MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnnyBrevo | 2025-10-16 20:29:44+00:00
On “average” wages: The chart uses a typical/median (net) hourly wage, not the mean. Means are pulled up by high earners, and many HN readers sit above the median. so your personal “hours to basics” will look lower than the chart. Using the mean would systematically understate hours for the typical worker, especially in unequal countries. Also note: the index assumes a single renter; couples/roommates or employer subsidies will reduce hours per person.
by mbesto | 2025-10-16 20:29:58+00:00
> LLMs are already being trained with RL to have goal directedness.

That might be true, but we're talking about the fundamentals of the concept. His argument is that you're never going to reach AGI/super intelligence on an evolution of the current concepts (mimicry) even through fine tuning and adaptions - it'll like be different (and likely based on some RL technique). At least we have NO history to suggest this will be case (hence his argument for "the bitter lesson").
by ok_dad | 2025-10-16 20:30:01+00:00
I also read it that way, I didn't take it as an assault.

Because I was in the military in the past and because I grew up on the US continent, I probably have it ingrained in me to not use the words of violence like "murder" for these things, and instead I use the softer words that don't explicitly call out the death that is inflicted by the "bombing". I should work on that, for sure.
by tyfighter | 2025-10-16 20:30:30+00:00
This is something I heard through the grape vine years ago, but when you're a very large corporation negotiating CPU purchasing contracts in quantities of millions, you can get customizations that aren't possible outside of gigantic data centers. Things like enabling custom microcode (and development support) for adding new instructions for the benefit of your custom JIT-ed server infrastructure. The corporate entity here is likely a hyperscaler that everyone knows.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-10-16 20:30:38+00:00
> you tell people what software they should and shouldn't use

Please, there's no point in arguing like that. There's no need to mischaracterize or reword what another user is saying.

I don't think we'll get much further in this discussion if you consider yourself a fan of the FSL, a proprietary license. Your time will be better spent replying to other people.
by bflesch | 2025-10-16 20:30:41+00:00
Nope, I dont think it works when painted over. Some vendors recommend colors which are very open for diffusion such as chalk colors, but every other "common" color based on acryl/latex/etc basically seals it from the air and destroys it over long term.

For clay I know you can add color pigments to the clay itself, most likely you can do the same with stucco for some limited amount of colors. But painting over it with modern products mostly destroys the diffusion properties.

Many people put plastics or other sealing products on top of a clay or lime-based wall and it's a shame.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-16 20:31:08+00:00
That's a good point, but the nuance matters and understanding why matters too.

Without being too specific about the who, I think your concern boils down to:

1) authoritarian leaders like crypto that they create themselves because it's not regulated and they can use it to raise funds from the gullable and uninformed.

2) authoritarian leaders who can move markets tolerate crypto that is decentralized because it's also unregulated and they can trade against their own words and actions. (E.g. short and then cause a crash, buy and then cause a spike, etc.) Very few authoritarian leaders have this kind of influence, and as adoption increases the influence one person can have over the market will diminish.

I think these authoritarian benefits are temporary artefacts of where it is in its lifecycle. The technology resists authoritarianism the more decentralized and ubiquitous it is.
by rickydroll | 2025-10-16 20:31:36+00:00
#2 reminds me more of *Flowers for Algernon"

This resonates with me particularly strongly, as one of the many failures of my body is that I live with NPH (normal pressure hydrocephalus).

Almost a week ago, I had a spinal tap as a diagnostic test to see if I truly had NPH or if there was a different reason for the bubble of fluid in my brain. An hour after the tap, I felt my arms and legs moving more freely than they had in years, and I was able to move significantly faster than before. And now, a week later, I can feel the stiffness setting in again. I'm sliding my feet more, and I can't move as quickly.

I don't know how to characterize the sense of loss I feel. As my body returns to the pre-spinal tap "normal." I'm left with the fading sensation of a freer movement and a clearer mind, with the hope that one of the treatments for NPH will restore that better self.

I can only imagine, with a bit of horror, the sense someone would have coming out of the fog of Alzheimer's, feeling normal for months. Then the anxiety one might feel, as the Alzheimer's fog returns, and be scared that it might not go away again with the next dose—a real "Flowers for Algernon" moment.

I still need to talk to my neurologist to find out if I qualify for the CFS shunt/drain operation. It would be nice to have a clearer mind and freer body, even if I do become part Borg.
by psunavy03 | 2025-10-16 20:31:54+00:00
One of the other things that strikes me about Switzerland compared to the US . . . there is no single President; there is a council, and the position of "head of state" is just a "first among equals" role which rotates through the council.

