MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-12-09 18:30:46+00:00
Our system is far more regressive than most people realize. The poor pay more for things, don't have access to all kinds of tax breaks and cheap money, and can't afford accountants and shell companies and all the other complicated tricks you can use if you are wealthier.

I wonder: if you added it all up, would a flat tax (which is nominally regressive) actually be more progressive than the regressive taxes we have?
by vidarh | 2025-12-09 18:31:10+00:00
Because the responses are often distilled down from the same garbage Google serves up, but presented as the opinion of Claude, whom she increasingly trusts.

I use Claude a lot. I have the most expensive Claude Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at client sites, separately. I'm increasingly close to an AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against extensive use of these models.

But it's not quick enough to of its own accord resort to verifying things before giving answers to be suitable as a general purpose replacement for Google unless you specifically prompt it to search.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-09 18:31:20+00:00
As another commenter pointed out, buying a home to live in gets you lower interest rates than buying for any other reason.

> but the ability of corporate owners to use depreciation on a new purchase to offset profits from previous purchases is more significant.

If you're referring to cost segregation, this is probably less true now than in the past. It used to cost a lot of money to do a cost segregation analysis, and made sense only for apartment complexes (i.e. the cost to do the analysis vastly exceeded whatever savings you'd get on a single house). So only rich investors who owned 20+ unit complexes would do it.

I've heard that in the last few years, many accounting firms are providing it for relatively cheap, so ordinary investors can do it now.

RE people make a big deal about depreciation as a tax benefit, but it's minor in my experience. You're effectively reducing the cost basis, so when you ultimately sell, you have to pay a larger tax on the capital gains. Overall you gain, but not by a lot.

Perhaps if you combine with a 1031 exchange, you may get a greater benefit.
by oersted | 2025-12-09 18:32:43+00:00
It also seemed to be like that 100-150 years ago, with all the big-name robber barons, oil/steel/rail tycoons and inventor-industrialists like Edison or Ford.

There are times when concentration of capital leads to a disproportionate influence of personal relationships and one-on-one deal-making. The same can be said of political or attention capital, not just wealth.

To be fair, that's also what Aristocracy always was, they were just less active in forcing their mad visions onto the world.
by cortesoft | 2025-12-09 18:33:11+00:00
Oh man. I remember having to send a check for $20 to some address to get my key.

That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.

After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
by amatecha | 2025-12-09 18:33:13+00:00
Ah wow , rip the awesome fonts used in the original game. The new ones are so "clean" and boring :(

Glad to see the art itself was not too badly modified. It's weird though, like the vegetation in the Farm building looks weird. The original version you can tell it's some kind of yellow fruit or vegetable but in the remaster the yellow dots are unusually small and don't really "feel right". Strikes me as AI upscaling rather than hand-crafted editing.
by MobileVet | 2025-12-09 18:33:52+00:00
If you still want to experience the joys of RTS... but struggle to play after so many years away, I highly recommend catching a few streams from Grubby. He plays WC3 and a few other games and is quite entertaining to watch. He is also crazy good... His typical APM during a game hovers between 200 and 250. He is an absolute beast at leveraging his items and maximizing his heroes' hp.

https://youtu.be/qaaWsRfbsls?si=EJ0WBvJ9hMmQCaNb
by BeetleB | 2025-12-09 18:34:08+00:00
> Ban corporate ownership of residences. Only individuals,

Many/most corporate owners are individuals (as per the linked report). See my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208561

> Cap how many rentals an individual can own.

Yes. Cap to 0. Until we get data on the breakdown (what percentage of rental homes are by owners who own 1, 2, 3, etc), we don't really know. It won't be easy to determine because a lot of RE investors create a new LLC for each property they own.
by nradov | 2025-12-09 18:34:21+00:00
We might have to give up on trust and understanding in complex domains. To draw an analogy from another field, pharmaceutical researchers often don't understand the exact mechanism of action for drugs they develop. Biological systems are too complex and much of the basic research hasn't been done yet. So they rely on rigorous testing to verify that new drugs are safe and effective. It isn't a perfect system — sometimes drugs get recalled or have warnings added later — but works well enough.
by drob | 2025-12-09 18:34:28+00:00
Github only for now. Out of curiosity, is yours on gitlab? Something else?

We should be able to find something interesting in most codebases, as long as there's some plausible way to build and test the code and the codebase is big enough. (Below ~250 files the results get iffy.) We've just tested it a lot more thoroughly on app backends, because that's what we know best.
by jrowen | 2025-12-09 18:34:54+00:00
It was around the "10,000 unlabeled pieces of paper" part that my question became, "is it really important to save all this?" Especially in the context of a design museum that isn't particularly interested in unique works?

