skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have two questions.

BNPL seem to be about 4 weeks — isn’t that about the grace period for a paid off credit card? If anything I thinking you charge at the beginning of a cycle, you get 7 weeks? Am I misunderstanding?

I heard on Planet Money how consumer sentiment is down in the Michigan survey, and I am really wondering if there is a bias in how the survey is run. With caller id and modern cell phones, I imagine there are pretty big demographic bias in who will willingly participate in a survey, and I suspect their outlook will dominate and may not be representative of the populace? Do they have a realistic way to collect reliable data in modern era?
I wouldn’t accept an offer from Apple if given one because I wouldn’t want to relocate and I really don’t have any interest working for any large company at this point in my life.

Heck, I never wanted to work at a large company. A chance to work remotely at AWS ProServe more or less fell into my lap and from the minute I got there I knew I didn’t want to be there more than four years.

More realistically from my connections and experience I would have a better chance working in the consulting division at GCP (full time position). I wouldn’t work there either even though it would probably pay close to $100K more than I make now.
It basically just says that version numbers are meaningless and purely marketing. "Pragmatic" yes, but in need of standardization, no. The project comes across almost as a satire, so its odd for you to treat it as serious here.
The US money supply has been getting smaller pretty much all of this year.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Title made me immediately think of 52 Blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/52-hertz_whale
I'm not sure if anyone outside of old Melbourne people would understand a book as fabulous as Monkey Grip - a story about a woman in love with a heroin addicted young man who she adores.

Maybe even lots of Melbourne people wouldn't understand it.

But for me this is the essence of Helen Garner - painfully raw relationships of young adults in Melbourne in the mid to late 20th century.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/634141
Would love to get involved!
Not relative to income/GDP, which is how you'd know what can actually be paid off.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N

There was an uptick in failure to pay credit card bills recently (don't have a graph) but that just means it went from "unusually low" to "same as 2019".
Credit cards and BNPL are the new subprime mortgage. Yeah the economy is great while everyone is spending like there's no tomorrow, but there will be a time soon enough when it'll be obvious that the trillions of dollars in consumer debt we have racked up simply aren't getting paid back.
Meta? Out of the BigTech companies I would least want to work for are Meta and Amazon (again).
Yeah I got an $80 Chromebook because my kids are breaking one semi annually. Don’t need it now, but there will be a night when they need on and theirs is DOA. Expiring 2029 will get them to college, so buying now seemed worthwhile.
Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.
If you ask the consumer finance media, it’s always time to start worrying. Worrying sells and breeds more worry.

I’m not being dismissive of the odd situation we are living through, but I’ve not found the worry level of other people to be that helpful a guide. Those preppers with bugout bags are still waiting to be proven right.
> an effect you see in the US and European countries is a sense that cleaning up your own messes is low-class

At least in the US, I don't think that's the case at all.

A lot of people from other countries are genuinely shocked, for example, that "rich Americans" pick up their own dog's poop. Or even bus their own tray in a cafeteria.

There are a lot of countries where it's normal to have a maid, for example, where tidying after yourself is low-class in a sense. But the US is most definitely not one of those countries.
The universe is infinite. Life is less infinite than the surrounding matter, but it is still infinite.
To be completely clear: most of the long install process and crazy list of crate dependencies is due to building the Rust compiler toolchain and Cargo tool from source, which MacPorts does when it cannot find corresponding binary packages. As far as I can tell, MacPorts is now shipping binary packages for the latest version of Rust (https://packages.macports.org/rust/), so this issue probably won’t crop up for most users. It’s likely that a package for the latest Rust wasn’t available at the time the post was made (or in any case, not for Darwin 22 on ARM64).
wait what????

lol. I didn't know that was even impossible right now. But I quit playing with VMWare a few years back.
Tell me why I'm wrong...

The federal interest rate applies to loans, so the main first order effect for consumers is via mortgage rates and car loans. However, home sales are low because prices have been sticky despite the higher interest rates, leading to far fewer sales as people can't afford the higher mortgage costs. Meanwhile, people who already own houses are completely insulated from mortgage rate changes.

So, consumer spending is relatively insulated from first order effects of the federal interest rate, especially for existing homeowners.
ya but now they are the racist carrier.
racism hunts. witch hunts. in the far future these 2 events will look no different
I love me some Go, but it is a gripe I have with the language; slice (and by extension string) allocation is opaque. There's no way of determining if two slices share the same underlying array, and no easy way of determining if an operation on a string will either cause the underlying array to be altered or cause the runtime to allocate a new array for the slice.
Anyone who went thru went felt like a life changing (and life challenging) event, like the pandemic, is not going to behave in the same way people used to (before they had those experiences).

