MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PromethApeiron | 2026-03-06 14:35:43+00:00
Authors here (writing under a collective pseudonym). This paper started as an attempt to map the structural drivers of modern economic inequality: not the downstream symptoms (wealth gaps, wage stagnation, polarization) but the upstream mechanisms producing them.

We expected to land on the usual suspects: regulatory capture, rent-seeking, declining competition. And those are real. But what kept surfacing was something more fundamental — a pattern where the gap between what it costs to produce something and what people pay to access it had grown so grotesque that standard explanations (R&D recovery, information asymmetry, natural monopoly) couldn't fully account for it:

- Gene therapy manufacturing at ~$65K, priced at $850K (triangulated from Spark Therapeutics' SEC filings and AAV manufacturing economics)
- Insulin markups of 30-100x that dropped 70-78% under federal pressure — manufacturers publicly confirmed they remained profitable at the lower price
- Academic publishers earning 38% margins on research scientists wrote for free, reviewed for free, and often paid to publish
- 10.6 million non-seasonal vacant U.S. homes alongside 771,000 homeless people

The economics literature calls this artificial scarcity: deprivation maintained through institutional design rather than resource constraints. Once we had that lens, it was everywhere. And it became clear that these weren't isolated market failures but a systemic coordination problem: institutions optimized for a world of genuine scarcity now applied to conditions increasingly capable of abundance.

Building a coherent framework pulled us into literatures we didn't expect — Ostrom's commons governance, the thermodynamics of information copying (Landauer/Bennett established that duplication approaches zero energy cost — every paywall is literally a dam against physics), Wright's Law applied to solar deployment curves, and Sen/Nussbaum's capabilities approach as an alternative to UBI.

The result proposes five design primitives for abundance-oriented institutions: Universal Capabilities, Commons Infrastructure, Polycentric Governance, Partner AI, and Market Residuals.

We try to steelman objections seriously — dedicated sections on free-rider problems (Section V, applying Ostrom's 8 design principles), the political economy of entrenched resistance, and genuine transition difficulties.

The sections we're LEAST confident in and most want pushback on:

1. The "stratified allocation" model — is the boundary between market/commons/guarantee principled or arbitrary?
2. Free-rider mitigation — do graduated sanctions + contribution recognition scale beyond small communities?
3. AI governance — are "constitutional limits on autonomous decision-making" enforceable or aspirational?

Full text readable on GitHub (no download needed):
https://github.com/Prometheus-Apeiron/The-Abundance-Declarat...

Where does this framework fail? Where does it succeed?

Released under CC0.
by glkindlmann | 2026-03-06 14:36:17+00:00
Sure, a license can't create new legal understanding of "derived work", but I think the intent of what Splinelinus said still works: a license outlines the terms under which a licensee can use the licensed Work. The license can say "if you train a model on the Work, then here are the terms that apply to model or what the model generates". If you accept the license, those terms apply, even if the phrase "derived work" never came up. I hope there are more licenses that include terms explicitly dealing with models trained on the Work.

Also, for comparison, both GPL and LGPL, when applied to software libraries (in the C sense of the word), assert that creating an application by linking with the library creates a derived work (derived from the library), and then they both give the terms that govern that "derived work" (which are reciprocal for GPL but not for LGPL). IANAL but I believe those terms are enforceable, even if the thing made by linking with the library does not meet a legal threshold for being a derived work.
by sublinear | 2026-03-06 14:36:22+00:00
You don't need to join what you don't actually need. You also need to be careful writing your queries, not just the schema. The most common ones should be wrapped in views or functions to avoid the problem of everyone rolling their own later.

Performance generally isn't an issue for an arbitrary number of joins as long as your indices are set up correctly.

