MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-09 15:34:49+00:00
"Asked a friend":

Key Themes & Arguments:

1. Divergent market signals • Gold has surged (~50 %+ over the past year) and the dollar has weakened, suggesting investor fears that governments may resort to inflation (i.e. currency debasement) to ease debt burdens. • But bond markets—especially through long-term inflation expectations embedded in yields and inflation swaps—are relatively steady and show little sign of expecting runaway inflation. 2. Why the disconnect? • The article posits that different investor motivations may be in play. Gold’s rally might be driven not purely by inflation fears, but by geopolitical risk, central bank reserve behavior, and rate cuts/expectations of falling yields. • Meanwhile, bond investors appear anchored by beliefs in central bank discipline, moderate inflation, and weak job growth, which limit inflationary pressure in the view of bond markets. 3. Longer-term concerns still loom • Over the long haul, the mismatch between rising debts, low taxation, and persistent spending may force a reckoning: either austerity or inflation. The article suggests many politicians will prefer the inflation route. • But for now, that outcome seems distant. Bond markets are not pricing in that scenario imminently. 4. Possible scenarios ahead • If economic growth maintains momentum and the recent softening in jobs is transitory, the Fed might reverse course—undoing rate cuts or raising rates. That could challenge gold, stocks, and bonds alike. • Only if policymakers allow inflation to run unchecked (or effectively “print money”) would the “debasement trade” fully materialize.
by runarberg | 2025-10-09 15:35:31+00:00
In theory the Palestinians (nor even Hamas) shouldn’t be too unhappy about this compromise. The draft deal had some serious issues, many of which flat out illegal under international law, and in a just world these parts would never actually be implemented and instead Palestine would get their independent and democratic state. As well as many Israelis would be tried for the crime of genocide.

Regarding the hostages, Hamas wasn’t gaining anything by keeping them, the best they could hope for was a prisoner swap, since Israel was more then happy to continue the genocide even if that would cost the lives of hostages. So releasing them will not cost Hamas any leverage, really.

But regrettably we don‘t live in a just world, and the best we can hope for is that this ceasefire will last long enough for the international community to step up their game and actually assert pressure on Israel to not only not break the ceasefire, but also to implement their obligations to international law and give Palestinians a) civil rights b) a political means of resistance, and c) self determination.
by churchill | 2025-10-09 15:35:52+00:00
I agree with you. We don't even have to imagine: the UK and US were planning preemptive nuclear strikes against the entire Soviet Union before they tested their first nuke.

Operation Dropshot and Unthinkable called for hundreds of nukes and conventional bombs to be dropped on Soviet cities to, "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire."

All in all, I don't even have a dog in the fight, but people like Qian Xuesen won't become retarded if they're expelled from the US. If I remember correctly, something like a third of all top-tier AI researchers are Chinese. If you count all those with an immigration background, they'll be close to 50-70%. They will simply create companies and products that compete and take market share from American companies.

Are Americans - the country that votes out presidents for rising gas prices - willing to make do with a lower standard of living? Because that'd what you'll get when some the world's best innovators are no longer based in your country.
by indrora | 2025-10-09 15:36:03+00:00
A few years ago, I was in Vegas for an event.

All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.

All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?

Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.

As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
by gen220 | 2025-10-09 15:36:22+00:00
When people are talking about inflation, what inflation statistic are they referring to? CPI has been below 3% since May 2024.

Precious metals (silver, gold, platinum, palladium) have out-paced Bitcoin.

USD:EUR hasn't gotten worse than 5-year lows, same with USD:GBP.

I don't think these statistics support "money is fleeing the U.S." or "tariffs are causing runaway inflation", unless I'm missing something? You could paint it as "wealthy people are hedging against globalized recession / future break-downs in trade", maybe, but then why are precious metals out-performing bitcoin?

If anything this feels like "momentum"-driven speculation, similar to what we're seeing with some of the biggest companies in the S&P500, and similar to what we saw in late-2020, where the numbers are front-running a plausible but as-of-yet-unrealized narrative.

What indicators that people are finding useful to make sense of this?
by zaphodq42 | 2025-10-09 15:36:22+00:00
Slow hand made path is required in programming because you are programming a machine to do the computation multiple times. Some programs might run for decades and do the same computation billions of times. So what it took a while to write the program! It is worth it to make sure it is right.

Sure, you can vibe code an MVP. But then let’s limit it at that.
by daemonologist | 2025-10-09 15:36:35+00:00
You've gotten lots of good advice for long-term improvement, and for the nuclear option; here are some short-term smaller fixes which are (much) better than nothing. The idea with these is to put up a little speedbump in the way of mindless consumption, but not so much of a barrier that you'll be tempted to remove it yourself.

