MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lanfeust6 | 2025-12-09 18:13:44+00:00
More broadly, housing cannot be relied upon as an investment vehicle and remain affordable. Whether it's private equity or others is a moot point. The perverse incentive is there in that housing appreciates in value because of artificial scarcity. It's a 1-1 relationship.

I don't think this is contingent at all on the capacity to buy and hold, but on policies that limit building and financial instruments related to housing. The 30-year mortgage even. So now similar to the case with Social Security and public pensions abroad, politicians are playing a game of hot-potato not wanting to be the ones to have to make changes and upset the large aging voting bloc. Similar, too, because it's a generational wealth transfer.

Many items through market exchange have gone down in price over time owing to increases in efficiency (see: coffee makers). This can't be blamed on markets qua markets. It's adversarial policy that harms young workers.
by davidbessis | 2025-12-09 18:14:12+00:00
As for this snide comment that you posted behind your flagged comment:

"I don't care if you find it fair. If you can't accept that genetics determines the entire organism (stress: entire) and does not stop at the neck, then you'd perceive my later criticisms as much worse than - gasp! oh great heavens! my pearls! - unfair. It is a bitter pill to swallow that some people were simply born with better hardware than yourself, one you are obviously railing against. Now, rush on and down vote this comment as well to lighten the burden of your cognitive dissonance. I'm also finding it difficult to reconcile your use of the flag/report on the parent comment versus the rules dictating and describing what is disallowed content. Disagreement is not against the rules. Perceived "fairness" is not in the rules."

Sorry to inform you that you don't understand the meaning of the verb "determine", as "genetics determines the entire organism" is scientifically wrong for obvious reasons: "influences", yes; "encodes proteins for", yes; but "determines", no.

And, no, I'm not railing against anyone's hardware as I'm pretty satisfied with mine.
by snayan | 2025-12-09 18:14:37+00:00
I would say it depends, from your examples:

1) borderline. Potentially provides some benefit to the thread for readers who also don't have time or expertise to read an 83 page paper. Although it would require someone to acknowledge and agree that the summary is sound.

2) Acceptable. Dude got grok to make some cool visuals that otherwise wouldn't exist. I don't see what the issue is with something like this.

3) borderline. Same as 1 mostly.

The more I think about this, the less bothered I am by it. If the problem were someone jumping into a conversation they know nothing about, and giving an opinion that is actually just the output of an LLM, I'd agree. But all the examples you provided are transformative in some way. Either summarizing and simplifying a long article or paper, or creating art.
by cantalopes | 2025-12-09 18:14:45+00:00
For me it feels kind of bad, i know i have not written it line by line and don't know it "by the heart" and it's super easy to miss bugs/edge cases that way. Let alone make architectural decisions based on the output because the whole logic structure is simply not in your memory to work with. Sure, you're thinking "wow that was fast", but deep inside you know the impersonal lifeless commit will haunt you and you will NOT remember what's in there in 2 days (like you do learning by writing things). Code used to be personal and exciting without ai. Creativity suffers and so is your brain usage. I am 100% sure that studies looking at complex tasks vs decline in dementia will plumment after ai.

It takes the only fun thing of programming for me, like playing puzzle game except you sometimes just comment on how the ai is solving the puzzle incorrectly

Never in my life i have wanted to be a farmer as much as i want to now
by jonjacky | 2025-12-09 18:15:17+00:00
This makes me sad because I recall seeing many of these at the late lamented Living Computer Museum in Seattle. Here we see its collection being auctioned off piecemeal.

The back story is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42309025 Ask HN: Why did no one save the Living Computers museum in Seattle? 73 points by superconduct123 on Dec 3, 2024 | ... | 78 comments
by hardtke | 2025-12-09 18:15:28+00:00
One of the issues the article doesn't mention is that these houses are effectively cheaper to purchase for corporate owners. Generally they can borrow money at a lower rate, but the ability of corporate owners to use depreciation on a new purchase to offset profits from previous purchases is more significant. Effectively they are redirecting money that would be paid in taxes into the payments on the new purchase.
by lapcat | 2025-12-09 18:15:39+00:00
> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.

It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.

> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.

The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
by stouset | 2025-12-09 18:16:19+00:00
$ curl ${flags} https://site.io/install.sh | sh $ curl ${flags} https://site.io/tool > ./tool $ chmod u+x ./tool $ ./tool

Both of these are effectively the same damn thing but everyone loses their minds over the first one.

Also, a lot of those install scripts do check signatures of the binaries they host. And if you’re concerned that someone could have owned the webserver it’s hosted on, then they can just as easily replace the public key used for verification in the written instructions on the website.
by jahsome | 2025-12-09 18:16:26+00:00
Appreciate the perspective.

