has recently been given notice that I must vacate my apartment in 90 days, you'd think I'd agree with you.

However, I think this depends highly on the personality of the renter/owner, and that is the point this article misses.

If someone is, like myself, comfortable with risks, I'm ok with changing neighbors, locations, and I've lived on 3 different continents and 9 cities?

If you're someone who craves stability, then this isn't for you, and you're proably better off buying a house.
by ethin | 2025-09-14 21:56:03+00:00
Funnily enough, when I was writing one in Zig for x86 I actually was the one who found a bug in (I think) 0.11/0.12 where packed structs broke when you assigned to their fields (and I also found that the `.interrupt` calling convention was a todo item in that version). GDT/TSS is always, always one of the most annoying parts of an x86 OS for me, because all of it is so tedious and unnecessary, and I wish Intel would just get rid of IA32 mode already, or add some kind of bit in CR0 or CR4 which caused all that extraneous setup of legacy structures to just cease to be. RISC-V is so, so much more pleasant to get started with. Limine helps regardless of which architecture your getting going with; it's pretty much my de facto bootloader at this point.
by 3036e4 | 2025-09-14 21:56:04+00:00
About mobile app, I never used pass until today, but it seems great, and so far I only tested it by installing it on my phone in Termux. Can't think of a reason for me to use a special app when running it in Termux works so well. Was happily surprised that even pass show -g worked out of the box, copying output to Android clipboard.

That is also nice since I have ssh already set up so syncing to my computer from the phone will be easy.
by miduil | 2025-09-14 21:56:27+00:00
> After a few years working in cybersecurity, I viewed EVERYTHING through the lens of “is someone lying to me?”

Oh thank you for highlighting that, I've had some instance where I'd suddenly have the urgent feeling that something I'm experiencing is a hoax and I couldn't tell why this suddenly surfaced back then, but I guess years of exposure to security does that to one.
by gxs | 2025-09-14 21:57:01+00:00
AI commentary has been super interesting

Kind of wild watching engineers, technologists, etc clutch their pearls

AI makes mistakes - so do people - I’ve been paid many a time to go clean up the non-AI generated code humans left behind. I’ve spent countless hours troubleshooting dumb bugs generated by humans

AI brings its own set of problems but I think some people just don’t want to hear what a net benefit it is

Post after post lamenting that no machine will ever replace the human touch is so old - people have been saying that about new technology since the beginning of time

I say embrace it - great to talk about its problems objectively and how to avoid common issues, but it’s tiresome to hear all the reasons why it’s crap all the time

I would instead love articles (you do see them here sometimes) that go over how people coded complex solutions to problems using AI and the challenges they faced along the way

Knowing where the weak points are or where it may be prone to error

If you don’t embrace it, pretty soon kids coming out of college that grew up with it that contrary to popular DO understand fundamentals are going to be running circles around the people who haven’t yet figured out how to get value out of it - while you’re out there saying it’s crap and only idiots use it, these kids are going to be moving mountains - I can’t wait to see the cool stuff people build - I don’t see the future as bleak
by dbish | 2025-09-14 21:58:19+00:00
I can say I'm very much on the other side now after owning (and unfortunately still owning) a townhome that I used to love living in but now can't seem to get rid of in Seattle while I rent across the country. I moved for work and really wish I had been renting since I do not want the hassle of being a landlord, but Seattle townhome sales have slowed to a crawl as the city never really recovered after covid.

If you get unlucky with no reason to still be in a particular city and that city starts a downward swing, there's no gaurantee it ever comes back and you're stuck taking care of something that you might never be able to sell for anything but a loss.

I will likely stay a renter and keep that flexibility in my new city for a long time after this experience.
by lol768 | 2025-09-14 21:58:31+00:00
The ship has very much sailed now with ballot SC63, and this is the result, but I still don't think CRLs are remotely a perfect solution (nor do I think OCSP was unfixable). You run into so many problems with the size of them, the updates not propagating immediately etc. It's just an ugly solution to the problem, that you then have to introduce further hacks (Bloom filters) atop of it all to make the whole mess work. I'm glad that Mozilla have done lots of work in this area with CRLite, but it does all feel like a bodge.

The advantages of OCSP were that you got a real-time understanding of the status of a certificate and you had no need to download large CRLs which become stale very quickly. If you set security.ocsp.require in the browser appropriately then you didn't have any risk of the browser failing open, either. I did that in the browser I was daily-driving for years and can count on one hand the number of times I ran into OCSP responder outages.

The privacy concerns could have been solved through adoption of Must-Staple, and you could then operate the OCSP responders purely for web-servers and folks doing research.

