MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2026-01-07 19:43:45+00:00
Besides the discussion of who is right, I think both theories are quite standard and we would benefit from learning the standard terms.

Regarding your theory of gold deposits being behind money creation is on Wikipedia as Metallism.

Regarding how banks worked before such laws existed, we could look at the period immediately before the creation of fractional reserve, I would predict that immediately before the rule was put in place, the banks were creating these 1000X (maybe 100X? I don't know) which caused a bank run. Without looking, the history of fiat money is quite recent, 1 century or maybe even less? So this shouldn't be too long ago. It is possible for banking working correctly for a long time without the rule, it might have been a short period, kind of like how soccer worked without offside rule for a long time, but it was put in place to stop some specific type of play anti-sportsmanlike play, not to enable another.

>I agree on the first and last part. I'm not what you mean by organic.

I think a more standard term is endogenous, as in an emergent behaviour of private individuals, rather than exogenous, as in set by a central bank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_money

>What is that supposed to mean?

You are right these are not standard terms, I meant gross money creation as money that is created with a corresponding liability. For example a loan, or a loan with a mortgage on land. The money base increases, but so does the size of the economy represented by that currency in equal increments. Endogenous money seems to map quite cleanly to gross money. Although not all exogenous money is "net" (as in creating currency without an underlying asset).

>No, it would absolutely contribute to inflation. As a thought experiment: just imagine the government banned private money creation tomorrow. Inflation would totally crash and the economy would collapse from a lack of demand.

One of the examples of exogenous money that does create inflation and I would say it's net money creation (for lack of a standard term I don't know about), would be seignorage, a term that comes from metal economies, where they would reduce the amount of valuable metal in coins, and the value of the coins was maintained by the trust, power and guarantee of the imperial seals imprinted on them, this gradually lead to fiat valuable metal was completely removed.

Nowadays it seems the term seignorage is still used to refer to the revenue created by the state whenever it 'prints' money without a liability. It is important to distinguish this from endogenous money creation like loans and clarify that the latter doesn't cause inflation, and if it does its effect would be minimal when compared to seignorage.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-07 19:43:56+00:00
No it doesn't. You can't do something like `import ../../foo/bar`. You can mess around with PYTHONPATH and importlib to work around that but that's a horrible hack that also breaks all tooling. Not a good idea.

With Deno you can just import by relative file path and it just works like you'd expect and the tools support it. I wish more languages worked like that.
by nitwit005 | 2026-01-07 19:44:01+00:00
> Only a small sliver of mechanics stick around long enough to get to that level of pay. The work is physically grueling. It is costly to start because mechanics need tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools. And the starting pay is closer to fast-food wages than to six figures. The 2024 median pay for a dealership mechanic or technician in the U.S. was $58,580, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Say they'll pay high wages. Won't actually pay high wages.

There are a lot of industries where there are outliers that receive high pay, but people know they're unlikely to become that outlier.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-07 19:44:03+00:00
This sounds backwards? Density means more units available, which should lower costs. Supply and demand. Rentals in a dense complex are cheaper than standalone rentals or duplexes, townhomes are cheaper than SFH, etc.

I don’t think cities should force density, but there’s no reason to go the other way either as long as growth is managed properly in terms of traffic, transit, and infrastructure.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 19:44:03+00:00
ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogs.

The 7DA tinfoil hat stuff is part of the story... beyond this, sometimes conspiracies are true. Look into education materials used for higher education for doctors, most are produced by companies actually owned by 7DA.

7DA believes it's an imperative of God to stop people from eating meat. Unless you don't believe people would ever do something in order to appease God.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 19:44:09+00:00
Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall.

Outside of a few metro areas where institutional ownership is very high, I don't think this would change anything. As long as houses remain an attractive investment, non-institutional smaller investors will happily buy the properties for a few thousand dollars less than the institutions would.

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.
by ericmay | 2026-01-07 19:44:13+00:00
If the war wasn't over the justification doesn't matter. I think that's the point you are broadly missing.

