MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bccdee | 2025-12-19 19:36:03+00:00
> Nope. More apartments mean more _expensive_ rent. This is an ironclad law of real real estate.

I don't know how to explain to you that an increase in supply results in the price of a good decreasing.

> Yup. And the rent is high because...?

High demand, low supply. Obviously.

> check the average pay in areas that don't have direct access to the city cores and the average pay in Downtowns

Yeah, because downtown office space costs more & goes disproportionately to higher-paying finance jobs. That has nothing to do with density—that's just finance bros wanting to work in the fanciest skyscrapers.

> The average total expense for _new_ cars in the US is about $1000 per month

Your source refers to cars generally: "As of 2025, the average annual cost of owning a car in the U.S. has reached approximately $12,297, translating to about $1,025 per month." Even with your $500/month figure, transit is still much cheaper. And that $500 isn't just distributed among riders—drivers pay some of it too, as they should, since every person on the subway is person not driving on the road, reducing the need for road infrastructure maintenance & expansion.

> Just one mile of tunnel in Manhattan now costs more than 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway!

Again, Manhattan is unique. I don't know why you keep referring back to it as if its problems are easily generalizable. They put their trash on the street in bags because they don't have room for dumpsters. Also, yes, that's why LRTs are popular—no tunnel required.
by fosterfriends | 2025-12-19 19:36:21+00:00
(Re-sharing some thoughts I posted on other HN thread)

Hi all! Graphite cofounder Greg here. I’ve been asked a few times so far why we decided to join.

Personally, I work on Graphite for two reasons. 1) I love working with kind, smart, intense teammates. I want to be surrounded by folks who I look up to and who energize me. 2) I want to build bleeding-edge dev tools that move the whole industry forward. I have so much respect for all y’all across the world, and nothing makes me happier than getting to create better tooling for y’all to engineer with. Graphite is very much the combination of these two passions: human collaboration and dev tools.

Joining Cursor accelerates both these goals. I get to work with the same team I love, a new bunch of wonderful people, and get to keep recruiting as fast as possible. I also get to keep shipping amazing code collaboration tooling to the industry - but now with more resourcing and expertise. We get to be more ambitious with our visions and timelines, and pull the future forward.

I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think the Cursor team weren’t standup people with high character and kindness. I wouldn’t do this if I thought it meant compromising our vision of building a better generation of code collaboration tooling. I wouldn’t do it if I thought it wouldn’t be insanely fun and exciting. But it seems to be all those things, so we’re plunging forward with excitement and open hearts!
by someNameIG | 2025-12-19 19:36:27+00:00
Not who you were asking but my reasons for thinking Brave is a joke.

First they're a cypto/addtech company, which is a type of company I wouldn't trust to run my browser. And this has resulted in them doing things in the past like:

Blocking ads and replacing them with their own ad networks ads: https://archive.is/W0k4j

Their rewards crypto was opt-in for creators. Making it look like creators were openly asking for donations in Braves crypto currency without their consent. They had to change this due to complaints: https://brave.com/blog/rewards-update/

Inserting their own affiliate links: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...

Installing a non-free VPN without user consent: https://www.xda-developers.com/brave-browser-installs-vpn-wi...

They criticise the effectiveness of ad block testing websites, and urge people to use and trust privacytests.org instead. They fail to mention the conflict of interest in that privacytests is run by a Brave employee. https://brave.com/blog/adblocker-testing-websites-harm-users...
by aabhay | 2025-12-19 19:36:34+00:00
jj is actually perfectly fit for this and many other problems. In fact, this is actually the default behavior for jj -- if you squash a bunch of jj commits, the bookmarks on top automatically point to the updated rev tree. Then when syncing the dependent branches to git they all rebase automatically.

The problem however lies in who or what does this rebasing in a multi-tenant environment. You sort of need a system that can do it automatically, or one that gives you control over the process. For example, jj can often get tripped up with branch rules in git since you might accidentally move a bookmark that isn't yours to move, so to speak.
by graypegg | 2025-12-19 19:36:46+00:00
That's a really interesting comparison! But does anyone know if any Apollo lunar lander was specifically notable at the time for the power of compute on board? I feel like the takeaway could be "wow, technology has come so far, the pinnacle of computing in the 60s is bested by this stupid keyfob."

It does make sense to me that automating only the bare essentials could be an intentional choice on a lunar lander. Relying on intense discipline + training of the astronauts combined with dirt-simple automation should hopefully put them in a good spot to resolve issues you couldn't predict earth-side. If you automated too much, the thing that goes wrong could be a bug IN the automation, which is obviously going to be harder to train for.

