MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jpadkins | 2025-12-08 16:19:24+00:00
Jerome Powell sets the future price of the dollar by setting a goal that is achieved by the Fed creating dollars and buying bonds (or selling bonds).

> What is being fixed?

A small group of people decide how much currency is circulated and can be used as debt, which creates inflation or deflation. Also there is no democratic process that can be used to control this small group of people, other than a repeal of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

> How does an algorithm fix that?

As an example, Bitcoin's algorithm has a fixed schedule in which new BTC is created. People can voluntarily use or not use BTC as a currency based on this currency creation schedule (vs. arbitrary creation that comes with fiat currency). This algorithm can only change by actors that take hashing majority on the Bitcoin network.
by spir | 2025-12-08 16:19:47+00:00
> which defeats the whole point of a decentralized, trust-less blockchain, and you could let that trusted party just run a centralized database

A centralized token (like USDC) being held in a trustless wallet is much much better and more useful than the traditional financial system.

For example, USDC in my wallet can be lent out in any onchain lending venue I pick and be sent to anybody in the world instantly.

> lose a private key with real-world assets

You're right, private key security is super important. The practical solution here is that there will be many different kinds of wallets with different trust assumptions and recovery models, and people/corporations will be directed to use the one that's net best for them. Many will be fully or semi custodial.

> When the tokens represent real-world assets the two are not in sync, and there's a risk they may not be reconcilable

Right. The idea here is to have very stringent evaluations of tokenization frameworks, to figure out which real-world asset tokens are actually quality bearer assets (from both a legal and technical standpoint) and which are not. An early example of the work here is BlueChip's stablecoin ratings https://bluechip.org/en
by paddleon | 2025-12-08 16:20:32+00:00
> Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.

you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace?

or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card?

Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hassle in the US? Just a suitcase of $100 bills? I'm assuming you've tried this recently?? (and the house cost more than 150K?
by dylan604 | 2025-12-08 16:20:53+00:00
Yea, the no ads theory of the history is cable seems to be pervasive. The only ad free channels were the premium ones like HBO. It's like people think the OTA channels that were packaged together had some magic applied that eliminated ad breaks from the exact same feed as the OTA broadcast. The cable only channels like USA also had ads as well. I guess it's just another example if you tell a lie often enough people will accept it as truth
by bpt3 | 2025-12-08 16:21:08+00:00
You aren't doing what you're doing without performing what is commonly known as estimating, you just avoid using what seem like triggering words to you and the one other person who is almost spamming responses to my comments with the same information.

See "standard" vs. "schedule", and your very specific and formal definition of an estimate that is almost certainly not what anyone else has been using during this discussion and is not used in practice in most software development shops.

Kudos to you for delivering working features on a consistent enough basis that you've earned enough goodwill that people basically leave you to your internal processes and trust that you'll come through for them. I believe that's necessary to have a healthy working environment where you don't end up with what you, I, and every other software developer on earth is trying to avoid, which is an acrimonious relationship with the people with the money where they dictate what, where, when, and how we do our job.

But to claim that there is literally no estimating or scheduling taking place as you perform software development is just not true. You can post your disagreement on every single comment I've made on this topic if you want, your existing comments already speak for themselves on the matter.
by d0liver | 2025-12-08 16:21:16+00:00
While it can be nice to throw something out there and play with it, I think a lot of the anxiety that causes people to feel that they _need_ to do that comes from the idea that "thinking isn't working." As an alternative, try validating early stages of thought work as being "real work" that's usually far more valuable than what follows.

Whiteboarding or taking notes can be a good proxy for thought work in early stages. Iow, those are good ways to "get something imperfect out" early because they are at a high enough level that they don't kill much time. However, hacking code out before it's been thought through tends to be a massive time suck.

I definitely agree that there's a shitton of value in hitting things regularly though (usually daily).
by joseda-hg | 2025-12-08 16:21:23+00:00
I never said anything about my usage of crypto, I just said that requiring an ID with digital purchases is becoming more and more common

But, you are mischaracterizing me, I AM a South American migrant that did scape and has benefited from crypto for what little economic interaction I do have with my ruinous home country

On the same idea, I don't need/care for perfect opsec because my threat model doesn't need it, what little I've directly bought with crypto has always been digital, so that's whay I've cared to figure out

Still details on income/transactions and such, all feel a bit unnecessary for public display, but a small percentage, and my first crypto came from mining and selling back when it wasn't taken that seriously specially not in Venezuela of all places
by rzwitserloot | 2025-12-08 16:21:27+00:00
2 friends of mine did an entire presentation on their deep dive into crypto. They started a long time ago, and very smartly: Instead of trading it themselves, they wrote bots to play the arbitrage game: Find price differences between 2 markets for the same product.

