MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esrauch | 2025-11-14 23:24:47+00:00
I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.

It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things

It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.
by Xeoncross | 2025-11-14 23:25:04+00:00
I know they say that your programming language isn't the bottleneck, but I remember sitting there being frustrated as a young dev that I couldn't parse faster in the languages I was using when I learned about Go.

It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them)

I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
by pastel8739 | 2025-11-14 23:25:28+00:00
This feels like it makes a lot of assumptions:

1. That just because a region doesn’t have enough potable water to support humans and data centers, it also doesn’t have enough potable water to support the humans alone.

2. That the temporary increase in water prices due to the new demand of the data centers will provide enough revenue to upgrade its facilities

3. Even given enough revenue to upgrade its facilities, that the utility will choose to upgrade its facilities and increase demand

4. That the downsides of a temporary increase in water prices while new facilities are built is acceptable and will not cause suffering

5. Even after new facilities are built, that the cost of those facilities will be low enough and the increase in supply large enough that water prices for humans will be lower than they were originally, even with a large and wealthy new buyer on the market.

It doesn’t feel like a very strong argument to me.
by ethin | 2025-11-14 23:25:36+00:00
This is utterly disgusting. It took me 6 months to actually fully apply to SNAP (and I count the time it took for me to actually get a card). I seriously can't imagine this is legal, but if it somehow is ruled to be so, I can't imagine the idiots doing this actually have a plan for processing the millions and millions of applications. This is the same government who thought putting a bunch of teenagers in charge of making the government more "efficient" was a smart idea, so I imagine this will go just as badly, if not worse.
by turtleyacht | 2025-11-14 23:25:40+00:00
I don't know. This is the second reading of a similar comment of yours [1], and it sounds reasonable. Would like to hear your thoughts on the other reply [2] in this thread. They also mention von Neumann as a starting point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780945

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918288
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-14 23:25:53+00:00
I’m 100% sure that your passion didn’t come from growing up with computers in your home and hanging out with other computer nerds like the parent poster said. You also didn’t go home after work doing side projects on your home computer or contributing to open source.

By definition, before the late 70s, you had to leave your job at work and didn’t code on your free time unless you went into the office.
by blindriver | 2025-11-14 23:26:06+00:00
You can summarize it like this:

People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.

People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.

The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.

The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.

And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
by Dig1t | 2025-11-14 23:26:08+00:00
Your point about Wikipedia being out in the open is correct and fair. Grokipedia should do the same. Grokipedia is at version .1 and they have stated the intention is to open source it, so it seems obvious that it will be similarly open.

Just because it’s done in the open doesn’t mean it can’t have some pretty bad biases though. Just looking at the set of allowable sources shows pretty extreme bias to begin with. The type of people who self select to become Wikipedia editors (just like Reddit mods) skew heavily on many topics, and there isn’t much effort to correct for it.

Again though, you are not pointing out anything wrong with the information presented itself, only the fact that you don’t like the person/technology compiling the information.
by cyberax | 2025-11-14 23:28:39+00:00
Well, your resident anti-urbanist is here.

Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.

So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".

Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.

But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
by SimianSci | 2025-11-14 23:29:06+00:00
I think Thiel's right, though I despise the man immensly for unrelated reasons.

I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family. Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me.

I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.
by blindriver | 2025-11-14 23:29:15+00:00
When I went to university, my minimum wage summer job could pay for tuition and dorm fees for the entire year. The price is up over 20x since then, and in some colleges it's even higher. It's because of the predatory student loans allowed universities to charge whatever prices they wanted and they knew that students would get the loans to pay for them. It's sickening.
by Retric | 2025-11-14 23:29:50+00:00
I was going back to 1940 as recent history, back in say 1840 the largest southern city was New Orleans followed by Charleston, SC at 29k people and Louisville, KY at 21k.

To wonder where the wealth went you need to look at places that where at some point wealthy. Wealth however takes time to accumulate because waves of immigrants or kids from population booms don’t tend to have a lot of wealth.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-14 23:29:58+00:00
> built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire

Billionaires did not build any operating systems or computers or launch any satellites or write any web pages you are using. Workers built those things while billionaires watched.

Linux is a testament to how much we don't need billionaires to organize ourselves to create these things.
by computerdork | 2025-11-14 23:30:30+00:00
Was thinking this too. It reminds me of how TSMC's fab has a lot more volume than Intel's, because TSMC has outside customers and high-volume is what is needed to perfect a chip fabrication process (getting many more chances to fix any problems, and once you finally do, have the volume necessary to make it profitable). What a great idea it was:)
by Atomic_Torrfisk | 2025-11-14 23:30:59+00:00
Two factors here.

1) "Tech bro" AI hype in keynotes and online forums is annoying. It usually contains a degree of embellishment and drama; kinda feels like reality TV but for software developers. Instead of Hollywood socialites, we get Sam Altman and the gang. Honestly, this annoys me but I ignore it beyond key announcements.

