MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Mechanism Design Theory
by mertbirlik | 2025-11-08 00:36:55+00:00
TL;DR: I’m exploring a simple, real-world mechanism design for e-commerce pricing that mixes a deterministic discount path with a tiny-probability “free purchase” option. Each ticket purchase slightly increases the public discount for everyone, so the system tries to be positive-sum rather than zero-sum. Looking for critique on the mechanism, proofs (IC/IR/BB), and implementation feedback.

What it is An applied mechanism that sets (i) a discount schedule over time/sales and (ii) a very small probability p that a buyer gets the item for free (or a full rebate). Buyers choose between: 1. Buy Now at the current discounted price, or 2. Try Your Luck by buying a low-cost ticket with a tiny chance to get the item free.

Every ticket purchase nudges the item’s public discount down a notch for everyone (externality on price), which increases conversion even for risk-averse buyers.

Why this might matter • Converts “promotion/giveaway” into a tunable, budget-bounded mechanism. • Encourages network effects: risk-seeking users fund discounts enjoyed by risk-neutral/averse users. • Potentially increases welfare and revenue simultaneously (under reasonable demand/elasticity assumptions).

Design sketch (feedback wanted) • Constraints: Individual Rationality (buyers should expect non-negative surplus), approximate Budget Balance in expectation, and platform risk caps (p·price ≤ margin envelope). • Knobs: p(t), ticket price τ, discount step Δ, cooldowns/limits to prevent abuse, anti-sybil rules. • Modeling: Monte Carlo for calibration; Markov-style retention for repeated interaction; A/B on p and Δ.

Open questions • Clean proofs/conditions for IC/IR/BB here? • Welfare vs. classic sales + coupons? • Regulatory posture across jurisdictions (promotion vs. lottery vs. sweepstakes)?

Status & Ask I’m packaging a Shopify-compatible module and a short whitepaper. I’d love rigorous critique, pointers to similar mechanisms, or collaborators who enjoy mechanism design + practical engineering.

Contact: Mert — beyazpiyon54@gmail.com
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-08 00:36:56+00:00
A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-08 00:37:15+00:00
1. Everyone has been saying youth has been hit because AI is taking entry level jobs (a claim I’ve been suss about). But why does youth tend to be the one to get hit? I guess because young people tend to be more risky than more established folks?

Similarly - the wealth by generation graph confuses me, it seems to start in 1990 and doesn’t include generations before? We’re the silent generation that much more wealthy than the greatest generation or whatevs? Where the greatest at?
by sfpotter | 2025-11-08 00:38:37+00:00
I agree with what you're saying (including saying that arcfour is out of touch and doesn't really know what they're talking about), but... I do agree with them to an extent. And I have a kid (with another along the way). Kids adapt. They want to be on social media, or games, or Discord, or whatever because their friends are. If they have enough friends in real life doing something fun, that becomes where their specific group hangs out. The number of people you need in that group before it crosses that threshold is really low... 4, 5 people? That's all you need to have a tight knit friend group.

I've seen things like after school D&D club at the elementary school down the street where my son now goes to preschool. I'm optimistic that by the time he's older, there will be even more groups like this and more opportunities for him to have friends where they're doing activities that aren't mediated by screens.

To be clear, I'm not weighing on in on whether or not I think a ban is a good idea. I tend to think it is. But I do think the idea that there's nothing parents can do from the ground up without the help of government (which I'm not opposed to!) is also a bit misguided.
by mekoka | 2025-11-08 00:39:09+00:00
> I think you skipped over the commenter's main point while replying to them: you need to be able to have a good mental model of the code.

I actually addressed the root cause of the main point: a misunderstanding of the purpose of interfaces in Go. To me these complaints are analogous to someone saying that they're not able to move fast enough while trying to run underwater. Why don't you try swimming? The fact that whenever a complainer elaborates a bit, it often points to indications that they might be looking for Java in Go, also leads me to connect the original difficulty to the latter misunderstanding.

> A few well defined interfaces have the advantage of being easy to understand and see usages around the codebase without the overhead of many different variants of an interface.

