MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-11-22 03:08:21+00:00
Profit is fine. It's how society tells you that your customers value what you are producing more than it costs you to produce (after paying suppliers and workers etc). That's how you avoid the massive misallocations of Soviet communism.

(Well, the Soviets did have one sector that performed reasonably well, and that's partially because they set plenty of decent incentives there: weapons production and the military.)

Now you could say that the 'wrong' activities are profitable. And, I agree and I am all for eg CO2 taxes or making taxes on equity financing cheaper than those on debt and deposits (to incentivise companies, especially banks, to rely more on stocks than on debt, to decrease brittle leverage in the economy); or lowering subsidies for meat production or for burning food instead of eating it etc.
by ivraatiems | 2025-11-22 03:08:22+00:00
You ignored the things I was actually trying to ask you about and instead focused on a point where I specifically called out that we wouldn't agree - a point I specifically conceded for the purpose of this discussion because I didn't think arguing it was productive.

When you say:

> You'd never accept the immigration system we had back when Fazlur Kahn came here, because you believe in magic soil. If we implemented such a system, immigration proponents would immediately shift their focus to eliminating any bargained-for restrictions, which is exactly what they've been doing since 1965.

I am not talking about what I'd accept. I'm asking why you aren't advocating for it as something you would accept. The critical point is:

> the people in control of policy on this issue, frankly, are people who are so bald-facedly hypernationalist that they see "Bangladeshi" and think "not American," and stop there. They do not care to implement a system that would work better. They don't want a system at all.

> If you think societies aren't a monolith, whether they can change or not, then allowing movement between societies to help people find ones they fit into better is a good thing. If you think the US is better off with you in it, then "just reject everyone from country/culture X" is not the right approach. That is not the position current immigration policy espouses. My original point was that the US immigration system is designed to make it impossible to immigrate legally. Not just difficult or subject to scrutiny - effectively impossible.

> Is that what you want, given your beliefs?

You may say that you don't actually think "people from culture X are not worth bringing to the US," but given the above, that is what you are functionally advocating for. You are advocating that the ladder be pulled up behind you, and me, and everyone else in this country who is successful as the child of immigrants.

If you think that an immigration system that isn't just "disallow all foreign immigrants" is worth fighting for, even if the system you want at the end isn't the one I want, you should be fighting for it instead of arguing it's OK we don't have it.
by eru | 2025-11-22 03:10:49+00:00
> Two big ifs: the central bank is competent and enough and people find new jobs.

That's only one 'if'. Well, the second 'people finding jobs' is a given if you have a half-way competent central bank and a regulations even slightly less insane than South Africa's.

But let's worry about technological unemployment once we actually see it. So far it has been elusive. (Even in South Africa, it's not technology but their own boneheaded policies that drive the sky high unemployment. They ain't technically more advanced than the rest of the world.)
by biztos | 2025-11-22 03:11:19+00:00
I went to a school of about 50 kids, and I often wished I’d been at a school of 500 or more kids, but looking back I’m very glad my family didn’t opt for the school of 5000 kids.

At 50 kids, if you were social you definitely had friends (not just acquaintances) from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. At 50 kids, you could play sports on the official team if you wanted to and showed up and didn’t slack off. You knew everyone and there were no cliques, that would have been ridiculous with 50 kids.

I could go on, but those are just a few things (IMO good things) you get in a tiny school that you probably wouldn’t have at 500 kids and surely not at 5000.

I find it strange that you don’t hear of more homeschooling groups pulling together to create something like the 50-kid school.
by Gimpei | 2025-11-22 03:12:52+00:00
I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-22 03:13:03+00:00
> Just how sure are we the AI bubble is the entire reason for these absurd prices?

We're not, and market dictates that they don't have to talk to know to jack up the prices.

This ram price spike is leading Nvidia reporting for this quarter: gross margins were 70 percent. It's looking like their year over year increase in margins (double) is not because it came anywhere close to shipping double the number of units.

Meanwhile if you look at Micron their gross margin was 41% for fiscal year 2025, and 2024 looks to be 24%.

Micron and its peers, are competing with Nvidia for shareholder dollars (the CEO's real customer). Them jacking up prices is because there is enough of the market, dumb enough, to bear it right this second. And every CEO has to be looking at those numbers and thinking the same things: "Where is my cut of the pie, why aren't we at 60 percent".