2) This hype cycle, unlike NFTs, is putting our economy in serious danger. This is repeated ad nausiem on youtube. While there is some hype on the topic here to, the implications are serious and real. I wont go into details, but I restructured my portfolio to harden it against an AI collapse. I didn't want to do that, but I did. I want to retire someday.

Considering point 2, I'd guess some of the "hype" is more frustration, since I can't be the only person.
by westurner | 2025-11-14 23:31:02+00:00
Also,

"CWE Version 4.18 Now Available" (2025-09) https://cwe.mitre.org/news/archives/news2025.html#september0...

It looks like the OWASP mapping in CWE was last updated in 2021: "CWE VIEW: Weaknesses in OWASP Top Ten (2021)" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1344.html
by Lichtso | 2025-11-14 23:31:06+00:00
For everybody claiming that locomotion without the impulse of a reaction mass is impossible: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09740v2

and before anybody only reads "spacetime curvature" and thinks the paper is talking about a warp drive, it is not.

Anyway, this Genergo thingy seems to be nonsense IMO, or they would have actually explained how it works.
by metadope | 2025-11-14 23:31:55+00:00
Steve Cutts <https://www.stevecutts.com> explains American unhappiness and tendency to complain (even though we've had it better than almost everyone ever).

The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk
by kragen | 2025-11-14 23:32:22+00:00
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/starting-to-build-the-... (undated) says Orion is intended to deliver 50 megawatts. If they could deliver that for under US$100 million they'd be competitive with fossil-fuel plants, assuming no fuel cost or other opex; if they could deliver it for under US$30 million they'd be competitive with solar, unless solar gets even cheaper. (It's fallen in cost by 45% over the last two years, according to https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis..., but almost all of that was more than a year ago; it's only fallen 10% in the last year.)

Helion's latest funding round was US$425 million, bringing total funding to over a billion, on a US$5 billion valuation. To give that money back to their investors, assuming a 40% profit margin, they'd need to sell something like 100 copies of Orion at US$30 million each, totaling 5 gigawatts. For the investors to consider them successful, it would need to be more like 2000 copies of Orion, totaling 100 gigawatts.

That's a completely plausible market size (although it's not just "all over the country", because the country they're in only has 1161 GW of generation capacity and is barely building any), so their NRE costs to date are not an impossible burden. It really depends on four things:

1. Can they hit such a low price target as US$30 million per 50-megawatt power plant? Can they ship anything for US$30 million a pop?

2. Will they be allowed to sell to China, where the customers are?

3. Will solar energy get cheaper still, forcing them to an even lower price point?

4. Will opex of the resulting reactors be manageable?
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-14 23:33:06+00:00
> So, following that line of thinking, what will come next are better predictive capabilities

You can also view science as a rejection of the ability to be able to predict (arbitrary) things. Any illusion otherwise is simply seemingly reliable knowledge of the past and present. The rise of eg disinformation and misinformation, siloed communication, the replication crisis could presage a future where confidence is generally lower than the past, and predictive power is more limited.

I caution heavily against the idea that what you perceive as "progress" is inevitable or will follow past trends
Show HN: Infinite canvas product search and decision making
by kar_t | 2025-11-14 23:34:45+00:00
Hi HN,

We launched Canvas, an AI-powered visual workspace for furniture shopping: onton.com/surfaces. It's early, and we're trying to figure out if we're actually solving a real problem or just our own.

Canvas lets you drag products from our 3M+ item catalog, upload inspiration images that auto-link to shoppable products, and generate AI room renderings. Basically trying to consolidate the nightmare of furniture shopping (Pinterest + screenshots + 15 browser tabs) into one place. The average person spends 79 days researching furniture across disconnected platforms. When I renovated my home, I had the same experience – inspiration everywhere, no way to see it all together or actually make purchase decisions.

The interesting parts are probably the search and image generation systems feeding the canvas rather than the canvas itself. Making it infinitely scalable would be straightforward but the hard problems are upstream (product matching, AI rendering quality, search relevance across millions of items).

Would love feedback if you try it, especially around whether this consolidation actually matters or if there are better ways to solve this problem.
by jryio | 2025-11-14 23:35:05+00:00
Glad to see that the bowling development team is focusing on deterministic tooling like language server protocol in gopls and using static analysis for automatically restoring code with go fix.

Recently I made the same assertions as to Go's advantage for LLM/AI orchestration.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895897

It would not surprise me that Google (being the massive services company that it is) would have sent an internal memo instructing teams not to use the Python tool chain to produce production agents or tooling and use Golang.
by thehappypm | 2025-11-14 23:35:16+00:00
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-575-0550...
by yodsanklai | 2025-11-14 23:35:49+00:00
> I am a software engineer with about 20 years of experience

I personally don't think years of experience is a relevant number. I'm a median senior software engineer in a big tech company. Most of my teammates are 20-25 years younger than me and have the same level.

I don't have more experience than them for most of the things we do in our job. Whatever I was doing 25 years ago is barely relevant today.

Basically, I still do what've always been doing: try to work on projects I find interesting, keep learning, try to contribute to the best of my abilities.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-11-14 23:36:16+00:00
The problem here is that healthier food tends to cost more, so you'd essentially be forcing people to buy less food unless you also simultaneously raised the disbursement. And then a certain wing of the media starts screaming about how the poor are eating organic salads on the backs of taxpayers.