Were we at war with Japan? Yes. Therefore any action we take to end that war was justified, including continuing to bomb Japanese cities, industrial areas, and civilian centers until the war is concluded and they surrendered. Testing weapons even would be acceptable. Japan was still fighting us. Nations test weapons during war all the time which is partially how weapons development occurs.
by scoofy | 2026-01-07 19:44:18+00:00
As a student of philosophy of language, I obviously agree with the author (against the quoted thesis).

The structure of a language matters to the ease and feel of its use, despite even being logically identical. One parallel would be the syntactic benefits of something like Hintikka’s independence-friendly logic vs first order logic, even if they are equivalent.

The sentiment shared is that we should sacrifice benefits to the next generation to make our own lives easier. This is a common sentiment, but a sad one. The goal should be a natural language based programming language, that everyone can use, along side a technical programming language that makes unambiguous the interface between the language and the machine.

Everyone seems to endorse their happy medium, and those languages are also perfectly fine.
by chankstein38 | 2026-01-07 19:44:26+00:00
Because some people might have 10 different things they're doing in any given day and sometimes their ADHD distracts them from one thing to the other and you don't want to lose all that context.

The article does actually explicitly address this as well.

>I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.

Which mirrors my experience. My brain can obsess over things all it wants but if I don't see that set of tabs open roughly in the same order as I had them then I am promptly forgetting about that. I've gone through setting things up before only to realize a week before I had done the same thing in a different spot that I didn't name very well.
by Y-bar | 2026-01-07 19:44:29+00:00
Related: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...

> One afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. On the spy chief’s agenda: moving vast amounts of top secret intelligence material into the US company’s cloud.

> Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-07 19:45:00+00:00
biggest threats are insider threats

back when bookstores were a thing most places I used to work in one, and had a manager watch us, the entire time, as we took romance novels we couldn't sell out back and ripped off the covers before tossing them in a ship-back bin. Ditto for a few others like best sellers and some mags

she took two us out back to do it, leaving only one person on the floor to run the checkout -- field day for any serious thief. but they were more worried about us...
by nphardon | 2026-01-07 19:45:19+00:00
Sonnet 4.5 did it for me. Cant imagine coding without it now, and if you look at my comments from three months ago, you'll see I'm eating crow now. I easily hit >10x productivity with Sonnet 4.5 and Opus. I use Opus for my industry C and math work and Sonnet 4.5 for my swiftui side project.

I think the gap between Sonnet 4.5 and Opus is pretty small, compared to the absolute chasm between like gpt-4.1, grok, etc. vs Sonnet.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-07 19:45:48+00:00
> If the requirement was for the goal of indefinite control of territory, this declaration doesn’t match the requirement

Yes, it does. “For now” has no definite endpoint and thus states that the mission targets indefinite control of territory. (“Until <clear objective endpoint>” is not, on the surface, indefinite, though if the endpoint is a fixed point in time but one of conditions that may or may not ever be met, it might still be indefinite if the criteria is temporal definition, but “for now” is indefinite by any standard.)

It does not target permanent control, but permanent is distinct from indefinite.
by rchaud | 2026-01-07 19:45:57+00:00
There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.

- A non-independent monetary authority

- A Department of Labor that uses data from a single private vendor instead of its own payroll tax records and surveys to measure unemployment

- A pro-monopoly consumer protection bureau scaling
back unprofitable regulations

- A foreign service ready to threaten allies within its own sphere of influence to protect its tech businesses.
by petsfed | 2026-01-07 19:46:13+00:00
The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.
by reactordev | 2026-01-07 19:46:17+00:00
The material costs are high too because of regulations that require specific lumber for framing etc.

It’s more complex than just reducing tariffs and inviting cheap labor. It’s systemic red tape put in by the large builders to prevent anyone but them to be able to build. When they do build, it’s never to code. The code they themselves help write. Ryan Homes for example…
by seanw265 | 2026-01-07 19:46:23+00:00
I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.

This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.