Because of social media, and the media - people felt, quite acutely - the very real risks of COVID - basically people felt (with some truth) that they were lucky to escape the pandemic alive, and because of this, are acting in a YOLO way - you saw people behave the same way 100 years ago from the combined effects of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and World War 1 - all over the world, but particularly in the United States.

I dont think we're really fundamentally understanding the real world psychological effects of the Pandemic and the psychological effects of feeling like we were living in an emergency for 18-24 months - and I think it'll likely take a decade or more to really analyze and process this.
I'm jealous of people who are aligned to the magic 24hr sleep cycle, for me my days feel better as 20hrs awake 10hrs asleep vs traditional 16:8.
Same... this is like a textbook, but worth it
This sounds like most big corp acquisitions, but nevertheless, sorry that happened.
When Twitter rebranded to X, I couldn't help but wonder, "What's going on? Does Musk have some secret bet against it?" It was funny to watch. Now, with Musk's recent moves, it's almost like he's intentionally steering Twitter downhill, as if he's got a bet that X will flop. I highly doubt it, but the thought just makes me smile.

And the way his CEO had to defend his ravings against advertisers [0], it's just all such a farce.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/xs-yaccarino-cal...
My understanding is that if you list on Amazon, you agree not to sell for less anywhere else, including your own site.

Advertising on Amazon is nearly, but not quite, a requirement in the current marketplace.

This has been part of the recent antitrust action against them.
I have had the thought that I should buy 'luxuries' that I've been saving for, before they get unaffordable again, even if it makes things a little tighter than I'd like in the near term.
There are two giant download buttons on the Noiselith homepage. The mac button downloads a dmg and the windows button downloads an exe.
Yes, every forum has its early years phase where this occurs. It’s about like trying to catch a wave, you look for a building wave, invest some participation, and you have a fine ride.

Eventually, the “organizers” show up and add too much order to a system that wants to be a balance between loose structure and otherwise chaotic ad hoc interplay.

And if the organizers aren’t the ones that over constrain the system, there’s always a PM somewhere looking to “monetize that asset.”

I think, sadly, SO has passed that inflection point now. I haven’t intuited where the next waves are breaking at.
yep, 55 days on some cards

and no, these surveys are as reliable as the ones before elections, same with other modern democracies
People are weird about electricity.

It isn't uncommon for people to be scared when they learn I wired my home which has a 400 amp service. I wired the previous two also. Sure electricity could kill me, burn me, burn down my house, etc., but I don't have to be the one to discover how it works. People have done that and there are building codes to follow that are build upon a whole bunch of previous failures.

We all learn different things and are at different places. I can wire my whole house and pass inspection, but I'd never take on this project, that is beyond me - but more power to him for trying. I agree, nothing wrong with some DIY that at most will go up in smoke.
(also seems kinda weird to measure this with black Friday sales... Which could simply be an indicator of people trying to get further with the money they have by spending less during non sale periods. But I assume there's more evidence than what's at the top of the article.)
Headline measures (like the overall consumer confidence index, or even the two major components of it), don't tell you much (the current situation portion tells you the same story as other broad economic indicators, the future expectations portion has been pure noise for a very long time.) I think some of the detailed components (current family situation and 6-month family expectation, for instance) do have some signal and are less a reflection of (social or other) media noise.
Yes exactly. They look like they're for grandma and will go with her pearls. And a Rolls-Royce.

I don't see what's so "lost" about that. It's certainly not the type of luxury vibe that seems to speak to anything desirable today. The logos look like something out of a museum.
Typehero: All you need to become a TypeScript menace
I just started recently, and I regret not taking screenshots or archiving websites that mentioned me and my work. I always believed that they would stay because they are the big brands, but nope- content gets regularly removed. Also, if not for your job and career, keep exciting records of the history of your life for you and your family.

I love your suggestions. I'm starting to keep digital archives -- domains, thoughts, alternate thoughts, documentation, etc.

My startup was acqui-hired in 2009. I kept the domain for records to tell the truth about people going around narrating weird stories in interviews and online articles. Early this year, I finally finished selling off all of that digital property -- the domain and a tiny component we wrote during the early years. That is the end of an era from 2006, when the domain was registered based on an idea, to 2023, when everything got sold.
I think that logic is usually applied to deflation and why it is so insidious (wait to spend and tomorrow will be even cheaper, grinding economy to a halt).

The inverse for inflation seems possible, but somewhat flawed because you will need even more money in general in the future, so hoarding cash to grow it could also be an impulse.

I feel like Keegan’s baby sitting coop has some parallels to the “unexpected” outcomes from human responses to market forces
The exact dollar amounts don't matter. As long as the ratio between amounts is the same, the authors' point still stands.
Underrated comment.

