MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by londons_explore | 2026-01-07 19:56:01+00:00
Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider.

That means responses can be far more tailored - it knows what your job is, knows where you go with friends, knows that when you ask about 'dates' you mean romantic relationships and which ones are going well or badly not the fruit, etc.

Eventually when they make it work better, open ai can be your friend and confident, and you wouldn't dump your friend of many years to make another new friend without good reason.
by Legend2440 | 2026-01-07 19:56:01+00:00
Consumers are happy to use AI. ChatGPT has been the most popular app on the app store all year long, with Gemini and Grok at #4 and #5.

What they don't want is an AI sticker slapped onto existing products with no real value. What does an 'AI PC' do that a regular PC does not? ChatGPT is a cloud app, it will run fine on any machine.
by ptaffs | 2026-01-07 19:56:11+00:00
Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac...
And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either.
I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
by andrewmutz | 2026-01-07 19:56:31+00:00
Left-populists and right-populists like to frame issues as being a conflict between the elites and the common man. Banning big banks from owning homes is a perfect example of this.

It's fine to ban big banks from buying homes and wont do damage to the nation, but don't expect it to solve the problem.

High housing prices are due to zoning-based supply restrictions. These are entrenched due to politically active NIMBY voters.

Actually fixing the housing crisis means addressing zoning, but that doesn't fit the elite vs common man narrative so gets ignored by the populists.
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-07 19:56:39+00:00
Germany did enough for it to matter¹, Spain did. Everything in Japan was imported when they started warmongering around².

Italy was in an exception situation at the beginning of WWII, where they couldn't afford external goods.

1 - Mainly because they pushed their definition of "hated foreigner" to an extreme.

2 - They made a huge movement into replacing production chains, mandated by the government at the beginning of the war. But their lack of access to tech was still crippling at the end of the war.
by xp84 | 2026-01-07 19:56:42+00:00
That sounds right. And, I have to admit, it's pretty good politics to ban a mostly imaginary thing that is a popular talking point. Since it's barely going to affect anyone, it'll be easy to pass.

And it may win votes for Republicans in swing districts, since the "BlackRock bought all the houses!" line is heard much more often from the Left, meaning this is something you can show an on-the-fence voter to signal how you are against those evil Wall Street guys.

I wonder if he'll be able to resist slipping in some kind of small-time grift for a family member or campaign donor, though.
by ajross | 2026-01-07 19:56:43+00:00
Or Apple. Also Microsoft who were the ones bankrolling OpenAI before it started floating on its own equity.

In point of fact money to throw at AI development is essentially free, not one of the big players sustains itself on income. Investors are throwing every dollar they have at everyone with a usable pitch.

Whatever advantages Google had, financial stability is way, way down the list. For better theories, look to "Proven Leader at Scaling Datacenters" and "Decoupled from the CUDA Cartel via being an early moving on custom AI hardware".
by LogicFailsMe | 2026-01-07 19:57:08+00:00
As much as I am pro AI and I really am very pro AI, there is definitely an emperor's new AGI vibe amongst the tech bro and billionaire classes. I can only attribute it to a compulsive need oversell everything and then deliver 25 to 50%, a state everyone is so used to now that if you try to be honest and make claims that state what you can really deliver, they will assume you can only deliver 25 to 50% of what you are claiming and therefore the guy promising twice as much gets the funding.

This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...
by shagie | 2026-01-07 19:57:11+00:00
This essay also likely influenced the "what are things appropriate for HN":

https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.

...

Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-07 19:57:15+00:00
This is just redefinition to belabor your insiders point (which I am not disagreeing with). Non-insiders are gambling, but they are also making predictions, with varying degrees of skill

Some kinds of gambling are truly random (unless they are scams) and no prediction is possible. Other kinds involve some degree of skill and predictive power. For example, people can make predictions on races based on past form, even though the element of chance can't be eliminated. It seems like you're trying to redefine 'prediction' to mean 'anticipated outcome as assessed by the most informed' in order to disqualify the validity of any opinions held by non-insiders.

I get that you want everyone to be aware of how prediction arguments were originally a fun way for experts to drive decision making without writing ever-longer arguments for their position. But you seem to be overlooking the the fact that objections are not so much to insiders disrupting hte prediction market as the impropriety of government officials or their special friends cashing in on military adventurism. Said government officials defend engaging military adventures without consent or even notice to Congress by citing security, yet placing big bets on markets to make a quick profit is highly insecure.
by rnoorda | 2026-01-07 19:57:17+00:00
I made a simple ON AIR sign with LEDs inside that I change to reflect what I was doing. Red means I am in a meeting or totally focused, blue means I'm working, but someone can interrupt me if needed. Green means I'm not working, come on in!

