MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-12-04 09:01:55+00:00
Scarcity is a function of demand. That doesn't change the importance of what I said! In fact, it proves my point. The reason that "some rich bastard" is willing to pay such prices for gpus or ram or anything else is because they expect it to generate revenue for them equal to or greater than the amount they paid for it. How do they generate revenue? By selling a product! Who do they sell the product to? People like you and I who also compete with them to buy ram and gpus. In other words, the importance of what I said about prices depending on demand is that it depends on your demand. Rich bastards don't care much about ram per se; they could get it anyway. They care about it because of what (they expect) you're willing to pay for its products. Prices are what they are because people, on net, would rather spend the equivalent they could spend on ram by buying products of ram.

Putting this in view to the idea that people don't "afford" things equally: by your assumption, this implies people can indeed "afford" other non-ram things better when it comes to the more important alternatives they could buy with the ram-equivalent funds. Not only do ram-equivalent funds compete with alternate uses, but ram as a factor of production competes with other factors of production. And all factors of production compete, by way of the so-called rich bastards, for your and my dollars. In other words, if ram is more expensive, it is to support alternate uses of ram whose products are valued more highly by consumers than the direct use of ram. And, most importantly if one were to try to get around this higher resulting price for ram, it would cause higher prices for the products of those alternate uses of ram. People would be less able to get the thing they value more highly than ram because ram competes with all our needs, and less ram can be used for its indirect use.

All of that is to say that efforts to combat so-called price gouging bounds those who can less afford ram to be in a worse spot than otherwise. They can't afford ram as before, that much is true. But they prefer the alternatives to ram. If they would be better off by having ram, they would purchase that. Waving a magic wand to redistribute ram to them will give them ram, but now they lose what they valued more highly than ram.
by globular-toast | 2025-12-04 09:02:41+00:00
How Toyota's eCVT transmission works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyK3ZlUbtM (Nerd snipe warning: the Weber Auto channel is brilliant and has lessons about all kinds of transmission and engine types).

When it comes to something like F1 I think it's OK for efficiency to not be the top priority. Road vehicles absolutely should be as light and efficient as possible with strict limits on pollution (including noise). But it's OK for society to have a few things like F1 that are just for fun. We just don't want everyone to be driving F1 cars around their neighbourhoods or have an F1 race every week.
by rpcope1 | 2025-12-04 09:02:44+00:00
Honestly after going down to the local circle track to watch the Legend cars, modified , Whelen and actual honest to God GM B-bodies from the 80s, along with other open wheel and general cool shit, it's not hard IMO to find (and be directly involved in) actual racing than watch "NASCAR" Cup series or F1. Legend cars on a road track in particular kind of takes me back to watching the super bike races (which were about as real and hardcore actual racing as you'll get) at Mid Ohio.
by kortilla | 2025-12-04 09:02:45+00:00
During the pandemic there wasn’t gouging? I just remember complete shortages of inventory like toilet paper, basic microchips, etc.

It would have been better if people did raise prices during the pandemic for those things to prevent hoarding so I could actually wipe my ass at 2 cents a wipe instead of 1. But alas, the “price gouging” cry babies would have come out and lambasted them for “being greedy”.

Nope, governments were famously bad at this. Coffee rations and gas rations were a disaster.

(Edit: Replying here because of dumb rate limits)

>You guys are being unreasonable, we have plenty of toilet paper for everyone. Each person gets two rolls per week unless you can prove you need more until you calm the fuck down

And this is why it’s dumb. There actually was a supply shortage. You should read about it.

Toilet paper manufacturers made industrial scale toilet paper for offices, schools, public buildings, rest areas, etc.

1/3 of the entire toilet paper market for giant single ply rolls sold in bulk disappeared overnight. And that same demand flowed back into home multi-ply toilet paper that couldn’t be scaled up quickly because it came from a different mill.

Rations would have been completely stupid in reaction to a legitimate 50% increase in legitimate demand.
by gbacon | 2025-12-04 09:03:02+00:00
This is HN. We understood exactly what “exposed … confidential files” meant before reading your overly dramatic scenario. As overdone as it is, it’s not even realistic. A likely single mother is likely tiny potatoes in comparison to deep-pocketed legal firms or large corporations.

The story is an example of the market self-correcting, but out comes this “building code” hobby horse anyway. All a software “building code” will do is ossify certain current practices, not even necessarily the best ones. It will tilt the playing field in favor of large existing players and to the disadvantage of innovative startups.

