MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kstrauser | 2025-10-17 17:44:10+00:00
Here's an example demonstrating why this is insane:

Suppose North Korea sends you a letter demanding that you take down a blog post joking about Kim Jong-un being chubby, because that's illegal in North Korea. Do you feel obligated to comply with that demand? After all, your blog could possibly be read by someone in North Korea.

I don't have anything against the UK. They've been our good buddies since a spat we had a couple hundred years ago. But I feel every bit as obligated to follow UK law as to obey North Korean law, which is to say, not at all.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-17 17:44:22+00:00
> Stop reselling your car and you won’t have to worry about resale value.

I mostly agree, but not-at-fault collisions throw a real wrinkle into this.

There's a non-trivial chance that even if you were planning on keeping your car for 15 years, you get rear-ended after 5 years, your car gets written off, and you receive a low value from your insurer.

All of the extra care and maintenance that you put into your car to make it a car that would be nice to drive far 15 years also becomes wasted as your insurance won't compensate you for that.
by Stratoscope | 2025-10-17 17:44:32+00:00
Thanks for the recommendation! I went looking for a Kindle edition, and unsurprisingly for a book from the late 19th century, there are quite a few of varying quality. I downloaded several of the free samples, and this one may be my favorite:

Progress and Poverty (modern edition)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058JG5TI

It was edited, abridged, and translated to modern language by Bob Drake of the Henry George School of Chicago.

As always, I recommend downloading the free Kindle sample or reading the free preview on the website before buying.

Here's an example, the first two paragraphs of the Preface in the original language:

---

THE views herein set forth were in the main briefly stated in a pamphlet entitled “Our Land and Land Policy,” published in San Francisco in 1871. I then intended, as soon as I could, to present them more fully, but the opportunity did not for a long time occur. In the meanwhile I became even more firmly convinced of their truth, and saw more completely and clearly their relations; and I also saw how many false ideas and erroneous habits of thought stood in the way of their recognition, and how necessary it was to go over the whole ground.

This I have here tried to do, as thoroughly as space would permit. It has been necessary for me to clear away before I could build up, and to write at once for those who have made no previous study of such subjects, and for those who are familiar with economic reasoning; and, so great is the scope of the argument that it has been impossible to treat with the fullness they deserve many of the questions raised. What I have most endeavored to do is to establish general principles, trusting to my readers to carry further their applications where this is needed.

---

And in the modern edition:

---

In 1871, I first published these ideas in a pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Policy. Over time, I became even more convinced of their truth. Seeing that many misconceptions blocked their recognition, a fuller explanation seemed necessary. Still, it was impossible to answer all the questions as fully as they deserve. I have tried to establish general principles, trusting readers to extend their application.

While this book may be best appreciated by those familiar with economics, no previous study is needed to understand its argument or to judge its conclusions. I have relied upon facts of common knowledge and common observation, which readers can verify for themselves. They can also decide whether the reasoning is valid.

---
by grim_io | 2025-10-17 17:44:40+00:00
Honestly, I don't see a big difference between learning the arcane non-standard, non-portable incantations needed to configure and use various forks of standard utilities running on the $CLOUD_PROVIDER, and learning to configure and run the actual service that is portable and completely standard.

Okay, I lied. The later seems much more useful and sane.
by klaff | 2025-10-17 17:45:26+00:00
I think this is spot on. I bought a new EV 6 months ago. I brag about paying less than $0.03/mile even with a large EV, but it's completely dependent on charging in my garage and being on a plan that reduces my night-time electricity cost down to $0.07/kWh. At cheaper DCFC stations ($0.39/kWh) it's about breakeven with a similarly-sized ICE vehicle and at higher cost stations ($0.59/kWh) it's more expensive per mile than the ICE vehicle.
by halayli | 2025-10-17 17:45:31+00:00
The paper claims that 95% of companies see no AI revenue gains, which seems like an outrageous blanket statement. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

The real issue here is a fundamental statistical and categorical error: the paper lumps all industries, company sizes, and maturity levels under the single umbrella of "companies" and applies one 95% figure across the board. This is misleading and potentially produces false conclusions.

How can anyone take this paper seriously when it makes such a basic mistake? Different industries have vastly different AI adoption curves, infrastructure requirements, and implementation timelines.

It's equally concerning that journalists are reporting on this without recognizing or questioning this methodological flaw.
by mrbungie | 2025-10-17 17:46:01+00:00
It's hell useful, I use Cursor several times a week (and I'm not even working as a dev full time rn), and ChatGPT is my daily driver.