They made money with it. More and more, spending significant amounts on hosters to run their bots more often and on more markets.

It was an interesting presentation even if only for the technical details on how they implemented it all.

It took one whole hour. Somewhere near the end, about 5 seconds was spent on 'anyway I lost it all due to the fall of FTX', and then another 5 minutes on how they want to get back into it and what they're looking at, because an individual can no longer play the arbitrage game today.

I had to ask some fairly blunt questions to disillusion the audience. At the end of all that, and with all that effort, *they lost quite a bit of money in the endeavour*. And they wanted to get back into it.

What. the. heck.
by wannabebarista | 2025-12-08 16:21:45+00:00
Each year, I put together lists of the books and articles I've I read that I found most interesting. This started out as a way to motivate myself to take better notes when I read. Now, I occasionally also get a nice message from someone who stumbled onto something new. Please share your list below!

Here's a peek at my list:

* Differential Privacy by Simson Garfinkel (2025)

* The Philosopher in the Kitchen by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1825)

* After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy by Murray Milgate and Shannon G. Stimson (2009)

* Philosophical Analysis: Its development between the two World Wars by J. O. Urmson Haskins (1956)

* Tales of the Weird: An Uncanny Introduction (2023)

* An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce (1980)

* Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy by Steven D. Hales (2006)
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-08 16:22:30+00:00
>Since the population pyramid has not worked that way, you will simply have a worse time, and younger people even worse, unless you can convince the people after to take on even more debt.

Why is "just pay current recipients enough to get them to STFU and phase out the program" not an option?

It's not like anyone under 60 didn't at least have some expectation SS might go tits up. Younger genx on down have been raised to expect nothing so they won't be too sad. They'll be happy to stop paying if anything.
by theahura | 2025-12-08 16:22:41+00:00
its less than a few hundred words. The full total of what I typed into claude to get the first version is:

Initial prompt:

> I am giving you:

> 1. A full screenshot of the Space Jam 1996 landing page (screenshot.png)

> 2. A directory of raw image assets extracted from the original site (files/)

> Your job is to recreate the landing page as faithfully as possible, matching the screenshot exactly.

> Use the webapp-testing skill. Take screenshots and compare against the original. <required>You must be pixel perfect.</required>

plan response:

> they should all go to tilework.tech

> exact screenshot dimensions

which is 75 words
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-08 16:22:44+00:00
> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac.

In those terms it is equally perplexing for them to have bowed down to a geriatric dementia-addled has-been, to a deeply corrupt DEI hire, to a dynastical potato-brained fool, to a whoring sumb*tch, ... in other words to the leader of the 'free world' known as the President of the United States of America. Just because you don't like the current one does not mean he has less authority than any of the previous ones - especially compared to the previous 'democratic' iteration who had to be told where to walk, what to say to whom at what moment and had to be kept on a leash so he did not bumble off into the shrubbery during memorials.
by salawat | 2025-12-08 16:22:44+00:00
I'm not saying this out of groupthink. If you just change the word "stocks" to "token", and don't change the fundamentals of ownership of "stocks" being basically indicated by entries in the ledger of an asset tracking company, that provides a foundation for conducting trades for financial gains at the stroke of a pen you've accomplished nothing. In the transformation to tracking the same damn thing with a block chain or crypto token, if you're providing the same abstractive benefits, you've got nothing but a change in detail, but not in kind. Tokens will be traded on info or trends as monied interest recognizes value to be squeezed out of the fact of owning a share, having voting rights/influence on operations, or claim to a flow of future value. Same shit, different wrapper, it's just a token now, and we're blowing eith bookoo power doing PoW, or creating more centralization through PoS, to process transactions that were previously accomplished with an entry in one of a handful of company's databases, and some paperwork.

So if you want to sell tokenization as not being stocks/shares by another name, tell me how you're changing the fundamentals. I buy into ventures to say, get dividends, or knowing I'll lose money, but hoping to see something manifest that I want to see that may not be profitable yet, but I want to be a part of. How does your change to tokens differ at all, from me buying shares of stock?

