MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petesergeant | 2026-01-08 01:10:25+00:00
> The system knowing who I am, what I do for work, what I like, what I don't like, what I'm working on, what I'm interested in... makes it vastly more useful.

I could not disagree more. A major failure mode of LLMs in my experience is their getting stuck on a specific train of thought. Being forced to re-explain context each time is a very useful sanity check.
by femto | 2026-01-08 01:12:19+00:00
> ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus.

If you add up the budgets of all the various "police" forces in the US, how much money is spent each year keeping the domestic population in line?

I'm interested, as it seems that lots of groups in the US have their own overlapping police force rather than relying on "the" police. Apart from the total budget, it would be interesting to see a list of all the various police type forces at work in the US.
by beeflet | 2026-01-08 01:13:41+00:00
I am an American, I just don't believe this idea that the law has anything to do with principles or a hard code of rules. That just isn't what I observe in practice, unless the enforcers of the law happen to be totally neutral to the conflict at hand.

The law is enforced based on the general feelings of the people in power, and they will bend principles to punish/reward those that they perceive to be "bad" and "good" accordingly, based on their prejudices.

The idea that "might makes right" is sort of a tautology. What you consider to be right is based on a historical precedent set by the mighty.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-08 01:13:57+00:00
Sure! I don't think the linear algebra pre-req is that hard if you do need to learn it, there's tons of material online to practice on and it's really just basic "apply this matrix to this vector" stuff. Most of what would be in even an undergrad intro to linear algebra course (inverting a matrix, determinants, whatever) is totally unnecessary.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-08 01:14:29+00:00
I'll add one more data point to the thread;

The timing and pricing of investor selling is different to residents selling.

Residents sell (mostly) for reasons other than profit. They might be moving up, or moving away, or whatever. There's some pressure to "get it done" so they can move on. They can't really afford to "time" the market.

For investors there's much more "buy in the down, sell in the up". Except that it's been going up for a while, so there's no motivation to sell at all. It would be uncommon for them to accept a loss. Even unoccupied it's (mostly) better to hold rather than sell at a loss.

As mentioned elsewhere, overall market penetration by investors differs wildly by market, and segment. So 3% overall might sound low, but 20% of a dwelling type in a specific market is plenty to alter market forces.

I say this as someone who has owned property as an individual, and also worked in a business that invested in property.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-08 01:14:41+00:00
Noah Smith on "Corporations aren't the reason your rent is too high", with nice things to say about Thompson:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/corporations-arent-the-reason-...

Quoting Thompson:

"The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—in which BlackRock is an investor—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common confusion: The investment firm Blackstone, not BlackRock, established Invitation Homes. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)

Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market."
by tootie | 2026-01-08 01:15:45+00:00
Republicans were actively angry at past attempts to fight obesity or limit sugar.

There is another side to the nutrition recommendations beyond pure nutrition and that's economics. Pro business Republicans were loathe to anger big food producers.

On the flip side, this new food guide is now advocating a diet that is far more expensive for average consumers at a time when food inflation is already hurting so many households.
by ctoth | 2026-01-08 01:16:00+00:00
Reread my #3 in the context of "rental yield vs owner-occupancy."

I'm not saying comps magically anchor prices. I'm saying institutional buyers ARE the clearing prices, because they are anchored to "how much can I rent this out for" whereas first-time homebuyers are anchored to "how much can my mortgage cover?" which are different questions.

29% of transactions, not 3% of stock.

Those become the comps. There's less of a gap for "but buyers won't pay that" because the institutions *are the buyers. The call is coming from inside the housing market.
by kingstnap | 2026-01-08 01:16:25+00:00
> We're just choosing between fraudster shop owners getting a cut, or the addict being able to buy twice as much malt liquor.

I don't agree with these zero friction in a vacuum takes. Difficulty in access does shape choices, a lot in fact.

If you make it easier for people to use handouts to gamble or do drugs or whatever then more people will do it and ones doing it will do more of it. This isn't even a take its the null hypothesis.
by tombert | 2026-01-08 01:16:29+00:00
There is a lot of internalized racism in Latino communities, so I don't think that that is necessarily in conflict with what I said.

Just because you can find a lot of minorities signing up for ICE jobs doesn't really change anything, even if they were all Hispanic. You can always find examples of people going against their own self interest.

There are black white-nationalists [1] out there. There are women who will openly say that women shouldn't be allowed to vote [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Lee_Peterson

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-reconsiders-womens-righ...
by websiteapi | 2026-01-08 01:17:06+00:00
they can be charged with anything, but there's no way this guy is convicted of murder.

anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been paying attention to the hundreds of analogous situations that have been happening to blacks.

literally just look it up, the exact scenario has already played out before. cop gets off. and I mean literally exact scenario - with two cops, one in front, one to the side, driver (black) tries to drive off, front cop shoots and kills the black guy, is convicted, and acquitted. seriously, look it up.