The only issue with my setup- I work from home. My wife does not. No one is there to care if they can come in or not. It was building something fun to solve a problem I never had.

Would do again.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 19:57:27+00:00
> The material costs are high too because of regulations that require specific lumber for framing etc.

Having done some extensive remodeling and building work in recent years and going to great lengths to follow building codes, this just isn't it. The type of lumber you can use for most framing jobs isn't that special. Having walked through a number of new construction properties and seeing what passes code, I don't think relaxing lumber standards would be a good idea, nor buy us anything.

When lumber, cabinetry, and other building products have tariffs in the range of 10-50%, you can't tell me that tariffs are not the primary problem driving costs up right now. There just isn't a secret stash of lesser grade lumber lying around that would also be perfectly good for building homes.
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-07 19:57:33+00:00
> because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.

Oh I thought the one extremely obvious way was to fix local policy roadblocks. After all, it's not like a lacking supply of housing is a new issue they suddenly appeared out of nowhere within the last dozen months.
by threetonesun | 2026-01-07 19:57:53+00:00
jQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI.

Tailwind being the default choice for AI UIs is not that different, it can continue to grow in usage but the fundamental need for Tailwind has passed.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 19:57:57+00:00
> "I'm not sure if a vegan hurt you or something"

And yes, I've known plenty of vegans who literally want to outlaw meat regardless of need...

As to other contaminants and their effects, of course... but can you honestly say that a half a century of "low fat" and mostly fat sources that are woefully incomplete on essential fatty acid profiles while consuming reduced amounts of fats all around hasn't affected hormone production? Hormone production is directly affected by fat consumption.
by newtonsmethod | 2026-01-07 19:58:02+00:00
I agree with the first half of what you posted, but immediately jumping to blaming tariffs in your last paragraph seems weak (and a slight attempt at a gotcha).

Concrete, gypsum and steel are primarily domestically produced. Similar goes for wood (although a substantial amount is imported, e.g. from Canada - the tariffs range from 25% to 50%). Labour & Materials may make up say 60% of the cost of a house, but only 50% of this is likely materials, with likely a minority of the materials tariffed.

What is likely to actually reduce rent and house prices is making development permission and laws more lax, as well as preventing rent control.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-07 19:58:17+00:00
and the effective tax rate today for the ultra wealthy is 0.

Shit, a few years ago Jeff Bezos got a tax credit for his kids.

Think of how absurd that is. Jeff Bezos, the founder of a multitrillion dollar corporation that already receives billions in government contracts and subsidies, who owns a $500m yacht and a multibillion dollar real estate portfolio, asked for, and was given, a tax credit for his adult children.
by kllrnohj | 2026-01-07 19:58:47+00:00
Right but Mach 1.0-1.3 is all that "Boom Supersonic" is claiming to hit, though, so the paper is in line with the marketing pitch. The speed advantage of "up to Mach 1.3" might not be worthwhile, no, but that's orthogonal to the claims of "boomless" supersonic.

Now the article randomly pulls Mach 1.7 out of seemingly nowhere, and I have no idea where that came from or how that is justified. But the company isn't making that claim as far as I can tell ( https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise the "FAQ" section even specifically says: "Boomless Cruise is possible at speeds up to Mach 1.3, with typical speed between Mach 1.1 and 1.2.")
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 19:58:59+00:00
> The tariffs are a bit of a new phenomenon so I think that may be motivated reasoning. Construction productivity has also been stagnant for about 60 years.

If construction was stagnant for 60 years, adding 10-50% tariffs on lumber and building materials would only make it worse. Not motivated reasoning, just basic economics.

The new tariffs went into effect January 1st, by the way. If you thought things were bad now, they're about to get worse.

This announcement is just another distraction. They want you mad at Wall St, not tariffs.

> In the same vein, it’s technically feasible for automobiles to be built for just a few thousand dollars,

No it's not.