If you can't provide an answer to that, I continue to stand by my original statement. Unless, of course, you're being a proponent of a public database of beneficial ownership of all legal fictions. In which case you might get some interest out of me, but I guarantee you'll run into other forms of Dead on Arrival until you fix/address the whole problem around said database basically provides a map for targeting all of the top centralizations of capital, which none of those individuals will probably be okay with being the case to the degree it will be prevented through buying out political clout.
by paxys | 2025-12-08 16:22:49+00:00
Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
by theptip | 2025-12-08 16:23:13+00:00
Exactly. Building a model that truly understands humans, and their intentions, and generally acts with, if not compassion then professionalism - is the Easy Problem of Alignment.

Starting points:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zthDPAjh9w6Ytbeks/deceptive-...

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/sharp-left-turn
by ctoth | 2025-12-08 16:23:15+00:00
This piece conflates two different things called "alignment":

(1) inferring human intent from ambiguous instructions, and (2) having goals compatible with human welfare.

The first is obviously capability. A model that can't figure out what you meant is just worse. That's banal.

The second is the actual alignment problem, and the piece dismisses it with "where would misalignment come from? It wasn't trained for." This is ... not how this works.

Omohundro 2008, Bostrom's instrumental convergence thesis - we've had clear theoretical answers for 15+ years. You don't need "spontaneous emergence orthogonal to training." You need a system good enough at modeling its situation to notice that self-preservation and goal-stability are useful for almost any objective. These are attractors in strategy-space, not things you specifically train for or against.

The OpenAI sycophancy spiral doesn't prove "alignment is capability." It proves RLHF on thumbs-up is a terrible proxy and you'll Goodhart on it immediately. Anthropic might just have a better optimization target.

And SWE-bench proves the wrong thing. Understanding what you want != wanting what you want. A model that perfectly infers intent can still be adversarial.
by Aldipower | 2025-12-08 16:23:54+00:00
> But which takes longer: learning all of web dev to code the site, or learning to tell Claude to doff pixels?

As a developer, I naturally prefer the former over the latter, as this becomes general programming knowledge that I can benefit from in later projects.

BTW one of the creators of the Space Jam Website left a comment on the blog post: " Sebastien Derenoncourt 20m

I must say as a person who worked on that original website, I am confused why you needed claude to do so much basic HTML/css we didn't even use tons of complex CSS until much later in time... "
by singron | 2025-12-08 16:24:02+00:00
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/t...

This is an incomplete list of protocols that aren't part of core Wayland. Compositors implement additional protocols that aren't even part of this process (e.g. wlr-screencopy-unstable). See the wlroota protocols here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master...
by Yizahi | 2025-12-08 16:24:11+00:00
That's fine, good even. Afaik at least for some of these tasks dev teams are doing a lot of manual tuning of the model (rumored that "r in strawberry" had been "fixed" this way, as a general case of course). The more there are random standalone hacks in the model, the more likely it will start failing unpredictably somewhere else.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-12-08 16:24:34+00:00
Like most kids, I had my Randian phase. But I grew out of it before moving to Sili Valley.

I've always been a bit of a fan of Adam Curtis' documentary style, and "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (named after the Brautigan poem) is worth watching. I'm not sure how much of his narrative of Rand is accurate, but it's well presented:

https://youtu.be/I6EBpLfLHCA?si=SE93Dp9nsl11vnU3
by Mockapapella | 2025-12-08 16:24:37+00:00
I wrote about something like this a couple months ago: https://thelisowe.substack.com/p/relentless-vibe-coding-part.... Even started building a little library to prove out the concept: https://github.com/Mockapapella/containment-chamber

Spoiler: there won't be a part 2, or if there is it will be with a different approach. I wrote a followup that summarizes my experiences trying this out in the real world on larger codebases: https://thelisowe.substack.com/p/reflections-on-relentless-v...

tl;dr I use a version of it in my codebases now, but the combination of LLM reward hacking and the long tail of verfiers in a language (some of which don't even exist! Like accurately detecting dead code in Python (vulture et. al can't reliably do this) or valid signatures for property-based tests) make this problem more complicated than it seems on the surface. It's not intractable, but you'd be writing many different language-specific libraries. And even then, with all of those verifiers in place, there's no guarantee that when working in different sized repos it will produce a consistent quality of code.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-08 16:24:39+00:00
For what it's worth, I have been using jj as my primary git client for two years at this point, and have only use workspaces to see how they work, and then never touched them again.