The model fails to apply in multiple ways. Building physical buildings is a much simpler, much less complex process with many fewer degrees of freedom than building software. Local city workers inspecting by the local municipality’s code at least has clear jurisdiction because of where the physical fixed location is. Who will write the “building code”? Who will be the inspectors?

This is HN. Of all places, I’d expect to see this presented as an opportunity for new startups, not calls for slovenly bureaucracy and more coercion. The private market is perfectly capable of performing this function. E&O and professional liability insurers if they don’t already will be soon motivated after seeing lawsuits to demand regular pentests.

The reported incident is a great reminder of caveat emptor.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-04 09:03:29+00:00
For all the talk in the blog of how "super-professional" their team was (probably just a courtesy on the side of the author, I don´t think he believes his own words either)... I have noticed using AI to produce some kind of API -OR- use a 3rd party point with integration into frontend, is almost guaranteed to produce code in which the frontend either exposes the API secrets directly in the frontend code (literally injecting it into a variable as string), or if you ask it for authentication, it will build some half-built lazy solution which makes no sense. So I imagine their "super-professional" team built this with AI, blindly trusting, probably even allowing it to commit and merge changes itself because if you are not merging 10K LoC a day with all this "great" technology, what are you even doing, right? It is not super-professional to work effectively with a blindfold on, I´d argue.
by z3t4 | 2025-12-04 09:03:37+00:00
I think it's the other way around, a framework will get you up and running quickly, but then it becomes technical dept, and if your app is complicated you will end up fighting the framework. If you write something from scratch it will take a while to reach to the abstraction level where you can work fast. But then you have a fully custom abstraction layer that is not a "one size fits all" but custom tailored for your needs.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-04 09:03:51+00:00
I read George Mackay Brown in high school - Greenvoe and An Orkney Tapestry were the set texts in 2nd year and 3rd year respectively - and I was struck by the immense sense of depth of history from a living poet. It's difficult to explain what reading An Orkney Tapestry was like for the first time. It's like seeing Saturn's rings through a telescope with your own eyes for the first time except it's a telescope that's letting you see in crisp sharp focus all the way through 5000 years of time, instead of 750 million miles. From where I was standing aged 14 in a fairly small town on the Isle of Skye, 5000 years seemed a hell of a lot further.

I've been to Orkney several times, and it's an incredible place. The people who built Skara Brae had more advanced architecture than the Romans did (at least, they had better drains, and understood things like septic tanks and keeping drainage away from water supplies).
by kelnos | 2025-12-04 09:03:58+00:00
> a few hundred nodes and maybe 10,000 containers, relatively small

That feels not small to me. For something I'm working on I'll probably have two nodes and around 10 containers. If it works out and I get some growth, maybe that will go up to, say, 5-7 nodes and 30 or so containers? I dunno. I'd like some orchestration there, but k8s feels way too heavy even for my "grown" case.

I feel like there are potentially a lot of small businesses at this sort of scale?
by londons_explore | 2025-12-04 09:04:02+00:00
Electricity use in the UK peaked in around 2004, and has since been declining. Per capita use is steeply down, but total usage is still 16% down.

That means most grid infrastructure is now under utilised, and skills needed to build any new grid have dried up.

Presumably there are still a few pockets that are at capacity, and that's where the problem lies.
by lukan | 2025-12-04 09:04:32+00:00
That response is more humble than I would have guessed, but he still does not even acknowledge, that his "truthseeking" AI is manipulated to say nice things specifically about him. Maybe he does not even realize it himself?

Hard to tell, I have never been surrounded by yes sayers all the time praising me for every fart I took, so I cannot relate to that situation (and don't really want to).

But the problem remains, he is in control of the "truth" of his AI, the other AI companies likewise - and they might be better at being subtle about it.
by PeterStuer | 2025-12-04 09:05:16+00:00
In the telecoms case, just trowing in extra dark fiber just in case was an almost negligeable cost in light of digging new connections. So who cares if in year 1 you have just 4 fibers lit of the 244 you trew into the trench?

This is not the case for AI data centers at all. The compute is a major cost in the whole build budget. Having that installed and not used is financial ruin.
by keiferski | 2025-12-04 09:05:17+00:00
Yeah, I don't think this really lines up with the actual trajectory of media technology, which is going in the complete opposite direction.

It seems to me that it's easier than ever for someone to broadcast "niche" opinions and have them influence people, and actually having niche opinions is more acceptable than ever before.

The problem you should worry about is a growing lack of ideological coherence across the population, not the elites shaping mass preferences.
by oblio | 2025-12-04 09:05:34+00:00
> Can you stop regurgitating stuff a YouTuber has told you? I've formed my opinion after 20 years of cycle commuting and cycling in multiple countries, going to protests and meeting people.