Of course it's bad. It's new. But it won't always be either of those things. I think "bad" is relative assessment and based on a build-up of knowledge, often over decades.

Electrical plugs and stairs are "good" only because that knowledge has been discovered and has been regulated. Expecting a tool to be literally and metaphorically fool-proof immediately upon discovery strikes me as pretty disingenuous.

In the case of AI, the most anti-AI crowd are often vehement with their fingers in their ears saying "it's not good and never will be, and shouldn't exist." To be fair, the pro-AI crowd are often raving as if all the kinks had already been worked out.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-09 18:16:35+00:00
You think the business line stakeholder is going to patiently hang out in JIRA, engaging with an overly cheerful robot that keeps "missing the point" and being "intentionally obtuse" with its "irrelevant questions"?

This is how most non-technical stakeholders feel when you probe for consistent, thorough requirements and a key professional skill for many more senior developers and consultants is in mastering the soft skills that keep them attentive and sufficiently helpful. Those skills are not generic sycophancy, but involve personal attunement to the stakeholder, patience (exercising and engendering), and cycling the right balance between persistence and de-escalation.

Or do you just mean there will be some PM who acts as proxy between for the stakeholder on the ticket, but still needs to get them onto the phone and into meetings so the answers can be secured?

Because in the real world, the prior is outlandish and the latter doesn't gain much.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-12-09 18:16:37+00:00
The poor floating point performance of many PCs at the time meant that a lot of code used ints rather than floats, making determinism much easier for multiplayer!

I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
by cyberax | 2025-12-09 18:16:43+00:00
It won't change anything. Private equity is always a nice scapegoat, but it just exploits the same market forces as any other economic actor.

If you ban private equity, it's going to be mom&pop redevelopment companies doing the same. I give you an example of Vancouver. It banned foreign purchases: https://www.kelownarealestate.com/blog-posts/canadas-ban-on-...

The impact was literally non-existing. The prices continued to grow as Vancouver 's housing density keeps increasing.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-09 18:17:21+00:00
> There are places where things like eigenvectors / eigenvalues or svd come into play, but those are pretty rare and not part of modern architectures (tbh, I still don't really have a good intuition for them)

This stuff is part of modern optimizers. You can often view a lot of optimizers as doing something similar to what is called mirror/'spectral descent.'
by paleotrope | 2025-12-09 18:17:42+00:00
If you go further, the whole thing wraps around. His suppression of his own sexuality, led him to embellish, to write out his own internal dialogue into the "nonfiction" books he wrote. So it all eventually comes back to the thesis, but yes, it's a huge drag to read through, but then Sacks' own writing is so turgid and overly dramatic, like he was writing for an audience.

The first sentence too is apt, "butter colored suit that reminded him of the sun" is a great example of Sacks' writing style.
by colinplamondon | 2025-12-09 18:17:58+00:00
Depends on worldview. If you believe in God, amazing has many dimensions for evaluations. What teaches us more about the the world He created, things that create beauty by expressing righteous thoughts for others to experience, or that which strengthens family.

LLMs certainly teach us far more about the nature of thought and language. Like all tools, it can also be used for evil or good, and serves as an amplification for human intent. Greater good, greater evil. The righteousness of each society will determine which prevails in their communities and polities.

If you're a secular materialist, agreed, nothing is objectively amazing.
by foxyv | 2025-12-09 18:18:59+00:00
I prefer the Buddhist interpretation of self. There isn't really a singular you. We are all interdependent beings. A four plus dimensional tree reaching back to the start of time. The "you" that you're experiencing right now is an illusion created by your brain. When the body you are currently experiencing with dies, there are still all the other bodies producing experience.

After all, are you really the same person that began your life? Do you have the same memories? Can you even remember what being 10 years old was like? Are those memories real? Are you experiencing the same universe as when you were born?

For all you know, you have died a thousand times and just don't remember it because those memories died in some other universe or some other body.
by nu11ptr | 2025-12-09 18:19:09+00:00
It is also equally odd to me that people want to cling so hard to C, when something like Rust (and other modern languages for that matter), have so much nicer eco systems, memory safety aside. I mean C doesn't even have a builtin hashtable or vector, let alone pattern matching, traits and sum types. I get this is about AI and vibe coding, but we aren't at a point yet where zero human interaction is reasonable, so every code base should assume some level of hybrid human/AI involvement. Why people want so badly to start a new code base in C is beyond me (and yes, I've written a lot of C in my time, and I don't hate it, but it didn't age well in expressiveness).
by mrlongroots | 2025-12-09 18:19:11+00:00
Hyperscalers do not need to achieve parity with Nvidia. There's a (let's say) 50% headroom in terms of profit margins, and plenty of headroom in terms of the complexity custom chip efforts need to implement: they don't need the complexity or generality of Nvidia's chips. If a simple architecture allows them to do inference at 50% of the TCO and 1/5th the complexity and reduce their Nvidia bill by 70% that's a solid win. I'm being fast and loose with numbers and Trainium clearly seems to have ambitions beyond inference, but given the hundreds of billions each cloud vendor is investing in the AI buildout, a couple billion on IP that you will own afterwards is a no brainer. Nvidia has good products and a solid head start but they're not unassailable or anything.
by bri3d | 2025-12-09 18:19:46+00:00
IMO the value of COTS software stack compatibility is becoming overstated: academics, small research groups, hobbyists, and some enterprises will rely on commodity software stacks working well out of the box, but large pure/"frontier"-AI inference-and-training companies are already hand optimizing things anyway and a lot of less dedicated enterprise customers are happy to use provided engines (like Bedrock) and operate at only the higher level.