We're now at a point where hardware costs are going to inhibit development. Everyone short of the biggest players are now locked out, and thats not sustainable. Of the AI ventures there is only one that seems to have a reasonable product, and possibly reasonable financials. Many of the other players are likely going to be able to weather the write downs.

The music will stop, the question is when.
by jorvi | 2025-11-22 03:13:08+00:00
> We learn that liberalism was literally a response to "take from the weak" so to present it as a primary criticism is... interesting.

If 3M dumps PFAS-related chemicals into rivers that feed drinkwater, its good business. If you or I pour a few cups of PFAS-related chemicals into our neighbor's well, that'll get us arrested for poisoning.

That's why I said "minimum impediment", which is something you would usually associate with libertarianism. The current strain of Western liberalism has evolved even past libertarianism. At least with libertarianism, the state is supposed to protect you from force and fraud. With modern-day Western liberalism, the state de facto licenses businesses to poison and defraud you so long as it makes the economy grow.

So yes, currently, (neo?)liberalism seems to lead to eat the weak to feed the powerful. It might not say that outright, and its talking points might be more noble, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..

It's led to the point where as soon as I hear someone in the West declare that they're a liberal (again, non-US), I immediately assume their primary goal is to further the tearing down of the social fabric of society so that businesses have even more power to make number go up.

I heard the beauty of a statement "we will make 140.000 people on welfare even more destitute, so that it becomes more attractive to work minimum wage", from the main liberal party in The Netherlands, supposedly a beacon of liberalism. That is malicious, bordering on malevolent.
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-11-22 03:13:13+00:00
Matmuls (and GEMM) are a hardware-friendly way to stuff a lot of FLOPS into an operation. They also happen to be really useful as a constant-step discrete version of applying a mapping to a 1D scalar field.

I've mentioned it before, but I'd love for sparse operations to be more widespread in HPC hardware and software.
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-22 03:13:17+00:00
Tax revenue hasn't gone up in the US despite many rounds of lowering taxes since the 1980s. Clearly, the US is on the part of the Laffer curve with a positive slope.

Laffer curve revenue increases have to derive from an increase in the marginal benefit of working. I can't see a mechanism for rich people to increase tax revenue if the rates drop.
by tharkun__ | 2025-11-22 03:13:38+00:00
The fact that a giant celestial body blocking out the source of the energy that powers all life on this planet inspired no awe in you

No. Why? We live on a larger giant celestial body than that ourselves and there are many others out there that are even larger. And there's giant tiny space rocks flying around and one could randomly come "out of nowhere" and end all life as we know it on the planet and no Bruce Willis would be able to save us.

with no ability for us to do anything at all to influence affairs whatsoever [...] that inspired no awe

That's exactly it. We can't do anything about that in any way. We also know it's gonna be over soon. No need to start praying or sacrificing animals or something.

reflection in you about our place in the universe

Why do I need a solar eclipse if I want to think about what we (think we) know about the universe and where we stand? I can still appreciate the eclipse, the fact that there's that giant celestial body you were talking about doing that.

our limitations as people

Again, why do I need an eclipse for that? Why does it automatically mean I need to think about my limitations?

I don't really think that's a testament to your superior apprehension of what you were looking at compared to the people who treated it as something worthy of reflection and introspection.

I never claimed any "superior apprehension" like that. Your opinion is your opinion and you're free to have it as well as share it and who would I be to tell you that you can't have it. But don't claim it's universally a "hauntingly humbling experience". You can have this event make you reflect and introspect but you have no right to claim that everyone has to and otherwise they're somehow inferior.
by ethbr1 | 2025-11-22 03:13:43+00:00
> BoJo delivered what the people demanded

This is one thing I don't get about the Brexit framing (at the time and now).

It was just under 52-48.

With some key constituencies voting remain (Scotland and Northern Ireland).

In a normal country, that should be 'There does not seem to be an obvious national consensus', not 'Leave won a mandate!'
by 0xfeba | 2025-11-22 03:14:10+00:00
> I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.

Same. I've also noticed that people entering the interstate seem to _expect_ that cars already on the interstate move over, or change speed to let them merge. Usually at 10-15 MPH slower than the speed of traffic.