- For Youtube, delete and disable watch history. This will make the "home" and "shorts" tabs blank, and make the below-video recommendations less effective. Your subscriptions and everything else will still work normally. Also uninstall the app from your phone, so you have to access it in a browser (even on Android you can "disable" it).

- For Reddit, block r/all (and maybe / (home)) in your adblocker on all your devices. (For ublock origin the rule is ||reddit.com/r/all^$document ) The block can easily be clicked through, but that means you'll leave it in place for next time. Non-r/all pages will still work. Again, uninstall any apps.

I don't have similar advice for Facebook and Twitch; maybe unfollow everyone on Twitch so you have to look up channels intentionally?
by jayd16 | 2025-10-09 15:36:39+00:00
20 years ago, you could consistently pick up a phone, get a dial tone, and then call a human to solve a problem.

Sure, plenty of stuff didn't work. The issue is we're not bothering to make anything that does. It's a clear cultural shift and all of this "nothing ever worked so why try" talk here is not what I remember.

We're in a stochastic era of scale where individual experiences do not matter. AI turning computers from predictable to not is in the same direction but with yet more velocity.
by ketzu | 2025-10-09 15:36:45+00:00
> Having said this I do not agree with the depiction of the restitution process [...] and use the DB Navigator app

Iirc they only started this possibility in june 2021. So anyone, especially foreigners, that experiences this system before then, will still know the paper only version. And 2021 is quite late to implement a digital version of that.
by luciferin | 2025-10-09 15:37:00+00:00
>The slowdown in immigration means the US doesn’t need such robust job gains to keep the unemployment rate stable, suggesting the recent slide in payrolls may not be so worrisome, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

If I'm reading this correctly, the argument being made is that U.S. population is declining now, so the job market shrinking doesn't matter. Isn't that...equally troubling...at least to the same people who are enacting the policies causing this?
by hungryhobbit | 2025-10-09 15:37:18+00:00
Node's test runner is a non-contender, at least right now.

If you've ever used any other test runner, you'll find Node's is woefully inferior. I'd say "but maybe it will get better", except I've seen the maintainer responses to several issues, and it seems they are wedded to bad architectural decisions that keep it that way.
by this_sudheer | 2025-10-09 15:37:52+00:00
Hello HN! I'm Sai Sudheer, and I built CinePrompt because I was tired of wasting 30 minutes scrolling Netflix just to end up watching nothing.

Here's what kept happening: I'd know exactly what vibe I wanted — something tense but not horror, or uplifting but grounded — but I had no title in mind. Netflix's keyword search was useless. Their recommendations? Just "what's trending" or "because you watched X." I'd read dozens of descriptions, watch trailer after trailer, check ratings, and still feel paralyzed by choice. My movie night would be ruined before it even started. So I built CinePrompt. You describe your exact mood in plain English, and it finds movies that match. Real examples that work: - "My boss is driving me insane, need something about workplace revenge" - "Something that feels like The Office but a movie" - "Just got ghosted, need dark comedies about dating disasters" - "Feeling like an imposter at work, want movies about faking it till you make it" Each recommendation comes with AI analysis explaining why it fits your vibe and what makes it worth watching — no spoilers, just enough context to help you decide with confidence. What started as a weekend side project turned into something I couldn't stop building. I kept adding features based on early user feedback: voice search for couch browsing, streaming platform data so you know where to watch, AI explanations so you're not guessing if a movie actually fits. Under the hood, it's built with RAG architecture using vector embeddings for semantic search, Groq inference (with Gemini fallback), and Redis caching for sub-second responses. This is my first full-stack product built solo. Recent grad from Northeastern University, and CinePrompt is the most ambitious thing I've shipped. Try it now: 5 free searches/day, no login needed. Sign up for 15/day. Live: https://cineprompt.vercel.app GitHub: https://github.com/SudheerNaraharisetty/Cineprompt I'm actively looking for full-time opportunities (AI Engineering, Data Analytics, Product Management, Full-stack). I'd genuinely appreciate your feedback: - Does this solve a problem you've experienced with movie discovery? - What search prompts would you try? Any edge cases I should handle better? - What features would make this more useful for you? - How accurate are the recommendations for your taste?

I know there's a ton of room for improvement, and I'd be grateful for any technical critique or suggestions. This community has taught me so much, and I'm here to learn from your insights on what I could do better.