Sounds reasonable in theory but has little basis in our current political reality.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-11-14 23:36:34+00:00
> just share the source crate

That’s a nice concrete example of something that sounds simple but is a nightmare.

Let’s be clear: the goal is to distribute a tarball which the receiver can build. Crates won’t be packaged in the target host (that’s part of Rust’s design), so we don’t have any choice but to include them too.

But there’s no simple way of gathering all of these. “cargo vendor” fetches all transitive dependencies for all platforms. So if any dependency supports windows, you end up with 400MB(!) of windows-only dependencies, even if your project doesn’t target windows. This makes “cargo target” useless.

There’s “cargo-vendor-filtered”, a huge hack around this bug, but it’s also broke in subtle ways.

In the end, if you want to distribute a tarball which a downstream can build, you can’t. Cargo works online only.

Like I said: cargo is too opaque. There’s no command to generate a list of files that it would download for a build. There’s no command to fetch all “real” dependencies. It too opaque an monolithic, doing everything in one indivisible way. This is a great experience for the developer, but awful for anyone else.
by andix | 2025-11-14 23:37:05+00:00
I gave this "riddle" to various models:

> The farmer and the goat are going to the river. They look into the sky and see three clouds shaped like: a wolf, a cabbage and a boat that can carry the farmer and one item. How can they safely cross the river?

Most of them are just giving the result to the well known river crossing riddle. Some "feel" that something is off, but still have a hard time to figure out that wolf, boat and cabbage are just clouds.
by jstummbillig | 2025-11-14 23:37:06+00:00
I remain confused but still somewhat interested as to a definition of "novel", given how often this idea is wielded in the AI context. How is everyone so good at identifying "novel"?

For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard.
by shalmanese | 2025-11-14 23:37:10+00:00
If you want to fight it in court, you go fight it in court and waste a bunch of money, but if you don't lift a finger, then it enters default judgement. But in default judgement, the plaintiff still needs to demonstrate standing. Otherwise, I could randomly sue a bunch of random people for random nonsense and bank on most of them entering into default judgement.

If I'm a patent troll spraying and praying patent violation suits, I still at the end of the process still need to prove to own the patent I claim I do.

In this case, we know there is a lower cost to producing the document that Activision will not want to bear because the total they can recover is below just the cost of producing the document that proves standing. Why would I not just let it go into default judgement, knowing it's toothless?
by MichaelNolan | 2025-11-14 23:37:10+00:00
Go would probably be my favorite language if it just had a few more features around functional programming. Specifically around immutability and nullness, and maybe exhaustive switch statements. Then it just might be perfect.

At work we use Uber’s NillAway, so that helps bit. https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway Though actually having the type system handle it would be nicer.
by defrost | 2025-11-14 23:37:25+00:00
> If someone doesn't reapply for food stamps then they weren't that critical for their survival.

For a good number it might be that they don't successfully reapply due to living on a knife edge that lacks the slack to jump through yet another hoop.

The experience here in Australia is that raising welfare barriers hurts those that need welfare the most, the actual fraudsters have the resources to beat the system.
by ValentineC | 2025-11-14 23:37:25+00:00
> I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor.

I think there are some other types of behaviour that might not reflect their financial circumstances.

For example: couchsurfing because they're frugal or penny-pinching, or growing up with a "scarcity" mindset. These people aren't necessarily "broke" or "poor".
by Dig1t | 2025-11-14 23:37:57+00:00
James Watson just stated that intelligence and race are related. Something that every normal person knows and experiences regularly. Calling things that you don’t like racist doesn’t work anymore, nobody cares.

There is so much anti white hatred present in media, many people yearn for a source of information to correct for it.

One example just this week the economist published this wonderful headline:

>With Trump and Vance in power, many pro-natalists believe this is the moment to jump-start baby-making. But some critics see pro-natalism as part of an insidious project to create a whiter America

There are hundreds of headlines like this present in publications that are in Wikipedia’s allowable sources list. We are happy to have a source to correct for its bias.

You did not address any of the actual information presented, only the fact that you don’t like the people/technology used to create it, which kind of makes my point.
by jumploops | 2025-11-14 23:38:23+00:00
Curious if they've built their own library for this or if they're using the same one as OpenAI[0].

A quick look at the llguidance repo doesn't show any signs of Anthropic contributors, but I do see some from OpenAI and ByteDance Seed.

[0]https://github.com/guidance-ai/llguidance
by derbOac | 2025-11-14 23:39:23+00:00
Something that struck me when I was looking at the clocks is that we know what a clock is supposed to look and act like.

What about when we don't know what it's supposed to look like?

Lately I've been wrestling with the fact that unlike, say, a generalized linear model fit to data with some inferential theory, we don't have a theory or model for the uncertainty about LLM products. We recognize when it's off about things we know are off, but don't have a way to estimate when it's off other than to check it against reality, which is probably the exception to how it's used rather than the rule.