Interfaces in Go are not a thing. They're a notice from a consumer to say "I'll be using these methods on whatever object you pass in this slot". Not much more. They're closely tied to the consumer (or a closely related set of consumers, if you don't want to be too zealous). It's a different mental model, but if you embrace it, it changes the way you write, read, and think about code.

> I've found it much more difficult to get my IDE to point out all the different ways some interface could be implemented.

Implemented? Forget that word completely. Ask instead "does the object I'm about to send have all the required methods?" If not, add the missing ones. That's it. It's all about the methods. Forget the interface itself, it's a label on a piece of napkin, a tag, to list the set of methods required by the consumer on a particular dependency.

I think Python duck-typing philosophy is a much better access door to Go's interfaces than Java interfaces. You just care about how a dependency will be used by its consumer. Now, if as a language designer you wanted to add the discipline of static typing on top of duck-typing, the logical conclusion would be either a syntax for "anonymous" interfaces that lets you duck-type

func Consumer(obj interface{doThis(str), doThat(int)}) { obj.doThis('foo'); obj.doThat(123); }

or the less ad-hoc style we've come to know from Go.
by CWuestefeld | 2025-11-08 00:39:13+00:00
I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my music.

But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify).

That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to them as well.
by kristofferR | 2025-11-08 00:41:08+00:00
It's right in the article:

"One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."

Don't forget that commercial launches may still have a government/science org as their customer in question.
by anordin95 | 2025-11-08 00:41:21+00:00
I'm an American who was retaliated against in the past for collective bargaining efforts. Luckily, that's illegal here as codified by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (it probably is in the UK too, I'm just not as familiar with their laws). I filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and eventually won my case, receiving compensation with interest; the Company also had to inform all employees of their collective bargaining rights digitally and physically.

Once the government shutdown ends, I highly recommend the affected American individuals file a complaint with the NLRB via their website: https://www.nlrb.gov/
by nitwit005 | 2025-11-08 00:42:06+00:00
> You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one.

I realize this is just for motivation in a subtitle, but people generally don't grasp how bicycles work, even after having ridden one.

Veritasium has a quite good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac
by SamInTheShell | 2025-11-08 00:42:59+00:00
Kinda wonder what the extent of this is. You can get some really great results from your employees by mandating shit like this. /s

I use AI daily and frankly I love it while thinking of it from the context of "I write some rough instructions and it can autocomplete an idea for me to an extremely great degree". AI literally types faster than me and is my new typewriter.

However, if I had to use it for every little thing, I'd do it. The problem though is when it reaches a point where I have to use it to replace critical thinking for something I really don't know yet.

The problem here is that these LLMs can and will churn out absolute trash. If this was done under mandate, the only thing I'd be able to respond with when that trash is being questioned is "the AI did it" and "idk, I was using AI like I was told".

It literally falls into the "above my pay-grade" category when it comes down as a mandate.

I really hope there's more nuance to articles like these though. I really hope these companies mandating AI use are doing so in a way that considers the limitations.

This article does not really clue me the reader in to if that is the case or not though.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-08 00:43:45+00:00
Mount a Windows 11 ISO. Open an administrative command window. Navigate to the new drive letter. Enter this command:

.\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning /Telemetry Disable

I've used this to upgrade 10 to 11 on non approved hardware, going back to at least 2nd gen Intel CPUs. I've used it to upgrade existing Pro, EDU and IOT that didn't want to upgrade.

The install window will say server but it isn't.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-11-08 00:46:30+00:00
After reading the abstract I'm not sure what they are trying to prove. None of their examples are relevant to "spontaneous" emergence of hierarchy, they are all somehow tied to environmental or economic factors.

Hierarchy is definitely useful in some cases but has interesting tradeoffs. In emergency conditions it's very useful to have a strong hierarchy (especially if the leader has experience with that type of emergency), but during 'good times' strong top-down regulation represses creativity and adaptability.

Alternating between phases of hierarchy to consolidate good ideas from phases with high generation of ideas/diversity is probably ideal, and is probably what I would have looked into if I was studying hierarchy.