You hear constantly about how people in the USA who went through the Great Depression became lifelong hoarders, etc.

The idea that folks who went through a massive global pandemic (which, unlike the Spanish Flu, was liberally reported on in the media) wouldn't realize that their life is short and act accordingly is... funny.
disposable things? why do you think that's what people are buying?
The krugman coop story: https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....
Yes, but if I push myself too hard, I might burn out. Seeing an endless list of tasks to be completed can be nerve-wracking and overwhelming.
I dont think so. I've been hearing that it's a time to worry for over 20 years, thru three major once in a lifetime events. If none of those were a time to worry, I dont see why this is.
Burning the trash?
> The issue is the parallel runway, not the traffic in front, which has a much larger separation.

Fair enough, but it's still true that doing a visual approach means the pilot is responsible for both, correct? There's no such thing as "an ILS approach where the pilot agrees to visually maintain separation from aircraft landing on the parallel runway", correct?

> What the environment at SFO does not permit is for a pilot to be able to rely on the controller to guarantee separation from the airplane landing in parallel.

So basically, if SFO were doing all ILS approaches, capacity would be cut in half because the planes would have to alternate landing on the two parallel runways instead of landing side by side?
>Economics is such a funny field to me. The systems involved are incredibly complex, yet economists habitually speak as though their models are anything more than that: models.

It’s funny that you bring this up, because this idea that the the power brokers forgot that their models were simplistic models of human behavior instead now thought of them as full, bidirectional descriptions of behavior is the thesis of many Adam Curtis documentaries. I’m thinking about the The Trap in particular.
Do people actually wait for black friday to buy a house?!
Not pc anymore but a lot of humor and insight. I got a kick out of why he thinks hungry animals run. Pretty sure he is wrong (there are often unexploited niches and opportunities) but it made me laugh.
> Hey quick question, how do I get a job at Amazon? ;) jk

(I know you are joking).

First, give yourself an hourly anal probe for a few days. If you can deal with that, then you may be able to deal with working at Amazon.

> I love "A job is not everything in someone’s life, but it’s very, very important to love your job."

There are literally billions of people on earth who go to work everyday not “loving their job”. I don’t dislike my job no more than I dislike using the bathroom everyday. It’s just something I have to do to survive.
Feel free to going into detail about what exactly this applies to.

I’m not talking about buying a house that is considered an appreciating asset. I mean going to dinner and buying clothes and other disposable goods/services.
I love being an economist and waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night to a terrifying riddle: “given the base points situation, how do they still decide to pay rent”
GDP calculations in the U.S. are not relevant to debt holders. It would be like saying everyone in the U.S. is wealthy when it's the top 1% that own the vast majority of that wealth.
Self-taught programmers/devs, how did you deal with analysis paralysis?
I took a couple of comp sci courses in just before graduating undergrad (up to Data Structures and Algorithms) and have wanted to go deeper in the subject since then. Every time I try to start though, I get overwhelmed by how much there is to learn and how many resources there are for every subject.

I'll start using one resource and then read about another one that some people prefer for x,y,z reasons. e.g.

Should I do Odin Project or Full Stack Open? Learning web dev sounds neat, but which course is best?

Or, should I work through the MIT OCW or Berkeley courses? Maybe a more comprehensive, official uni curriculum would be better.

or teachyourselfcs.com?

I'm also interested in learning game dev, so should I start with Unity or come back to it after learning more theory?

etc...

I think the hard part is that I want to optimize my time, because I'm working a full-time 50-60hr/wk job, so I don't have a ton of time after work to study, but I'm too ignorant to know what I need to study, and in what order, so I just waffle.

So, people who are self-taught, how did you get past the anxiety of studying the "wrong" thing or that there are big holes your self-guided education?
Sadly, doesn’t this sort of “faith promoting stories” create a sense of survivorship bias?

I love these stories. And for every cool one, there’s at least a hundred “contributions” that result in no form of “payback.” I fear younger readers might read these and work their butts off in hopes of a payback, or worse, “tune” their philanthropic contributions (er, open source) to optimize for a return. Make cool things. Be glad when good things happen to you. Don’t try to connect too many dots.
There's a whole line of thinking in the Austrian school of economics that consumers cannot be accurately modelled.
i am old enough that i managed to reduce judgement to one metric: is nice to other people. everything else is irrelevant when it comes to accepting someone as a friend.

for seeking a partner there are further questions related to compatibility of character and also goals, but that often is not what you look at when you are a teenager.
So you spend excessively on clothes and eating out and traveling because it’s going to get more expensive next year, despite now getting paid 4-5% for cash when that hasn’t been true for almost 20+ years?