The older I get, I think one of the major flaws of the US system was creating a sole President. The great strengths of the US Constitution over many European ones (even given today's craziness) is that it explicitly sets up checks and balances amongst both the branches of the Federal government and between the states and the Feds. And it also uses the Bill of Rights to essentially ban even the most popular laws if they infringe fundamental human rights.

But despite all that, the singular President has turned into a king-like figure, because we can't seem to get around the fundamental human tendency to want a strongman leader. And this along with toxic partisanship is beginning to corrode everything I mentioned above. I really wonder if the Founders made a mistake not splitting executive power up amongst 3-5 people, merely because it might have counteracted this "worship the strong man" tendency in the human psyche.
by ourguile | 2025-10-16 20:32:11+00:00
I agree there is some implicit bias in this reporting, particularly because Nathan is colleagues (or at the very least previous colleagues) with Ian Hogarth, who is currently the chair of the UK AI Safety Institute, recently renamed to the "AI Security Institute".

So, I would have to take reporting on safety with a grain of salt. That said, I do think there are a lot of other interesting insights throughout the presentation.
by brokencode | 2025-10-16 20:32:28+00:00
Just imagine you’re trying to build a custom D&D campaign for your friends.

You might have a fun idea don’t have the time or skills to write yourself that you can have an LLM help out with. Or at least make a first draft you can run with.

What do your friends care if you wrote it yourself or used an LLM? The quality bar is going to be fairly low either way, and if it provides some variation from the typical story books then great.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-16 20:32:40+00:00
> But with a C++-like constructor, it starts with a struct where all fields are in an invalid state, and then the struct's invariants are slowly established field by field.

AIUI, that's why MaybeUninit<T> exists. But even if you address the issue of it being unsafe to assert that a MaybeUninit has been initialized (which &out references could in principle solve) there are real problems with this; for example, MaybeUninit<T> has no niches or free-for-use padding even when T does, so you can't just "project" MaybeUninit to individual fields except in special cases. My understanding is that C++ partial initialization has the exact same issues in principle, they just don't come up as often because the standard for code correctness is a lot less rigorous.
by vector_spaces | 2025-10-16 20:33:07+00:00
OK, point taken re most people vs most food deserts

In any case, I am talking about the availability of items in response to the parent's obviously absurd implication "every food market I have been to sells X, therefore every food market sells X".

I am using food deserts as a counterexample since definitionally these are regions where certain items are hard to find. I know (hope?) that the person I am responding to likely doesn't believe every grocery store in the United States carries plain yogurt, but I also know that people here often forget that not every place enjoys the same level of choice that is enjoyed in places like the SF Bay Area

I truly don't understand why you are bringing up obesity, this feels very remote to what is being discussed.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-16 20:33:12+00:00
I used census data to come up with my guesstimate [0]. In 1905, the largest share of men were making $10-15 per week. Women and children less, of course.

The 2025 equivalent seems to be about $1330 per week. So in [very] round numbers it looks like about 100x.

[0] https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/03421399v4...
by throwacct | 2025-10-16 20:33:20+00:00
Don't get me wrong, the gig economy is really bad, but unfortunately covers a big chunk of jobs. When this scales up (and it will), what would happen to these people and the economy in general? There won't be an UBI reasonable enough to deal with the aftermath of this reality (basic law of supply and demand).

If things keep going the they are right now, in less than 50 years (give or take 10 years?), we could literally see the economic landscape migrating from a capitalist society to a neo feudalistic one, where companies will basically control everything (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, are basically investing in everything, from health to food) and people just work (if there are still any left), just to survive.

Interesting times we're living...
by amirhirsch | 2025-10-16 20:33:46+00:00
I like these benchmarks and the videos are funny!

Consider examples using building tools like screwing in a drywall screw, or hammering a nail, using a paint roller, caulking a sink, minor plumbing repair with a torch and solder. These differ enough in terms of forces, state changes, and combined dexterity/acuity (two-handed proprioception) from the windex, sandwich and key examples

Ikea product assembly for gold medal.
by pmontra | 2025-10-16 20:34:26+00:00
IMHO Django's templating engine is its worst feature but that only proves how subjective all these matters can be. I'm currently making money both from Django and Rails. I made quite a bit of money from Phoenix years ago. Customers choose their platforms, I can choose customers.