I agree that AI should not be used "if the curators are too lazy to organize their collections of researched object information." Just get rid of it. Boom. Done.

I appreciate people that archive and preserve things but that makes a lot more sense when there's like 5 scrolls to be found from an entire century. In the world of infinite data streams there's an almost comical futility to it imo. If the people don't care enough about it, using AI to create more volumes of data on it is just wild.

Curation nowadays is about the purge, the filter.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-09 18:35:20+00:00
Apple: "It just works".

Me: Nah, it doesn't. I get fine-grained app permissions but there's a certain absurdity in using voice control for your CarPlay app, where Apple Maps is currently navigating you home, and you say "Find me the nearest Panera" and the reply is "Sorry, I don't know where you are."
by stack_framer | 2025-12-09 18:35:33+00:00
I'm here to learn what other people think, so I'm in favor of not seeing AI comments here.

That said, I've also grown exceedingly tired of everyone saying, "I see an em dash, therefore that comment must have come from AI!"

I happen to like em dashes. They're easy to type on macOS, and they're useful in helping me express what I'm thinking—even if I might be using them incorrectly.
by Lerc | 2025-12-09 18:35:36+00:00
This is not sycophantic (assuming you meant that, syncophantic is not a word). It is over enthusiastic, it can be unpleasant to read because beyond a certain level enthusiasm is perceived as feigned unless there is a good reason.

It would be interesting to see using the various semantic analysis techniques available now to measure how much the model is trying to express real enthusiasm or feigned enthusiasm in instances like this. This is kind-of difficult to measure from pure output. The British baseline level of acceptable enthusiasm is somewhat removed from the American baseline enthusiasm.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-09 18:35:53+00:00
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy.

For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay when stock goes up and never down, which is not exactly a fair incentive.

Now imagine artwork I bought 15 years ago from Banksy. Or imagine my video game collection I bought on eBay that contains some rare titles. Or what about my wine collection? Now imagine I'm Elon Musk, on paper worth $400B, but if I sold even 20% of my stock, that paper valuation would be shredded from an excess of liquidity driving the share price down, so you can't tax me on what is physically impossible to realize.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-09 18:35:55+00:00
I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that unless it's also done in the other categories.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-09 18:35:58+00:00
There is an AI bubble just like there was a dotcom bubble; the fact that it is a real technology with real uses we with world changing long-term impacts does not mean that the recent investment hype will not soon be recognized as excessively exuberant given the actual payoffs to investors and the timelines on which they will be realized.

(And putting masses of people out of work and and thereby radically destabilizing capitalist societies, to the extent it is a payoff, is a payoff with a bomb attached.)
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-09 18:35:59+00:00
Agree and I think it might also be useful to have that be grounds for a shadowban if we start seeing this getting out of control. I'm not interested, even slightly, in what an LLM has to say about a thread on HN. If I see an account posting an obvious LLM copy/paste, I'm not interested in seeing anything from that account either. Maybe a warning on the first offense is fair, but it should not be tolerated or this site will just drown in the slop.
by thephyber | 2025-12-09 18:36:04+00:00
The only reason capitalism works is because it turns everything into a struggle for existence, which is the best motivator. Every company is forced to compete (assuming there is no moat created by politics eg. Intellectual Property or contract law) or the company will go under.

But it also means that the people who can’t compete in this type of Darwinism only survive because of the empathy of others who do (whether that be family/friends, politics, or charities).

I’m worried about the breadth of industries that PE has infected in the US.
by easton | 2025-12-09 18:36:11+00:00
I lived in Jacksonville for most of my life, and near the end of my tenure I started noticing the Kroger trucks. They were coming all the way from Orlando? That's like a two hour drive for cold groceries, feels expensive.

(i do recall the chatter that this was their way to compete with publix, although I don't know anyone who actually used it.)
by vidarh | 2025-12-09 18:36:14+00:00
The prompt is funny, in itself. The notion of predicting the future is itself not a serious prompt, because there is no meaningful way of giving a serious response. But the addition of "Writ it into form!" makes it sound even more jokey.

If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did, I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.
by immibis | 2025-12-09 18:36:19+00:00
The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram.

I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).

And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
by jjfoooo4 | 2025-12-09 18:36:44+00:00
The existential hope that all the other players have is that AI will drive adoption of a form factor that replaces the phone. Because if in 5 years the dominant device is still the phone, Apple wins.