If this was true you'd see it in some other countries. It's not happening anywhere in the world. Unless you redefine automobile to mean a tiny cart with a 5HP motor and some seats.
by dmos62 | 2026-01-07 19:59:00+00:00
You complain that it doesn't explain this or that, but you can just ask it: it's a discussion or a dialogue: what books can say that? I'm not discounting good books or good educators, it's just that LLMs are good too, I think. These mediums, if you can call them that, have their overlaps, but they also have distinct strengths. I wouldn't be so quick to berate either. Your quip about stitching SO content is funny, but that's hardly what's happening, right? Unless you're willing to say the same about humans.
by cyberpunk | 2026-01-07 19:59:03+00:00
I did read the second paragraph:

> Now before you mention NIH syndrome, yes, we looked at the existing Go implementation, go-webdav. This library was lacking some key features we needed, like server-side collection synchronization, and the interfaces didn’t really align with our data model. This is also going to be a key feature of our product, so we should have some level of ownership for what gets implemented.

This is a different, non x/net library.
by agentifysh | 2026-01-07 19:59:15+00:00
your comment is largely accurate, regarding public reits, but focusing on blackrock misses the "vancouver model" dynamic which is absolutely happening in major us markets.

the issue isn't just yield-seeking corps, it's opaque shell companies (llcs) using real estate as a store of value / money laundering vehicle. vancouver showed how this decouples prices from local wages completely. the us has this exact vulnerability—anonymous delaware/wyoming llcs buying in cash, specifically in supply-constrained cities like ny or miami.

this only works because of zoning. if nimbys didn't artificially cap supply, housing would be a depreciating consumer good (like in Japan) rather than a deflation-proof asset class. zoning is what turns a house into a safe deposit box for offshore capital.

if the corporate transparency act that Trump vetoed is successful then I expect to see the real estate become US's top source of GDP like it is for Canada.
by gopher_space | 2026-01-07 19:59:34+00:00
The assessor's office in my county provides data older than two weeks (iirc) as a few sql export dumps because that's how things were done back in the day.

Current information is gated behind a web2.0 view of their live data with severe limits. It wasn't designed to be scraped and is in fact hostile to the attempt. I'd imagine they're seeing rising hosting costs and that they'll keep rising.

I should reach out to them and see what this looks like from their angle. The local commercial real estate community is pretty tech-savvy and I'm wondering if we could all be a bit more proactive around data access.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on county vs state vs national data! I'd be very interested in any bandwidth usage or processing requirement info you might have recorded.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-07 19:59:39+00:00
Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.

That's quite an extreme political take.

A more humble basic economic theory question would be:

If you ban large institutional investors from buying homes, and then you ban small institutional investors from buying homes. And only owners directly can buy homes, no renting. Would that be good? Sure homes would be cheap, but very shortly after that the supply of new housing would drop dramatically, as there's no one to finance building homes, maybe the ultra rich will just invest in their own mansions or yachts?

Just very basic economics is the discussion here, not tariffs and china politics, but just a variant of the highschool/red-scare question of, "will anti-wealth laws have a positive effect on the economy"? in the past it was determined that no, and that you were a communist for suggesting it, but maybe there's a nuanced take like making a difference between some type of "institutional" investors and other types of investors?
by garciasn | 2026-01-07 19:59:48+00:00
That gets into policy on how tax revenues are spent and which quintiles receive the most benefit from them, not the actual revenues generated and that's not what the original comment I replied to was talking about. They were saying we were much better off in the 1950s when the tax rates for high income individuals was higher.

What I provided from FRED shows the US has a _relatively_ flat revenue stream from taxation since the 1950s and thus THAT point is not relevant to the conversation.
by deckard1 | 2026-01-07 19:59:55+00:00
it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.

https://www.fsf.org/

But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-07 19:59:58+00:00
I think people's definition of "politics" aren't universal. And a lot of people just take all the things they don't like and say "well they're 'politicial' therefore they aren't allowed here." Using the site guidelines as their own personal eraser.

"Gay people exist," for example, is not a political opinion. It's not a political topic. It's a statement of fact that even a five year old with gay parents can observe and understand. But if the topic comes up, people will come out of the woodwork to explain how it's not allowed to be discussed because "it's political."
by swashq | 2026-01-07 20:00:16+00:00
Nice focus on fundamentals over hype.

A few metrics I'd want to see:

- Revenue quality: Recurring vs one-time. A company with 80% recurring revenue is worth more than 100% transactional at same margins.
- ROIC trend over 5-10 years, not just current. Declining ROIC often precedes margin compression.
- FCF yield vs earnings yield. Big divergence = accounting shenanigans or capex cycle.
- Insider buying/selling. Insiders are often early on inflection points.