I do think AWS need to improve their software to capture more downmarket traction, but my understanding is that even Trainium2 with virtually no public support was financially successful for Anthropic as well as for scaling AWS Bedrock workloads.

Ease of optimization at the architecture level is what matters at the bleeding edge; a pure-AI organization will have teams of optimization and compiler engineers who will be mining for tricks to optimize the hardware.
by overtone1000 | 2025-12-09 18:19:46+00:00
Thanks for the excellent response and clarification! I apologize for misreading your method with regard to inclusion of subspecialties. Figure 1 is particularly enlightening. Indeed, I'm in one of the two most skeptical subspecialties, and I considered switching to the other for some time. I suppose that says something about my biases as does the fact that I lurk on HN.
by cgorlla | 2025-12-09 18:20:04+00:00
>yet, the way you described your method, it involves modifying internal model activations

It's a subtlety, but part of it works on API based models, from the post:

"we combine this with a graph verification pipeline (which works on closed weight models)"

The graph based policy adjudication doesn't need access to the model weights.

>Could you bake the activation interventions into the model itself rather than it being a runtime mechanism?

You could via RFT or similar on the outputs. It functions as a layer on top of the model without affecting the underlying weights, so the benefit is that it does not create another artifact for a given customization.

>What exactly are you serving in the API?

It's the base policy configuration that created the benchmark results, along with various personas to give users an idea of how uploading a custom policy would work.

For industry-specific deployments, we have additional base policies that we deploy for that vertical, so this is meant to simulate that aspect of the platform.
by chrsw | 2025-12-09 18:20:11+00:00
I think that's just the name they picked. I don't mind it. Taking a glance at what it actually does, it just looks like another command line coding assistant/agent similar to Opencode and friends. You can use it for whatever you want not just "vibe coding", including high quality, serious, professional development. You just have to know what you're doing.
by skeledrew | 2025-12-09 18:20:20+00:00
Even given that convention, with your example, a car is a far steeper investment than this ring. The more you invest in something, the more you expect to get out of it, and this ring is designed for a very low investment point, while still being highly durable (there are other similar rings out there at even lower investment points, but they probably won't survive anything beyond a sprinkle).
by mrandish | 2025-12-09 18:20:44+00:00
No doubt. From cult's 'love bombing' to dictator's 'yes men' to celebrity entourages, it's a well-known hack on human psychology. I have a long-time friend who's a brilliant software engineer who recently realized conversing with LLMs was affecting his objectivity.

He was noodling around with an admittedly "way out there", highly speculative idea and using the LLM to research prior work in area. This evolved into the LLM giving him direct feedback. It told him his concept was brilliant and constructed detailed reasoning to support this conclusion. Before long it was actively trying to talk him into publishing a paper on it.

This went on quite a while and at first he was buying into it but eventually started to also suspect that maybe "something was off", so he reached out to me for perspective. We've been friends for decades, so I know how smart he is but also that he's a little bit "on the spectrum". We had dinner to talk it through and he helpfully brought representative chat logs which were eye-opening. It turned into a long dinner. Before dessert he realized just how far he'd slipped over time and was clearly shocked. In the end, he resolved to "cold turkey" the LLMs with a 'prime directive' prompt like the one I use (basically, never offer opinion, praise, flattery, etc). Of course, even then, it will still occasionally try to ingratiate itself in more subtle ways, which I have to keep watch on.