George Zimmerman stalked Treyvon Martin, shot and killed him and was still acquitted. you think this guy is going to be convicted really?
by gfaster | 2026-01-08 01:17:12+00:00
I am well aware of what the phrase means, and I re-read the Wikipedia article to be sure. Maybe you read the use of the word in a different way than I did, but I helpfully included my precise interpretation of it in my comment to clarify the meaning.

> the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords

Having "literally no place" is certainly a strong choice of words, particularity as it was introduced in this thread as being a inaccurate label to apply to landlords.

Personally, I first learned about the term applying it to Feudalism, in which the (land)lords' only contribution was their ownership of the land. That example alone seems to pretty handily disprove your claim of "literally no place", in fact it's specifically cited in the Wikipedia article as the Georgist interpretation of economic rent.
by ebbi | 2026-01-08 01:17:38+00:00
It's the same in New Zealand - property is the primary mechanism for wealth creation, and you have boomers with 10+ properties that they use for rental income for their retirement.

The issue is exacerbated by the tax structures not incentivizing investments in other assets - e.g. in NZ if you invest over $50k in offshore equities, there is an annual FIF tax that must be paid, even for unrealized gains.
by lithocarpus | 2026-01-08 01:18:03+00:00
Partisan spite does cut both ways and should be seen as such and ignored on either side.

Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.
by ghxst | 2026-01-08 01:19:29+00:00
Unfortunately, I feel like I'm in the minority here, but AI has been really helpful to me and my doctor visits when it comes to preparing for a ~10-minute appointment that historically always felt like it was never long enough. I can sit down with an LLM for as long as I need and discuss my concerns and any potential suggestions, have it summarize them in a structure that's useful for my doctor, and send an email ahead of the appointment. For small things, she doesn't even need me to come in anymore and a simple phone call to confirm is enough. With the amount of pressure the healthcare system is under, I think this approach can free up a lot of valuable time for her to spend with the patients who need it most.
by nerdponx | 2026-01-08 01:19:31+00:00
The actual value of landlording is offloading financial risk. The tenant pays a stable rent including a premium in exchange for maintenance, repairs, and not having to sell a home in order to move to a new one.

I just can't bring myself to agree with the hard-line socialists who think landlording is fundamentally a bad thing. There are a lot of problems with it, but it does have a legitimate place in the world.
by iteria | 2026-01-08 01:19:39+00:00
You are assuming access to a grocery store. Disproportionately poor people live in food deserts and have to rely on dollar stores and other things where fruit and vegetables are expensive.

Also, if you are busy single person, basically anything not shelf stable is expensive because you have to buy it in high quantities and it will go to waste if you are not skilled at storage. I, a mature adult, know how to store things, but as a younger person things went to rot a lot from inexperience.

Then there is prep. I spent literally all day on sunday just preparing food for the week. It's about 10-12 hours. That's what 2 hours a day to cook during the week. I have lied to myself and said, "oh, I'll cook something" and then eaten out all day from being busy or being exhausted. To save money stuff I could jam into the microwave was cheaper.

This is how you get there. I cook from fresh vegetables all the time now, but I have the time and energy for it. That just wasn't true at all when I was younger.
by quesera | 2026-01-08 01:20:01+00:00
I just timed it for accuracy. When launched alone, on my M2 MBA, it's about 18 seconds to full draw of visible tab list, and 29 seconds to snappy interactivity. I didn't check CPU utilization.

Usually, when I launch this 20+Kt profile, I also launch 2-3 other profiles simultaneously (work 2Kt, personal/misc 3Kt, sometimes commerce 400t). I've noticed that they each peg a core while launching, but this is the only one that isn't ready quickly.
by tombert | 2026-01-08 01:20:03+00:00
"I didn't like the DNC so I decided to vote for someone who is an unapologetic racist sack of shit and who bragged about how he'd abuse the presidency to get revenge on his enemies" really doesn't change anything to what I said.

I'm not a huge fan of the DNC either but I think that they're being used as a scapegoat for people not to own their terrible decisions to vote for a moronic demagogue.
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-01-08 01:20:25+00:00
> Yes, I know cloud models will continue to get better but turning on/off my fans/lights/etc doesn't need to best model available, just needs to be reliable and fast, I'm even fine with it "shelling out" to the cloud if I ask it for something outside of the basics though I doubt I'll care to do that.

This is exactly how I feel. Its also why I like the multiple wake words - one for remote and one for local.