If you really do need a bulk read like that I think you want json columns, or to just go all in with a nosql database. Even then, the above regarding indexing is still true.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-06 14:36:34+00:00
You say fail, but that's because you're looking at it from a "running a business" viewpoint. Instead, you have to look at "enrich personal wealth" viewpoint. It's possible to run a business into the ground while personally gaining financially. A failing business has some beneficial tax purposes. So people that think these failed businesses are a negative just need to look at them differently. The succeeded in their true purpose. The "running a business" was just the facade.
by leephillips | 2026-03-06 14:36:54+00:00
I’ve written book-length documents in Plain TeX (probably what you mean — nobody writes in “raw” tex) and in LaTeX. I would say that Typst, if it’s a replacement for anything, is a replacement for LuaLaTeX, because of its programmability. But in this article I framed it as a possible LaTeX replacement:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/
by lostmsu | 2026-03-06 14:37:39+00:00
The multicore score is worse than a $650 HP laptop: https://www.staples.com/hp-omnibook-5-16-2k-laptop-copilot-p...

This HP laptop also has 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD and is an excellent machine overall. I'm speaking from experience. There's an even cheaper $570 model with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD and still slightly better than this Mac on multicore.
by sailfast | 2026-03-06 14:38:54+00:00
“Unexpectedly” lol

We’ve been digging ourselves a giant AI-inflated hole in the economy for months and folks have just been playing musical chairs to grab as much money as possible before the music stops.

Hard to believe it’s taken this long. I never wanted to live through the late 70s / early 80s economically but I guess I’ll have my chance!
by ajross | 2026-03-06 14:39:19+00:00
Honestly, no. The administration is not subtle with its lies. If they want to fib, they do it out of POTUS's mouth at a podium, and it's a huge whopper that just dares the nasty liberal media to try to call it out. The strategy works for them, and they apply it repeatedly.

They don't just fudge numbers a bit. This is a bad number for them because it's probably the correct (or best available, really) number produced by the existing bureaucracy that does things via the same rules it always has. Doesn't mean it won't be revised later (note that there's also a big downward revision in this report of previous numbers). But it's likely trustworthy.

Along with Big Lie polemics, you also need to recognize that the administration is very sensitive to market motion (sort of a variant kind of democracy, I guess). And markets HATE when the government messes with the economic regulatory aparatus.
by kevinsync | 2026-03-06 14:39:39+00:00
Last time I worked corporate, we were acquired and I was asked what my job was by somebody on the other side. I said “My job is to make you feel good about whatever it is that I may or may not be doing around this place.”

Despite it being a joke, I think there’s a lot of truth in there that explains corp-tongue -- from being visible in endless meetings to in-group parlance to cutthroat promotion tracks, a lot of corporate America boils down to narrative, storytelling and performance more than booking sensible profit and delivering the very best to client and user. This type of language and expression is a major tool for making people feel good about your actual, contestable value in an organization. It’s both kabuki and kayfabe lol
by bearjaws | 2026-03-06 14:39:57+00:00
We are rewriting our entire frontend from Webpack + Gatsby to Vite + React, we converted all static pages in one day using Claude Code.

We basically have ~40 components and 6 pages to go until complete rewrite, I am sure we will run into bumps in the road, but it's been crazy to watch.

We also added i18n (English + Spanish), ThemeProvider for white labeling solution, and WCAG 2A compliance, all in one shot.

If I went to a third party and asked them to rewrite just the static pages it would have been $200k and 3 months of work.
by gwbas1c | 2026-03-06 14:40:23+00:00
> I exhausted my ability to do this (without AI). It was a codebase I don't know, in a language I don't know, solving a problem that I have a very limited viewpoint of.

And that's the critical point! I think it's fine to send the diff in; and clearly mark it as AI / vibe-coded. (Along with your prompts.)
by joe_mamba | 2026-03-06 14:40:29+00:00
>Most of the world is not visiting the US right now

Only right now? The US touristic cities have been and continue to be the most expensive places in the world to visit by far, so most of the planet will never visit the US out of cost reasons alone, regardless if they would or wouldn't want to visit. regardless of views on $CURRENT_POLITICS.