Yet, it's weird to me that we're 3 years into this "revolution" and I can't get a decent slideshow from an LLM without having to practically build a framework for doing so.
by hinkley | 2025-10-17 17:46:17+00:00
Xonix is listed as a remake of Qix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix

I encountered a version of this game sometime around 1990 and played the hell out of it. Since I don’t see any remakes from around that time, and I never had a Game Boy, I might have found it on a BBS, or a discount rack. There were a huge number of people briefly playing another game in this genre sometime around 2004, with lots of pretty colors. Everyone was playing it, and then they weren’t. I didn’t because I’d already played the original enough for one life. But I can’t find it in the list either.
by bonesss | 2025-10-17 17:46:26+00:00
Behaviour Driven Design, following Test Driven Design practice, can create a living specification. Human readable domain exploration, human-readable criteria, and direct links to the test harness to demonstrate conformance and domain capabilities.

This gives you verifiable set of spec documents (BDD reports for integration tests, acceptance tests, domain requirements, etc with green/red status), to iterate and collaborate on without requiring undue upfront work separated from the actual product. ‘Agile’, JIT, YAGNI-aware, specifications, no waterfall necessary.
by ram_rar | 2025-10-17 17:46:29+00:00
I’ve spent a decent chunk of my career wrestling with time sync — NTP/PTP, GPS, timezones, all that fun stuff. For real world network time infrastructure, where do we actually hit diminishing returns with clock precision? Like, at what point does making clocks more precise stop helping in practice?

Asking partly out of curiosity, I have been toying with a future pet project ideas around portable atomic clocks, just to skip some of the headaches of distributed time sync altogether. Curious how folks who’ve worked on GPS or timing networks think about this.
by kachapopopow | 2025-10-17 17:46:41+00:00
AGI is already here if you shift some goal posts :)

From skimming the conversation it seems to mostly revolve around LLMs (transformer models) which is probably not going to be the way we obtain AGI to begin with, frankly it is too simple to be AGI, but the reason why there's so much hype is because it is simple to begin with so really I don't know.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-17 17:47:14+00:00
Certainly a lot of that inflation was in the last ~8 years. I certainly know what you mean.

Groceries are one of the more discretionary items. Your mortgage is fixed, demand for gas is inelastic, etc. But groceries you respond to the price. And so many staples have become 2,3,4X times more expensive compared to pre-covid. I remember the cheap beef (chuck roast) was about $4/lb and decent steak (ribeye) was about $9/lb. Now its about $10/lb and $22/lb.

So psychologically, now your "splurging" just gets you the "cheap" stuff.

Wages have risen a bit. But 1) not nearly as much as inflation 2) these are very asymetric and 3) the way they rise doesnt feel like wage inflation. Even those who saw wages rise due to inflation probably felt like it was other things. Such as simply changing jobs. Or just normal yearly review. Or maybe they havent switched jobs and have some "unrealized gains" awaiting them still. No one one saw their wages incrementally rise month by month.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-10-17 17:47:49+00:00
Yup! I've had my car stolen and broken into in the past. So I have a rational fear the same thing could happen to my house, so I have a ring system. Out of respect for my neighbors, I'll go the E2EE pathway and make sure my camera isn't tilted towards the road, but I'm not going without cameras again.
by codyb | 2025-10-17 17:48:05+00:00
Using the first 35,000 words is a bit unfair for a rapper such as Lil Wayne who's been releasing work since he was 14.

Also I wonder if this is including proper nouns and other references. (I'd think it should, but it's hard to account for the fact that referencing seven different Chris's would be counted as one token used seven times. Similarly, many words have many meanings, and those are all being lumped together as well, so no accounting here can probably ever be perfect).

If you had all the lyrics for all the rappers I think I'd - aggregate word counts - combine variations - remove most commonly used words in each language (I, I'm, You, You're, etc)

Then see who came out ahead. You shouldn't get penalized for releasing more.

You could probably do a bunch of cool analysis with that data.

edit: Oh no, there's actually a Genius API isn't there. No no no no. I have no time!
by babblingfish | 2025-10-17 17:48:08+00:00
Hi HN! I'm the author of this piece. I wrote it after struggling with my own writing habits for years and realizing that chasing metrics and external validation was killing my creativity.