Consumer hardware chips will be plenty powerful to run “good enough” models.

If I’m an application dev, do I want to develop something on top of OpenAI, or Apple’s on device model that I can use as much as a I want for free? On device is the future
by doug_durham | 2025-12-09 18:37:34+00:00
I don't think the author would disagree with you. Ad you point out coding is just one part of software development. I understand his point to be that the coding portion of the job is going to be very different going forward. A skilled developer is still going to need to understand frameworks and tradeoffs so that they can turn requirements into a potential solution. It just they might not be coding up the implementation.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-09 18:37:39+00:00
I think perhaps what was lost is mostly this: Macromedia. They had a knack for making content creation simple. Flash was just one of the results of this: It let people create seemingly-performant, potentially-interactive content that ran almost universally on the end-user computers of the time -- and do it with relative ease because the creation tools existed and were approachable.

Macromedia also provided direction, focus, and marketing; more of the things that allowed Flash to reach saturation.

Someone could certainly come up with an open JS stack that accomplishes some of the same things in a browser on a modern pocket supercomputer. And countless people certainly have.

But without forces like marketing to drive cohesion, simplicity, and adoption then none of them can reach similar saturation.
by ReptileMan | 2025-12-09 18:37:44+00:00
That is the point. Capitalism has never included free markets in its honest definition. They are nuisance for the capital owners. But when they are forced to participate in the free market - then a big part of the surplus generated by the companies is captured by the society. See that was Marx error - instead of socializing everything, he should have just made sure that no monopolies, monopsonies and enough state capacity exist to make the unfree markets free. Send this message back in time and we will save couple of hundred of million people.
by moffkalast | 2025-12-09 18:37:51+00:00
Looks like another Deepseek distil like the new Ministrals. For every other use case that would be an insult, but for coding that's a great approach given how much lead in coding performance Qwen and Deepseek have on Mistral's internal datasets. The Small 24B seems to have a decent edge on 30BA3B, though it'll be comparatively extremely slow to run.
by djoldman | 2025-12-09 18:37:54+00:00
> The United States is short 4 million housing units, with a particular dearth of starter homes, moderately priced apartments in low-rises, and family-friendly dwellings

The number cited links to here:

https://upforgrowth.org/apply-the-vision/2023-housing-underp...

Which has this as the report:

https://upforgrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/2023_Hous...

The number is driven by this definition:

> Missing Households. Households that may not have formed due to lack of availability and affordability, e.g. households with children over 18 years of age still living with their parents or individuals or couples living together as roommates at levels exceeding historical norms.
by submeta | 2025-12-09 18:38:04+00:00
While I agree that we should be genuinely engaging with each other on this platform, trying to disallow all AI generated content reminds me of the naysayers when it comes to letting llms write code.

Yes, if you wanted to ask an llm, you’d do so, but someone else asks a specific question to the llm, and generates an answer that’s specific to his question. And that might add value to the discussion.
by vidarh | 2025-12-09 18:38:11+00:00
Claude at times feels like it's mildly manic and has ADHD... I absolutely prefers that to Codex...

Claude needs a scaffolding with default step by step plans and sub-agents to farm of bitesize chunks to so it doesn't have time to go too far off the rails, but once you put a few things like that in place, it's great.
by catapart | 2025-12-09 18:38:16+00:00
What do game engines have to do with this?

You're welcome to your counter-opinion about the design, but you haven't convinced me. I've played plenty of games with third-person views where the gameplay was quite conducive to running in to things. I can also appreciate that the design is faux-retro, but that's kind of my whole issue with it. Sticking to a design because it is nostalgic is not user-focused. It's demographically limiting, by design. It's specifically niche-targeting. That's the opposite of trying to make the best kind of thing for the most kinds of people. Which is a business interest of a portfolio site. Building a little game for people who likes those types of games? Sweet! More power to you. But if you're showcasing a demo for wide audiences, a critique of the niche-targeting is valid. Not nearly as important as the people claiming they can't even play the game, for sure! But if you bounce one person because they press up on the keyboard and the truck moves "forward", and they don't like that - it's a marked negative for the site's intent.

You can't worry about pleasing everyone, and you especially can't worry about broad, overall, two-paragraph critiques on literal months of dedicated work. But neither of those make the critiques, themselves, improper or even wrong.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-09 18:38:45+00:00
Did you agree with it before the AI wrote it though (in which case, what was the point of involving the AI)?

