HN user
The study was published in May 2025, and then revised in March 2026. It's based on data through December 2024, so virtually useless for saying anything about today.
Given that, I actually think the conclusions of the article are backwards. If the gpt-4/gpt-4o era had a measurable 3% improvement in productivity, how much more improvement are we getting from models today that are way way better?
Note: the title of the paper is "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools", which is 10 characters too long.
I asked Claude Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Thinking, and Gemini 3 Fast "Tell me about the Siberian marmoset" exactly and all 4 said it doesn't exist, with Gemini Thinking suggesting that I'm thinking of the Siberian marmot or Siberian chipmunk (both real animals).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbagan_marmot (also known as Siberian marmot)
Yes, winters are getting worse and worse, but this year was really bad, way worse than any predictions. I was in Park City in February and there was so little snow it looked like summer, and that was before the streak of warm and dry weather this article is talking about. I literally hiked up to the 2002/2034 Olympic facilities in 55 degree weather with no snow on the ground, while the Olympics were still going on in Milan. And I was in Park City because they had more snow than Colorado...
In addition to the current supply constraint keeping prices high, mortgages being fixed rate means higher interest rates don't really drive prices down (although lower interest rates do drive prices up). If you have a mortgage for $600k at 3% interest rate and rates go to 6.6% (like they are now), the naive loan math says your house is now worth $400k. Who has $200k in equity built up in their home and is willing to walk away from it? Virtually no one, so prices stay high until people get desperate to sell.
This leads to the fun conclusion that raising interest rates might actually make inflation worse. Rent/rent equivalent is already 30% of CPI, so increases in housing costs have a big effect on overall inflation.
For what it's worth, that's already a thing in NYC. NYC shares the ticket revenue for illegally idling vehicles with the reporter, and so some people have made 6 figures in one year reporting idling vehicles[1]. There was a push to get a similar provision in a recent bill about illegal parking in bus and bike lanes, but they ended up just allowing citizen complaints with no bounty payout.
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nyc-anti-idling-la...
There's an interstate that runs entirely within one county, in Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_97
Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine. You can't have the largest natural gas exporter and second largest oil exporter invade one of the largest grain exporters without causing basically everything in a supermarket or restaurant to be more expensive.
To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).
This is a cry for help, not some myopic bureaucrat thinking they're clever. Most of the USFS budget goes to forest fires (both fighting them and prevention), up from 16% 30 years ago, and they're now saying just fighting the fires is taking up too much of their budget to do much of anything else. The USFS already announced they won't hire any seasonal employees next year, which means basic things like emptying trash cans probably won't happen.
Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.
Yeah, I think this leads to some of the misconceptions about Brutalism. People think of the violent and aggressive connotations of the word, when it really just means "raw" like unpainted, or more accurately as opposed to the sculpted concrete of Art Deco. Being associated with Soviet and low-income apartment buildings, and urban decay in general, didn't help though.
Because of that, all ski resorts on US public land aren't actually "exclusive". A lift ticket just buys you access to the lifts, you can hike up during the winter or summer, with restrictions during the winter mainly around everyone's safety (designated uphill routes, don't go where they're doing avalanche control).
Yes, an undercover cop (or anyone) putting a gun to your head is not entrapment, it's duress.
On top of what everyone else said about how they make money, lots of climbers at this level live outrageously frugally and so can easily save up. Marc-Andre Leclerc lived in a stairwell[0], and their dinners are rice and beans or "what was on sale at walmart". Think stereotypical startup incubator of bunk beds and ramen, there's only one goal and it's not day-to-day comfort.
[0] http://marcleclerc.blogspot.com/2012/07/dreaded-first-blog-p...
Microsoft has $80 B in cash and cash equivalents, Alphabet has $30 B in cash and cash equivalents, Apple has $30 B.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/balance-sheet/
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/balance-sheet/
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/balance-sheet/
Numbers pulled from quarterly (not annual) breakdown.
As zwieback said, a lot of the dams just aren't that useful, for a bunch of reasons but biggest is that they're just too small. On top of that, at least for the Washington dams I'm more familiar with, the power generation doesn't match up with need. Most of the river flow is over the winter and spring (that's when it rains/snows and then more rain and melting snow) and in the late summer when electricity use is highest the dams don't have enough water flow to be really productive. Worse yet, some of the oldest dams are even more limited because there's too much mud in their reservoirs.
Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.
How are you defining crossover? Not body-on-frame or more like the "lifted sedan/hatchback" like the Subaru Crosstrek or Mazda CX-30? If looking for body-on-frame, your options are really just Rivian (R1T or S1T) or F150 Lightning. If you're OK with unibody but large, there's a bunch of options that came out recently like the Audi Q8, Volvo EX-90 (even 3 row seating), BMW iX and X5, and some models from Mercedes that I can never remember the names of. All of them are all-wheel-drive.