One of the amazing things I've found with the LLM powered voice assistants is being able to 'recover' from mistakes - e.g. when cooking and forgetting to set the next timer, I can recover by asking about another event like when the last timer ended or when I turned off the bedroom light. Its annoying you can't do that with Alexa. This 'complexity' doesn't need a huge or SOTA model to resolve! I also enjoy being able to ask for a song by half title and half description - my wife was trying to play Ghost by Au/Ra, which we just can't get the Alexa to do, and I can't reasonably get my local LLMs to fail at.

After your comment earlier I took the preview edition into the kitchen, where it did perform a lot worse with the multiple bits of white noise and odd room shape.
by mikem170 | 2026-01-08 01:20:49+00:00
I don't get how that hasn't had an effect on prices.

There's not enough houses on the market (zoning, and people want to keep their low-rate mortgages), there's people worried they can't afford houses (prices inflated faster than wages, rates went up), and a large amount of housing transactions (someone quoted 29% of starter homes) are being paid for by institutional investors (who can pay cash).

Wouldn't these institutional investors buying houses be "marginal consumers", kind of like the marginal producers who set the price of inelastic commodities such as oil? Seems like 29% of transactions is even more than marginal.

I assume that sellers would need to come down in price to what non-institutional buyers could afford if institutional buyers were removed from the equation.

As an aside, I'd rather see supply increased, but maybe demographics over the next decade or two will fix that problem anyways.
by jordanb | 2026-01-08 01:22:33+00:00
If "criminals" are now are the mass population then we need to think about how we're defining "criminal."

Police were always allowed to bug a vehicle with a court order. They weren't allowed to just casually bug random people's cars because that's mass-surveillance. Now mass-surveillance is completely normalized. Every citizen is treated as a potential criminal and surveilled into a database.
by defrost | 2026-01-08 01:22:36+00:00
It's a poor video, taken from far away at a high angle, one that misses the wide angle and intial context.

That video doesn't show the officer that shot, that you say was hit, reaching for and unholstering his weapon as she was reversing and then stepping into the turn cicle in front of the car to fire at her.

If he got hit then it was as a result of placing himself there in order to shoot the driver.

Legally, this is clear unjustified use of force.
by k2xl | 2026-01-08 01:23:11+00:00
ChatGPT arguably saved my fathers life two weeks ago. He was in a rehab center after breaking his hip and his condition suddenly deteriorated.

While waiting for the ambulance at the rehab center, i plugged all his health data from is MyChart and described the symptoms. It accurately predicted (in its top two possibilities) C Diff infection.

Fast forward two days, ER has prescribed in general antibiotics. I pushed the doctors to check for C Diff and sure enough he tested positive for it - and they got him on the right antibiotics for it.

I think it was just in time as he ended up going to the ICU before he got better.

Maybe they would have tested for C Diff anyway, but definitely made me trust ChatGPT. Throughout his stay after every single update in his MyChart I copy and paste the pdf to the long running thread for his health.

I think ChatGPT health- being able to automatically import this directly will be a huge game changer. This is probably my number one use case of AI is health and wellness.

My dad is getting discharged tomorrow (to a different rehab center, thankfully)
by adzm | 2026-01-08 01:23:42+00:00
Real sugar Coca-Cola is delicious though, and while this may just be a personal anecdote, real sugar soda always makes me feel full and satiated, while I've been able to drink several cans of corn syrup soda in a sitting before, I can't imagine doing that with several cans of real sugar soda. The calories are pretty much the same!
by agentultra | 2026-01-08 01:23:47+00:00
Funnily enough I took up trying to develop a new MUD engine from scratch in Haskell, with an embedded Lua interpreter for scripting as well.

https://github.com/agentultra/bakamud

And I often stream working on it at https://twitch.tv/agentultra

MUDs are great! Achea is another great one.

Happy gaming folks.
by eskaytwo | 2026-01-08 01:24:16+00:00
In more formal traditions the focus on breath (or similar) is to develop concentration/samatha/samadhi.
The focus on sensations is the insight/vipassana component, and often this is where the tension bubbles up to the surface. Keeping calm (equanimous) during this process can indeed be non-trivial!

It sounds like you have come to a practice very similar to a lot of the Burmese traditions of insight meditation, which is quite fascinating.
by halperter | 2026-01-08 01:24:34+00:00
This is a really nice concept. I think that sometimes just seeing the data isn't enough; you need _conversational_ feedback and the other features all seem quite interesting. However, I just have one question about the premium tier.

The premium model offers:

>AI Recovery Strategist

>Predictive Risk Modeling

>Behavioral Anomaly Detection

>Mood & Pattern Correlation

>Financial Impact Analysis

Are these not the things that distinguish this from the other addiction-breaking tools out there? Without these, the basic plan just looks like any other addiction breaker tool/applet thing. What's the purpose of a free plan if the value is in the premium tier?
by beeflet | 2026-01-08 01:24:52+00:00
That may be the case, I am not an expert in law. I hope there is some type of repercussion for the cop that point-blanks a random driver.