If you agree with it after seeing it, but wouldn't have thought to write it yourself, what reason is there to believe you wouldn't have found some other, contradictory AI output just as agreeable? Since one of the big objections to AI output is that they uncritically agree with nonsense from the user, scycophancy-squared is even more objectionable. It's worth taking the effort to avoid falling into this trap.
by phkahler | 2025-12-09 18:38:55+00:00
>> Not to be pedantic, but this would make you not so "pro capitalism as it comes". The ability to develop and sell houses, but not hold them (in service of rent-seeking) runs contradictory to the very core tenant of capitalism, which is private property and free markets.

I think you're right. A lot of people confuse capitalism for working for a living - because that's what capitalists want the middle class to think it is. Capitalism is really about getting capital to work for you so you don't have to. Building and selling homes is a form of working. Holding homes for rent is capitalism.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-09 18:38:59+00:00
> If you haven't been paying attention to the various bigots trying to rouse hate from their position of technology prominence, then I don't think my post will convince you of anything

You think your post is not one trying to rouse hate against specific people?

You ever come across the word thoughtcrime? You think telling perhaps 50% or the population they "have no business being here" is inclusive? A large number of the classes who you pretend to be representing actually don't buy into oppression olympics.

You want to write a screed against the owner of X? Sure, go ahead. But your screed is against anyone who doesn't care about verifying a person's race, gender or sexual orientation.

You're presenting an extremist "you're with us or against us" view; some of us who aren't racist, sexist, misogynist, etc also don't want to have to pass your purity test.

Some people just want the puritannicals to leave everyone alone.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-12-09 18:39:31+00:00
So, this is only for codebases hosted on Github, right? Any plans for folks not in that ecosystem? And which languages do you support? The examples show Go, (Type|Java)Script, Python, Rust and Zig, which is rather diverse, but lacks some typical 'enterprise' options. The examples look nice and quite different from the usual static analyzer slop, so that is welcome!
by alwa | 2025-12-09 18:39:36+00:00
I tend to trust the voting system to separate the wheat from the chaff. If I were to try and draw a line, though, I’d start at the foundation: leave room for things that add value, avoid contributions that don’t. I’d suggest that line might be somewhere like “please don’t quote LLMs directly unless you can identify the specific value you’re adding above and beyond.” Or “…unless you’re adding original context or using them in a way that’s somehow non-obvious.”

Maybe that’s part of tracing your reasoning or crediting sources: “this got me curious about sand jar art, Gemini said Samuel Clemens was an important figure, I don’t know whether that’s historically true but it did lead me to his very cool body of work [0] which seems relevant here.”

Maybe it’s “I think [x]. The LLM said it in a particularly elegant way: [y]”

And of course meta-discussion seems fine: “ChatGPT with the new Foo module says [x], which is a clear improvement over before, when it said [y]”

There’s the laziness factor and also the credibility factor. LLM slop speaks in the voice of god, and it’s especially frustrating when people post its words without the clues we use to gauge credibility. To me those include the model, the prompt, any customizations, prior rounds in context, and any citations (real or hallucinated) the LLM includes. In that sense I wonder if it makes sense to normalize linking to the full session transcript if you’re going to cite an LLM.

[0] https://americanart.si.edu/blog/andrew-clemens-sand-art
Ask HN: IPv6 capable transactional email senders?
by hevisko | 2025-12-09 18:40:26+00:00
Preferably also PostgreSQL, but currently I get answers like "No reliable IPv6 email sending to the big names" and "IPv6 not supported for receiving".

The reason that I'm on this discourse, is that I'm busy deploying IPv6 only hosts, and Mailgun for one doesn't have an IPv6 SMTP only IPv4 ;( and the others I've found either way too expensive or also not IPv6 capable, so I started looking at roll my own... and ran into these constraints just as I'm ready to swallow the docker only options for systems like Postal.io and Hyvor Relay
by modeless | 2025-12-09 18:40:27+00:00
Hmm does it actually set reminders? Or does it just take a note and you have to manually set the reminder later? I would love this if it actually could create reminders like "remind me when I get home" etc. Otherwise I'm sure I'll never go back and look at notes I took.

Edit: "It’s converted to text on-device, then processed by an on-device large language model (LLM) which selects an action to take (create note, add to reminders, etc)." This is perfect!
by ReptileMan | 2025-12-09 18:40:29+00:00
There was a lot of private property in the socialist countries. I am not sure from where this thought even came to you. What was impossible was owning big private enterprise. But small businesses - like a restaurant or a shoe repair shop were allowed. You were also allowed to own houses, cars, appliances, clothes and almost everything else. Land was a bit weird - you could own, but not too much - basically stuff that was small enough to evade the collectivisation process.