I can understand this about an appreciating asset like a house, not buying clothes and trinkets.
What a nice comment!! This has been a big failing of my mental model. I always believed if I was smart enough I should understand things without effort. Still trying to unlearn this....
I don't think people voted for Trump because he promised tax cuts for the rich. I think it was the other stuff like building a wall and appointing anti abortion judges to the Supreme Court.

I hope no one other than a strange fringe minority believes in trickle down. I haven't seen it argued often. I think most people agree that tax schemes favoring the rich are unfair
I mean the next 20 decades weren’t great for Europe after the Spanish flu. Hope it’s not that
i got a bunch of job offers when i started building del.icio.us, but ended up keeping my job and starting a company a few years later
I am surprised more software libraries don't simply use date versioning. What is the reason?
Anecdotally, my non-tech peer group have a booming economy thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Act, and Chips Act. Business owners are seeing orders go through the roof which they attribute to booming manufacturing, trades and retail. They don't believe it when I say tech is in recession (or at least laying off/reducing headcount).
(This is a US-based response response about the US phone system.)

Because it's a political problem, not an engineering or business problem.

In order to prevent monopolies, we have very strict requirements about carrying all calls that enter the network. Otherwise, phone companies would randomly block each other as part of anti-competitive tactics to push each other out of business.

The telephone spammers take advantage of these laws, because it is very difficult to legally block a spam call. Your phone provider must carry all phone calls without any prejudice!

(So I'm about to get very close to the line about hacker news's "no politics" guideline. Please consider that spammers "hack the law" and "hack politics" before you flag me. Instead, I would appreciate it if you take a minute or two to fact check my opinion disguised as fact.)

The primary way out of this is by a legal change, not by an engineering change or culture change: We must update our laws so that it is very difficult to make and carry spam calls on the telephone network.

I personally believe that one way to do this is to require that all phone calls provide rich metadata to the phone that is ringing. I really should know who is calling me, and the phone company that originates that call should be responsible for verifying it. I would even consider a requirement that makes it trivial, or automatic, to "lift the corporate veil" on who owns the company that is calling me. Otherwise there should be strict penalties for a phone network that allows originating calls with phony or spoofed metadata.

(I also don't think anyone has a right to make a 100% anonymous phone call. I think we can figure out how to allow people who need to make anonymous phone calls to make them, without exposing the entire phone network to SPAM.)

Ultimately, every phone call that enters the phone network needs to have a strict and auditable chain of liability.

In reality, if our laws included a requirement for strict metadata, and then a requirement to make an "abusive phone call" button really obvious, we could figure this out pretty quickly: at this point it becomes a simple reputation system.

Finally, we need laws that prohibit co-opting the phone network for marketing. We may want to start with prohibiting unsolicited commercial and political calls. We need to make sure that there are no loopholes, where the company you bought something from 2 years ago is still free to call you as if you have an ongoing relationship. We need to recognize that pulling out one's phone and looking at who is calling is really a significant burden to us, and that our government should protect us from companies and politicians who think that they have the right to interrupt our day at any moment to listen to a sales pitch.

If you really care and want to put time into this, advocate politically. (And remember that hacker news is not supposed to be political.) Don't waste your time reading instructions about how to report spam.
go the extra mile of studying yc's free startupschool.org curriculum. come up with a project, look for a cofounder there, post your weekly updates there, and apply for yc startup school deals. you will get $5k in aws, $2k in gcp, $1k in do, waived fees in stripe, discounted company setup in stripe atlas and clerky.

best case you build a startup and turn your life around, worst case you build a project that improves your skillset. yc is very supportive regardless if you get in or not.
so YOLO spending isn’t talking about clothes and traveling and eating and going out? what is it then if it’s not that?
In terms of raw calorie count, which is the major contributor to the American obesity crisis, french fries probably pale in comparison to a sandwich, while being dramatically more filling.
Physicists may have found a limit on the performance of large quantum computers
I love your writings, and I quote a lot of you while helping others, especially on simplicity, text-based file organization, etc.

And the only theme I have on my Obsidian setup is Minimal. Thank you again for your work with Obsidian.
Plants may be absorbing 20% more CO2 than we thought, new models find
Inflation has come down, and rates have come up. As a result, real rates are higher than they've been for more than a decade.

So, now it makes more sense, economically, to delay consumption, than in a long time.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT1MO

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y
And the fact that the disease itself was mild for most people didn't change the fact that people's lives were put on hold for 2 years. Even if you didn't feel like you "survived" it still put front and center that our current way of life isn't a given.
There are many enterprises install Cisco AnyConnect or ZScaler