There's also power savings and weight, which I'm sure were big factors... so I can't imagine the guidance computers were great examples of the most performant compute 60s/70s had to offer.

(Also, not able to listen to the podcast right now, so if that idea gets dispelled during it, disregard me. Just basing this on what I can read over a coffee break.)
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-19 19:36:58+00:00
Someday the mcdonalds kiosk will want to be your friend. It will remember who you are and ask you how your kids are doing. It will recommend new specials and maybe even give you "specials friend" deals. And I'll just tell it to shut the fuck up and queue me an order for the egg mcmuffin combo with a coffee and the fried potato patty because this bullshit is fucking obnoxious.
by lxpz | 2025-12-19 19:36:59+00:00
I talked about the meaning of the Jepsen test and the results we obtained in the FOSDEM'24 talk:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3...

Slides are available here:

https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/src/commit/4efc8...
by svat | 2025-12-19 19:37:00+00:00
Interesting, there seems to be a different Sacks (software engineer Robert Sacks) who devised his own Ulam-like spiral.

Anyway sorry I didn't keep track of the pages I visited, but here are some of the search results I see now, indicating at least some time wasted exploring something that did not need to be explored if it had been clear that the story was not fully real:

- https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/twins....

- https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/yamaguchi.htm

- https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and... (pretty good article!)

- https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-0... (mention by Granville!)

- https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/09/possibly-re...

- https://www.discovermagazine.com/oliver-sacks-and-the-amazin...

- https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/prime-numbers-mental-calcula...

BTW the same account of the twins (https://archive.is/MmogP) also has several paragraphs revealing major misunderstandings on the part of Sacks, e.g.:

> And yet they are called “calendar calculators”—and it has been inferred and accepted, on next to no grounds, that what is involved is not memory at all, but the use of an unconscious algorithm for calendar calculations. When one recollects how even Carl Friedrich Gauss, at once one of the greatest of mathematicians, and of calculators too, had the utmost difficulty in working out an algorithm for the date of Easter, it is scarcely credible that these twins, incapable of even the simplest arithmetical methods, could have inferred, worked out, and be using, such an algorithm.

[Needless to say, calculating the day of the week for a fixed date is a much easier and completely unrelated problem to that of Easter, “the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon (a mathematical approximation of the first astronomical full moon, on or after 21 March” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter ]
by bgun | 2025-12-19 19:37:05+00:00
If a computing device can’t actually do more useful things tha another computing device, then saying it has more “computing power” is a bit silly.

It’s like measuring national power by population, or saying that ants have “more power” than humans because ants are more numerous, have more legs and can lift more per unit of size. It’s fun to think about for about five seconds before recognizing that “power” is about capability, not abstract numbers.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-19 19:37:30+00:00
C# places quite low though (at ~1s). C# (SIMD) that you see towards the top is more complicated: https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/blob/master/.... In your metric winner is Nim: https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/blob/master/... (followed by Julia and D).
by pipes | 2025-12-19 19:37:36+00:00
Times article explaining that the uk governments first intention was never child protection, it was controlling the public discourse:

https://archive.ph/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...

This isn't some tin foiled hat wearing nonsense, every person I talk to seems think that ending anonymity online would be a good thing, until I explain the democracy protecting use cases,i.e. whistle blowers.
by throwaway2016a | 2025-12-19 19:38:01+00:00
First, I'm using frontier models with Cursor agenic mode.

> Also, if you use an LLM haphazardly and it introduces a security flaw, you as the user are responsible. The LLM is a power tool, not a person.

I 100% agree. That was my point. A lot of people (not saying you, I don't know you) are not qualified to take on that level of responsibility yet they do it anyway and ship it to the user.

And on the human side, that is precisely why procedures like code review have been standard for a while.

But my main objection to the parent post was not that LLMs can't be powerful tools but that specifically the examples used of maintainability and security are (IMO) possibly the worst examples you can use. Since 70k line un-reviewable pull requests are not maintainable and probably also not secure (how would you know?).
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-19 19:40:20+00:00
Bro. You’re gonna have a hard time finding people panic posting about how they’re going to lose their jobs in a month. Literally find me one. Then show me that the majority of people posting were panicking.

That is literally not what happened. You’re hallucinating. The majority of people on HN were so confident in their coding abilities that they weren’t worried at all. Just a cursory glance at the conversations back then and that is what you will see OVERALL.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-19 19:40:57+00:00
Meh. I would rather just have the ability to query any given products catalog in a machine-readable way. Any tool or protocol specifically designed for an LLM to consume is in my opinion a design smell. We should instead design proper APIs and protocols usable by all kinds of program and the LLMs can adapt.