About OTP's primitives, they are great but a background job system has more features than those primitives offer. We wrote a fair amount of extra code to get what we needed for our production system. I'm using Sidekiq in Rails in my current Rails project and it's more feature complete than what we built for Phoenix. I'm using Celery with RabbitMQ in my current Django project and we would like to get rid of it. It's too fragile.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-16 20:34:53+00:00
> Edit: yeah ok fair call. it needs to apply to anyone

It was pointed out how historically un-American this is, and your response is to say we should in fact expand this policy - to be able to kick people out of the country or deny them entry for saying things online that aren't even as dramatic, hateful, or violence-glorifying as the things that this administration's supporters constantly, constantly, constantly say, for example, about victims of police shooting or victims of mass shootings?
by xp84 | 2025-10-16 20:34:58+00:00
> Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.

What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested.

It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-16 20:35:09+00:00
Yeah, I'm a Comcast customer and I'm very happy with their IPv6 support. The only things I would want different are a prefix larger than a /60 (say a /56), and the ability to have a permanently assigned prefix on my residential connection (but that's unlikely, I know). As evil as the Comcast business people are, their engineers clearly are trying to do right by customers.
by AdmiralKrunch | 2025-10-16 20:36:53+00:00
Democracy was an experiment from the beginning. All the funding for that experiment dried up long ago. When democracies fail new ones do not replace them. Disposing of the US over some trivial BS is not wise. The replacement forthcoming will be much worse than what we have now. It is literally impossible to do better in this day and age. We are looking at the ultimate failure of not only capitalism and democracy, but western values and even common morality.

The new reality is that the surveillance state is part of the ride. If you are not a rapist or pedophile then why would you be concerned about cameras in Public anyways? If nobody is trying to smuggle children then why do we keep losing them? These ideas would not get so much traction if they were not a legitimate response to a real world stimuli.

Favouring any argument made by non citizens and/or “the naysayers” tends to be labeled as “Anti” which is a dangerous label

I would assume anyone who has kids would support the idea of tracking programs because it implies a higher level of operational security and access denial. I am truly curious who's voices these are calling for transparency and open security, because they are trying to rape your daughter. Prove me wrong, prove me wrong. I repeat, only a rapist, thief, terrorist or spy would be alarmed about the development of this “Surveillance State” technological paradigm. So when the trolls try to argue Philosophy as some generic excuse to protest scrutiny, take another look. What does he have to hide. What business is it of theirs to speak for you about cyber security or domestic opsec? And in fact who are you to care about that stuff at all either?
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-16 20:36:57+00:00
Whatever justification is initially given for powerful surveillance tech (and snooping on Americans w/o a warrant), the eventual reason will always be 'its what we want'.

Ordinarily, HSI is focused specifically on criminal cases, such as child abuse, human trafficking, or cybercrime. But the distinction between HSI and its umbrella agency ICE is largely meaningless in this administration. HSI has reassigned at least 6,198 agents, or nearly 90 percent, to assist targeted operations with Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)
by chrisco255 | 2025-10-16 20:37:17+00:00
A company generates value for society, or it ceases to exist over the long run.

We have unemployment insurance for laid off workers and most people at megacorps also get severence when they get let go. Older employees can find the same jobs at different companies there are almost no jobs that are exclusive to any one company and even where that is the case you can still find related jobs. There is no excuse.

Unemployment levels are near 4% right now, historically near all time lows.

Silicon Valley is expensive because of nimby zoning laws. We do not have that problem in Austin as Texas is pro-growth and allows for dense, high rise buildings and apartments to be built at will. As a result, our rent has gone down significantly in the last several years despite population growth. Fix your regulations and the supply problems in housing will fix themselves.
by spankalee | 2025-10-16 20:37:58+00:00
Even simple web apps can benefit from web platform improvements. JS, HTML, and CSS have all gotten significantly better in recent years.

But YouTube is also a very complex app. Yes it "just" exists to play videos, but the app is so much more than a video player. Browsing, searching, comments, chat, playlists, YT Live, subscriptions, profiles, ratings... there's a lot there.
by mickeymounds | 2025-10-16 20:38:08+00:00
Scope note: This index is a floor affordability ratio for non-tradables (rent, utilities, basic food, transit). It doesn’t rate product quality or luxury/tradable goods.

Quality: True—quality varies. We use a fixed, minimal basket to avoid hedonic debates; I can add sensitivity bands by quality/spec.

“What extra hours buy”: Good point. We’ll add Discretionary Hours = paid hours/month − hours to essentials to show room for non-essentials, saving, leisure.

iPhone / tradables: Different lens. Many tradables price similarly across countries; essentials are mostly local/non-tradable and drive this metric. We can add a companion “tradables-hours” (e.g., hours to buy an iPhone/streaming bundle).