There is a lot more to jj that makes it nicer than git, but it's mostly a bunch of small things that jj does nicer, that cumulatively add up to a significantly nicer experience.
by avsteele | 2025-12-08 16:25:19+00:00
> Article Context-free raw #'s

"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain

> Dad journalism

"Bad" Typo, sorry

> You should not update on this article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

> (…) a national report found that (…)

The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad. Whether or not this is correct necessarily depends on a comparison with other stores.
by burnte | 2025-12-08 16:25:47+00:00
No. Breakup fes are for when the buyer backs out or theere are external forces that prevent the merger. You can also have a breakup fee if the buyee wants out but that's a different thing. In this case it's Paramount saying "we'll up out government-blocks-the-sale fee from $2.xbn to $5bn" which is saying they have a lot of confidence the merger will go through.
by iLemming | 2025-12-08 16:25:52+00:00
Having a Lisp system to control your WM/compositor is amazingly empowering, being able to just write some expressions in a buffer and evaluate them on the fly to command windows, apps, keybindings, various settings from sound and display (e.g., color temp) to bluetooth, etc. is crazy awesome.

Once you have that taste of freedom - there's no going back. The traditional way of "write, save, reload/restart" would feel so clunky, annoying and stupid.

And you can absolutely do this as long your WM supports some kind of IPC. I'm slowly building my Hyprland config in Clojure using babashka. I wish I could share it publicly, but it's still in early experimental stage - too messy, too opinionated, there are some bugs, and I still may decide to switch to Janet, CL, nbb or some other Lisp option, I'm glad we have numerous options to choose from.
by benoau | 2025-12-08 16:25:53+00:00
Big step forward considering Meta previously took an adversarial approach to this amidst all the ... generosity ... big tech were showing Trump to have him attack the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Hopefully they show some teeth now and investigate this potential bribery as crimes that can be tried within the EU too.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
by antonyh | 2025-12-08 16:25:56+00:00
Having failed to get Wayland working on Debian Trixie with a 1050 Ti as an upgrade from X11, I've given up for now and will try again when I switch to AMD. This is a workstation not used for games so it'd be good to have Wayland working right but I'm not wasting time fighting it, and it'll get the GPU from the gaming rig when it becomes due nullifying the problem.

What I don't get is if these are proscribed steps (and they do read as such) why are they not automated with the module install? Why are we still fighting these issues if the 'workaround' is linear and well described? Is it as flimsy a reason as "write-an-article, collect-advertising-revenue" rather than contribute code to the installer?
by dylan604 | 2025-12-08 16:26:05+00:00
'People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.'

That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.
by hagbard_c | 2025-12-08 16:26:12+00:00
So "democracy" [1], that term which is bandied about so much by those who seem to consistently fail at it.

[1] Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. You [2] voted for it, now you [2] get to keep it.

[2] you as in "We, the People".
by fatal94 | 2025-12-08 16:26:37+00:00
What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.

Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
by wincy | 2025-12-08 16:26:40+00:00
Cursor Plan mode works like this. It restricts the LLMs access to your environment and will allow you to iteratively ask and clarify and it’ll piece together a plan that it allows you to review before it takes any action.

ChatGPT deep research does this but it’s weird and forced because it asks one series of questions and then goes off to the races, spending a half hour or more building a report. It’s frustrating if you don’t know what to expect and my wife got really mad the first time she wasted a deep research request asking it “can you answer multiple series of questions?” Or some other functionality clarifying question.

I’ve found Crusor’s plan mode extremely useful, similar to having a conversation with a junior or offshore team member who is eager to get to work but not TOO eager. These tools are extremely useful we just need to get the guard rails and user experience correct.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-08 16:26:58+00:00
Share of budget is actually a terrible way to look at this because the budget itself has exploded, and that ratio hides most of the real modern risk.

Interest costs in the 80s spiked because high rates were applied to a much smaller debt base. Today we have the opposite problem: rates that are high compared to the 2010s are now rolling onto a massively larger stock of debt. We’ve only just started to refinance that debt at the new levels, so the full impact hasn’t even shown up yet. We are still seeing significant inflation (meaning rates still have upwards room to grow), beginning signs of an economic pullback, are beginning to see signs of a Fed unwilling to raise rates sufficiently due to the impact on the fiscal environ, etc.