I'm sharing this in case others (especially those with technical backgrounds) find themselves in similar patterns with creative pursuits. Happy to discuss writing habits, the intersection of technical and creative thinking, or anything else this brings up for you!
by johnohara | 2025-10-17 17:48:10+00:00
Not sure "Cargo Cult" is an apt description. Feynman's description of Cargo Cult Science was predicated on the behavior of islanders building structures in expectation it would summon the planes, cargo, personnel, etc. that used the island during WWII.

Without a previous experience they would not have built anything.

There is no previous AI experience behind today's pursuit of the AI grail. In other words, no planes with cargo driving an expectation of success. Instead, the AI pursuit is based upon the probability of success, which is aptly defined as risk.

A correct analog would be the islanders building a boat and taking the risk of sailing off to far away shores in an attempt to procure the cargo they need.
by quantumcotton | 2025-10-17 17:48:11+00:00
I'm pretty sure it's a mixture between this and the fact that EVS don't really break down. You have the same amount of them for sale a few years later. Versus gas cars. You have half of them around being parted out. So they do go up in value oddly.

They've pretty much just saturated their own market. Everyone needs a car. Not everyone needs an EV. If you have a garage then yes it makes perfect sense to have an EV. But if you don't and you live in an apartment or you live in a shared house. It's not really going to work for you. People who have their own house don't want old cars. So they basically just have a bunch of older car sitting around that nobody really wants even though they technically do have better value. A $30,000 Tesla and a $30,000 BMW? You'd have to be biased to think that it makes logical sense for the BMW. Sure! It's 40. It's fun but the cost of maintenance. The reliability.... It's not really a family car in the same way. It appeals to more people, but it's not more logical. However, you don't need a garage to charge your BMW. I don't care how fast the car charges. I don't want to go to a charger. I've had my car for 4 years and I've only been to a supercharger twice.

But I fully understand why not everyone has them. Every time I pass by a mechanic shop an oil change place like gas station. I just think of how much wasted time that people use on their cars thinking that it's more convenient.

But but for them in fact it may actually be. Imagine sitting at a charger for 20 mins 2x a week if you drive a lot and use sentry.
by neom | 2025-10-17 17:48:50+00:00
Just in case anyone is interested: There is good research into microtubules being related to neurodiversity, the research is specifically in the direction of ASD. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33526823/ - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728923/

On the second point of QM in biology more generally tho, this research is interesting: https://arxiv.org/html/2409.03497v1
by jerf | 2025-10-17 17:49:21+00:00
1. Go to, let's say, a video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qm8PH4xAss [1] Start it playing.

2. Copy and paste this into your browser location bar: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 50/prompt("Inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value:"))

3. Enter the inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value, which as we are talking about this today, is 109.

Et voila, inflation-adjusted 50 Cent music, and anyone finding this later can adjust it to their current inflation-adjusted value.

I believe there are limits on how slow the browsers will playback video. This code is not guaranteed to work past any possible hyperinflations or massive deflations that may occur in the future.

If you're curious how that may sound with a more careful job done then the browsers will do with stretching, consider Beethoven's 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSJ9Bkhb1Q4&list=PLMEcbs3sHQ... Some of you may well legitimately love this. Obviously the frequency profile of doing this to a 50 Cent piece will be quite different but it at least gives the idea.

[1]: It is sheer coincidence that this video ID ends in "Ass". This is "50 Cent - In Da Club (Official Music Video)" for those wondering.
by tra3 | 2025-10-17 17:50:16+00:00
Fair enough, I may have conflated "there's an AI bubble" with "AIs aren't useful".

My employer pays for Claude pro access, and if they stopped paying tomorrow I'd consider paying for it myself. Although, it's much more likely for me to start self hosting them.

So that's what it's worth to me, say $2500 USD in hardware over the next 3 years.

I'd love to hear what your take on this is.
by didibus | 2025-10-17 17:50:37+00:00
> it's the claims that it's not useful

I think the reason is because it depends what impact metrics you want to measure. "Usefulness" is in the eye of the beholder. You have to decide what metric you consider "useful".

If it's company profit for example, maybe the data shows it's not yet useful and not having impact on profit.

If it's the level of concentration needed by engineers to code, then you probably can see that metric having improved as less mental effort is needed to accomplish the same thing. If that's the impact you care about, you can consider it "useful".

Etc.
by alganet | 2025-10-17 17:52:07+00:00
> There is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Yes. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

> Then anyone can verify the provenance chain: Was this made by a human? Which AI created it? Has it been altered since creation? Who owns the rights to it?