Tourism probably isn't large enough part of the US GDP to be making a dent in the US economy as a whole.

@WarmWash: where is the dollar collapsing? USD:EUR and USD:GBP are on par with where they were 10 years ago. Hardly a collapse. The people who can't afford flights and boarding in Vegas, Santa Monica or NY won't get any massive benefit from current currency fluctuations.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-03-06 14:41:05+00:00
Seems like many people here in Germany also don't want anything to do with the US any longer as well. I myself wouldn't go to the US, even before Trump, and recently also heard from someone else, who wants to travel around the world, that they will not be visiting the US, due to what is going on over there. Just 2 anecdotes, N=2 of course, but I can imagine many people sharing the worries or concerns about visiting the US.
by eel | 2026-03-06 14:41:05+00:00
Corporate BS is the topic I want to study if I ever pursue a PhD. Not only BS that is directed from the top down, but also BS from the bottom and laterally. I'm curious what in corporate culture allows it to grow and what slows it. I also wonder if it's always bad or if it's beneficial in small amounts.

Anecdotally I have seen BS used to delay or avoid making commitments. BS can mask someone's lack of knowledge, or lack of execution. Middle managers seem to be the position to squash or spread BS. They often have a hard time detecting BS because they are too far from the work. When I think back to the best Directors and skip-level managers I have had in my career, they were all great BS detectors. They didn't let smooth talkers in their organization rise based on BS alone. They didn't let dependencies wriggle out of their commitments based on BS.
by oidar | 2026-03-06 14:41:09+00:00
context distillation mostly. Agents tend to report success too early if they find something close to what they need for the task. If you are able to shove it in a 1M context, it's impossible for them to give up looking, it's in the context. But for actual implementation, it's not useful at all. They get derailed with too long of a context.
by alexc05 | 2026-03-06 14:41:48+00:00
that's a bit of a meta discussion and it'd probably reveal some super interesting things about how tech culture have changed in the last ~15 years.

I've been on HN since 2010 (lost the password to my first account, alexc04) and I recall a time when it felt like every second article on the front-page was an bold directive pronouncement or something just aggressively certain of its own correctness.

Like "STOP USING BASH" or "JQUERY IS STUPID" - not in all caps of course but it created an unpleasant air and tone (IMO, again, this is like 16 years ago now so I may have memory degredation to some extent)

Things like donglegate got real traction here among the anti-woke crew. There have been times where the venn diagram of 4chan and hackernews felt like it had a lot more overlap. I've even bowed out of discussion for years at a time or developed an avoidance reaction to HN's toxic discussion culture.

IMO it has been a LOT better in more recent years, but I also don't dive as deep as I used to.

ANYWAYS - my point is I would be really interested to see a sentiment analysis of HN headlines over the years to try and map out cultural epochs of the community.

When has HN swayed more into the toxic and how has it swayed back and forth as a pendulum over time? (or even has it?)

I wonder what other people's perspective is of how the culture here has changed over time. I truly think it feels a lot more supportive than it used to.
by ck2 | 2026-03-06 14:42:29+00:00
Are you referring to where he just eased sanctions on Russian oil so they can sell again at high profit to fund their own war of choice?

I figured he was going to drop sanctions on them sooner or later but that was quite the ploy

The problem is zero consequences for anything he does now, completely isolated, so it's one country destroying choice after another

https://reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/comments/j6z8eh
by antonymoose | 2026-03-06 14:43:07+00:00
Wildly controversial!

I look at OOP Patterns as standards and practices.

The same way we have building codes for staircases the framing of walls and electrical installations to prevent injury or collapse or fire.

Sure, you can dodge a lot of design pattern paradigms and still make a working application that makes money. You can also invent your own system when building your house and maybe nothing bad will happen. That tragedy hasn’t yet struck does not make the building codes bad just because you got away with it.
Show HN: Voiced, image-based D&D inspired AI-native RPG
by tommywilczek | 2026-03-06 14:43:14+00:00
I'm a solo dev and I built a visual novel-style RPG where you type what you want to do and an AI game master responds in real time. Free alpha, plays in the browser.