For workflow: ability to save screens and get alerts when new stocks qualify would be sticky.

What data source are you using for fundamentals?
by miladyincontrol | 2026-01-07 20:00:30+00:00
By large agree, the most recent years in lightroom have been some of it's most transformational. A lot of tasks that used to require going into PS have been borderline automated. Their more recent denoise methods as well have been nothing short of excellent.

Not that its perfect when 100% automated but it takes a fraction the time to adjust things towards perfection, no one misses doing it by hand.

Rapidraw does try to compete some having ML based masking but I gotta agree most the open source solutions have been lagging behind bigtime.
by HackerThemAll | 2026-01-07 20:01:27+00:00
The best decision for Google happened like 10 years ago when they started manufacturing their own silicon for crunching neural nets. No matter if they had a really good crystal ball back then, smart people, time travel machine or just luck, it pays for them now. They don't need to participate in that Ponzi scheme that OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft created, and they don't need to wait in line to buy Nvidia cards.
by michaelteter | 2026-01-07 20:02:05+00:00
Will not happen with the current administration.

Like so many other big promises, it will appease a lot of people, but there will be no real follow through.

Any regulation that prevents unrestrained capitalism is immediately decried as socialism and therefore evil.

These kinds of promises are made which temporarily create market volatility, and once it later (usually quite soon) becomes clear that the big thing will not actually happen, the markets snap back. At this point, it’s incredibly likely that these situations are manufactured to both look good AND create large short term investment gains for people in the know - without actually changing anything.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-07 20:02:09+00:00
> we're more confident that unprocessed red meat causes cancer than we are there aspartame causes cancer.

Yes, I'll give you that, because you're jumping over a pretty low bar.

> replacing kale and spinach with cheeseburgers and milkshakes is a bad deal.

Again jumping over a low bar. Replacing kale & spinach with pretty much anything is a bad deal. Including >99% of all healthy foods.

And cheeseburgers/milkshakes aren't in the list of healthy foods. We can argue whether it's the ground beef patty in there that's unhealthy but there's lots of other stuff in those...
by tootie | 2026-01-07 20:02:15+00:00
It's interesting to think that as we approach a post-hydrocarbon world, not only will we extract less fossil fuels, we'll ship less too. Ironic to think about how much fuel is used to ship fuel. I know there's been speculation about shipping batteries, but I'd imagine that shipping traffic will decrease at a similar pace to fossil fuel usage after we hit peak. And the IEA estimate for that peak is 2030.
by buran77 | 2026-01-07 20:02:26+00:00
> said WMD existed. On paper.

So they didn't.

> a hostage dies when SWAT hits a place, the murder rap lands on the person who took the hostage even if it turns out to be a police bullet in the hostage.

The murder wrap doesn't fall on the SWAT shooter even when they shoot completely unarmed, innocent people, in their own home. So all your example says is that SWAT gets gets a free pass for murder no matter what. All it takes is for someone to anonymously say "LorenPechtel is a terrorist, he's planning to blow up some children at this address right now" and your chances are slim.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 20:02:38+00:00
> After all, it's not like a lacking supply of housing is a new issue they suddenly appeared out of nowhere within the last dozen months.

The main lumber and building materials tariffs went into effect January 1st 2026.

If you thought the current situation was bad, it's only going to get worse.

This announcement is a distraction to get people blaming Wall Street. It's a "look over there!" announcement literally days after they raised tariffs to make a bad situation worse.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-07 20:02:44+00:00
Frankly, the right move (before Trump did as Trump does, and fucked up our foreign relations) would have been to straight-up buy Greenland. The people of Greenland have the right under Danish law to vote for independence, and there's not that many of them. Paying individual people for the votes probably would have cost the US $10 billion, and then we could give them Puerto Rico-esque status.
by sgerenser | 2026-01-07 20:03:23+00:00
Not sure about $10,000 houses (that would be pretty spartan, even Tiny Homes usually cost more than that), but the $2500 car thing being due to lenders is completely off base. The reason there are no $2500 cars is that it's impossible to make one and meet current US safety regulations. Once you meet all of those, then you're already well beyond $2500, but it's still a pretty crappy car. Might as well add a few extra creature comforts that most consumers demand (power locks, power windows, bluetooth/stereo, disc brakes, more than 100HP engine, etc.) and you're never going to be below ~$15K with current parts and labor pricing.