Oops, seems like you are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

---

What is the genie that got out?

*Trust*

What if someone tempered with the crypto? What if quantum starts breaking cryptography?

We will never, ever acquire trust in digital platforms again. It is bound to be ephemeral. That ephemeral part of it is what deus-ex-cryptos supporters don't understand. Maybe you can in fact fix the tech, but fixing the human minds is not going to work.

Consider me, for example. I'm an idiot in crypto. For me to trust it, I need to understand it completely. There is no way in hell I'm going to be able to learn all those algorithms, and no way in hell I'm going to inspect their implementations (it's too much work for a single person), and not doing that is not good enough for me anymore.

This brings back all the same cans of worms. Infiltrators in crypto implementations, bad actors, state influence.
by Agingcoder | 2025-10-17 17:52:26+00:00
To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure.

Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much.

If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea.

Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.
by skeaker | 2025-10-17 17:52:29+00:00
Alternate clients and APIs aside, HN has a simple enough layout that you can really easily write up some JS as a browser extension to modify the page a whole lot to your own preferences. Comments have exact timestamps baked into the hovertext of their age, so you could have your script grab all of the comments from the page, sort them by their timestamps, then set all the indent widths to 0. Replies could really easily be tracked and added to the page by reading the parent URL on each comment. Might look into doing this myself later.
by strangattractor | 2025-10-17 17:52:34+00:00
Flying vehicles are fundamentally a different beast. They need to be light and are therefore more fragile. Also my car engine quitting while driving is not necessarily a life threatening situation. When you're a thousand feet above the ground just about any failure can be life threatening.

So no I wouldn't think flying a beater around is a good idea. People generally get away with flying unsafe planes now because they fly over unpopulated areas. They only kill themselves. Start flying over populated areas and you can wipe out a kids soccer game.
by potatolicious | 2025-10-17 17:53:20+00:00
Listen, I'm literally just describing basic market dynamics here - my post is not intended as an endorsement of plainly observable phenomena.

The depreciation/utility curve has always been aggressive no matter what product you're buying. Is a 2 year-old ICE car twice as bad as a new one? Is a 2 year-old TV? Clearly not, yet they are all worth that in the open market.

For EVs the depreciation curve is especially aggressive because of perceived advancements. Are the advancements worth buying new? I dunno! You tell me - but this is clearly being reflected in the market.

From a strict utilitarian standpoint, optimizing your depreciation/utility function should mean you're buying almost every single thing used. But yet lots of people don't do that. Humans are empirically not very good utilitarians!
by martin-t | 2025-10-17 17:53:26+00:00
Nobody wants to talk about the real solution because it involves making all social relations based on consent.

Choosing not just your partners but classmates, teachers, colleagues, and neighbors.

First, it's less efficient. But most importantly, it involves making value judgements of other people - identifying those who cause most conflict in society and not consenting to their interactions with us - not consenting to their participation.

And that's a no-go because we're all supposed to believe we're all equal.
by bityard | 2025-10-17 17:53:58+00:00
I mean, yes, housing and land is cheaper in the midwest US, but you mostly have to get at least an hour away from a major city before it becomes what I consider "cheap." (Otherwise you're still looking at more desirable suburban or bedroom community housing prices.)

But to defend Jeff, the pictures in the article show like a 4x4 corner of a room, even if we extrapolate to say, 8x8x8, that amount of space can usually be found in even a 1-bedroom apartment. I have seen many pictures of amazingly complete electronics/hacking workbenches from around the world that easily fit into much smaller spaces.
by Slowrodreguez | 2025-10-17 17:54:07+00:00
Hey everyone, I’ve been hacking on something called FlowAPI — it automatically turns a CSV or Excel file into a REST API with CRUD routes, OpenAPI docs, Supabase auth (JWT), and basic rate limiting.

I built it to avoid spending hours wiring up boilerplate every time I need an API for internal data.

Curious how others handle quick API generation from datasets — do you usually script it, use Airtable, or something else?

(If it’s okay per sub rules, I can drop a demo link in the comments.)
by mxuribe | 2025-10-17 17:54:24+00:00
I'm 50/50 on this...Because on one side, i'm happy to see more innovation, or if not innovation, at least some progress on energy industry in this form. But, on the other side, i tend to - maybe sometimes unfairly - feel really pessimistic once i hear that Amazon is involved. Like, whatever eggs need to be broken for making the omelette are just not worth it in the long run. But, maybe this is "Pessimistic Friday" for me. ;-)