True, and I didn't mean to imply it was. I was just thinking of things Americans say because of the British that the British no longer do, wasn't thinking America-exclusive things.
Rhoticity is the big one I know. Parts of Britain started dropping the R before 1776, but it became more widespread after that. The US port cities (most notably Boston, but it was also a class difference) had enough contact with Britain that they dropped the R too, whereas the rest of the US kept it.
Reddit's problems aren't because of their technology, it's product decisions. Yeah, sure, maybe all their devs suck, but it was managements decision to create the abomination of their new layout to be more instagram-like. Devs aren't putting a million nags to use the official app on their mobile site of their own accord. Devs aren't consistently ignoring moderator issues/complaints.
Maybe their devs are jealous of what one guy with freedom to actually create the best thing he can can do, but I really doubt they came up with the idea to charge 100x what imgur charges for similar API calls.
No, it's very obvious. There is some audiophile tendencies at the very expensive end of the espresso home setups, but there's a pretty noticeable difference between a good shot and the same shot ground ever so slightly finer. Because espresso is so strong, any off flavors are very strong and noticeable.
Maybe an analogy here is gold plated wires don't make any difference in a home setup (well, they make zero difference in a digital setup), but when you're AC/DC blowing the roof off an arena with your speakers turned up to 11 bad equipment can be pretty noticeable.
But at this level, where glacier starts, its already the dreaded temperature they want to avoid, so glaciers should be melting from the bottom with this logic.
Yes, that's generally what happens to glaciers even ignoring climate change. The bottom melts, but is replaced by snow/ice that accumulated on top. Glaciers grow top down, not bottom up. But, if you lower the top so it's warmer, less ice accumulates, which can't replace all that melts, and so you get net shrinking.
The conclusion of the article seems wrong, or at least the stated facts don't support the conclusion.
the caffeine won’t bind forever, and the adenosine that it blocks doesn’t go away. So eventually the caffeine breaks down, lets go of the receptors and all that adenosine that has been waiting and building up latches on and the drowsy feeling comes back – sometimes all at once.
This seems like a net win? The adenosine would have always been there making you feel tired without the caffeine, so you are getting "free" energy, and the only after-effect is that you suddenly become exactly as tired as you would have been either way.
That said, I had heard before (and can't find a source for right now) that building up a tolerance to caffeine also causes an up-regulation in adenosine production (or receptors?), so when you stop drinking coffee you become extra tired. But, this article doesn't mention that and my personal experience has been mixed.
Dollar slices aren't just a slice of pizza for a dollar, they're a different business model focusing on just sheer volume. Joe's has at least 3 employees (cashier, guy taking your order and reheating the slice, and guy making the pizzas), plus prep people in the back, and 4+ different pies, and 20+ seats. The dollar place I go to has 2 guys, they don't reheat it, any toppings are just added onto your slice not actually cooked into the pie, no seats. I'm ignoring differences in quality/quantity of ingredients because I've had some great dollar slices, but also some abysmal ones.
That said, a lot of dollar slices are now $1.50.
the only operator on its own tracks
Amtrak only owns ~630 miles of tracks out of the 21,000 it uses, and basically all of that 630 is in the North East. This is definitely Amtrak's best area, although that's partially because of the amount of people going between Boston/NYC/Philadelphia/DC; the rest of the US doesn't have as many big cities that close together.
multi-state 1000km trip
If you get on I-5 North in Los Angeles and start driving, 1000km later you'll still be in California.
There's a lag in the index, but in August (most recent data available) housing prices were down 0.7% month over month, and 0.6% the month before https://www.fhfa.gov/AboutUs/Reports/Pages/US-House-Price-In....
But, as others have pointed out, housing prices are sticky for a variety of reasons.
Not true jeans, and you'll pay for the durability, but Outlier comes up occasionally amongst bike commuters. I wore my strong dungarees (now replaced with bomb dungarees but different fit and material) to bike to dinner dates many times. The new way shorts aren't quite as durable but I wore them biking a lot too.
It's called "Supreme" because it can hear trials about anything, as opposed to things like traffic court. Definitely confusing, but it's also significantly older than the US Constitution, so I can't fault whoever named it too much.
Because it's confusing: the NY Supreme Court is just a trial court, it's not at all like the US Supreme Court. The top appellate court is called the Court of Appeals. It's called "supreme" because it has general jurisdiction, as opposed to things like traffic court.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/im-a-... has a good example of how sophisticated phishing attempts can be. Even for less sophisticated messages, they can cast a really wide net and just need to find someone on a busy day with an urgent request from "their boss".