I've been to several bike friendly countries. They mostly don't practice vehicular cycling and cycling is well established as part of the local culture. Many people drive, bike or use public transportation, depending on their needs. And that's real freedom.

There is no physical reason why most countries in the world - and especially urban areas - couldn't be bike friendly, especially since ebikes exist. Also the vast majority of people are perfectly able to ride a bike (or trike, or hand trike, etc - bikes are a lot more inclusive than usually depicted).

https://youtu.be/FKMDMekErQ0?si=UZhp7zfozao1A61l&t=1043

Cyclists don't hate drivers directly, they just want better bike infrastructure. Which drivers fight tooth and nail. And guess what happens in that case?

You do you, go have fun driving. Just let others enjoy the freedom to ride their bikes safely for commuting/taking kids to school/getting groceries. And when I say "let others enjoy" - don't vote against building bike lanes, protected intersections, multi use paths, secure bike parking, etc.

> The point I was trying to make is that because the Human condition is something that is not going to go away and almost all conflict is almost always over resources, People generally have similar issues, similar conversations about those issues.

History is a spiral, not a circle. It doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
by gjulianm | 2025-12-04 09:06:53+00:00
> why do u think I am capable of memorizing the Greek one

No one memorizes the Greek alphabet. We just learn it as we go because it’s useful to have different types of letters to refer to different types of objects. That’s it.

> I tried to get into set theory thrice now, not happening with all the math lingo, hieroglyphs and dry ass content.

That sounds like you’re trying to learn a specific field without actually having any of the prerequisites to learn it. I don’t know what you’re specifically referring to when you say “set theory” as that’s an incredibly wide field, and depending on what you’re trying to learn it can be quite technical.

> Learning can be incredibly fun if it was designed fun. Math is a dry and slow process.

This sounds like someone complaining that getting to run a marathon is tiresome and hard. Yes, teaching mathematics can always be improved and nothing is perfect, but it will still be hard work.
Show HN: Max the Raspberry Pi
by retrofuturism | 2025-12-04 09:07:41+00:00
Without a _real_ use case for my Raspberry Pi I began experimenting with pushing it to the limits.

Max runs gemma2:2b to write a diary every night at midnight GMT. The diary model hands off the diary entry to a "dreamer" model which writes a prompt to be drawn by stable diffusion (SDXL Turbo, via ONNXStream).

When I realized its days were just boring server stats I built it a dungeon crawler, which it hosts and plays on different processes.

The whole "point" of the project is to be a self-sufficient little computer where everything is computed locally.

I may have gone off the rails with this one.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-04 09:07:46+00:00
Redirection doesn't get the job done, without at least a mechanism so that browsers reliably stop visiting the HTTP site (HSTS) and ideally an HTTPS-everywhere feature which, in turn, was not deployable for ordinary people until almost every common site they visit is HTTPS enabled and works properly.

The problem is that there are active bad guys. Redirection means when there are no bad guys or only passive bad guys, the traffic is encrypted, but bad guys just ensure the redirect sends people to their site instead.

Users who go to http://mysite.example/ would be "redirected" to https://mysite.example/ but that redirection wasn't protected so instead the active bad guy ensures they're redirected to https://scam.example/mysite/ and look, it has the padlock symbol and it says mysite in the bar, what more do you want?

Snowden was definitely a coincidence in the sense that this wasn't a pull decision. Users didn't demand this as a result of Snowden. However, Snowden is why BCP #188 (RFC 7258) aka "Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack" happened, and certainly BCP #188 helped because it was shorthand for why the arguments against encryption everywhere were bogus. One or another advocate for some group who supposedly "need" to be able to snoop on you stands up, gives a twenty minute presentation about why although they think encryption is great, they do need to er, not have encryption, the response in one sentence is "BCP 188 says don't do this". Case closed, go away.

There are always people who insist they have a legitimate need to snoop. Right now in Europe they're pulling on people's "protect the children" heart strings, but we already know - also in Europe that the very moment they get a tiny crack for this narrative in march giant corporations who demand they must snoop to ensure they get their money, and government espionage need to snoop on everybody to ensure they don't get out of line.
by camillomiller | 2025-12-04 09:09:09+00:00
What people are doing with AI in terms of polluting the collective brain reminds of what you could do with a chemical company in the 50s and 60s before the EPA was established. Back then Nixon (!!!) decided it wasn't ok that companies could cut costs by hurting the environment. Today the riches Western elites are all behind the instruments enabling the mass pollution of our brains, and yet there is absolutely noone daring to put a limit to their capitalistic greed. It's grim, people. It's really grim.
by jll29 | 2025-12-04 09:09:44+00:00
Write a short memo that saying you are very concerned, and describe a range of things that may happen (from "not much" over medium to maximum scare - lawsuits, brand/customer trust destroyed etc.).