You are also solving a business problem with a technical solution. Shopify recently announced that they will open up their entire catalog via an easy to use API to a select few enterprise partners. Amazon is doing a similar thing. This is because they do not want you and I to have the ability to programmatically query their catalog. They want to extract money out of specific partners who are trying to enshittify AI chat apps by throwing tons of ads in there. The big movers in the industry could have already easily adopted a similar standard but they are not going to on purpose. On top of you technical issues other commenters are pointing out, I don’t see why this should be in use at all.
by sfc32 | 2025-12-19 19:41:05+00:00
Are they planning to payback all the Geneva cantonal and CERN money they took?

I seem to recall that one of their original selling points was that they were based in Switzerland which does not have data sharing agreements with the US under the Patriot act, unlike the EU.

Cynical view - they prefer to IPO in another market than Swiss, the real reason for the move.
by hypeatei | 2025-12-19 19:41:24+00:00
I'm not European, but it's probably a mix of intelligence services advocating for it and government regulation as a solution to everything. If you believe that every problem can be solved by a regulator, then the logical endgame is the regulator needing a window into every aspect of your life so they can make sure you're not violating regulations.

The Patriot Act isn't on equal footing as these Chat Control-esque laws we're seeing. The US government spies on people, sure, but they're not mandating encryption backdoors or trying to outlaw VPNs.
by maxglute | 2025-12-19 19:41:25+00:00
The PRC motto is not about "can do", it's about "able to do". Can Palau build a commercial airliner when Boeing and Airbus workforce is 10x their population? No that's simply out of their reach.

That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it. They're the only country whose manufacturing sector has every industrial category classified by UN. That's the context behind the quote (directed at domestic doubters), every other country in the world has to pick and choose what to specialize in, PRC doesn't, so as long as item is not made by god, PRC can figure out how to build it.

The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true. There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.
by roamerz | 2025-12-19 19:41:44+00:00
>>I don’t know how to connect constructively

Yeah we probably never will. The part of him that everyone hates is creating a division in the nation. On the flip side I disagree so much with what the Biden administration did I am willing to accept his faults and will bide my time until Vance and Rubio take office when hopefully the hate will subside and we can start to come together as a country.
by xp84 | 2025-12-19 19:41:49+00:00
Having 3 separate companies own it means one of them can’t just decide tonight to call whoever’s in charge and tell them to change it, or else they’re fired and lose everything. I do actually assert that these three entities are going to have divergent interests. Also I get that you don’t like Saudi, and yup we all know MBS had that journalist killed (totally F’d up), but overall they’re still not a government hostile to the West — especially when compared to several neighboring countries.
by bitwize | 2025-12-19 19:42:58+00:00
There's no GPL in the BSD sources used by Apple or Sony. They are free to release their operating systems as closed source; Sony does this. Apple releases Darwin sources "out of the goodness of their hearts", meaning, back in the 2000s they wanted to capture mindshare amongst the tech community for whom Linux was the strongest contender. Now that the future has refused to change, the year of the Linux desktop never materialized, and macOS has become the default developer's workstation OS, Apple has been much more sparing with Darwin source drops and may cease them altogether.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-12-19 19:43:12+00:00
Don't worry, the LLMs are already post-structuralist (at least the ones working on them are often familiar with those thinkers). Which is incredibly disturbing, I think, for many linguists who have spent their entire careers fighting against the French, only to have such philosophical and intellectual work become the most important in the development of this new technology. Hey, at least I'm employed! (And they said it "wasn't serious," that Chomskian Linguistics was the "real science"!)
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-19 19:43:12+00:00
In my experience, levels are more a question of delivery and trust than of technical skill. If a Senior is off down a rabbit hole, that's them doing their job. It's almost a defining feature of the level down (SE2, or local equivalent) that if they're off down a rabbit hole then something's probably gone wrong somewhere: if you could trust their judgement, they'd be a senior already.

(Yes, that's circular and overly reductive, don't take it too literally)

Where I've worked, "senior" has also meant being a final authority: more junior folk will come to you with questions about your team's codebases, and more senior folk will too. You might not have anyone else to ask that kind of question of.
by justin66 | 2025-12-19 19:43:14+00:00
> Improving FreeBSD will make it easier to run BSD on non-apple hardware which will eat into their bottom line.

The number of people who want to run FreeBSD on their laptops probably numbers in the hundreds. Not exactly a threat to Apple's bottom line.