Takeaway: Essentials-hours ≠ welfare. It’s one clean piece—time to cover basics—best paired with discretionary and tradables views.
by artpar | 2025-10-16 20:38:35+00:00
I am sorry I think you might have installed the our workflow plugin(close ended agent) instead of agent4 (open ended). Its a new experiment we are working. We are working on the website messaging.

Agent4 - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/agent4/kipkglfnhnpb...

Old workflow plugin - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/100xbot/dhcenlmiiom...
by astura | 2025-10-16 20:38:39+00:00
>High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.

Dude, no. This is just wishful thinking.

I've seen critical employees get laid off without any backup plan or even knowledge of what these employees do. When those critical tasks then don't get performed I've seen laid off employees be called and begged to come back because there's no one left who even knows how to perform those critical tasks.

Layoffs rarely make sense. I've been though multiple rounds of:

"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."

"Oh wait, admin work is not getting done. We need more admin staff, hire"

"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."

Ad nauseam.
by nancyminusone | 2025-10-16 20:39:15+00:00
I'd go for something in the manipulation of ropes or wires.

State of the art seems to be that they can untangle a loosely knotted cord.

Untying a short rope with a tightly pulled overhand knot in the middle seems like it's decades away. You have to be able to grip it well enough, then twist the rope and push (even though every physicist says pushing a rope is impossible).
by Rendello | 2025-10-16 20:39:36+00:00
I recently spent a week or so creating a library for my project. There's not a lot of code, but it was hard to reason about the data model, what I wanted the API to look like, and what I wanted actually rendered on the other side.

I was proud after getting it working, but when I had to run dozens of files through it, it was horribly slow. I don't tend to write a lot of hot code, so I was excited by the fact I had to profile it and make it efficient.

I decided that I should rewrite the system, as my mental model had improved and the code was doing a lot more than it should be doing for no reason. I've spent the last few days redesigning it according to Data-Oriented Design. I'm trying to get the wall-clock time down by more than an order of magnitude. I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, wish me luck :)

Since I mentioned DoD, these three links will probably come up in conversation:

Mike Acton's famous performance talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

DoD in the Zig compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IroPQ150F6c

The DoD book: https://dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook.pdf
by mickeymounds | 2025-10-16 20:39:50+00:00
Not “9.5h worked each day.” It’s hours of pay needed in a month for a single renter to cover a bare-bones basket. Quick anchor with public data: Tel Aviv non-rent essentials ≈ ₪4,470 + studio/1-bed rent ≈ ₪5,000–6,300 ⇒ ≈ ₪9,500–10,700/month. If take-home pay is ~₪45–55/hour, that’s ~175–235 hours of pay. Many Israelis don’t live alone in TA (roommates/partner/subsidies/outside TA), so their effective hours are lower. The chart standardizes a tough single-renter scenario to compare places; it’s not saying people literally work 9.5h/day.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-16 20:39:59+00:00
You make it sound like you get to be the decider on whether the specific case is comparable or not.

Also note that in order to remove your comment, a clear case would have to exist in the first place.

> comments will state that the other side did it first.

That is exactly the excuse they are using for a lot of this type of sick behavior/policy, despite the examples being weak.
by gruez | 2025-10-16 20:40:16+00:00
That argument might work against f2p lootbox games, but that does not explain the "release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions" phenomena that's described in the GP. Nobody is like "wow this game doesn't have lootboxes? I guess I'm not going to buy it". If someone is buying such a game, to a first approximation they're buying for the gameplay, not because they're addicted to gambling and are buying it to get their fix.
by bartblast | 2025-10-16 20:40:18+00:00
(Disclosure: I'm building Hologram)

You might find Hologram interesting for this use case - it transpiles Elixir to JavaScript so your UI runs client-side. No persistent connection needed, so no reconnection delays or error messages. Still write in Elixir, still communicate with the server when needed.

It's early stage with some rough edges, but there are already Hologram apps in production: https://hologram.page
by pif | 2025-10-16 20:41:10+00:00
> Yet people seem to like making useful things in it so it must have gotten something right.

I'm not commenting on Rust, seriously! But I couldn't help to notice that this sentence is a non sequitur. Something right has been developed in PHP and Visual Basic, even in Javascript and Go; still, those developers who freely choose to use those abominations, they do deserve to be pointed at and made fun of.
by ludvig_tech_v1 | 2025-10-16 20:41:24+00:00
Im from Sweden, and let me tell you, the average swede is working less than 168, probably more like 140 hours a month taking into account all the vacation and other generous days off. Finland aint very different. And people are living well. So im wondering what is the purpose of the 200+h number? It feels wrong or manipulated/molded into existence.

Something doesnt pass the smell test.

I mean, just look at your colored map. Its like the reverse of where people live good lives.