Thanks for taking the time to check this out!
by johnfn | 2025-10-09 15:37:57+00:00
I tend to like the idea of making impossible states impossible, but your particular example seems to have a number of negative tradeoffs. For one, it's more complex than the original data structure - a simple call like .map() is now a fairly chunky operation, and if you want to filter after that, you really have a mess on your hands. Additionally, you seem to have traded off one set of "state we shouldn't allow to be represented" for another. For instance, you could have mistakenly included `active` in `prev` or `next`. That is something you couldn't have done in the initial version.
by AJ007 | 2025-10-09 15:38:29+00:00
I've been using newsboat for years. I've thought about trying out miniflux for a while, but a few days ago I got a different idea.

First, the newsboat DB is SQLlite so it's easy to access. I wrote a few scripts that built static HTML pages of all of the feeds along with a feed style page. I copied the HN page html/CSS, which to me feels like the maximum compact view while still being readable.

Now I have a bash script that will refresh all of the newsboat feeds and then open the static HTML page in the default web browser.

Thinking a lot about the impact of "vibe" coding recently made me wonder why anyone needs to be locked in to not just a set UI but any sort of rigid external control of how the user sees and interacts with information.

I want to see all my news chronologically. Now in a single place I have hn, lobste.rs, numerous twitter/x feeds, mastodon, and a lot of other blogs all visible chronologically. If someone was noisy I could apply keyword filters to the feeds and block certain things out. If I wanted to, I could put this on a server and access it through my phone.

This was definitely "the easy" way to do this. You could raise $1 million and do the same thing the hard way.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-10-09 15:38:33+00:00
Instead of relying on vector databases, DeepMind proposes:

1. The LLM itself selects the most relevant documents — no vector database needed.

2. The selected documents are then placed directly into the context for generation.

This kind of in-context retrieval approach greatly improves retrieval accuracy compared to traditional vector-based retrieval methods.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-09 15:38:33+00:00
> Gold and silver are at record levels because of capital fleeing fiat due to lack of confidence in central banks -- Trump is actively attacking the US Fed trying to destroy Fed independence.

That may be part of it. But another part is the US deficit. There is no way that's sustainable. The Fed can't fix it; Congress has to. And do you see any reason to hope that Congress will?
by david_draco | 2025-10-09 15:38:34+00:00
A browser using 32 GB for 8 tab isn't necessarily wasteful, there is a lot of caching one can do to make back/forward buttons extremely fast. It would be wasteful to not allocate that memory if it is otherwise free and unused. Usually browsers use up what is available. The more interesting metric would be whether starting another high-RAM application will lead the browser to give up most of the 32 GB.
by ealexhudson | 2025-10-09 15:38:38+00:00
Moore's law has kind of ended already though, and maybe has done for a few years, and even if you can make a chip which is faster there's a basic thermodynamics problem running it at full tilt for any meaningful period of time. I would have expected that to have impacted software development, and I don't think it particularly has, and there's also no obvious gain in e.g. compilers or other optimization which would have countered the effect.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-09 15:38:42+00:00
> Using public roads as a racetrack is also obnoxious - so what you're really saying is that these cars aren't needed.

High-end sports cars are generally bought because they are sexy, aesthetically superior to regular vehicles, have brand cachet, and signal status. They’re also the trophies of people who adore the motor vehicle. They generally lead in high technology.

People who buy them and wanna race them typically do it on racetracks, not speeding in neighborhoods or cities. That racing is the domain of your average driver, cab driver, etc. who drives more mundane vehicles.
by indigodaddy | 2025-10-09 15:38:42+00:00
Couldn't find a non-paywall for it, but Google AI mode managed to give a brief summary:

Gold prices are rising sharply, suggesting investor concern about currency debasement through inflation, while the bond market forecasts long-run inflation will remain near the Federal Reserve's target. This discrepancy is likely driven by separate narratives, with gold potentially fueled more by central bank diversification and speculative buying than a pure "debasement trade"
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-09 15:38:43+00:00
Fundamentally, if immigration declines, you do not need as many new jobs to keep the labor market in balance. The US population is barely declining at this point, so this wouldn't be an issue until wages climb from labor shortages beyond what the market can bear in each sector being discussed. Based on current US profit data, we have a long way to go, all over the economy (profits are unpaid wages, broadly speaking; lots of room to raise wages based on observable value transfer flows).

There are labor "shortages" in the sense that wages are going up slowly (you see this in Amazon and Bank of America raising their minimum wage to the low $20s), which is new for an economic system and its participants unfamiliar with a population cohort of workers that is starting to shrink and will do so far into the future due to demographic dynamics. With that said, there is still a long way to go to create enough "labor shortage" (workers aging out of prime working age population cohort, reduced immigration) to push wages up to living wages for domestic workers (which is $25-$50/hr, depending on geography and target historical purchasing power parity).