These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
by Animats | 2026-01-07 19:46:39+00:00
For small screws, in the millimeter range, the jump between metric sizes is too big. So, in addition to M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, etc. standard metric screws include M1.4, M1.6. M1.8, M2.5, and M3.5 (rare) to fill in the gaps.

Screw sizes and drill sizes should have been sized by a ratio, like resistor values. But that would have been a pain for manual machining.
by TheTaytay | 2026-01-07 19:46:57+00:00
Good article. I nodded along and wish OP had written more about their solutions!

The problem for folks like me/us is fear of "losing" something, and like the OP. knowing that something can be saved and found again (or stumbled across) later solves the problem, whether it's ever searched for again. The act of "hoarding" actually scratches the itch for me. I'm fine to close a tab if it doesn't feel like I'm "throwing it away forever." And bookmarking a site is just a slower way to lose something forever. It's not easily findable, and I won't take the time to organize my bookmarks into a nice hierarchy. That reminds me of those old "internet yellow pages" that were sold at Microcenter back in the early days. That's a silly, slow way to organize information for retrieval.

I wish that 99% of my browser history was automatically indexed/recorded for later searching. I could imagine "boosting" particular links' importance with a bookmark concept, but I think you could also choose to elevate any site I spent a little bit longer on to actually read, or that I came back to later. If you added semantic search into that, and offline plain-text greppability, we'd really be in business. A lot of my searches boil down to "Didn't I see a tool or HN post that solved this problem 6 to 12 months ago?" Sometimes I find it again. Often I don't.

I keep hoping that someone like Kagi (which I already happily pay for) will let me build my own personalized internet index consisting "only" of the tens of thousands of URLs I've seen...They've built some stuff that is kinda close, and they already have a good crawler/indexer.

I have been using OneTab to quickly consolidate a lot of tabs to a single list of URLs, which actually does help me "feel" a bit better, but doesn't solve the semantic search issue. It sounds like Karakeep (mentioned by @miladyincontrol) does some of what I want already, and that they're working on semantic search too, but it doesn't offer it yet.

If anyone (including the OP) has something to help me auto-hoard, I'd love to hear it.
by roadside_picnic | 2026-01-07 19:46:57+00:00
The key word here is "Wall Street". And this statement is playing off a popular misconception around corporate investors buying up American houses.

There has been a bit of a panic around "Investors buying up all the property!!!" With people often citing Black Rock and Blackstone as the main culprits. But most of the "investors" buying up property are individuals purchasing investment properties.

Here's an article on the topic from 2023[0], a bit old but my understanding is large institutional investment in residential real estate was already starting to cool down.

Black rock isn't buying up all the housing, your neighbors are.

I suspect this statement, and even if it becomes an actual ban, is largely to gain wider popular support around a largely imaginary concern people have.

0. https://www.housingwire.com/articles/no-wall-street-investor...
by scottyah | 2026-01-07 19:47:19+00:00
I think they are similar to FedEx. FedEx knows that millions of packages per day are transporting illegal goods, any bad enough accident shows it. However, FedEx would absolutely go bankrupt if they tried to open every package and make sure the contents were good. At the end of the day, that's the government's job.

If the DEA and ATF wants to staff every shipping hub with people checking every package, that's fine by them (though admittedly it would hurt revenues).

For Google and Facebook and all the other user-content sites, it's just impossible to actually, fully uphold the law themselves, so their best bet is just to try to make it a pleasant experience for the users and leave upholding the law to the upholders of the law.
by zahlman | 2026-01-07 19:47:50+00:00
> When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right?

Okay, presumably you're familiar with the experience of seeing these links. When you saw them, how much effort did you put into opening them in new tabs and checking whether they answer your question? I'm guessing, not a lot. The UI affordance isn't great. The semantic search is just not very good (and it has to filter through massive piles of dreck) and it constantly updates; it shows you answer counts and doesn't try to sort or filter what it shows you for quality; but most importantly someone writing a question isn't expecting it, and checking it breaks the flow of drafting the question.

> Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card.

My experience has been that the very large majority of these closures are correct, and the large majority of closures complained about on the meta site are very obviously correct and the objections often boil down to trivialities and/or a general opposition to the idea of closing duplicates at all (without attempting to understand the reasons for doing so).