What makes it different from AI Dungeon: the AI doesn't just generate text. It emits structured commands that change the music, move NPCs between locations, give/remove items, swap character portraits based on emotional reactions, and trigger cutscenes. Cinematic stills are generated on the fly with Flux 2 Klein 4B, and characters are voiced in real time via Inworld. Separate AI agents maintain a quest journal and write save summaries. The result feels more like a tabletop RPG session than a chatbot conversation.

The world is hand-crafted, not AI-generated. I wrote all the locations, characters, and lore by hand (Himalayan fantasy setting inspired by travel through Nepal and Bhutan). The AI's job is to run the game inside that authored world. Everyone explores the same world, every playthrough is different.

Stack: Godot 4.5 client, FastAPI backend, WebSocket streaming. Some AI calls use Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, others use Claude Haiku 4.5 (cannot wait for 4.6). Cutscene images generated on the fly with Flux 2 Klein 4B. Voice TTS via Inworld.

Every turn costs real money in AI inference and I'm covering it until the $100 runs out (which will be a while because these models are SO cheap to run). Happy to answer questions about the architecture.
by bthallplz | 2026-03-06 14:43:38+00:00
> I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.

I'd pretty much grown up believing that that's how the US worked post-slavery (aside from occasional deviances from the rule). Since the start of the pandemic, I've had quite the awakening.
by cjbgkagh | 2026-03-06 14:43:59+00:00
A decade of data from many hundreds of people, help desk type roll where all communication was kept, mostly chat logs and emails. Machine learning with manual validation. The goal was to put a dollar figure on mistakes made since the customers were much more likely to quit and never come back if it was our fault, but also many customers are nothing but a constant pain in the ass so it was important to distinguish who was right whenever there was a conflict.

Mistakes made per call, like many things, were on a Pareto distribution, so 90% of the mistakes are made by 10% of the people. Identifying and firing those 10% made a huge difference. Some of the ‘mistakes’ were actually a result of corruption and they had management backing as management was enriching themselves at the cost of the company (a pretty common problem) so the initiative was killed after the first round.
by mightybyte | 2026-03-06 14:44:00+00:00
One plausible future I can see from here is that we see a shift in our relationship to code in high-level languages that is similar to what happened with code written in assembly language back when the first high level languages were introduced. Before them, software engineers operated in assembly language. They cared about the structure of assembly code. This happened before I started my professional software career, but I can imagine that a lot of the same things we are hearing from developers today were heard back then. Concern about devs producing code they didn't understand, the generated assembly not being meant to be understood by others, etc etc.

Now, however, we know how that played out in the case of assembly language. The fact of the matter is that only a very tiny fraction of software engineers give the structure of the compiled assembly code even passing thought. Our ability to generate assembly code is so great that we don't care about the end result. We only care about its properties...i.e. that it runs efficiently enough and does what we want. I could easily see the AI software development revolution ending up the same way. Does it really matter if the code generated by AI agents is DRY and has good design if we can easily recreate it from scratch in a matter of minutes/hours? As much as I love the craft and process of creating a beautiful codebase, I think we have to seriously consider and plan for a future where that approach is dramatically less efficient than other AI-enabled approaches.
by nkmnz | 2026-03-06 14:44:11+00:00
So we have two positions here:
1) LLMs are trained on non-licensed information, so anything coming out of them must be created without a license, so no one should be allowed to use it.
2) LKMs are trained on public information, so everything coming out of the must be public domain.