On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.
by E39M5S62 | 2025-12-19 19:44:41+00:00
Don't forget the V series in there. I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 258V in my Thinkpad. I think they're still being made. I bought an open box Thinkpad T14s Gen 6 with it - they come with a nicer GPU than the Ultra 7 255U.
Show HN: Stickerbox, a kid-safe, AI-powered voice to sticker printer
by spydertennis | 2025-12-19 19:44:48+00:00
Bob and Arun here, creators of Stickerbox.

If AI were built for kids, what would it look like?

Asking that question led us to creativity, and more specifically, the power of kids’ imaginations. We wanted to let kids combine the power of their ideas with AI tools but we needed to make sure we did it safely and in the right way.

Enter Stickerbox, a voice powered sticker printer. By combining AI image generation with thermal sticker printing, we instantly turn kids' wildest ideas into real stickers they can color, stick, and share.

What surprised us most is how the “AI” disappears behind the magic of the device. The moment that consistently amazes kids is when the printer finishes and they are holding their own idea as a real sticker. A ghost on a skateboard, a dragon doing its taxes, their dog as a superhero, anything they can dream of, they can hold in their hand. Their reactions are what pushed us to keep building, even though hardware can be really hard.

Along the way the scope of the project grew more than we expected: navigating supply chains, sourcing safe BPA/BPS free thermal paper, passing safety testing for a children’s product, and designing an interface simple enough that a five year old can walk up and just talk to it. We also spent a lot of time thinking about kids’ data and privacy so that parents would feel comfortable having this in their home.

Stickerbox is our attempt to make modern AI kid-safe, playful, and tangible. We’d love to hear what you think!

P.S. If you’re interested in buying one for yourself or as a gift, use code FREE3PACK to get an extra free pack of paper refills.
by someNameIG | 2025-12-19 19:44:49+00:00
> Firefox was and still is mostly used by "power users" and we're pretty much the only ones left that intentionally install the browser.

This really isn't the case. Firefox has almost 200 million users, yet sub 10% of them have uBlock Origin installed:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

Less than half have any extensions installed (with extensions include language packs):

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior

The users who talk about Firefox online are not the average user.
by 7thaccount | 2025-12-19 19:45:29+00:00
Possibly an unintended consequence. Those abound in our governing systems as you're rightfully complaining about.

On the other hand, competition is good for consumers and letting Microsoft and Amazon use unfair tactics to crush the competition or their large revenues to just buy up all competition isn't good either. That is part of the problem today in that practically every industry is a monopoly or near total monopoly (maybe there are 2-3 firms colluding). There are no incentives to innovate or keep prices competitive in such a gilded-age system. There was a reason we broke up all the robber barons. There is also the hazard when you have businesses that are so large that they effectively control everything and the government can no longer regulate them. High inflation is at least partly coming from this lack of competition. There is also the issue of the money supply where we degrade our currency to make it easier to service the debt. That is also a really big component here.
by monocasa | 2025-12-19 19:45:43+00:00
> if any Apollo lunar lander was specifically notable at the time for the power of compute on board?

It was somewhere in between. Absolutely impressive for the physical volume and was consuming about 80% of all integrated circuits being produced at the time, but around an order of magnitude slower than the fastest computers at the time (and maybe more depending on how you want to calculate that. It's very back of the envelope).

And it did have huge amounts of automation. The modern multitasking hard RTOS was basically invented for the AGC. The pilots weren't super happy about it, but also it's generally considered that landing on the moon is essentially impossible without huge amounts of automation.
by chocochunks | 2025-12-19 19:45:44+00:00
Using the Kobo desktop app is almost identical to Kindle with regards to DeDRM. You open app, you download book in app, you open Calibre, then here is where it changes, you click the Obok plugin on the Calibre toolbar, find book and import and get an ePub and you don't even have to convert it!

ACSM is Adobe's crap and the same thing you'd have use for Google Play Books and a few others. It's again another slight step change where you have to open the ACSM with ADE to get the book in the first place. WTF Adobe did it that way, IDK but they did.
by Desafinado | 2025-12-19 19:46:19+00:00
That's true, but the parenting part isn't actually that complicated, particularly at a young age when you're laying the foundation. Basically just stay out of the way and let your kids do stuff. Don't do anything for them that they can do for themselves. That way they learn problem solving skills and gain the confidence to follow through on things, so when they're 16 they are capable of navigating buying a car and getting a job.

Somehow this isn't intuitive for parents, though. They feel like they need to show and do things for their kid, rather than letting them pick up the experience of doing themselves.

When I was growing up my parents were borderline neglectful in how they handled my brother and I, but in that neglect we were forced to deal with situations ourselves, gain experience, and discover who we were. Counterintuitively, that approach was actually more fruitful than being over-present.