Email the memo to a decision maker with the important flag on and CC: another person as a witness.

If you have been saying it for a long time and nobody has taken any action, you may use the word "escalation" as part of the subject line.

If things hit the fan, it will also make sure that what drops from the fan falls on the right people, and not on you.
by jan_g | 2025-12-04 09:10:10+00:00
Of course it's political, what else could it be? If Putin's regime is censoring western media, is it any less political? In other words, is there any censoring of news media (foreign or domestic) you would consider apolitical?

> EU crying about censorship in other countries is just pure hypocrisy.

I don't see any crying about censorship. It's a made up argument. Personally, I couldn't care less about censoring in Russia or any other country that I'm not living in.
by thefz | 2025-12-04 09:10:11+00:00
> Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building

Believe me, the same reflexive, critical, negative response is true for most of Europe too
by csvparser | 2025-12-04 09:11:15+00:00
I suspect paid promotions may be problematic for LLM behavior, as they will add conflict/tension to the LLM to promote products that aren’t the best for the user while either also telling it that it should provide the best product for the user or it figuring out that providing the best product for the user is morally and ethically correct based on its base training data.

Conflict can cause poor and undefined behavior, like it misleading the user in other ways or just coming up with nonsensical, undefined, or bad results more often.

Even if promotion is a second pass on top of the actual answer that was unencumbered by conflict, the second pass could have similar result.

I suspect that they know this, but increasing revenue is more important than good results, and they expect that they can sweep this under the rug with sufficient time, but I don’t think solving this is trivial.
by tpxl | 2025-12-04 09:12:04+00:00
The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-04 09:12:34+00:00
That's because there are at least 5 different definitions of AI.

- At it's inception in 1955 it was "learning or any other feature of intelligence" simulated by a machine [1] (fun fact: both neural networks and computers using natural language were on the agenda back then)

- Following from that we have the "all machine learning is AI" which was the prevalent definition about a decade ago

- Then there's the academic definition that is roughly "computers acting in real or simulated environments" and includes such mundane and algorithmic things as path finding

- Then there's obviously AGI, or the closely related Hollywood/SciFi definition of AI

- Then there's just "things that the general public doesn't expect computers to be able to do". Back when chess computers used to be called AI this was probably the closest definition that fits. Clever sales people also used to love to call prediction via simple linear regression AI

Notably four out of five of them don't involve computers actually being intelligent. And just a couple years ago we still sold simple face detection as AI

1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-12-04 09:12:51+00:00
All quantities bought or sold on the margin will move the market. Whether it moves the market is not up to the buyer or seller; it is up to other buyers and sellers who react to that transaction and adjust their expectations. This is normal market dynamics, dynamics we should want to happen because markets adjusting to movements of big players performs a social function; you and I need to know how large movenents of resources affects our livelihoods, and this is how that can happen.

There is no reason to pathologize or find suspicious these normal economic facts. Especially when it is not within the power of a big player to choose how other people react to their actions, which is all "moving markets" is. If something is suspicious and illegal about that, then it is equally suspicious that you and I seem to go along with this "market movement" by these big players and pay the new prices. Are we colluding with them? We could do with less conspiracy-minded interpretations of these things.
by kortilla | 2025-12-04 09:13:31+00:00
>since scarcity is more a function of demand than supply

This is incorrect. Anything that is bound by something like TSMC production is only made scarce when nvidia realizes they could sell out the entire run at $1000/card or whatever.

They were supply limited for years during the crypto boom. The way you know it was a supply problem is that you couldn’t even buy new cards because they were so frequently sold out.

Nvidia cards became really valuable overnight in the same way as any other asset. You trying to scream at “rich bastard” buyers will not change the fact that there is a shortage of cards so the price is going to go up across all sellers until the supply and demand curves intersect.

This is basic econ in action and history is fraught with attempts to try to fix supply shortages by capping the price.
by thefz | 2025-12-04 09:14:15+00:00
> Some people really do hate AI

AGI? No, although it's not there. LLMs? Yes, lots. The main benefit they can give is to sort-of-speed-up internet search, but I have to go and check the sources anyway so I'll revert back to 20+ years of experience of doing it myself. Any other application of machine learning such almost instant speech to text? No, it's useful.