These two positions are mutually exclusive and I feel that both are not entirely false, but also certainly not fully correct.
by dmos62 | 2026-03-06 14:44:42+00:00
An acquaintance had his phone taken away at a US airport by a border guard (or whatever you call them) for inspection. The guard went through his messaging apps, read chats. I understand the necessity for occasional physical searches for contraband or what have you, but reading private conversations is beyond what I can stomach. That, together with the infamous case of some guy being forbidden entry to US because he had the wrong meme on his phone, feels like Soviet Union bullshit. Actually, now that I mention this, reading my messages is fine compared to looking through my photos. I find it insane that this is happening in a first world country. I'm not a fan of hyperboles, but, man, this is just like what I'm told Soviet Union was like. I think I'll be skipping events in US for the next decade or so.
by hibikir | 2026-03-06 14:44:48+00:00
OOP pattern were useful for people stuck in a pure OOP language (say Java 1.4) And needed to make something understandable. Today, when many languages, including Java, have reasonable functional programming support, a large percentage of the patterns are over complicated. Just look at the list, and see how many can be replaced with less boilerplate by passing a function, doing some currying, or both.
Controversial and blunt and slightly uncomfortable truth
by mikasisiki | 2026-03-06 14:45:02+00:00
1. In the same amount of time, AI now generates about 5× more code than before.

2. In the same amount of time, engineers have to review about 5× more code than before.

3. The time spent reviewing code is now greater than the time spent writing it.

Conclusion: In many companies, AI has actually reduced the overall efficiency of engineering teams.

If companies really want AI to improve productivity in production environments, the key is to improve the quality of generated code and the efficiency of the human-in-the-loop validation process.

What teams actually need to find is a balance point, and that balance point depends heavily on the methods used by individuals and teams.

At that point, AI might generate only 2× more code instead of 5×, but the time required for both individual and team code reviews could drop significantly. In that case, code quality would not decrease—in fact, it could improve—while iteration speed would still increase in a meaningful way.
by rswail | 2026-03-06 14:45:03+00:00
What I noticed was that when I was at dinner tonight with my young twenties down to 14 nieces and nephews, every one of them knew what the Macbook Neo was, including the colors.

There was a big argument about iPad w/Pencil vs laptop, but they all said it was a good laptop for highschool/uni.

None of them have seen or used one.
by TwoNineA | 2026-03-06 14:45:50+00:00
Statistics Canada has over the last year shown that tourism to US from Canada is down by a lot and it's not getting better. Hell, as an anecdote, I keep seing ads on TV like: Come to Disneyland! We got rebates for canadians!

Edit, didn't realise it was this bad:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260223/dq260...
by krapp | 2026-03-06 14:46:00+00:00
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” - LBJ

If anyone wonders why class consciousness seems to be impossible in the US, this and the parent comment lay it out. The belief in American exceptionalism and capitalism as a moral force and the defense of systemic racial hierarchies in a low trust society override all other concerns.
by btown | 2026-03-06 14:46:44+00:00
In all seriousness, I’m unsure that official job numbers (even if they weren’t intentionally distorted, which is a big if these days) have caught up with the gig/creator economy. If a person making ends meet with food delivery and a few dollars of ad revenue is classified as “self-employed,” is that the same level of stability and ability to keep up with cost-of-living increases (which may outpace traditional inflation) vs. self-employed freelancers with clients? Which isn’t to cast shade on those paths, but it’s meaningful to the metrics we choose to follow.
by myrmidon | 2026-03-06 14:46:47+00:00
Looking at seasonally adjusted somewhat longer term trends, unemployment appears to be rising somehwat continuously for two years now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/

I'd say the article overstates its point somewhat. The numbers (rise in unemployment) don't look to be caused by Trump alone (trend started before), but he most certainly did not improve the situation in his first year (numbers grew worse instead of better).

But the absolute numbers (<5%ish unemployment) are not especially concerning for now despite trending in the wrong direction (and all of Trumps policies seem to make things worse so far).
by glkindlmann | 2026-03-06 14:47:06+00:00
Is there any visibility or accountability to record exactly what it did and not look at? I doubt it. So we're left with a kind of Rorschach test: some people think LLMs follow rules like law-abiding citizens, and some people distrust commercial LLMs because they understand that commercial LLMs were never designed for visibility and accountability.