(~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month)

Citations:

Postpandemic US Immigration Surge: New Facts and Inflationary Implications [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529166 - October 2025

A Major Bank [Bank of America] Is Upping Pay to $25 an Hour — And Amazon Is Coming Close Too - https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/bank-of-america-a... - September 18th, 2025

Amazon spends $1B to increase pay and lower health care costs for US workers - https://apnews.com/article/amazon-pay-health-care-b847655049... - September 18th, 2025

Bank of America's $25/hour minimum wage jump flexes on everyone else - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45315804 - September 2025

The US Population Could Shrink in 2025, for the first time ever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111228 - September 2025

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025

Vermont May Be the Face of a Long-Term U.S. Labor Shortage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38249820 - November 2023

Dallas Fed blog post mentioned: https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1009

MIT Living Wage Calculator - https://livingwage.mit.edu/

US Census: US & World Population Clock - https://www.census.gov/popclock/

HN Search: labor shortage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(think in systems)
by churchill | 2025-10-09 15:38:48+00:00
I don't think that website implies what you're thinking. The only significant thing that happened in 1971 is that Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, giving the US leeway to run unlimited deficits, paying for imports with paper.

Now, America wants to reduce its debt and curb industrial powers like the EU, Japan, China, etc. but it doesn't want to give up its exorbitant privilege that got it into the debt whole in the first place.

You can't have it both ways.
by isodev | 2025-10-09 15:39:10+00:00
I wouldn’t blame the “ever expanding” abstractions as the root cause behind lower quality. Adding layers of abstraction is how we make ever more complex software. It’s misleading to think that just because the main human interface idioms have remained similar (mouse, pointer, windows, task bars, etc), there hasn’t been an astronomical increase in depth and complexity of what one can do on one’s system.

And it’s not all bad. Yes, SwiftUI can be glitchy but at the name time, it gives us an extremely simple API to create everything from complex UIs to widgets. Yes you have “more control” with App/UIKit but that comes at the cost of extra learning curve and development time. And we live in a world that’s unfortunately still driven by money, so every app or system has some constraints that push the limits of what we can do.
by fwipsy | 2025-10-09 15:39:16+00:00
I apologize for accusing you of pasting AI output; I still would have preferred that you edited it down to a more manageable length.

The probability calculation apparently assumes that Ghislaine Maxwell has a Reddit account. Reddit had only about a million users in 2006. There were about a billion people with Internet access in 2006, so the chances of a given Internet user being on Reddit in 2006 are about 1 in 1000.

Regarding stylometry, I agree that the account reads as British (and the user admits that he's worked in the UK during an AMA) but it also reads to me as male, and not in a way that seems affected.

It seems to me that the whole argument basically hinges on /u/hasharin's screenshots being faked. I agree it wouldn't be hard to perfectly counterfeit Reddit screenshots, but it still seems more likely that they're real to me.

Overall I would give maybe 1 in 4 odds on it being true. Fortunately nothing of importance (to me) hinges on finding out the truth about this :)

> article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence

Where does it do that? I don't see it.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-09 15:39:24+00:00
Some feature requests:

* Is it possible to add/remove timezones and store the setting in a cookie?

* Rename the timezones? (I may prefer to read "John&Mary(Berlin)" instead of just "Berlin")

* 12hs vs 24hs, [Hi from Argentina! 12pm is very confusing.]

* Hard question: Does it handle DST? (Yes, it's a huge mess.)
by imiric | 2025-10-09 15:39:25+00:00
If you haven't noticed a dramatic decline in average software quality, you're not paying attention or willfully ignoring it. The article is right.

This is partly related to the explosion of new developers entering the industry, coupled with the classic "move fast and break things" mentality, and further exacerbated by the current "AI" wave. Junior developers don't have a clear path at becoming senior developers anymore. Most of them will overly rely on "AI" tools due to market pressure to deliver, stunting their growth. They will never learn how to troubleshoot, fix, and avoid introducing issues in the first place. They will never gain insight, instincts, understanding, and experience, beyond what is acquired by running "AI" tools in a loop. Of course, some will use these tools for actually learning and becoming better developers, but I reckon that most won't.

So the downward trend in quality will only continue, until the public is so dissatisfied with the state of the industry that it causes another crash similar to the one in 1983. This might happen at the same time as the "AI" bubble pop, or they might be separate events.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-10-09 15:39:49+00:00
> When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he crafted a French constitution that he wanted to be “short and obscure”, the better to enable his authoritarian power. The United States has ended in the same place.

What is “obscure” in the US constitution?

The first amendment is the one thing that makes it impossible for authoritarian US to be reality.