> The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason.

No. It's because the downvotes are for quality rating and are explicitly not intended as a rebuke to the OP, regardless of account age or reputation. Also because they affect sort order; because non-duplicates can't be immediately closed, people who want the question closed (note: the explicit, sole purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from receiving new answers) have a vested interest in hiding it from the sort of users who try to answer everything without heed to quality or suitability.
by overgard | 2026-01-07 19:47:53+00:00
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)

Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
by matthewkayin | 2026-01-07 19:48:10+00:00
I wonder if this is because it has less to do with fat and carbs and more to do with processed foods.

The Mediterranean diet is regarded as quite healthy by many health professionals but, it is also high in carbs and fat. But these are healthy, unprocessed carbs and fats. Whole grains and olive oil.

People going for high fat, low carb / low fat, high carb are usually doing so while also sticking to real foods.
by georgeburdell | 2026-01-07 19:48:15+00:00
This will help out home prices in a lot of lower priced markets, but do little in higher priced markets. In the Bay Area, many houses are bought up by non-occupying internationals. I've been in a couple of such houses. It's bizarre walking into a $5M+ hilltop mansion that's completely bare inside except for a token "student" living out of one room.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-07 19:48:25+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance

Trump's declaration that he is taking over Venezuela fits pretty comfortably within this category.

In your terms, a light did appear. You're right that the light is not directly connected to the utterance. But since the argument above that there was no invasion is premised on a lack of intent to invade rather than on the invasion not having happened, the utterance disproves that.
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-01-07 19:48:26+00:00
I have a weakly held conviction (because it is based on my personal qualitative opinion) that Google aggressively and quietly quantizes (or reduces compute/thinking on) their models a little while after release.

Gemini 2.5 Pro 3-25 benchmark was by far my favorite model this year, and I noticed an extreme drop off of quality responses around the beginning of May when they pointed that benchmark to a newer version (I didn't even know they did this until I started searching for why the model degraded so much).

I noticed a similar effect with Gemini 3.0: it felt fantastic over the first couple weeks of use, and now the responses I get from it are noticeably more mediocre.

I'm under the impression all of the flagship AI shops do these kinds of quiet changes after a release to save on costs (Anthropic seems like the most honest player in my experience), and Google does it more aggressively than either OpenAI or Anthropic.
by mountainb | 2026-01-07 19:48:26+00:00
There is a conservative case for this in that the 30 year fixed mortgage, combined with all of the foreclosure protections both old and new, amount to a government benefits program. Historically, this type of mortgage was developed to promote family homeownership. The mortgage systems have continually blown up in "crises" in part because it's a product of policy more than it is a market product. This is partly why investors both corporate and small flipper types actually do cause serious distortions: the US housing market is a welfare program first and a market for bundled land and houses second.

No one wants to abolish this welfare program (you would have an easier time abolishing Social Security), but also the government wants to keep the trappings of a market price system. It is easier to have serial crises and to blame some guys for the predictable explosions every time, adjust the laws to create enormous numbers of lawyer billable hours nationwide, and then set the stage for the next crisis and the next round of patsies to be blamed. Fortunately, this time we have AI to write all the think pieces about what it really means.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-07 19:48:29+00:00
/commands are like macros or mayyybe aliases. You just put in the commands you see yourself repeating often, like "commit the unstaged files in distinct commits, use xxx style for the commit messages..." - then you can iterate on it if you see any gaps or confusion, even give example commands to use in the different steps.

Skills on the other hand are commands ON STEROIDS. They can be packaged with actual scripts and executables, the PEP723 Python style + uv is super useful.

I have one skill for example that uses Python+Treesitter to check the unit thest quality of a Go project. It does some AST magic to check the code for repetition, stupid things like sleeps and relative timestamps etc. A /command _can_ do it, but it's not as efficient, the scripts for the skill are specifically designed for LLM use and output the result in a hyper-compact form a human could never be arsed to read.