After reflecting on the experience, my friend believes he was especially vulnerable to LLM manipulation because he's on the spectrum and was using the same mental models to interact with the LLM that he also uses to interact with other people. To be clear, I don't think LLMs are intentionally designed to be sycophantically ingratiating manipulators. I think it's just an inevitable consequence of RLHF.
by gitpusher | 2025-12-09 18:21:19+00:00
In ChatGPT at least you can choose "Efficient" as the base style/tone and "Straight shooting" for custom instructions. And this seems to eliminate a lot of the fluff. I no longer get those cloyingly sweet outputs that play to my ego in cringey vernacular. Although it still won't go as far as criticizing my thoughts or ideas unless I explicitly ask it to (humans will happily do this without prompting. lol)
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-12-09 18:21:25+00:00
Agreed, part of playing old games is that you aren’t required to be exploited by hardware manufacturers who are charging exorbitant prices for GPUs and RAM. A constant whine I hear is the unaffordability of hardware to play new games, but you do not have to play new games. For the cost of a single GPU you can fund many other hobbies for a lifetime.
by scoshap | 2025-12-09 18:21:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Blurble (https://[your-domain]) – an anonymous platform where people can share what’s really on their mind and get support from others who understand.

The Problem:

61% of U.S. adults report feeling lonely (source: Cigna’s Loneliness Index). The U.S. Surgeon General has called it a public health crisis. Yet on traditional social media, everyone’s curating perfect lives. We’re performing instead of connecting. We’re afraid to share what we’re actually struggling with.

This silence makes loneliness worse. People think they’re the only ones feeling this way.

The Solution:

Blurble is an anonymous confessions feed where users can:

•Share their thoughts without real names or profile pictures •Get real support from a community that’s been there •Build daily streaks to create healthy habits around vulnerability and connection

Think Reddit’s r/offmychest meets Duolingo’s engagement model, with a focus on mental health and authentic connection.

Tech Stack:

•Frontend: React 19 + Tailwind CSS 4 •Backend: Node.js + tRPC for type-safe APIs •Database: PostgreSQL (Supabase) •Auth: Email magic links (no passwords)

Current Status:

Landing page is live, collecting waitlist signups. Building in public. Planning beta launch in Q1 2026.

Why I’m Building This:

I’ve struggled with loneliness myself—even when surrounded by friends and family. When I finally started talking about it, I realized almost everyone I knew felt the same way. We were all suffering in silence.

I want to create the space I wish existed: a place where you can be honest about what you’re feeling without fear of judgment.

Questions for HN:

1.Moderation: How would you handle moderation at scale for sensitive mental health content? I’m thinking community reports + AI flagging + human review for edge cases.

2.Retention: What features would keep you coming back daily? Currently planning streaks, upvotes, and supportive comments—but open to ideas.

3.Monetization: Freemium model ($5.99/mo for premium features like post analytics, custom themes). Too early? Alternative models?

4.Privacy: Email-only login. No real names. No tracking beyond basic analytics. What else should I be thinking about?

Would love your feedback, especially from anyone who’s built community platforms or worked on mental health tech.
Show HN: AvocadoDB – Deterministic RAG (same query, same context, every time)
by eprasad7 | 2025-12-09 18:21:47+00:00
RAG systems return different context for the same query. This makes debugging impossible and outputs unpredictable.

AvocadoDB guarantees determinism - same query, same context, verifiable by SHA-256 hash.

- 100% deterministic (not probabilistic top-k) - Pure Rust, 40-60ms latency, local embeddings - 95%+ token utilization (vs 60-70% typical) - Exact file + line citations - $0 cost (no API required)

Install: cargo install avocado-cli

https://avocadodb.ai https://github.com/servesys-labs/avacadodb

Built this after burning too many hours debugging inconsistent RAG outputs. Happy to discuss the architecture.
by donmcronald | 2025-12-09 18:22:01+00:00
> Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it.

I’ve been paying for a personal license for about 20 years and I’ve been thinking of dropping it. I don’t use it much, but I wanted access to something that I could use offline. I’m not sure that’s possible at this point, so the main appeal is kind of gone for me.

I frequently choose “lesser” tools if it means I’m guaranteed they’ll run offline. I’ve always wanted to have a dev container with all the tools needed to develop 100% offline if needed. Licensing makes that almost impossible and Jetbrains doesn’t look like they have any solutions that work great for 100% offline development anymore.

I might check out Zed this week. I’ve never heard of it. If anyone has some great resources for 100% offline development, I’d love to see them. My subscriptions are getting out of hand and this may be the year for me to trim the fat.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-09 18:22:04+00:00
It's also such a stupid question to ask. No one doubts AI needs fuckton of power. Not the fanboys or the haters or even the don't-cares.

What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
by llm_nerd | 2025-12-09 18:22:43+00:00
>the comments that sound "AI" generated but aren't have about as much value as the ones that really are

When "sounds AI generated" is in the eye of the beholder, this is an utterly worthless differentiation. I mean, it's actually a rather ironic comment given that I just pointed out that people are hilariously bad at determining if something is AI generated, and at this point people making such declarations are usually announcing their own ignorance, or alternately they're pathetically trying to prejudice other readers.

People now simply declare opinions they disagree with as "AI", in the same way that people think people with contrary positions can't possibly be real and must be bots, NPCs, shills, and so on. It's all incredibly boring.