I've made a point to, when I cannot move over, remain in my lane at the same speed. And I've had people just absolutely wait until the last moment of a long on-ramp to speed up, or slow down to merge. It's bizarre.
Ask HN: Suggest tiny website ideas that I can build this Christmas holiday
by ms7892 | 2025-11-22 03:15:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I am based in India. I work remotely for a US based company and I got a long holiday so I thought to be productive and build some tiny websites that can earn some side cash for me. I would love if someone can suggest simple website ideas to build in a day or week.

Thanks
by mawise | 2025-11-22 03:17:51+00:00
The article goes back and forth between bloggers who "are doing well" (ie: making money) and efforts that are non-commercial. It comes across as asking humanity to put more effort into writing and publishing in a non-profitable space while the blogging incentives are profit. I still think the unexplored space for blogging (and the LLM-proof space) is _private_ blogging--for friends and family. But maybe Facebook killed that space off, who knows.
by aeroevan | 2025-11-22 03:18:05+00:00
From those slides (I did have to open them via google, the direct link didn't seem to work):

Discussion • Evidence from this study and others suggest that homeschoolers may not be a socially isolated group • Instead, homeschoolers in these samples seem to have peer networks and social connections that arise in conventional and unconventional social settings and they report being well-connected later in life • It is important to note that although this study contributes to the literature, it has methodological limitations (e.g. small sample, self-reports)
by moduspol | 2025-11-22 03:19:17+00:00
It costs a lot more than a few bucks when you’re putting a lot of traffic through it. And running your own NAT instance does not incur per-GB traffic costs.

That said, the paid NAT gateways do also publish metrics. That can be nice when debugging a legitimate issue, such as when your gateway actually runs out of NAT ports to use.
by nvlled | 2025-11-22 03:20:16+00:00
The difference is in the ownership and lifetime of the state used by the function. A pure function uses state that it owns or is not outlived by the mutable state it uses. Closures on the other hand uses that it doesn't own or is outlived by the state during the invocation.

The important detail here is that closures automatically moves the variable that lives in the stack frame into the heap. You can't do that with a regular function. In languages with manual memory management like C, if you try to store and use a pointer to a invalidated stack frame, you will either get a crash if you are lucky, or get a crazy bug that shouldn't happen within reason.

Your supporting and concluding statements are directed at a scarecrow though. The person you are replying to isn't contending that closures and objects are different, they are specifically saying that closures and (regular) functions has an important distinction, which I agree.

Although I would say the person you are replying to did have poor imprecise wording on their part.
by eru | 2025-11-22 03:20:26+00:00
You'd think so, yes. But outside of wars, recessions caused by 'real' factors are surprisingly rare. They are almost all caused by central bank 'nominal' incompetence. (I'm using 'nominal' and 'real' here in the sense of 'to do with the number of zeros on your banknotes' vs 'actual goods and services and other real stuff in the economy'.)

One rare counter-example was perhaps Covid, where we had a real issue cause a recession.

That's not to say that real issues don't cause problems. Far from it! They just don't cause a recession, if the central bank is alert. The prototypical example is perhaps the UK economy after the Brexit referendum in 2016:

The leave vote winning was a shock to the British economy, but the Bank of England wisely let the Pound exchange rate take the hit, instead of tanking the economy trying to defend the exchange rate. As a result, British GDP (as eg measured in Euro) immediately shrank by a few percent and the expected path of future real GDP also shrank; but crucially: there was no recession nor its associated surge in unemployment.

For another example have a look at Russia in the last few years. Thanks to the very competent hands of Elvira Nabiullina at the Bank of Russia, the Russian economy has perhaps been creaking under the strain of war and sanctions but has not slid into recession.

Summary: real issue cause problems for the economy, but they don't have to cause a recession, if the central bank is alert. (That's in economies with a central bank. Central banks are actually more of an arsonist than a fire fighter here.)
by Melatonic | 2025-11-22 03:20:43+00:00
Just like some of the crypto booms and busts if you time it right this could be a good thing. Buy on a refresh cycle when AWS dumps a bunch of chips and RAM used or refurbished (some places even offer warranty which is nice).

And if the market crashes or takes a big dip then temporarily eBay will flood with high end stuff at good prices.