I'm going to read more of the thesis to be sure, but part about VDJ recombination seems tenuous - the fact that some aspects of VDJ recombination are regulated or vary between individuals shouldn't surprise anyone since environments and diseases vary all over the world. It's also not a new finding.

Here's some better reading about the origins of antigen receptor diversity, or as some people call it, the Generation of Diversity (GOD):

Another manifestation of GOD (2004) https://www.nature.com/articles/430157a

Evolutionarily conserved TCR binding sites, identification of T cells in primary lymphoid tissues, and surprising trans-rearrangements in nurse shark (2010) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20488795/

Evidence of G.O.D.’s Miracle: Unearthing a RAG Transposon (2017) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5428540/

Origin of immunoglobulins and T cell receptors: A candidate gene for invasion by the RAG transposon (2025) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40614193/

edit, did not realize this was written by the He Jiankui, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui#Human_gene-editing_...

Makes sense that his thesis was in biophysics, not in biology itself. in a biology department someone would probably have disillusioned him of his top-down control tendencies
by zjp | 2025-11-08 00:47:11+00:00
>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.

This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (especially the young ones) regularly pitch welfare state expansions that are more generous than European counterparts (see Kat Abu on 'medicare for anyone physically present in the US, for free'; a more generous offer than even the NHS).
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-08 00:47:56+00:00
See, I'm coming from the understanding that language development is a dead-end in the real world. Can you name a single language made after Zig or Rust? And even those languages haven't taken over much of the professional world. So when I say companies will maintain compilers, I mean DSLs (like starlark or RSpec), application-specific languages (like CUDA), variations on existing languages (maybe C++ with some in-house rules baked in), and customer-facing config languages for advanced systems and SaaS applications.
by com2kid | 2025-11-08 00:48:48+00:00
Apple is the often sung master of this.

Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0

There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.
by badtuple | 2025-11-08 00:49:16+00:00
I was also curious what direction the article was going to take. The showcase is cool, and the features you mentioned are cool. But for me, Zig is cool is because all the pieces simply fit together with essentially no redundancy or overloading. You learn the constructs and they just compose as you expect. There's one feature I'd personally like added, but there's nothing actually _missing_. Coding in it quickly felt like using a tool I'd used for years, and that's special.

Zig's big feature imo is just the relative absence of warts in the core language. I really don't know how to communicate that in an article. You kind of just have to build something in it.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-08 00:50:24+00:00
This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.
by londons_explore | 2025-11-08 00:51:12+00:00
I really want this to be the thing that pushes the industry into automated air traffic control.

It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia.

Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-08 00:51:24+00:00
From TFA: "One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."

So it sounds like Blue Origin would be concerned
by crazygringo | 2025-11-08 00:52:02+00:00
I think it might be useful to put some screenshots of other fonts on your page, to show what symbol or alignment problems yours corrects. Because I've studied a lot of typeface design, and I can't really figure out what you're doing, what pain points you're trying to address.

Because when you say "and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?", I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. I certainly am curious though, since you went to all the work of building a new typeface!

And when you talk about fixing alignment, like all of these seem correctly vertically aligned with each other here on HN at least in monospace mode:

<->=+-~

So if you could demonstrate what it is fixing with reference to the most common monospace system/coding fonts, I think that would help a ton.
by pdonis | 2025-11-08 00:54:13+00:00
> I made the request to try and tease apart where we disagree exactly.

I thought that was obvious: you're making a claim about how individual people's confidence vs. competence evolves over time, that as far as I know is not supported by any research--certainly it's not supported by Dunning and Kruger's research. That's why I asked you if you know of any research that does support it. "Images found in a Google search" does not qualify.

> It seems increasingly likely that I was mistaken in thinking we could explore this subject together.

That's the way I see it too, though evidently not for the same reason you do.

> It seems you are intent on attacking my position and discrediting my points

I'm interested in finding out what basis you have, if any, for the claim you made that I described above. "It's self-evident" is not what I was looking for. Nor is "do a Google search and look at the images".

> and not interested in building a shared understanding.