And let's not pretend users aren't already sending all the hostnames they are visiting to their selected DNS server. Why is that somehow okay, but OCSP not?
by al_borland | 2025-09-14 21:59:12+00:00
The prevalence of luxury apartments flies in the face of the overbuying section. People overbuy on apartments as well.

Every time I see someone arguing about minimum wage, their benchmark seems to be having a 2 bedroom apartment, not a studio or even a 1 bedroom. I find this wildly unrealistic.

Apartments also sell people on amenities that almost no one uses, but justify higher rent prices.

These luxury apartments are used in the same way people use their over-bought homes. It’s a way to buy into a different class of neighbors, feel like you’re not sacrificing with a rental, signal to others that you’re doing well, ideally have better management/maintenance, and live in a place that out-classes the home they may otherwise buy… all with no maintenance or investment.

I’ve seen some crazy rent prices. I’m not sure who is renting these places, but someone must be, because they keep building them.

I prefer renting, but I ended up buying a house because rent prices starting going up beyond what I felt with reasonable.
by bnchrch | 2025-09-14 21:59:32+00:00
I've seen these critiques for years.

and while its not necessarily wrong, I believe it under weights a few points:

- Fixing your housing costs against inflation: You can't count on housing price increases, but you can count on inflation. If you buy a house and your mortgage payment is > rent. Overtime it will naturally flip. $1 no longer buys me a chocolate bar, and $800/month no longer gets me a 2 bed apartment.

- Leverage: I can't get a $700k loan to put into equities but I can for a home.

- Capital Battery: As I build equity in my home it can become an asset I take loans against to pursue other opportunities.

- Flexibility: Should I need to fiscally downsize I can still move out and rent out. Or rent a portion either via a suite or secondary unit

- Stability: No one can evict me into a hot rental market to suit their needs.

I wish more people talked about these points, selfishly so I didnt take so many of these articles at face value because in hindsight I wouldve bought earlier.
by filoleg | 2025-09-14 22:00:28+00:00
> the stability of buying

It depends.

Personally, after witnessing both sides of the coin second-hand, I am not leaning in the direction of either buying or renting in absolute. It is highly dependent on the context and circumstances of a specific situation/market.

I am aware that this is just an anecdote (i.e., it isn't going to say much about the overall state of things across all states in the US), but there is a specific example I'd witnessed myself, which led me to believe that this is a bit more complicated than just "renting is the move" and "buying is the move."

TLDR: one of my former coworkers bought a condo in Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle (which is a highly desirable and expensive neighborhood in that metro area). Within the first year of his ownership, the pipes behind his laundry machine burst due to no fault of his own (while he was at work), and it ended up flooding the apartment of the neighbor below. It decimated the flooring of both his own unit and the unit of the neighbor below. He ended up was facing the costs of unfucking his own condo AND the unit below.

I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head at all (as the whole thing happened around 2018-2019, and I wasn't really involved in any direct way at all), but I remember that he did the math and (based upon the numbers, reasonably) ended up selling his condo as soon as he'd finished fixing his own unit + paying for the fixes to the unit below.

Meanwhile, I am currently renting, and if the pipes in my unit burst and end up flooding the neighbors below, it would be mostly the problem of the property management company running my building to deal with, not mine. This alone make me feel way more stable than if I'd owned the unit I live in atm.
by summarity | 2025-09-14 22:00:39+00:00
EVO ICL. Or even pinned ICL. Just got it recently, would recommend.

LASIK/SMILE/etc were never and are not safe. At least ICL is fully reversible.

Note that is the current version (EVO) I’m referring to, not the older (Visian) which still involved irreversible steps.

Info: https://eyewiki.org/Implantable_Collamer_Lens

Patient info (simpler language): https://www.rcophth.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Phakic-...

(I paid out of pocket for this and have no affiliation with any clinics)
by bdangubic | 2025-09-14 22:00:53+00:00
I have followed one simple principle for the last 16 years and have been incident-free. The communication with every business I am affiliated with in any way is one-way - I contact them. I never answer any calls or texts and I never answer any emails. no exceptions. It is amazing how much this simple rule just works. To fall for most scams you have to make a mistake which almost always involves you getting something, call, text, email…
by mongol | 2025-09-14 22:01:29+00:00
> I didn't like the idea of pushing a pass git repo to a private GitHub repo.

I had the same reluctance at first, but after considering it was protected both with my gpg key and my passphrase, and private on top of that, I came to the conclusion it is fine for me. It feels assuring to have it in a remote location where it is safe if I have burglary or fire or an accident like that. My keys are in a few secure locations too