Sucks for anyone who needs to upgrade in the next year or two though !
by squeaky-clean | 2025-11-22 03:21:00+00:00
I frequently have to wait 20-30 minutes for an Uber or Lyft pickup at my apartment in south Brooklyn. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm usually going somewhere like Bay Ridge if I'm ordering an Uber and not somewhere popular. If it's after 1am I just open both Lyft and Uber and book both because at least one of them will just park the car and not come and wait out the timer before it assigns a new driver. I wish the situation is them just canceling, but drivers get penalized for that but apparently don't get penalized for parking at a gas station waiting for you to cancel and pay the fee or sit out the 10 minutes.

One time the guy was just 3 blocks away so I walked to where his icon was, found the car, and banged on his window.

During a weekend trip to Orlando trying to get from our hotel to Disney it took 6 drivers until someone finally came to pick us up.

At least the price is given ahead of time and paid through the app. I once had a cab driver charge my card for $300 when I was borderline blackout drunk in Miami Beach trying to get back to mainland Miami. Didn't use the card reader in the cab either, he used something like a Square reader on his phone. Not exactly sure which one, I didn't piece together what he was doing was fishy until the next afternoon when some blurry memories started coming back and I called my bank.
by Maxatar | 2025-11-22 03:21:24+00:00
What's awful is thinking that making mistakes is a form of shame, and that being corrected is a form of dominance. That view is something that is taught and acquired and I am very thankful that the people who taught me never made me feel that way. I make mistakes all the time and I never have to feel ashamed about it, nor do I feel that the people in my life who I've learned from hold some kind of position of power over me.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-11-22 03:23:19+00:00
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.

To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
by cxr | 2025-11-22 03:23:30+00:00
Not sure what any of what you wrote has to do with the subject at hand. Your comments are vague and come across as non-sequiturs at best.

The only thing I've claimed is that keeping dependencies under source control neutralizes the supply chain attacks that the author of the post describes.

They each belong to two totally different genres of comment.

If you have something concrete to say about the relationship between supply chain attacks and dependencies being excluded from source control in lieu of late-fetching them right at/before build time, then go for it.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-22 03:24:45+00:00
> which is fundamentally a housing supply issue

There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
by diob | 2025-11-22 03:25:27+00:00
It’s always frustrating to see the implication that people just need to exercise to solve their mental health struggles. It might not be your intention, but it's a take I see a lot online from influencers.

I say this as someone who is extremely fit. I've worked out religiously since high school. While exercise is integral to me feeling somewhat normal and provides a short-term boost, that is just not how it works for everyone. Some of us have 'broken brains' that cardio can't fix.

Exercise manages my baseline, but sertraline is what helped me finally bridge the gap. It allowed me to regulate my emotions and anxiety in a way that no amount of exercise ever did. And the introspection from being on it helped me make lifelong changes.

To be honest, fearmongering from folks online is what stopped me from taking it sooner, but I wish I had. It was fairly life-changing.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-11-22 03:26:34+00:00
On top of this, they started encouraging adoption of multithreading and polished up the APIs to make doing so easier even in the early days of OS X, since they were selling PPC G4/G5 towers with dual and eventually quad CPUs.

This meant that by the time they started pushing devs to pay attention to QoS and such, good Mac apps had already been thoroughly multithreaded for years, making it relatively easy to toss things onto lower priority queues.
by kenrose | 2025-11-22 03:26:41+00:00
We did this at OpsLevel a few years back. Went from AWS managed NAT gateway to fck-nat (Option 1 in the article).

It’s a (small) moving part we now have to maintain. But it’s very much worth the massive cost savings in NATGateway-Bytes.

A big part of OpsLevel is we receive all kinds of event and payload data from prod systems, so as we grew, so did our network costs. fck-nat turned that growing variable cost into an adorably small fixed one.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-22 03:28:23+00:00
Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.

Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
by arjie | 2025-11-22 03:28:29+00:00
Huh, thank you for letting me know. What did you observe? It's running on a machine in my home office so it's entirely possible something happened for a short duration of time.

I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.

Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!

> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)

And another where I say

> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.

It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)
by amarant | 2025-11-22 03:28:53+00:00
I actually kinda think ai will help with this, in a roundabout way.

I think of AI as a kind of floor, a minimum required skill to be able to get a job as a professional anything. If you want to find paid work as a developer, you have to at least be better than AI at the job.

Optimistically AI will filter out all the helpless Devs who can't get anything done from the job market. "Code monkeys" won't be a thing.

Juniors will have to enter unpaid trainee programs I guess, but that might not be such a bad thing