If you can point me at research I wasn't previously aware of that supports your claims, that would be helpful. If you want to try to get to "a shared understanding" based on claims about what you think is self-evident or by looking at images from a Google search, then no, I don't think we're going to get anywhere.
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-08 00:54:22+00:00
This is patently wrong on at least several of these.

Rust is explicitly a community project having been born out of a non-profit, and if you’re discounting corp-funded but community driven that’s definitely Rust. If not, please indicate the corp that’s driving Rust.

Zig is a BDFL project like Python was (not sure how it is these days) - community contributes sure, but Andrew makes the big calls and directional changes.
by lmm | 2025-11-08 00:55:00+00:00
> clearly the horrid performance of modern web apps has /something/ to do with the 2 frameworks they’re all built on.

Nonsense. Apps from all frameworks and none show the same performance issues, and you can find exceptionally snappy examples from almost all frameworks too. Modern webapps are slow because the business incentives are to make them slow, the technology choices are incidental.
by TZubiri | 2025-11-08 00:55:17+00:00
There's some properties that ensure it's moat. Developers need to learn React and there's not much transferability of knowledge from the underlying tech. If I know Debian, I can understand most of Ubuntu. However if I know HTML, I'll probably understand react even less. This is a great tactic of having a vendor lock in not only at the infrastructure level of a company, but at the programmer level.
by fragmede | 2025-11-08 00:55:20+00:00
Oh yeah on that front, China's fucked and they have a housing crisis like every other country. Did I say like every other country? Well, not quite. See, their problem is that they have the opposite problem. China's current housing problem is that they've built too much housing so there's a real threat of an industry collapse just because there's too much housing! A glut of housing.

What fools!
by kg | 2025-11-08 00:55:24+00:00
> You can adjust how much you want to pay the site per hour and also send one-time payments. The money is "streamed" every minute, which you can observe in DevTools.

I guess the era of being able to leave a tab open without worrying about it is long over. Now you'll need to be careful to close every tab the moment you're done with it - perhaps after taking a screenshot of the page so you can read it more cheaply.
by rvz | 2025-11-08 00:55:25+00:00
Great article. Here is a very simple test that I use to find very cracked compiler engineers on this site.

Just search for either of the words "Triton", "CUDA", "JAX", "SGLang" and "LLVM" (Not LLM) and it filters almost everyone out on "Who wants to be Hired' with 1 or 2 results.

Where as if you search "Javascript", 200+ results.

This tells me that there is little to no interest in compiler engineering here (and especially in startups) unless you are at a big tech company or at one of the biggest AI companies that use these technologies.

Of course, the barrier is meant to be high. but if a recruiter has to sift through 200+ CVs a page of a certain technology (Javascript), then your chances of getting selected against the competition for a single job is vanishingly small.

I said this before and it works all the time, for compilers; open-source contributions to production-grade compiler projects with links to commits is the most staightforward differentiator and proof one can use to stand out against the rest.
by chrisco255 | 2025-11-08 00:56:24+00:00
I feel like the article didn't really hit on the big ones: comptime functions, no hidden control flow, elegant defaults, safe buffers, etc.

What Zig really does is make systems programming more accessible. Rust is great, but its guarantees of memory safety come with a learning curve that demands mastering lifetimes and generics and macros and a complex trait system. Zig is in that class of programming languages like C, C++, and Rust, and unlike Golang, C#, Java, Python, JS, etc that have built-in garbage collection.

The explicit control flow allows you as a developer to avoid some optimizations done in Rust (or common in 3rd party libraries) that can bloat binary sizes. This means there's no target too small for the language, including embedded systems. It also means it's a good choice if you want to create a system that maximizes performance by, for example, preventing heap allocations altogether.

The built-in C/C++ compiler and language features for interacting with C code easily also ensures that devs have access to a mature ecosystem despite the language being young.

My experience with Zig so far has been pleasurable. The main downside to the language has been the churn between minor versions (language is still pre-1.0 so makes perfect sense, but still). That being said, I like Zig's new approach to explicit async I/O that parallels how the language treats Allocators. It feels like the correct way to do it and allows developers again the flexibility to control how async and concurrency is handled (can choose single-threaded event loop or multi-threaded pool quite easily).