I just don't hold much faith in the separation of power between state and federal government, it sounds like there has been a massive erosion of this barrier since the civil war and the abuse of the commerce clause and all that.
by xp84 | 2026-01-08 01:24:57+00:00
I wish people would be honest with themselves and the rest of us when they go on about ICE.

"Abolish ICE" sounds like you think once you get a few miles past the border, no one should be able to apprehend you. Sounds like you just want open borders.

Even if you think they should use different methods, or be more careful, it's still stupid to say "abolish ICE" or "we should dox and harass all ICE officers and interfere with them." That's just as dumb as saying that because several people die every day from medical malpractice we need to abolish doctors and hospitals.

Borders don't exist if you just let whoever wants to, come and stay forever and do whatever they want. And that's also why legal immigrant citizens moved to the right in recent years. They think it's messed up that they worked hard, paid a ton of money, followed all the rules, meanwhile random people from central America just hopped the fence and made up some story to claim asylum -- interesting that they crossed 4 countries before claiming asylum.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-08 01:25:15+00:00
Yeah, what? No.

Maybe Democrats didn't vote [for Harris] because of that decision.

But the idea that they instead voted for Trump, or that people who went out of their way to vote for Trump would have voted for the Democrat candidate if they had just "been better than Harris" is so fucking absurd it's actively insulting that you try to claim this.

> Most Americans, in contrast with the DNC platform, think it's gross to select candidates for a job based on their race.

Most Americans think it is gross to select candidates for a job based on how much money they've given you, how willing they are to look the other way for your crimes, or how pretty you think they look.

> hiring based on their accomplishments and skills

That you can look at the Trump administration and say this with a straight face is demonstrable of how ignorant you are.
by iteria | 2026-01-08 01:25:48+00:00
Where? It's $4 for a dozen eggs where I am and I think that's pretty cheap. It's $5 for a bag of shitty apples. And then another $5 for a bag of oranges, so my kid can have fruit for the week. I cook from nothing but fresh and my kid gets one bag of chips or cookies a week. I buy 2lbs of meat for us both. I still spend over 100 dollars.

I guess we could have beans and rice every day, but I don't think it's a lot to give my kid a varied diet based on what's in season. Out of season is awful and that's how I ended up spending $15 on berries my kid wanted.

When people talk about these cheap meals, I wonder if they just expect everyone to eat the same thing every day at the lowest quality. I can go to a budget grocery store and get $3 eggs. That's true, but I feel like the local national chain should ve a good enough yard stick.
by tripletao | 2026-01-08 01:25:59+00:00
Their problem is with false positives they find, not true positives you find. My application for a credit card was somehow flagged as fraudulent. Chase repeatedly asked for additional forms of ID, then told me the scans I sent were illegible. (The scans were fine; I think they just needed an excuse.) I went to a branch with the physical documents, and they said they couldn't look at them. The branch put me in an office and called the same telephone support, with the same result. I eventually gave up.

I guess I'm lucky they rejected me before any money changed hands. I've heard horror stories from people with significant assets at their bank, locked out until an actual lawsuit (the letter from a lawyer didn't work) finally got their attention. I think it's like Google support, usually fine but catastrophic when it's not.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-08 01:26:55+00:00
You're absolutely right but Americans don't consider rice + legumes (the standard international poverty meal) to be a "real meal" like the rest of the world.

In general the American diet is very meat-based. Once you hold meat as constant, you realize that fast-food or ultraprocessed food are the cheapest way to get a meat-based meal. E.g. McDonald's is probably the cheapest way to buy a hot meal containing beef (and it used to be even cheaper, you could add fries+coke for just 50c in the past). A lot of poor Americans eat hotdog sausages, microwave meals etc just to get some kind of meat even if it's low quality.
by tpmoney | 2026-01-08 01:27:11+00:00
Sure I get it. I just don't think your annoyance level is going to go down that much. It wont take many sign twirlers on every corner, or people driving up and down your neighborhood at all hours of the day with a "ad truck" to be more annoying than the worst of youtube's advertising. Imagine if every fedex or ups truck and amazon van you see was also blaring a loud speaker advertising businesses. Door to door salesmen are less prevalent because other forms of advertising are cheaper, but if you can't do those other forms of advertising, door to door becomes economically competitive again. I'm pretty sure a "town criers only" world would be significantly more grating and annoying than you think. Imagine "liberty tax" sign holders during tax season, but all the businesses and all the time.